![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The most salient was the modern (eighteenth-century) system of war finance, or the practice of borrowing large amounts of money-or capital-to fund the costs of war. “Capitalism” began as a French word ( capitalisme) but was used initially to refer to several largely British problems. In the beginning, the word referred to several different subjects. The genealogy of the word could, in short, be a guide to the genealogy of the thing. Piecing together the story behind the word could show, firstly, how a number of initially separate ingredients crystallised into a single noun and, secondly, how the resulting conceptual compound throws fresh light on both the connotations and the content of capitalism itself. Together, the two questions are good reasons for finding out more about how the word “capitalism” was originally used and what, over time, both the word and the concept were intended to do. The second is about how to evaluate the relative significance of the qualities involved in the concept of capitalism. The first is a question about how and why one set of connotations changed into the other. The differences between the conceptual connotations of the same word-one earlier, the other later-raise two large and interesting questions. These, however, were once the subjects that formed the core of the concept of capitalism in the early nineteenth century. Modern conceptions of capitalism standardly refer to subjects like states and markets, empires and slavery, power and patriarchy, prices and profits, money and exchange, value and surplus-value, property and commodities, machinery and industry, religion and ethics, custom and law, entrepreneurs and firms, and, probably, a great deal more.Ĭuriously, none of these modern versions of the concept of capitalism makes much reference to subjects like war and the costs of war, public debt and public administration, sociability and community, individuality and individualism, utility and integrity, originality and nationality or even justice and expediency. Surprisingly, the problems in question were considerably less familiar and more varied than those usually associated with most current versions of the concept of capitalism. In this purely etymological sense, capitalism began as a kind of shorthand for a ramifying array of moral, political, social or economic problems that, at the outset, were once quite discrete. Like many other words that end in “-ism” (think, for example, of liberalism, atheism, nationalism, feminism or environmentalism), capitalism is the name given to a number of originally separate subjects and problems that, because of the ending in “-ism”, came to be grouped together as a single noun. Capitalism is a word used variously to describe an economic and social system, a modern form of political power, a dynamic mode of production, a stage in a world-historical process running from feudalism to communism, a western object of ideological allegiance, a durable form of inequality or, more simply, a thing. ![]()
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