Capitalism: The History of the Concept

Jurgen Kocka, Free University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany

2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Abstract

Capitalism is a controversial concept. It emerged as a key concept of social criticism and as a concept for socioeconomic and
historical analysis, in Western languages in the second half of the nineteenth century. The contributions by Marx and
Hilferding, Sombart and Max Weber, Veblen and Keynes, Schumpeter and Braudel were particularly important. The concept
played a role in controversial politico-ideological debates. Since the 1990s, a limited revival of the concept can be observed,
but it is used more by social scientists and in the humanities than by economists. In conclusion, a working denition of
capitalism is suggested.

Origins: A Concept of Difference
Capitalism is a controversial concept. Many scholars avoid it,
because they nd it too ideological, value-loaded, vague, or
broad. On the other hand, capitalism has been a central
concept for many important analyses and debates in academia
and the general public. In the present time, it is increasingly
used again, although, more by social scientists and in the
humanities than by economists. If one wants to use it for
scholarly purposes, one must dene it and should know its
history.
The concept capitalism is a neologism, which emerged in
Western languages in the second half of the nineteenth century.
It is much younger than the historical reality it denotes and also
younger than its major theoretical justications. Neither Adam
Smith and his contemporaries nor John Stuart Mill and the
classical political economists used the concept. Certainly,
capital and capitalist (as a noun and an adjective) were older
and frequently used in European languages at least since the
sixteenth and the eighteenth century, respectively. But the noun
capitalism appeared only after the European revolutions of
1848. The French socialist Louis Blanc (181182) used it in
1850 and dened it critically as appropriation of capital by
some to the exclusion of others. In 1851, Pierre Joseph
Proudhon (180965) castigated landed property on the Pari-
sian house market as a fortress of capitalism when demanding
public regulation against exorbitant rents and speculation. The
same year, the liberal economist Frdric Bastiat (180150)
also quoted the term. In 1867, a French encyclopedia, the
Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe sicle, dened capitalism as
power of capital or capitalists.
In German the concept was not pioneered by Karl Marx
(181883) and Friedrich Engels (182095) who in the 1850s
and 1860s wrote much about the capitalist mode of produc-
tion and capitalist accumulation, but used the noun capi-
talism only later and rather marginally. It was an economist
with state socialist sympathies, Johann Karl Rodbertus
(180575) who in 1869 wrote: Capitalism has become
a social system. In 1870, a liberal-conservative professor of
economics, Albert Eberhard Friedrich Schfe (18311903),
published a voluminous monograph Capitalism and Socialism.
He extensively dealt with the conicts between capital and
wage labor, advocated state-sponsored reforms in order to
mitigate those conicts, and dened capitalism as a national
and international organism of production under the leadership
of entrepreneurial capitalists competing for highest prot.
The Socialists are correct, he added, when they declare the
present economy to be characterized by the capitalist mode of
production, i.e., by the hegemony of capitalism. In 1872, the
socialist Wilhelm Liebknecht (18261900) thundered against
capitalism as a juggernaut on the battleelds of industry. In
1876, a much read encyclopedia (Meyers Universal-Lexikon)
mentioned capitalism for the rst time, while its 1896
edition carried a whole entry on the term dening it as the
capitalist mode of production in contrast to the socialist and
collectivist one (Hilger, 1982: 443f.; Kocka, 2013: 69; Bastiat,
1851: 407, 415; Rodbertus-Jagetzow, 1869: XVf.; Schfe,
1870: 116; Silberner and Silberner, 1940).
