ABSTRACT
I welcome the request to comment on the three intriguing articles in this issue by Gartzke and Hewitt, McDonald, and Mueller. 1 Space and time constraints mean that much more theory and research will be needed to evaluate them properly. My basic message is to agree that elements of capitalism— meaning relatively free national and international markets for goods, services, labor, and capital—do help avoid conflict among states in the contemporary international system. But micro-level understanding of just why that happens for capitalism, as well as for democracy, remains contested in these articles as before. 2 So too does any claim that capitalism replaces some other widely accepted liberal or realist hypotheses rather than merely supplements them. The search for adequate causal explanations goes on, but is unlikely ever to produce a single explanation for what is probably an equifinal phenomenon. So both producers and consumers of this literature would be wise to refrain from early celebration or despair about the primacy of a capitalist peace. After some conceptual clarifications I discuss the three articles, in rough order of the degree to which they proclaim capitalism to be the prime influence. Only Gartzke and Hewitt claim that the effect of capitalism completely subsumes democracy.
