This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism.

After describing unemployment, insecurity and competition in capitalist production, Einstein turns to their effect on social consciousness. He says education reinforces the damage by training students to prize competitive acquisition, then argues for economic and educational arrangements oriented toward social responsibility.

Einstein regards the weakening of people’s social capacities, rather than only material hardship, as capitalism’s gravest harm.

The opening demonstrative points back to the damage to social consciousness in the previous paragraph. It is not a free-standing claim about physical disability, nor an assertion that every form of state planning would solve the problem: he soon warns against bureaucratic enslavement.

Suffering, Society, Politics, Morality, Evil

• It consists in preventing the world from falling apart. Albert Camus
• We are today in the midst of a cold war. Bernard Baruch
• Nevertheless, it is necessary to remember that a planned economy is not yet socialism.
• We are now facing a problem more of ethics than of physics. Bernard Baruch
• So great the evils to which religion could prompt! Lucretius

• socialistmag.us/1949/05/01/why-socialism
• monthlyreview.org/articles/why-socialism

Albert Einstein, Why Socialism? (1949), Why Socialism?, paragraph beginning This crippling of individuals; February 1951 pamphlet, PDF page 8. Checked at Quotogeny, https://quotogeny.com/q/this-crippling-of-individuals-worst-evil-of-capitalism/ (25 October 2026).

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