In Great Britain, the concept was not unknown already in
1855, but then reluctantly introduced since the 1880s, espe-
cially in Fabian circles. John A. Hobson (18581940) pub-
lished a book on The Evolution of Modern Capitalism in 1894 in
which he concentrated on the rise of the factory system. The
Encyclopedia Britannica mentioned the concept rst in its
191011 edition (still in Capitalism) and carried a whole
entry on the term in 1922 dening capitalism as a system in
which the means of production were owned by private
proprietors who employed managers and workers for
production. The history of the concept in the United States
paralleled that of Great Britain, though there is evidence that
the term was known to radical working-class circles before
journalists and scholars adopted it. Here, Thorstein Veblen
(18571929) was one of the rst who used it in his The
Instinct of Workmanship of 1914. He followed European
authors when stressing that capitalism was much older than
industrialization, growing out of the handicraft system, of
trade and of nancial businesses in the fteenth and sixteenth
century. But he emphasized that its highest development
comes with the advanced stages of the machine technology
and is manifestly conditioned by the latter (Pendennis, 1855:
75; Brick, 2006: 2333; Veblen, 1914: 28283, 302; Williams,
1976: 4244; Merrill 1990, 470473).
Individualized property rights; commodication on
markets for goods, labor, land, and capital; the price mecha-
nism and competition; investment, capital, and prot; the
distinction between power holding proprietors and dependent
property-less wage workers, tensions between capital and labor,
rising inequality; the factory system; and industrialized

International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 3 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.03069-5 105
106 Capitalism: The History of the Concept
production these were, in varying combinations, major
characteristics of the concept capitalism as it emerged until
World War I. It was mostly used to denote an economic practice
or an economic system, frequently with special attention to its
social and cultural consequences.
To judge from German examples, the concept capitalism
emerged as a concept of difference. It was used to highlight,
usually in a critical way, certain features of the then dominant
or emerging socioeconomic reality in contrast to what this
reality was thought to have been in previous (precapitalist)
times, and to what it might become under socialism in the
future. It is remarkable how closely discourses about capitalism
and socialism were interrelated. It is equally striking how much
the capitalist elements of the contemporary reality or the
capitalist period in which one lived were seen as something
modern. In other words, many observers did not only discuss
capitalism as they observed it, but they also placed it on an
imaginary time line. The contrast with a selectively commem-
orated and frequently idealized past, as well as the contrast
with an imagined and sometimes utopian future was consti-
tutive for the emergence of the concept.
Critique and Analysis
While all authors saw capitalism in its developed form as
a modern phenomenon, the concept was also used for histor-
ical research. It was applied to medieval and ancient Europe,
i.e., to historical constellations in which capitalism was much
less developed than in modern times or in the present. Werner
Sombart (1902), Max Weber (18931908), Giuseppe Salvioli
(1906), Henri Pirenne (1914), William Cunningham (1916),
Richard Henry Tawney (1922), Henri Se (1928), and many
others participated in the frequently controversial exploration
of distant pasts by using the modern category capitalism. The
ndings of the Belgian economic historian, Henri Pirenne
(18621935), have stood the test of the time best, while others
like Sombart (18631941) exaggerated the static, noncapitalist,
even anticapitalist spirit of the medieval period, in which, as
recent research has shown, capitalist forms of behavior were
not altogether alien to both long-distance merchants and
market-related producers, in different regions of Europe even
before the spread of capitalist principles accelerated between
the sixteenth and the eighteenth century (in long-distance
trade, banking and nance, agriculture, and proto-
industrialization) and industrialization got under way (since
the eighteenth century).
It is more than obvious that capitalism originated as
a polemical, critical concept. Of course, there were those who
defended capitalism on the basis of its economic strength, as
a creator of wealth and welfare as well as a motor of modern-
ization and a force of liberation from traditional bonds and
hierarchies. However, among conservatives as well as on the
political left, capitalism was seen as an irresistible force of
erosion: custom was replaced by contract, Gemeinschaft by
Gesellschaft, the traditional by the modern, social ties by the
market. On the right, anticapitalism frequently went hand in
hand with antiliberalism and antisemitism, particularly since
the Great Depression of the 1870s. But the socialist critique of
capitalism was the most powerful one. On the one hand, it
attacked the exploitation of labor by capital, increasing social
inequality, suppression at the work place, and the lack of a fair
deal in the distribution of product and wealth. On the other
hand, it predicted the decline of capitalism due to its internal
contradictions and its eventual replacement by something new,
namely socialism.
