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———. 2020b. The real “Money Heist” is taking place in the private equity industry. Financial Times
June 22: 11.
Foroohar, Rana. 2016. Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business. New
York: Crown Business.
Hooke, Jeff. 2022. Maryland is wasting its pensioners’ money. Washington Post February 4. Accessed at:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/04/maryland-is-wasting-its-pensioners-money/.
Hooke, Jeff, and Ted Barnhill. 2013. Replicating buyout funds through indexing. Journal of Indexes
October 23. Accessed at: https://www.etf.com/publications/journalofindexes/joi-articles/20196-repli-
cating-buyout-funds-through-indexing.html?nopaging=1.
Hooke, Jeff, and Ken Yook. 2017. The curious year-to-year performance of buyout fund returns: Another
mark-to-market problem? Journal of Private Equity 21 (1): 9–19.
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York: Portfolio Penguin.
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Back to Reality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press.
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American Workers. New York: Portfolio Penguin.
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Investigative Journalism. New York: Columbia University Press.
Tabb, William K. 2012. The Restructuring of Capitalism in Our Time. New York: Columbia University
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Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It?
By Brett Christophers. London: Verso, 2020. 512 pages. Cloth $34.95. ISBN: 9781788739733.

DOI: 10.1177/04866134231183739

Date received: July 26, 2022

Date accepted: June 5, 2023

In 1936, when John Maynard Keynes famously advocated for the “euthanasia of the rentier”
(Keynes 2017: 326), he had in mind something less provocative than the phrase would at first
suggest. For Keynes, financial rentiers—capitalists who extract interest payments without con-
tributing to economic development—are little more than byproducts of a socially constructed
scarcity of capital. Increase the stock of capital, he claims, and inequalities of wealth will gradu-
ally decline into irrelevance.
Nine decades later, after almost fourteen years of rock-bottom interest rates—cheap money
and with it an abundance of capital—high levels of wealth inequality persist across the developed
world and rentiers appear to be doing better than ever. So, what went wrong? In Brett Christophers’s
book, Rentier Capitalism, building on earlier works such as The Great Leveler (Christophers
2016) and The New Enclosure (Christophers 2018), he sets out to address precisely this question
alongside many more.
Book Reviews 729

