The Stoic Capitalist: Advice for the Exceptionally Ambitious,
Robert Rosenkrantz
Bloomsbury (May 2025)

How to free yourself for yourself

To “free yourself from yourself” means to break free from limiting self-beliefs, attachments, and behaviors that hinder personal growth and happiness. This process involves self-reflection, exploring limiting beliefs, and actively practicing techniques like meditation and journaling. It’s a journey of self-awareness and conscious choices to cultivate a more authentic and fulfilling life.

This brief preface helps to create a context, a frame-of-reference, for the material that Robert Rosenkrantz provides in this book. First, a few words about the book’s structure. He combines several features from the biographical and historical frameworks within a personal narrative that combines elements of exposition, introspection, and some elements of description and argumentation.

It is fast-paced and always interesting to accompany Rosenkrantz  on his picaresque journey through higher education (Yale and Harvard degrees) and continue with him through several high-level positions in the legal/financial world (RAND Corporation, Oppenheimer, Rosenkrantz & Co.).  I was especially interested in meeting and getting to know his several mentors/associates (including Robert Dowling, Ananda Krishnan, Leon Levy, Jimmy King, Joe Mailman, Bob Posnak) as well as his always interesting personal life.  His intellectual curiosity seems insatiable.

Near the end of The Stoic Capitalist, Rosenkrantz cites one of his countless sources: “As a modern reader of Seneca, Steven Fideler puts it: ‘The keyphrase from here is free yourself from yourself for yourself.’ Three hundred years before Seneca, the Greek Stoics developed the idea that in addition to being enslaved physically, it is also possible to be enslaved psychologically…Stoicism as a philosophy was designed to free its practitioners from the slavery of false judgments  and opinions that lead to negative emotions kike fear, anxiety, greed, greed, anger, and resentment'”

Rosenkrantz then adds, “The Stoic concept of freedom is not a license to do whatever you like, but self-possession, of  learning how to value and experience the fullness of time.”

In this context, I am again reminded of Ernest Becker’s key insight in his classic work, Denial of Death: “No one can deny physical death. Only the suicide can determine when and where. But there is another form of death that we can deny: That which occurs when we become wholly obsessed with fulfilling others’ expectations of us.”

Robert Rosenkrantz seems to have lived the good life. His hope and mine is that what he so generously shares in this book will help countless others to value and experience the fullness of time.

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Here are two suggestions while you are reading The Stoic Capitalist: First, highlight key passages. Also,  perhaps in a notebook kept near-at-hand (e.g. Apica Premium C.D. Notebook A5), record your comments, questions, and action steps (preferably with deadlines). Pay special attention to the first and last paragraphs in each chapter.

These two simple tactics — highlighting and documenting — will expedite frequent reviews of key material later.