What is capitalism, and how is it created? Based on a timely reassessment of the classic arguments of Schumpeter, Weber, Hayek, and Parsons, this book suggests new answers to those questions. The large question here is: why are some countries rich and others not? Taking an approach grounded in Weber, Schumpeter, and Hayek, the author of this book argues that it is ultimately the expansion of markets that drives growth. But for that expansion to be successful, it must be supported by increasingly more abstract, impartial, and anonymous political institutions - a movement toward what Heller calls the 'parametric' state. Political leadership and political power are crucial in bringing about the necessary reforms, and representative democracy is the last phase of development - a result not a cause liberalization. Successful liberalizing reform, he argues, requires creative destruction; and in the context of the developing world, that means crisis. But crisis leads to successful reform only when the conditions of culture and cognition are right; if conditions are wrong, and the response to crisis of political and private interests is guided by nationalist, populist, socialist, or similar ideologies, the result is likely to be not growth but the kind of unending cyclical crisis familiar in Latin America. So, in the end, Heller makes a plea for the creation of a genuine liberal 'ideology'.