What if Marcus Aurelius were a capitalist?

Last week, I read a fascinating memoir titled The Stoic Capitalist: Advice for the Exceptionally Ambitious (Bloomsbury, 2025). This beautiful book is intriguing for two reasons. One is that it was written by a modern-day Marcus Aurelius, the billionaire financier/philanthropist Robert Rosenkranz. The other is its iconoclastic title, which brings me back to the original “Adam Smith problem” of lore: the relationship between ethics and economics, between the pursuit of virtue and the pursuit of profit. In short, how can a life devoted to money, power, and material wealth–i.e. “the capitalist life”–be consistent with the pursuit virtue for its own sake, i.e. the wisdom of an ancient Stoic sage? How can we mix such sublime and ethereal Stoic ethical precepts as reverence of the divine and the love of wisdom and justice with the rough-and-tumble, dog-eat-dog world of stock markets and business deals, like vinegar and water, into a logically coherent and soul-cleansing whole? Stay tuned,…