Because the concept capitalism was frequently used for
critical and polemical purposes, and because its denition
varied between single authors a lot, many scholars stayed in
distance to it or avoided it altogether. The economist Richard
Passow (18801949) documented the lively discussion about
the different meanings of the concept in the scholarly literature
from the late-nineteenth century to the 1920s (1918/1927).
But as it has happened so often with key concepts in the social
sciences bureaucracy, democracy, and modernization can
serve as examples the value-loaded, mostly critical and even
polemical use of capitalism did not prevent, but sometimes
even helped to turn it into a fruitful descriptive and analytical
tool for scholarly purposes. Marx and Weber are two cases in
point.
Marx did not only criticize the capitalist mode of produc-
tion and the bourgeois society based on it. Together with
Engels, he developed the building blocks of a critical theory of
capitalism. Impressed by the victorious industrial capitalism of
his time, he emphasized: (1) the market and its increasingly
compulsive laws; (2) the basic role of work and labor as well
as the asymmetric relations and built-in tensions between
capitalist employers and property-less wage workers to be
transformed into the class conict between bourgeoisie and
proletariat; (3) investment, prot, accumulation, and endless
expansion of the capitalist economy, which would spread over
the world and transform social relations and dominant
cultures, before being destroyed by its internal contradictions
and being replaced by something new socialism in a revo-
lutionary way. Marx theories and visions have been sharply
criticized. At the same time, they have inuenced not only
social movements, political parties, and historical develop-
ments, but also scholarly discourses and research more than the
work by anybody else, ever since. Among his intellectual
followers, Rudolf Hilferding (18771941) deserves particular
attention who published Finance Capital in 1910. In his book,
Hilferding transformed the Marxist analysis of capitalism in
a way that it could deal with the rise of the modern corporation
and the partial separation between ownership and control at its
top, with the increasing tendencies toward concentration and
centralization of capital as well as with the frequently close
relation between industrial enterprises and banks. Hilferding
developed the building blocks of a critical theory of Organized
Capitalism (his concept), which would not abandon the
market as the basic regulatory mechanism, but would supple-
ment and modify it by adding elements of collective coordi-
nation, structured negotiation, and conscious organization
(Marx, 1967; Muller, 2003: 166207; Hilferding, 1910;
Winkler, 1974; Bottomore, 1985).
Classical Contributions
Max Weber (18641920) combined analysis and critique in
another way. He conceptualized capitalism as a world-historical

phenomenon with many variations merchant capitalism,
political capitalism, spoils capitalism, among others but he
was primarily interested in modern capitalism, which he saw
dened by the capitalist enterprise (Unternehmung) with its
specic rationality, its discipline, contractual wage work, divi-
sion and coordination of labor as well as a clear separation from
the households of the economic actors, including the entre-
preneurs. Weber found modern capitalism in this sense only in
the West, since about the sixteenth century. He analyzed its
interdependence with important social, cultural, and political
developments, particularly with legal change and the rise of the
modern states in a long history of formation and coercion,
negotiations, and wars. Weber emphasized that modern capi-
talism had indispensable economic presupposition, especially
markets for goods, labor, and land as well as for money, credit,
and capital. It also needed specic economic sentiments
(Wirtschaftsgesinnung), which would motivate main actors to
relentlessly strive and intensively work for innovation and
prot, used not for consumption but for reinvestment with
a perspective of long-term growth per se. Weber saw this
capitalist spirit, in its early phases, grounded in the ascetic
religiosity of early modern Calvinists and Puritans. This Weber
thesis has been much criticized on empirical grounds. While
Weber appreciated capitalism as a central pillar of Western
modernity, he saw its built-in irrationalities, too. He doubted
whether capitalism would lead to general welfare, and he feared
that in the long run it might threaten human freedom (Weber,
1988, 2012; Parsons, 192829; Mommsen, 1997; Schluchter,
2009: 6387).
By World War I historical and social science-based thought
on capitalism had produced results, which have remained
inuential until the present. But over the next decades, econo-
mists, social scientists, and historians contributed major new
thoughts to the discussion, which remained controversial, uid,
and stimulating.
