Conservatives Against Capitalism, by City University of New York (CUNY) professor Peter Kolozi, can be read as a patiently choreographed joke. First there’s the slow setup, where the author lays out his cast of characters. All of them, he claims, fall into the titular category of “conservatives against capitalism.”

There are antebellum Southern thinkers and politicians like George Fitzhugh, James Henry Hammond, and John C. Calhoun, slave owners worried about capitalism overturning their beloved racial caste system, which they see as the most humane and enlightened hierarchy the world has ever known.

There are fin-de-siècle imperialists like the historian Brooks Adams or President Theodore Roosevelt, each perceiving individualistic capitalism as a threat to the martial values and civilizing mission of an increasingly decadent ruling class.