Christophers’s main argument, spelled out early in the book, is that rentier capitalism is about
having rather than doing; it is a phenomenon related to power and privilege, and economic bar-
riers to entry matter immensely. Navigating a path between what he calls “heterodox” and “ortho-
dox” accounts of rentierism—the former pertaining to monopoly control and the latter to concrete
market power—Christophers (xxiv) settles on a hybrid definition of “income derived from the
ownership, possession or control of scarce assets under conditions of limited or no competition.”
Keynes’s mistake was to assume that actors in an economic system respond according to purely
economic motives and assumptions, that rentiers will give up without a fight. If the abundance of
capital increases, then interest rates will drop, then rentiers will no longer be able to extract rents
and will gradually cease to existent. The problem with this theory, Christophers observes, is that
it assumes rentiers—here in the form of commercial banks—will always pass official base rate
adjustments set by central banks on to their customers. Spoiler alert: they won’t, and they don’t.
And thus, just as capital has become ostensibly cheap in the years following the 2008 Global
Financial Crisis (GFC), so too have the returns on interest rate spreads increased, and with them
the rents that financiers have been able to extract.1 What Keynes failed to account for, it seems,
are systemic economic distortions not simply related to the scarcity of capital, but to the scarcity
of power—specifically, in this case, “the inherently scarce power to create, price and monetize
credit” (77).
Of course, financial rents constitute only one—albeit crucial—category of rent, and in this
in-depth study of UK rentierism Christophers is aiming his critique at the entire system. Following
a twenty-page preface and forty-eight-page introduction (the former perhaps put in place to break
up what is already far too lengthy an introduction to the book), Christophers presents his analysis
and critique over seven chapters, each addressing a different category of rentierism: financial
rents (discussed above), natural-resource rents, intellectual property (IP) rents, platform rents,
contract rents, infrastructure rents, and finally land rents. While the order at first appears strange,
Christophers’s delivery ensures that it all makes sense by the end. Each of these categories over-
lap with one another, some more so than others. For example, Christophers addresses the para-
sitic instincts of financial rentiers in the first chapter of the book, but revisits this sector time and
time again, such as in the chapters on infrastructure and land rents, if for no other reason than that
financiers are inexorably drawn to monopoly profits and growth assets. Other rentiers similarly
traverse categories and chapters, typically because of the underlying nature of what they pos-
sess—BT Group (formerly British Telecom), for instance, are both IP and infrastructure rentiers,
CRH (Cement Roadstone Holdings) benefit from both natural resource and contract rents, and
BAE Systems (the product of a merger between British Aerospace and Marconi Electronic
Systems) fall into the dual category of IP and contract rentier. Wherever an opportunity arises,
would-be rentiers will seemingly exploit it.
Crucial to Rentier Capitalism’s underlying narrative are the four decades of privatization in the
United Kingdom including in more recent times the Royal Mail’s denationalization and the alarm-
ing “academization” of state schools. The UK Conservative Party is unsurprisingly the key villain
in this history, but Christophers does not present New Labour as innocent of rentier enablement.
Notably, while infrastructure (e.g., the “natural” monopolies of railway or telecommunications
infrastructure) and land were, under neoliberal reforms beginning in the 1980s, sold off at prices
woefully below fair market value, representing a steal for rentiers and a robbery for UK taxpayers,
New Labour “did not so much as raise a finger on the question of land-value capture during its
time in power” (354). Still, the Tories take the brunt of the flak, not least of all during the discus-
sion of natural resources, whereby—and despite the best efforts of Thatcher’s first energy minister
David Howell to encourage smaller companies into the fold—competition was brazenly abrogated

1
Specifically, Christophers argues that unavoidably reduced margins on bank interest rates have been offset
by significant growth in the asset balances upon which those rents are based.
730 Review of Radical Political Economics 55(4)

as a principle of economic efficiency in order to make way for the now infamous TINA (“There Is
No Alternative”) doctrine. In this case, the assumption is (and continues to be) that increasing
globalization will result in capital flight if government policies do not keep large companies
(energy or otherwise) comfortable and secure in their local operations.
Evidently, political institutions, ideologies, and rationalities are key, and consequently,
Rentier Capitalism’s point of departure is to perform “a political-economic critique of rentier
capitalism” (xxvii) in contradistinction, says Christophers, to the prevailing “moralist” critiques
of rentierism given by scholars such as Guy Standing and Mariana Mazzucato (xxix). While
these scholars offer useful accounts of the irrationality, injustice, or unfairness of rentierism—
making claims that rent is either counterproductive to economic growth or is somehow
undeserved—according to Christophers they nevertheless fail to address the ethical status of
concrete outcomes such as rising inequality.2 Furthermore, because rentierism, by Christophers’s
definition, is partly based on the monopoly control of valued assets, it is bad for competition and
becomes an obstacle to innovation—it is, in short, not only morally and ethically unsound, but
economically problematic.3
Christophers’s point is that we should care less about whether UK rentiers are undeserving of
their rent-based wealth and more about the fact that, for example, IP protections legally applied
to medicines can literally mean the difference between life and death. It is a point well made.
Whether a corporation or entrepreneur deserves to be wealthy or not for “having rather than
doing” would be irrelevant if that wealth did not come at everyone else’s expense. The moral
outrage pertaining to “deservedness” is a distraction from what could and should be a channeled
critique of the widespread obstacles impeding social prosperity, health, and mobility.
Of course like any book, Rentier Capitalism has its limitations, and yet here it must be said
they are mostly by design. Readers of Christophers’s previous works will find that the book con-
spicuously lacks an original or explicit theoretical contribution—such as that given in The Great
Leveler (Christophers 2016), for instance. But, the flipside is that Rentier Capitalism delivers a
remarkably deep level of empirical-historical analysis. The book contains no less than forty-nine
figures and seven well-populated tables of data, and it deploys a plethora of examples and anec-
dotes to illustrate its arguments. Admittedly, the details and data make Rentier Capitalism a
rather dry read, and the book may have limited appeal for wider audiences. However, scholars of
critical political economy will likely find it a valuable desktop reference that they may return to
time and again, even absent a strong theoretical framework to draw upon.
Another feature of the book that will undoubtedly disappoint some readers is that to permit the
depth of empirical-historical analysis that makes Rentier Capitalism so valuable, Christophers
has limited the book’s scope to the United Kingdom. His justification that the United Kingdom
represents the quintessential model for rentier capitalism is undeniable when put in the historical
context of UK privatization and neoliberal reform. Nevertheless, it stands to reason that some
readers will be expecting more analysis of US rentierism—such as can be found in the work of
Michael Hudson (2021) and Ron Baiman (2014), for instance—and they will not find it here.
Furthermore, as other reviewers have pointed out (Sheppard 2021), Christophers’s analysis does
not make space for a treatment of topics such as race, gender, and the carceral economy, all of
which should be urgent agenda items for political economy today.
But such criticisms are arguably beside the point, for not only does Rentier Capitalism offer
reference after reference for scholars studying topics related to the evolution of capitalist