For John Maynard Keynes (18831946), the concept did not
play a central role, but he did not avoid it, either. In 1927, he
saw the essential characteristic of Capitalism in its
dependence upon an intense appeal to the money-making
and money-loving instincts of individuals as the main motive
force of the economic machine. In some parts of Europe, but
not in the United States, he observed a latent reaction,
somewhat widespread, against basing Society to the extent
that we do upon fostering, encouraging, and protecting the
money-motives of individuals. In contrast to Weber and
Sombart who had emphasized the calculability and the
rational instrumentality of capitalist behavior, he stressed the
great importance of tempers, emotions, and animal spirits in
capitalism.
In the work of Joseph A. Schumpeter (18831950) who
always enjoyed being outside the mainstream, capitalism
was a central category. He dened that word which good
economists always try to avoid: capitalism is that form of
private property economy in which innovations are carried
out by means of borrowed money, which in general .
implies credit creation. On this basis, he assumed that
capitalism began in Southern Europe around 1300. As the
core of capitalism, Schumpeter famously discovered creative
destruction. Innovation on the basis of new combinations
would lead to new methods of production and distribution,
Capitalism: The History of the Concept 107
new forms of organization, new demand, and new economic
opportunities, but also to the displacement or the
destruction of older methods, patterns, and opportunities.
There were always winners and losers. Schumpeter argued
that booms and busts, ups and downs of the capitalist
economy were related to the rhythms of innovation; he
developed his theory of the business cycles on this basis. In
the 1940s, Schumpeter was highly pessimistic as to the
future of capitalism. He did not expect its failure due to
internal contradictions and crises like Marx, but he observed
capitalisms propensity to undermine itself: Its success would
transform and weaken social and cultural forces e.g., the
middle class family, precapitalist elites, and the protection by
a powerful state which capitalism had needed and would
need for its ascent and survival (Keynes, 1927: 50f.;
Schumpeter, 1939: 223f.; 1976).
In his monumental Civilisation matrielle, conomie et capi-
talisme (19671979), Fernand Braudel offered an alternative
denition by sharply distinguishing capitalism from market
economy. He saw local markets, fairs and stores, the everyday
practice of exchange by producers, traders, and consumers as
constitutive for market economies throughout the ages and
nearly everywhere in the world, while he tried to reserve the
term capitalism to the businesses of a relatively narrow and
exclusive superstructure of wealthy and inuential merchants,
bankers, ship owners, proprietors, entrepreneurs, and nancial
capitalists. Among them, competition played minimal, close
contacts to the holders of political power princes, bishops,
magistrates, and governments an important role. While
Braudels contraposition of market economy and capitalism
has met many insurmountable problems, it had the merit of
highlighting that oligopolistic and monopolistic practices
have always been frequent in capitalism, and that a close
symbiosis between capitalists and the politically powerful has
been much more the rule than their clean separation. Braudel
also further developed the tradition of seeing capitalism as
a world-historical development. He inuenced authors like
Immanuel Wallerstein and Giovanni Arrighi, who in the last
quarter of the twentieth century conceptualized and
investigated capitalism as a global phenomenon. Wallerstein
built on older theories of imperialism and dependencia when
placing capitalism into the center of his world-system
approach. Arrighi stressed nance capitalism and proposed
a scheme according to which capitalist lead regions have
changed over time and moved from Northern Italy in the late-
middle ages via the Netherlands in the early modern period
and England since the eighteenth century to the United States
(twentieth century), and perhaps China in the future
(Braudel, 19671979; Wallerstein, 1974; Arrighi, 1994, 2007;
Vries, 2012).
