The front cover of Martin Wolf’s new book, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, is emblazoned with a red flying wedge straight out of an early Soviet-era constructivist poster. However, the book’s author is more interested in saving capitalism than burying it.

Wolf, the chief commentator of the Financial Times on economics, is arguably one of the most influential media defenders of the neoliberal order, and certainly the most nuanced. He sets out his case in an intellectual doorstop — nearly five hundred pages long — of the kind made popular by Thomas Piketty.

Yet verbosity is not always proof of a sound argument, and that proves to be the case here. Wolf is a brilliant journalist and commentator, but his attempt at outlining a blueprint for a Neoliberalism 2.0 gets lost in its own labyrinthine contradictions.