2
Christophers’s distinction on this point is subtle, but the implication is that Standing, Mazzucato, and oth-
ers would conceivably accept the ethical status of rents if they had been fairly earned as a result of “hard
work.”
3
Readers of The Great Leveler will likely recognize that Christophers is here riffing on his earlier argument
pertaining to the dialectical tension between competition and monopoly under IP regimes.
Book Reviews 731

practices in and through UK borders, it also offers a blueprint for future studies of its subject.
Scholars might draw upon the structure and argument of Rentier Capitalism, apply it to a new
case study (such as the United States, race, gender, or the carceral economy), and still come up
with a valuable and original contribution to the subfield of critical political economy. Indeed,
more recent publications such as Balihar Sanghera and Elmira Satybaldieva’s (2021) study of
rentier capitalism in Central Asia, Rentier Capitalism and Its Discontents, while not necessarily
modeled on Rentier Capitalism, serve to demonstrate the possibilities of using Christophers’s
work as a platform for inquiry.
All that said, the book does have one legitimate shortcoming, and that relates to its relatively
short and seemingly perfunctory “Coda,” arriving abruptly after the final chapter on land rents.
This criticism has been leveled at Christophers before (cf. Pooley 2020), and it is feasibly another
example of limitation by design. Nevertheless, in this instance it is not a feature that enhances the
overall effectiveness of the book. The reform suggestions Christophers puts forth in this chapter
are disappointingly prosaic. Admittedly, this may be the sad result of how entrenched rentier
capitalism has become and of how difficult it is today to imagine any prospect for change, but the
proposals as laid out here—including revisions to competition and taxation policies; public
investment in the private sector to lure capitalists away from rentierism; and private ownership
reforms including expropriation—all feel uninspired and pro forma. Christophers suggests that
such “de-rentierization” reforms would actually work in favor of the capitalist system, for “nei-
ther monopoly power nor excessively squeezed wages. . . are propitious for capital—inviting, as
they do, stagnation while dampening overall effective demand” (410). But while this is all good
and well, and even presuming pro-capitalist readers will not have been turned off by the previous
376 pages of critique, one cannot imagine a 44-page coda-manifesto is likely to change many
capitalist hearts and minds. The problem, as Christophers damningly points out, is that “monop-
oly and cheap labour are wonderful for the individual capitalist company that happens to enjoy
them.” And therein lies the rub—it’s a classic collective action problem, and one that is addressed
far too briefly, and with too little elaboration. Perhaps, like studies of rentier capitalism focused
on other geographical regions or specific subsections of society, such elaborations will be the
task of future scholars building upon Christophers’s otherwise excellent contribution. This
reviewer, at least, hopes that will be the case, for rentier capitalism is undoubtedly a social prob-
lem in urgent need of redress.