Political Contexts and Recent Revival
No doubt, capitalism has always been more than a political
catchword or instrumentalized slogan. Scholarly denitions,
clarications, and application have made the term a pene-
trating and far-reaching analytical instrument, ever since the
nineteenth century. But the term has preserved part of its
afnity to social criticism. Over the decades it has frequently,
108 Capitalism: The History of the Concept
though not at all exclusively, been used by authors who saw
themselves somewhere on the left and combined analysis with
criticism in varying combinations when writing about
economy, society, politics, and culture. For illustration,
consider economic interpretations of imperialism (e.g.,
Luxemburg, 1913), studies on monopoly capitalism (Baran
and Sweezy, 1966), treatises on the relation between the
crisis of capitalism and the rise of fascism (e.g., Poulantzas,
1974), critical comments about the internal contradictions of
capitalism (Habermas, 1973; Bell, 1976; Boltanski and
Chiapello, 2000), the need for reembedding capitalism in
order to make it more compatible with human needs (Polanyi,
1944; Streeck, 2009), or reections on how capitalism will
cope with present-day challenges like the hypotrophy of
nance capitalism, increasing social inequality, or climate
change (Wallerstein et al., 2013). Analysis and criticism can
reinforce each other.
In addition, the term capitalism has continued to play
a role in controversial political debates in the public arena,
reaching far beyond academic discourses. Capitalism has been
a central combat term within socialist and communist rhetoric
and propaganda, sometimes ambitious and pointed, frequently
simplied, aggressive, and totalizing. As a consequence, the
term got involved into and damaged by the political and
ideological struggles of the past century. Capitalism was a key
word in deep-reaching conicts between different positions on
the left and various shades of the right as to the correct or
desirable economic, social, and political shape of the future. It
played a role in controversies between democratic speakers and
the advocates of both left- and right-wing dictatorships. It has
been shown how the deep tension between the United States
and the Soviet Union after World War I and later on between
West and East in the Cold War inuenced and avored the
public use of the term capitalism in the United States (Marks,
2012). The Cold War impacted politics, culture, and language in
most European countries, too. Again, capitalism served as
a concept of difference. It was dened and applied in contrast to
the Communist alternative and challenge. This sometimes led
to dichotomic simplications and distortions. The more capi-
talism was used as a polemical catchword in politico-
ideological conicts, the less useful it appeared to many
scholars. Consequently they criticized or avoided it altogether
(Sombart, 1935: 195; Hayek, 1954; Hartwell, 1983; Grassby,
1999).
Since the 1990s, something like a limited revival of the
concept can be observed, within general discussions as well as in
the social and historical sciences (Sklansky, 2012). On the one
hand, the Cold War is over. Nowadays capitalism is much less
a combat term in a systemic conict of global scale than it used
to be during most of the twentieth century. The concept has been
freed from this burden. On the other hand, a resurgence of
market liberalism if not of laissez-faire capitalism has taken place
since the late 1970s, primarily on the level of neoliberal
discourses, but partly also in economic and social policy
(Harvey, 2007). Between World War I (at the latest) and the
1970s, powerful trends toward more political coordination of
markets, more planned organization of competition, and more
welfare state intervention had been on the way, at least in
parts of Europe and North America. Some observers spoke of a
move toward organized capitalism, others argued that
a transition from nineteenth century industrial capitalism to
a mixed system or a postcapitalist era was on the way (Brick,
2006: 5485). In the increasingly neoliberal atmosphere and
the waves of deregulation since the 1970s at least in the
United States and in some parts of Europe (including Eastern
Europe since the 1990s) this perspective has lost much
credibility. In some parts of the intellectual spectrum,
capitalism had always been used in an unconditionally
positive sense, at least in the United States (e.g., Friedman,
1962). Now, the afrmative (e.g., Mackey, 2013) or strictly
neutral usage (e.g., Hall and Soskice, 2001) of the term gained
additional ground. The Great Recession of 2008 had thirdly
an opposite effect. It led to a renewed questioning of the
neoliberal belief in the self-regulating capacities of capitalist
markets and to new proposals in favor of reregulation. But it
also contributed to rising interest in the term capitalism.
Fourthly, the accelerated globalization of capitalism in the last
decades has demonstrated that capitalism can ourish in very
different social contexts and under very different political
regimes, even in authoritarian and dictatorial systems, at least
for a while. A well-dened concept of capitalism appears to
be well suited for guiding comparative research on a global
scale, now on the agenda. Global perspectives enlarge the
typology of observable forms of capitalism. They question
received theses, e.g., with respect to the relation between
bonded labor, wage labor on a contractual basis, and
capitalism. They reopen the debate on the relations between
capitalism, freedom, and democracy (Pryor, 2010: 74111;
van der Linden, 2008; Sanyal, 2007).
