Capitalism: The Story behind the Word

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But this, Sonenscher contends, would not be a much more equal world, because the hierarchies generated by the division of labour would remain and inequalities of skill, talent, or industry could even widen as those unable to give found themselves marginalised by a community founded on labour. For Marx, Sonenscher argues, this was not much of a concern but it left unanswered the question of how we might get on transforming the more deeply rooted problems associated with a commercial society. An incisive, erudite, compelling, and deeply original contribution to the history of political and economic thought.”—Paul Sagar, King’s College London

In both, the future has a kind of magnetic power over the present: it orients and also pulls, draws, or strains the present toward itself. Here is another passage from Levy: This political awakening overlapped with certain intellectual trends that were similarly pervasive at this time, themes or tropes that help us understand why “capitalism” looks the way it does in the history of capitalism—why it is conceptualized the way it is. For this argument, I want to jump off from the Levy piece cited above, which (despite my quibble with its dating of the field’s “arrival”) is absolutely brilliant, one of the most stimulating theorizations of the field’s foundations and suppositions yet written. This question structures the second half of Sonenscher’s book, which functions not only as an analysis of a series of proposals to mitigate the worst effects of the division of labour, but also as a characteristically original account of the works of Marx, Smith, Hegel, Ricardo, and Lorenz von Stein. Walk on parts for Rousseau, Sieyès, Kant, and a host of more minor thinkers form an admirable supporting intellectual cast and help link this book to Sonenscher’s earlier writings which have focused on the French Revolution and the intellectual history of the 18 th century. PDF / EPUB File Name: Capitalism_The_Story_behind_the_Word_-_Michael_Sonenscher.pdf, Capitalism_The_Story_behind_the_Word_-_Michael_Sonenscher.epub Provocative. . . . [ Capitalism] will provoke much discussion in the fields of modern intellectual thought, political economy and various stripes of global history."—Tom F. Wright, Times Literary SupplementLevy does not mention poststructuralism at all but instead claims that Thorstein Veblen’s recognition of both the contingency of the “forward-looking capital process” and the non-existence of “hidden metaphysical essences” may “safely be labeled pragmatist.” Regarding J.M. Keynes, Levy cites the work of John B. Davis, who compares Keynes to the later Wittgenstein on “language-games,” so that “the numerical representations involved in establishing an investment’s value have a meaning for investors in terms of the social practice–or convention–that links them to one another.”

Coined in France in the early 19th century, “capitalism” was the name given to the investment of private wealth in public debt, particularly as a means of funding wars. This is to say that capitalism was the product of the private ownership of capital. “Its beneficiaries were its owners,” Sonenscher writes, “while its victims were those without capital.” In other words, capitalism, originally understood, was a property theory. Seen as such, capitalism itself was not principally blamed for economic exploitation. The question instead turned on who owned the capital. I have tried to make a similar argument a number of ways now, but I don’t think any version of it has proved very convincing. My underlying argument has been that the new history of capitalism has an important intellectual debt to poststructuralism, and particularly to poststructural theories of language that were taken up in history and the social sciences as “the linguistic turn.” But “poststructuralism” is, particularly for many historians, a nebulous term: the set of associations it carries and even the particular thinkers or texts connected to it may differ widely from one person to another. To be more precise, one’s exposure to the term (and thus one’s understanding of what is included under it) likely depends largely on the nature and timing of one’s graduate (and maybe undergraduate) education. DSJ: In what way did Marx contribute to the transformation of Smith’s “commercial society” into “capitalism”? Why did he err in conflating capitalism with the division of labor? Sonenscher astutely calls our attention to the original meaning of capitaliste and its implications." ---Martyn Ross, Applied Political Theory

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Before what we now call ‘capitalism’, there were commercial societies founded upon the division of labour, and if we ever move beyond capitalism, the division of labour will, in all likelihood, outlive it. This, in short, is the central argument made by Michael Sonenscher’s brilliant new book Capitalism: The Story Behind the Word, which traces the gradual emergence of the idea of ‘capitalism’ in the 18 th and 19 th centuries and its complex relationship with the older notion of ‘commercial society’. Or, as the author puts it, the book sets out “to describe how the many heterogeneous components of the concept of capitalism came to be crystallised as a single word.” Stein, Sonenscher argues, adapted this insight to the domestic economy more broadly, seeking to demonstrate how something resembling Hegel’s administrative state could mitigate the inequality of rewards engendered by the division of labour and realise the material as well as legal equality of citizens. Capital would now become the basis of a ‘social democracy’, and could neutralise the tumultuous forces of the market, generating a more equal society without abolishing ‘capitalism’ or the division of labour. To borrow a common refrain from the economic historiography of the 20 th century, the ‘warfare’ state would thus become a ‘welfare’ state, and capital, once the most important sinew of military power, would underwrite equality, peace, and prosperity rather than inequality, warfare, and ruin. However, as the 19 th century American social reformer Jane Addams – who is not quoted in this book – observed, although “Theoretically, ‘the division of labour’ makes men more interdependent and human by drawing them into a unity of purpose… the mere mechanical fact of interdependence amounts to nothing”. The interdependence which arises from a complex division of labour, in other words, does generate strong bonds of community, but reduces human society to a vast machine of production and consumption composed of increasingly isolated and replaceable parts. Curiously, 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. These, however, were once the subjects that formed the core of the concept of capitalism in the early nineteenth century. The differences between the conceptual connotations of the same word—one earlier, the other later—raise two large and interesting questions. The first is a question about how and why one set of connotations changed into the other. The second is about how to evaluate the relative significance of the qualities involved in the concept of capitalism. 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. 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. The genealogy of the word could, in short, be a guide to the genealogy of the thing.

