The Capitalist Manifesto

by Louis O. Kelso

Blurb

The Capitalist Manifesto is a best-selling book first published in 1958, written by Louis O. Kelso, a lawyer-economist and Employee Stock Ownership Plan inventor, and Mortimer J. Adler, an Aristotelian philosopher. The book was on the New York Times Non-Fiction Best Seller List in February and March of 1958, ranking 15th and 13th, respectively, and was reviewed in a number of major publications, including Time magazine, which stated that the book presents its analysis as "a revolutionary force in human affairs offering still unplumbed promise for the future," and that it "refutes the charge that capitalist thought has lost the imaginative flexibility to cope with the challenges of the age."
In Chapter 5, the book details the three principles of economic justice, Participation, Distribution, and Limitation. These principles laid the foundation of what eventually came to be called “binary economics.” The term “binary” comes from attributing all production and just distribution of income to two factors, the human, classified as labor, and the non-human, classified as capital.
In the Preface, Adler acknowledged Kelso as the originator of the theory.

First Published

1958

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