A Lean Definition
The denitions of capitalism will vary with different topics and
different research priorities. In the light of the previous survey,
and if a broad systematic and historical analysis of capitalism
is intended, a working denition is useful, which emphasizes
decentralization, commodication, and accumulation as basic
characteristics. On the one hand, it is essential that individual
and collective actors dispose of rights, which enable them to
make economic decisions in a relatively autonomous and
decentralized way. On the other hand, markets serve as the
main mechanisms of allocation and coordination; commodi-
cation permeates capitalism in many forms, including the
commodication of labor. Thirdly, capital is central, that
means utilizing resources for investment in the present with
the expectation of higher gains in the future, accepting credit
besides using savings and returns, dealing with uncertainty and
risk as well as having prots, and accumulation as aims.
Change, growth, and expansion are inscribed (Kocka, 2010,
2013).
Such a lean denition allows to distinguish between very
different types of capitalism and to study the ways in which they
have changed and mixed. It also allows to trace capitalist
phenomena in epochs and regions in which they were or are
just minority phenomena within dominantly noncapitalist
environments while acknowledging that to speak of capitalism
as an economic system its mechanisms must be fully developed
and dominant. While such a denition concentrates on
economic criteria, it also directs attention to the numerous,

changing, and changeable social, political, legal, and cultural
conditions and consequences of capitalism. While the term has
been used and can be used for the analysis of very specic
problems like the change from entrepreneurial to managerial
capitalism in the history of modern rms (Chandler, 1977;
John, 2008) it has been and can be particularly useful as
a frame within which to study the changing interconnections
between economic, social, legal, political, and cultural
dimensions (e.g., Zakim and Kornblith, 2012). The term can
serve as a tool for bridging boundaries between disciplines.
Throughout its history, the concept has been used for
relating specic objects of study to grand questions of the past,
present, and future, questions in which normative orientations
play a role. In this respect, the term capitalism resembles
concepts like modernity or democracy. The term capitalism John, R.R., 2008. Turner, Beard, Chandler: progressive historians. In: Business History
emerged as a critical concept of difference, contrasting observa-
tions of the present with constructions of different pasts and
imaginations of a future, which would be different again.
Criticism and analysis have been closely intertwined. While this
accounts for some of the problems and weaknesses of the
concept, it also explains some of its particular strengths and its
continuous attraction. Today, it is not at all clear how an
alternative to capitalism could and should look like. People
who use the concept surely diverge as to their personal and
political visions of the future. But some, though vague, idea or
protovision about how things could and perhaps should be,
differently from the present, seem to be in the back of the head
of some of those who use the term capitalism to talk about the
past, present, and future. In this sense, the critical potential of
the concept has not fully disappeared, while not exacerbating
empirical description and theoretical analysis.
See also: Capital: History of the Concept; Capitalism: Global;
Capitalism; Communism, History of; Marx, Karl (181883);
Marxism in Contemporary Sociology; Schumpeter, Joseph A.
(18831950); Socialism: Historical Aspects; Socialism; Veblen,
Thorstein (18571929); Weber, Max (18641920); Weberian
Social Thought, History of.
Bibliography
Arrighi, G., 1994. The Long Twentieth Century. Money, Power and the Origins of Our
Time. Verso, London.
Arrighi, G., 2007. Adam Smith in Beijing. Lineages of the Twenty-First Century. Verso,
London.
Baran, P.A., Sweezy, P., 1966. Monopoly Capital. An Essay on the American Economic
and Social Order. Verso, New York.
Bastiat, F., 1851. Harmonies conomiques, second ed. Guillaumin et Cie,
Paris.
Bell, D., 1976. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. Basic Books, New York.
Boltanski, L., Chiapello, E., 2000. Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme. Gallimard, Paris.
Bottomore, T., 1985. The Theories of Modern Capitalism. G. Allen & Unwin,
London.