I should take responsibility for any confusions about Levy’s argument here: your two objections may be my fault rather than his. In the last post in this history of capitalism series, I wrote about the way commodity histories (like Cod: A Biography of a Fish that Changed the World) illuminate some of the influences—intellectual and geopolitical—that shaped the emergence of the new history of capitalism. One of those influences or factors has to do with a broader argument that I’ve been trying to make throughout this series: that the new history of capitalism should not be understood as rooted in or a response to the financial crisis of 2007-2008. Certainly the crisis drew attention to the field at a critical moment in its development, but I think it is a mistake to frame the crisis as a “coming-of-age” moment for the field or as in any important way setting its research agenda or providing its recurrent concerns and underlying motivation. When Jonathan Levy writes in “Capital as Process and the History of Capitalism” (2017) that “the new history of capitalism arrived in U.S. historiography in the wake of the politicization of American economic life during the Great Recession,” I think he is invoking a common but basically inaccurate self-mythologization of the field’s history.Two further developments favoured the crystallisation of capitaland capitalistesinto capitalisme. One was the appearance of the concept of the division of labour in Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nationsin 1776 and its bearing on what Smith called a commercial society. The second was the use made of a combination of Smith’s concepts and Montesquieu’s “prophecy” by a French royalist writer named Louis de Bonald during the constitutional debates that took place in 1794 and 1795 after the end of the Jacobin regime of the first French Republic. To Bonald, trying to replace the republican system established during the French Revolution with a more balanced, British-style constitutional regime was to jump out of the frying pan into the fire. Opting to do so, Bonald warned, amounted to endorsing Montesquieu’s prophecy without registering its consequences. The real alternative to Jacobin republicanism, he argued, was not British constitutionalism, but absolute monarchy.

Sonenscher astutely calls our attention to the original meaning of capitaliste and its implications."—Martyn Ross, Applied Political Theory Sonenscher is widely recognized as one of the most versatile historians of ancien régime France, an ambitious thinker who writes knowledgeably about subjects as diverse as guild life, social cla MS: Marx’s hostility to the idea of equality was based on the initial idea that laws or rules work like markets and prices, because they apply generally to everyone irrespective of their real differences. Markets, as the saying goes, are impersonal, because the things that make markets possible, like quantities and prices, are measurable. But people have personalities, and some aspects of personality are incommensurable. Marx’s hostility towards equality was connected to a set of distinctions between singularity and universality, particularity and generality, irrationality and rationality—or, to put it more directly, between whatever is involved in making me different from you, although we are both human beings and, in this respect, are subject to the same sort of causal processes that are built into natural and human life. We live, in short, in a causally determined world, and the propensity to subordinate individuality to generality is an effect of how the idea of causation presupposes something fairly general that can be applied to something fairly particular.We now think of the French Revolution as a political revolution that had a social effect, but 'the eighteenth century's concern' was of an 'extant and ongoing social revolution that would soon have political consequence'. This is the central insight of Michael Sonenscher's new book. [In this] highly interesting book...Sonenscher's emphasis on public credit is novel and useful. [I]t is a genuinely meaningful contribution to the history of Enlightenment Europe."—Patrice Higonnet, Times Literary Supplement All the ingredients of what was to become the original concept of capitalism were readily available in Bonald. They were soon brought together under the aegis of the word itself in a number of royalist publications that began to circulate before and after the French Revolution of July 1830. Here, capitalism became a shorthand for a fusion of two related problems. Behind the political question of the type of constitution suitable for the new regime, there was also, they argued, a social question, which asked whether any or all of the constitutional arrangements established by the July Monarchy were compatible with the combination of the division of labour, public debt, and inequality that, they claimed, were the hallmarks of capitalisme. No simple constitutional adjustment, they argued, could erase the legacy of the French Revolution. Real closure would have to come from erasing the French Revolution itself. One counterintuitive solution was to promote productivity and free trade. Another, in the light of this pair, was to think about how to find ways to have the benefits of productivity and free trade without succumbing to the spiraling logic of inequality that free trade could bring in its wake. This is what my book is about: It’s about how credit and capital, products and product cycles, money and prices, administration and entitlement, government and welfare can be used to offset the otherwise remorseless effects of the division of labor. It is also, more schematically, about the types of states and the forms of politics that seem to have acquired a measure of ability to establish these neutralizing, stabilizing, risk-avoiding, and sometimes creative functions. The meaning of a text is constantly subject to the whims of the future, but when that so-called future is itself ‘present’ (if we try and circumscribe the future by reference to a specific date or event) its meaning is equally not realised, but subject to yet another future that can also never be present. The key to a text is never even present to the author themselves, for the written always defers its meaning. DSJ: What then are you trying to recover from the older understanding of capitalism, especially if, as you argue, the division of labor cannot be overcome?