Mark R. S. Howard
University of California Santa Cruz
Santa Cruz, CA, USA
Email: mrhoward@ucsc.edu

ORCID iD
Mark R. S. Howard https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8107-0945

References
Baiman, Ron. 2014. Unequal exchange and the rentier economy. Review of Radical Political Economics
46 (4): 536–57.
Christophers, Brett. 2016. The Great Leveler: Capitalism and Competition in the Court of Law. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
———. 2018. The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain. London: Verso.
Hudson, Michael. 2021. Rent-seeking and asset-price inflation: A total-returns profile of economic polar-
ization in America. Review of Keynesian Economics 9 (4): 435–60.
Keynes, John Maynard. 2017. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. Hertfordshire, UK:
Wordsworth.
732 Review of Radical Political Economics 55(4)

Pooley, Samuel. 2020. Book review: The new enclosure: The appropriation of public land in neoliberal
Britain. Review of Radical Political Economics 53 (1): 212–14.
Sanghera, Balihar, and Satybaldieva Elmira. 2021. Rentier Capitalism and Its Discontents: Power, Morality,
and Resistance in Central Asia. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.
Sheppard, Eric. 2021. Book review: Rentier capitalism: Who owns the economy, and who pays for it?
Economic Geography 97 (4): 413–14.

Theory of Crisis.
By Kozo Uno. Translated by Ken C. Kawashima. Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2021. 208 pages. Cloth
$168.00. ISBN 978-90-04-24956-1

DOI: 10.1177/04866134231171441

Date received: September 24, 2022

Date accepted: April 6, 2023

Ken Kawashima provides a vital intellectual service in bringing to an English reading academic
public the immensely important contribution to Marxian economic knowledge of Japanese politi-
cal economist Kozo Uno on the theory of capitalist crisis.
Uno, in broad brush strokes, makes three major interventions in the Marxist literature. First,
Uno draws to the fore Marx’s arguments over the unique ontology of capitalism as an object of
study in the social world. Polanyi (1957, 1977), for example, maintained how across economic
history, prior to the capitalist era, no one referred to such a thing as “the economy” because eco-
nomic life was always found enmeshed with other social practices and indistinguishable from
them. Uno develops Marx’s argument as to why economic life in the capitalist era appears to
“disembed” from the social, appearing as a separate sphere, amenable to systematic study. The
phenomenon derives from the ontological properties of capitalist marketization that objectify
human socioeconomic relations, converting them into impersonal “relations between things,”
which then appear to take on “a life of their own” as famously put by Marx (1977: 165). Stated
differently, given that it is only capitalism that evidences a real tendency toward the self-suffi-
ciency of the economic substructure and its separation from the superstructure, whether in its
rendering in bourgeois economics or conventional Marxist theories of historical materialism, it is
not possible to study the economic and its causal power over social life directly. Why economic
science is necessary in the first place is because human material life, though common to all soci-
eties, only appears transparently in its capitalist form. Failure to apprehend this fact of the super-
posing of capitalism and material life per se upon each other is what led to the naturalizing of
capitalism in bourgeois economics and the plethora of theoretical distortions following from that.
Thus, Uno argued the epistemology and methodology for the study of the capitalist mode of
production necessarily differs from the study of material life across the sweep of human history
in toto in historical materialism, meaning that Marxian economic theory and historical material-
ism must be considered two distinct projects within Marx’s corpus.
Second, Uno concurred with Marx’s methodological procedure of categorial development in
economic theorizing of capitalism predicated upon the real tendency capitalist marketization
exhibits in history of purging or “purifying” the economic life of noneconomic, noncapitalist
contingencies to materialize a commodity-economic society par excellence. In the words of
Marx (1981: 275), “In theory, we assume the laws of the capitalist mode of production develop
in their pure form. In reality, this is only an approximation; but. . . [one] all the more exact, the