Did Europe Invent American Capitalism?

Free markets. Innovation and disruption. Entrepreneurialism. Laissez-faire. Perhaps no country is more synonymous with these phenomena than the United States. However, many of the ideas and policies undergirding American capitalism were imported from Europe during the twentieth century. This talk probes behind the veil of contemporary political economy to look at the origins of modern capitalism in Austria, Germany, Great Britain, and Switzerland in the decades around the Second World War.

Janek Wasserman teaches European history at the University of Alabama. He has written two books and numerous articles on European intellectual history, Central European history, the history of conservatism and fascism, and the history of economic thought.