Braudel, F., 196779. Civilisation matrielle, conomie et capitalisme, 3 vols. A. Colin,
Paris.
Brick, H., 2006. Transcending Capitalism. Visions of a New Society in Modern American
Thought. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY.
Chandler Jr., A.D., 1977. The Visible Hand. The Managerial Revolution in American
Business. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
Cunningham, W., 1916. The Progress of Capitalism in England. Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge.
Capitalism: The History of the Concept 109
Friedman, M., 1962. Capitalism and Freedom. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Grassby, R., 1999. The Idea of Capitalism before the Industrial Revolution. Rowman &
Littleeld, Lanham.
Habermas, J., 1973. Legitimationsprobleme des Sptkapitalismus. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt.
Hall, P.A., Soskice, D. (Eds.), 2001. Varieties of Capitalism. The Institutional Foundations
of Comparative Advantage. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Hartwell, R.M., 1983. The origins of capitalism: a methodological essay. In: Pejovich, S.
(Ed.), Philosophical and Economic Foundations of Capitalism. D.T. Heath & Co.,
Lexington, MA, pp. 1123.
Harvey, D., 2007. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Hayek, F.A. (Ed.), 1954. Capitalism and the Historians. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Hilferding, R., 1910. Das Finanzkapital. Eine Studie zur jngsten Entwicklung des
Kapitalismus. Verlag der Wiener Volksbuchhandlung Ignaz Brand & Co., Wien.
Hobson, J.A., 1894. The Evolution of Modern Capitalism: A Study of Machine
Production. W. Scott, London.
Hilger, M.-E., 1982. Kapital, Kapitalist, Kapitalismus. In: Brunner, O., et al. (Eds.),
Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, vol. 3. Klett, Stuttgart, pp. 339454.
Review, vol. 82, pp. 227240.
Keynes, J.M., 1927. The End of Laissez-Faire. The Hogarth Press, London.
Kocka, J., 2010. Writing the history of capitalism. In: Bulletin of the German Historical
Institute, vol. 47. German Historical Institute, Washington, pp. 724.
Kocka, J., 2013. Geschichte des Kapitalismus. Beck, Mnchen (Engl. transl. forth-
coming 2015 with Princeton University Press).
van der Linden, M., 2008. Workers of the World. Essays toward a Global Labor History.
Brill, Leiden.
Luxemburg, R., 1913. Die Akkumulation des Kapitals. Ein Beitrag zur konomischen
Erklrung des Kapitalismus. Buchhandlung Vorwrts Paul Singer, Berlin.
Mackey, J., 2013. Conscious Capitalism. Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business.
Harvard Business Review Press, Cambridge, MA.
Marks, S.G., 2012. The word capitalism: the Soviet Unions gift to America. In:
Society, vol. 9, pp. 155163.
Marx, K., 1967. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. I. International Publishers,
New York.
Merrill, M., 1990. The Anticapitalist Origins of the United States. In: Review: The Journal
of the Fernand Braudel Center 13 (4), 465497.
Merrill, M., 2014. How Capitalism Got Its Name. In: Dissent Fall, pp. 8792.
Mommsen, W., 1997. Die Wirtschaftsgesinnung des modernen marktorientierten
Kapitalismus. In: Lthique protestante de Max Weber et lesprit de la modernit.
Maison des Sciences de lHomme, Paris, pp. 208224.
Muller, J.Z., 2003. The Mind and the Market. Capitalism in Western Thought. Anchor
Books, New York.
Parsons, T., 192829. Capitalism in recent German literature: Sombart and Weber.
In: Journal of Political Economy, vol. 36, pp. 641644, 37, pp. 3151.
Passow, R., 1918/1927. Kapitalismus. Eine begrifich-terminologische Studie, second
ed. G. Fischer, Jena.
Pendennis, A., Thackeray, W.M. (Eds.), 1855. The Newcomes. Memoirs of a Most
Respectable Family, vol. 2. Bradbury and Evans, London.
Pirenne, H., 1914. The stages in the history of capitalism. In: American Historical
Review, vol. 19, pp. 494515.
