The Jesuit priest Oswald von Nell-Breuning (1890–1991) was one of the most influential social scientists in twentieth-century Europe, omnipresent within two of the central institutions of modern German history: the Catholic Church and the West German state. His long and prolific life spanned the economic period from the organized capitalism of the 1920s through the social market economy of the 1950s, to the shattering economic transformations of the 1980s. He was always rooted in natural law ethics, but he also tried throughout his career to interpret that law in the light of rapidly changing times. In this spirit, the editors of this volume promise a contemporary take on Nell-Breuning that seeks to place his ideas in context and ask what purpose they now serve. As they point out in the introduction, the rise of finance capital and globalization have transformed capitalism in ways that Nell-Breuning did not foresee. They are thus not so naïve to think that all of his ideas are relevant today, but do point out that Nell-Breuning, sometimes viewed as a bourgeois apologist, had strikingly radical ideas about solidarity, the dignity of workers, and the need for power- and resource-sharing among classes. By drawing our attention to his legacy, and by critically probing it with present concerns in mind, this volume does a great service.

The fifteen essays in the volume—written by a diverse array of well-known sociologists, historians, and theologians—treat seven themes: the critique of capitalism, the accumulation of capital, corporate governance, the just wage, collective bargaining, generational solidarity, and general theories of social policy. Overall, the essays represent thought-provoking attempts to revive Nell-Breuning and his style of thought for a new era of globalized capitalist hegemony. They remind the reader that, despite the much-publicized revival of Marxist analysis amongst some academics, there are many more Catholics in the world than there are Marxist scholars. For that reason, it is extremely important, socially and politically, to recover and reinterpret some of the most radical elements of a social Catholic tradition that has, more often than not, been highly critical of inequality and ecological devastation.

Two of the most interesting sections are on the accumulation of capital and generational solidarity. The first, which covers an issue of burning concern for many social scientists today, includes two essays by the volume's coeditors. In the first, “Against the Concentration of Capital,” Hans-Günter Hockerts draws on Nell-Breuning's ideas about the redistribution of wealth, which, he believed, was utterly necessary. Although often overlooked, social Catholicism served alongside socialism as one of the leading discourses critiquing the “economic miracle” and the class inequalities that came in its wake. Nell-Breuning sought various ways to involve workers in the process of capital formation without recourse to nationalization, most notably through theorizing a system in which a portion of workers' wages would automatically be invested in the firm. When that approach seemed to be failing, he began to focus increasingly on codetermination—the participation of workers in management—as an essential component of wealth redistribution. Hockerts details the difficulties Nell-Breuning faced with actual political actors, notably the Deutsche Gewerkschaftsbund (DGB), and is rightly skeptical that his specific ideas can be of great utility in today's economy. He nevertheless praises Nell-Breuning for keeping the issue of inequality on the table, and for reminding us that the concentration of wealth has also been a concern of German social scientists outside the socialist tradition.

Bernhard Emunds's contribution, “Nell-Breuning and [Thomas] Piketty,” attempts to place Nell-Breuning in conversation with the most famous European economist of the present day, whose Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) galvanized an international conversation about booming inequality. After a cogent analysis of the two economists' analyses of wealth inequality, Edmunds shows what each has to learn from the other: Nell-Breuning, he suggests, lacked Piketty's scientific sensibility and international focus, whereas Piketty lacks Nell-Breunings sweeping ethical view of property and power.

The essays on “generational solidarity” follow the same basic pattern: in each of them, Nell-Breuning is praised for drawing attention to certain important problems, while, at the same time, his specific policy solutions are deemed ill suited to the present. In the first, Christiane Kuller shows how Nell-Breuning's idea of solidarity among youth, the working class, and the elderly developed in the 1950s and 1960s in critical dialogue with the plans of Wilfrid Schreiber, a Catholic economist and the main theorist of the epochal pension reform of 1957. Schreiber's scheme originally called for a three-generational contract of solidarity among the elderly, workers, and youths, but, in the end, it was narrowed to a two-generational contract between the elderly and workers, who were made fiscally responsible for their elders' well-being. Nell-Breuning, in Kuller's view, rightly diagnosed some of the problems with this scheme, which relied on a constantly growing population to remain sustainable, but his lack of social-scientific precision and his moralizing appeals to solidarity render his diagnoses largely irrelevant to contemporary concerns. Franz-Xaver Kaufmann, a sociologist at Bielefeld, largely agrees: on the one hand, he also applauds Nell-Breuning's analysis of the German welfare system and, in particular, his clear-sighted diagnosis of the ticking time bomb of the 1957 pension reform. On the other hand, Kaufmann agrees with Kuller that Nell-Breuning's own prescriptions are of little use in the present. Nell-Breuning's account of “solidarity” is too optimistic and collectivist to remain plausible for us today, so he turns instead to the “human assets” (Humanvermögen) approach, to which he and other German sociologists have turned in recent years. This approach is similar to that of Amyarta Sen in that it focuses on maximizing the capabilities of individuals, including those capabilities that are unpaid and thus invisible to a purely economic calculus.

Den Kapitalismus bändigen is a fascinating and worthwhile reckoning with one of the giants of German social science. The book is also an important experiment in genre, and one from which Anglophone historians might learn: contributors from multiple disciplines have worked together to show how intellectual history and analysis of the present can work together. Moreover, and just as important, the volume shows that there are, and have been, many ways to critique capitalism and wealth inequality. One important service the contemporary academy can provide is to excavate and interrogate these traditions, putting them into conversation with one another and reminding readers that, when it comes to the critique of inequality, a thousand flowers bloom.