Capitalism: The Story behind the Word

by Michael Sonenscher

How the history of a word sheds new light on capitalism and modern politics

What exactly is capitalism? How has the meaning of capitalism changed over time? And what’s at stake in our understanding or misunderstanding of it? In Capitalism , Michael Sonenscher examines the history behind the concept and pieces together the range of subjects bound up with the word. Sonenscher shows that many of our received ideas fail to pick up the work that the idea of capitalism is doing for us, without us even realizing it.

“Capitalism” was first coined in France in the early nineteenth century. It began as a fusion of two distinct sets of ideas. The first involved thinking about public debt and war finance. The second involved thinking about the division of labour. Sonenscher shows that thinking about the first has changed radically over time. Funding welfare has been added to funding warfare, bringing many new questions in its wake. Thinking about the second set of ideas has offered far less room for manoeuvre. The division of labour is still the division of labour and the debates and discussions that it once generated have now been largely forgotten. By exploring what lay behind the earlier distinction before it collapsed and was eroded by the passage of time, Sonenscher shows why the present range of received ideas limits our political options and the types of reform we might wish for.

Genres: Economics, Politics, History, Philosophy

248 pages, Hardcover

Published September 20, 2022

About the author

Michael Sonenscher is a fellow of King's College, University of Cambridge. His books include Before the Deluge: Public Debt, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution; Works and Wages: Nature Law, Politics and the Eighteen-Century French Trades; and The Hatters of Eighteenth-Century France.

Reviews

[Erika]

I find the subtitle a bit misleading here - it is true that this book is about the evolution of the word capitalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but it's less "the story behind the word" in the way one might be interested in how the term's usage developed in intellectual and common parlance and more Sonenscher's explorations of capitalism versus commercial society

[Caitlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have very conflicted feelings about this book. On one hand I was disappointed because I was expecting a linguistics book and got a philosophy book with some historical context. On the other hand it is a pretty interesting discussion of the usefulness of the word capitalism.

Given the book is technically about the history of a word, he changes the definitions of key terms often and without acknowledgement. I think a glossary and markers to distinguish definitions he was using would have made the book substantially easier to parse.

Overall I found his argument interesting and fairly convincing, if poorly written.

[Jake · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good philological exploration of the historical definition of capitalism with useful splicing of terminology for what composes current unified definitions of capitalism. Shifting definitions of division of labor (among others) with no fully argued “so what?” upshot makes the book largely useless as a current political text. About half of a decent book.

[Ugh · Rating 3 out of 5]

I should admit at the outset that a big part of my buying this book was because its shape is such that it fits into the pocket of a spring jacket as opposed to a winter coat. (PLEASE could we bring back pocket editions as a mainstream thing!!)

The book itself is a kind of history of thinking about capitalism, rather than an attempt to argue for or against capitalism or any variations of it.

Its main argument is that capitalism used to be thought of as having two components: not just who owns and benefits from capital, as it's thought of today, but also how and by whom work ought to be divided up.

And then it goes into how thoughts on that evolved into the form of social democracy that's prevalent today.

Which is quite interesting, but the book is also a bit hard to follow at times, with certain terms being kinda loosely defined. Which I guess is understandable given that this entire book is about the definition of one term, so there's a rabbit hole issue to defining all of them...

Anyway, despite my medium score, it's the kind of book I wish was far more common... and not only because it's so wonderfully portable.

[Lucille Nguyen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A thoroughly fascinating political and intellectual history of capitalism, commercial society, and social organization. The German Freiburg school economist once wrote that capitalism says nothing definite about the economy, and this work continues and supplements that history by showing just how that indefinacy developed.

[Rune · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a mere 174 pages, Sonenscher begins a dizzying journey of philosophical discussion with Adam Smith, rapidly wizzing through Plato, Marx, Hegel, Kant, and others.

Today, like in any other age, capitalism is understood to be a particular relationship between capital, division of labor, and everything else in between.

[Aidan Choi · Rating 3 out of 5]

broke my mind in multiple ways

[Rosa Angelone · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my second time through this book (I first read it in 2022) and I look forward to reading it again.

It is such a help to read these clear summaries of 19th century thought. I can get bogged down and turned around with the political/economic arguments of today..with everybody and their brother calling everybody else a fascist, marxist, capitalist so often it feels the words lose meaning. 

Rooting the book in Adam Smith's "commercial society" and how the philosophers right before and after tried to answer the why and how of gov't is incredibly helpful to me. It feel like I have space to tackle these questions again.