Polanyi, K., 1944. The Great Transformation. Farrar & Rinehart, Inc., New York.
Poulantzas, N., 1974. Fascism and Dictatorship. The Third International and the
Problem of Fascism. NLB, London.
Pryor, F.L., 2010. Capitalism Reassessed. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Rodbertus-Jagetzow, K., 1869. Zur Erklrung und Abhlfe Der heutigen Cerditnoth des
Grundbesitzes, vol. 2. Friedrich Mauke, Jena.
Salvioli, J., 1906. Le capitalisme dans le monde antique. V. Giard & E. Brire, Paris.
Sanyal, K., 2007. Rethinking Capitalist Development. Primitive Accumulation,
Governmentality and Post-Colonial Capitalism. Routledge, London.
Schfe, A.E.F., 1870. Kapitalismus und Socialismus mit besonderer Rcksicht auf
Geschfts- und Vermgensformen. H. Laupp, Tbingen.
Schluchter, W., 2009. Die Entzauberung der Welt. Sechs Studien zu Max Weber. J.C.B.
Mohr, Tbingen.
Schumpeter, J.A., 1939. Business Cycles. A Theoretical, Historical and Statistical
Analysis of the Capitalist Process, vol. 1. Porcubine Press, Philadelphia.
Schumpeter, J.A., 1976. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942). Harper & Row,
New York.
Se, H., 1928. Les origines du capitalisme modern. Adelphi Co., New York.
Silberner, L.F., Silberner, E., 1940. Le mot capitalisme. Annales dhistoire sociale 2 (2),
133134.
Sklansky, J., 2012. The elusive sovereign: new intellectual and social histories of
capitalism. In: Modern Intellectual History, vol. 9, pp. 32248.
110 Capitalism: The History of the Concept
Sombart, W., 191927. Der Moderne Kapitalismus. Historisch-systematische
Darstellung des gesamteuropischen Wirtschaftslebens von seinen Anfngen bis
zur Gegenwart, third, second and rst ed., 3 vols. Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig
(rst ed. 1902).
Sombart, W., 1935. Capitalism. In: Seligman, R.A., Johnson, A. (Eds.), Encyclopaedia of
the Social Sciences, vol. 3. MacMillan, New York, pp. l95208.
Streeck, W., 2009. Reforming Capitalism: Institutional Change in the German Political
Economy. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Streeck, W., May/June 2014. How will capitalism end? New Left Review 87, 3564.
Tawney, R.H., 1962. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. A Historical Study (1922,
1926). P. Smith, Gloucester, MA.
Veblen, T., 1914. The Instinct of Workmanship. The Macmillan Company, New York.
Vries, P., 2012. Europe and the rest. Braudel on capitalism. In: Garner, G., Middell, M.
(Eds.), Aufbruch in die Weltwirtschaft. Braudel wiedergelesen. Leipziger Univ.-Verl.,
Leipzig, pp. 81144.
Wallerstein, I., 1974. The Modern World System, vol. 1. Academic Press, New York.
Wallerstein, I., et al., 2013. Does Capitalism Has a Future? Oxford University Press.
Weber, M., 1988. Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (1904/05).
In: Gesammelte Aufstze zur Religionssoziologie, vol. 1. J.C.B. Mohr, Tbingen,
pp. 17206.
Weber, M., 2006. Zur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte des Altertums. Schriften und
Reden 18931908. J.C.B. Mohr, Tbingen.
Weber, M., 2012. Abri der universalen Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte. Mit- und
Nachschriften 1919/20. J.C.B. Mohr, Tbingen.
Williams, R., 1976. Keywords. A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford University
Press, New York.
Winkler, H.A. (Ed.), 1974. Organisierter Kapitalismus. Voraussetzungen und Anfnge.
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Gttingen.
Wood, E.M., 2002. The Origin of Capitalism. A Longer View. Verso, London.
Zakim, M., Kornblith, G.J. (Eds.), 2012. Capitalism Takes Command. The Second
Transformation of 19th-Century America. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.