"How Capitalism Got Its Name," Dissent (Fall 2014) (original) (raw)
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, have done much to recover the political and moral dimensions of economic thought in history. Thanks to their work we have been reminded that, unlike the abstract science of modern economics, the early modern discourse of "political economy" was just as concerned with sovereignty, justice, and rights as it was with markets. To a casual observer it might therefore seem curious that scholars working in this tradition have largely demurred at the recent enthusiasm for the "new history of capitalism"-a field of scholarship that is eager to expose the historical, political, and moral blind spots of economics. In this extended essay, Michael Sonenscher, one of the leading exponents of the Cambridge approach to the history of political economy, provides a clarifying justification for this resistance to historiographical fashion. Despite its title, this is a book that seeks to relegate the importance of capitalism as both a historical phenomenon and a political problem. Capitalism, Sonenscher claims, emerged recently, and its pathologies are quite easily cured. Sonenscher's real task is to get "behind the word," to excavate the sophisticated insights of late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century theorists of what he takes to be a far more entrenched, intractable feature of modernity: commercial society, and its defining characteristic, the division of labor. The argument rests on some definitional ground-clearing. Capitalism now refers to any number of economic, social, and political problems, but it once had a very specific meaning. In eighteenth-century France, Sonenscher claims, a capitaliste was someone who invested in public debt, particularly to fund the rising costs of war. Once generalized and applied to domestic politics, this investment of private wealth (capital) in public debt came to be understood as "capitalism"; its beneficiaries were those who owned capital, its victims those who did not. Capitalism, then, is essentially "a property theory," and its origins lie in the modern state form (p. 168). In the early nineteenth century, up to 1848, both royalists and socialists had very little trouble conceptualizing alternatives to this arrangement of property and power: the ownership of capital could be
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For those unhappy with the status quo, Ellen Meiksins Wood's eloquent explanation of the origin of capitalism embodies hope for a future beyond the system that is so often taken for granted. By walking the reader through a comprehensive and thorough account of relevant European history, this book demonstrates why the transition to capitalism could not have been a natural or inevitable process. What she proposes seems so logical and uncontroversial that it is initially hard to grasp the significance of her argument -if capitalism is manifested in very specific social relations of production, it is thereby possible to deconstruct and abolish.
Origin and development of Capitalism Assignment
Introduction: The history of capitalism can be traced back to early forms of merchant capitalism practiced in Western Europe during the Middle Ages. [1] It began to develop into its modern form during the Early Modern period in the Protestant countries of NorthWestern Europe, especially the Netherlands (Dutch Republic) [2][3][4][5][6] and England. Traders in Amsterdam and London created the first chartered joint-stock companies driving up commerce and trade, and the first stock exchanges and banking and insurance institutions were established. [7][8][9][10] Over the course of the past five hundred years, capital has been accumulated by a variety of different methods, in a variety of scales, and associated with a great deal of variation in the concentration of economic power and wealth. [11] Much of the history of the past five hundred years is concerned with the development of capitalism in its various forms. Since 2000 the new scholarly field of "History of Capitalism" has appeared, with courses in history departments. It includes topics such as insurance, banking and regulation, the political dimension, and the impact on the middle classes, the poor and women and minorities Capitalism: System in which private or corporate wealth (capital) is used in the production and distribution of goods resulting in the dominance of private owners of capital and production for profit.
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Policy Point--Counterpoint: Whither Capitalism: The Historical Foundations and Fallacies of an Idea, Theory, Framework, Ideology, and Worldview By the mid-2010s, the term capitalism seems to have crept back into our shared cultural vocabulary--from games (e.g. Venture Capitalist) to movies (e.g. The Big Short), the word, and often the connotative baggage it carries with it, seem to be experiencing a resurgence of popular interest. Looking back through the historical record, the term seems to have enjoyed a regular number of resurgences, as well as a corresponding number of abatements; the cycles of which do appear to be sensitive not to actual economic cycles, but rather to our collective understanding. In some ways, it could be argued that usage of this term serves as a barometer of economic culture, a reflection, or refraction, of our changing relationship to the tides of economic development and the significance we believe they hold over our lives. What does the word capitalism a...
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The Journal of Economic History, 2016
Book Reviews 286 opinion, better equipped to understand it. Berry includes as an epigraph the opening lines of Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments passage in Theory worldview. The Af uent Society Revisited The Af uent Society into his time machine as he went to save the world, and answers in the negative. Just as Wells's hero would not need The Af uent Society to save the world, readers will not need The Af uent Society Revisited in order to understand it.