Definition
Anarchic capitalism is the term used (notably by sociologist John Scott and others, including in this book's framing) for the phase of industrial capitalism running roughly from the early 19th century to the 1930s. It is "anarchic" not because there is no state, but because the state's involvement in regulating markets, business cycles, and labour conditions is minimal compared to what follows. Markets, banks, and firms operate with limited oversight, and the resulting system is unstable, violent in its conflicts, and prone to severe slumps.
It is the form of capitalism that Marx, Dickens, Engels, and Veblen all describe — long working hours, brutal factory conditions, periodic depressions, robber-baron concentrations of wealth, and recurrent panics. It ends with the Great Depression and the political pressures that produce New Deal-style regulation and the post-war managed capitalism.
Why it matters
History
The anarchic phase begins as the post-Napoleonic state retreats from mercantilist regulation and the corn laws and other protections are dismantled (Britain, 1846). It deepens with the spread of industrialisation, peaks in intensity through the late 19th century, and collapses politically in 1929-33 when the Great Depression discredits laissez-faire and brings in the New Deal, Keynesianism, and eventually post-war managed capitalism.
What replaced it was not abolition of capitalism but its political domestication: full-employment policies, welfare states, financial regulation, and the recognition of organised labour. That settlement, in turn, was substantially undone after 1980 by neoliberalism.