Capitalism: The Story behind the Word

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If the division of labour is so intimately bound up with the fruits of modern society, we might ask ourselves why anyone would want to abandon it or elements of it, and this book does not fully elaborate the nature of the problems we might associate with commercial society. Indeed, it might even be imagined that the increased mutual dependence of human beings in a complex economy would lead to a social harmony mirroring the international peace sometimes assumed to result from increased global trade, underscored by once unimaginable prosperity resulting from greater economic efficiency. Capital, Blanc argued, could be turned against the set of social relations and inequalities which he identified with the unequal distribution of property and capitalism. This ‘golden goose’ could, instead, serve as the foundation of a universal right to work and an economy founded upon common labour, if only it’s fruits – capital – were owned publicly, or socially. Thus, Villeneuve argued, “ capitalism, that seductive and dangerous serpent” spelled the ruin of France, as the endless accumulation of public debt to finance war abroad and the amassing of private wealth by unproductive finance rather than productive agriculture and industry at home brought about social crisis with no means to remedy it.

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. Review: Michael Sonenscher, ‘Capitalism: The Story behind the Word’, (Princeton University Press, 2022)Two further developments favoured the crystallisation of capital and capitalistes into 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 Nations in 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. An incisive, erudite, compelling, and deeply original contribution to the history of political and economic thought.”—Paul Sagar, King’s College London

Subsequently, the book navigates the course of capitalism’s evolution during the early nineteenth century. This transformation by continental thinkers developed capitalism from an idea mostly involving international economics based on war and debt into a national one. In the years leading up to the Revolution of 1848, Alphonse de Lamartine and Louis Blanc clarified the debate over capitalism by revealing that there were really two problems, which required two solutions: “the problem of … the ownership of capital” and “the problem of the division of labour and markets” (73). Marx’s complaint was that transferring this way of thinking about causation to relationships among humans had the effect of turning particularity into generality and of reducing human individuality into generic uniformity. The basis of this complaint was not only the market but, more fundamentally, the idea of equality. Equality does to people what prices do to commodities: It overrides whatever it is that makes them who they are. It subordinates individual personality to impersonal generality and turns individual creativity into labor power. Marxists have, accordingly, associated equality with the concepts of alienation or reification and, inversely, have usually associated the concept of communism with the ideas of individuality, personality, and, perhaps, autonomy. The underlying claim is that something about the causality built into capitalism will, ultimately, get humanity out of the causality built into the idea of equality—and if this were to happen, equality would give way to singularity. Marx’s approach to understanding equality was the other side of his initial endorsement of the concept of personality. PDF / EPUB File Name: Capitalism_The_Story_behind_the_Word_-_Michael_Sonenscher.pdf, Capitalism_The_Story_behind_the_Word_-_Michael_Sonenscher.epub Many of the concerns raised by capitalism’s modern critics would not be resolved if only capital was held publicly, or nationally, or socially, because they do not stem from capitalism in the literal sense, but from the bundle of concepts we now refer to by that name taken in toto. The question, then, is what can be done not about capitalism, but about the division of labour. 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.

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Instead in his famous manifesto Marx, like Stein, suggested that a national system of public credit administered through a socialised banking system could gradually abolish the capitalist system by enabling workers or the state to socialise or nationalise production, whilst reducing the inequalities resulting from the division of labour – particularly those between town and country. Public credit and the fiscal state would enable capital to be turned against what Marx knew as capitalism, allowing the benefits of commercial society to be preserved whilst rectifying its worst features. In other words, Marx argued, the problem with the division of labour was that unlike capitalism it could not be jettisoned without also jettisoning modernity as such: this is also the central insight of Sonenscher’s book. However, while Levy’s definition is explicitly in conversation with longstanding debates about the nature of capital and owes its fundamental insights to two of the greatest economists of the first half of the twentieth century, I would like to argue that it is still most influenced by—or minimally that it is most similar to—late twentieth century intellectual currents.

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.

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Michael Sonenscher: Think of a cityscape. The cityscape could contain streets, houses, shops, workshops, people, and animals. It could be Rome or Athens. It could be Lyon or Bruges. It could be Chicago or Shanghai—or a landscape in Brazil, Zimbabwe, or Bangladesh. But it will still be the case that quite a large number of extra ingredients will be needed to make it look like a cityscape or landscape housing capitalist agriculture or capitalist industry, finance, or trade. There will certainly be disagreements over what those ingredients should be, but some of the more obvious would consist of large-scale industrial buildings or agricultural units; high-rise offices; mechanized, automated, or electrified processes of production; huge urban and suburban agglomerations; integrated networks of transport, communication, information, or finance; and the myriads of differentiated human occupations and activities that they house. Capitalism, in short, is visible—built into our lived environment. But this does not mean that capitalism is transparent.

This is not a problem which we can resolve by returning to a fantastical pre-social state or via a retreat into primitive communism. Instead, as Sonenscher observes, like Rousseau, we must recognise that the chains we have forged for ourselves are, by and large, here to stay: our only choice is to find some way to live comfortably, chained together as we are. It is Michael Sonenscher’s very significant contribution, both as a historian and a political theorist, to demonstrate that this is a far more elementary and long-standing problem than that of the private ownership of capital.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. 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. Superbly researched and thoroughly referenced, the originality of Michael Sonenscher's study lies in illuminating the very real political problems faced by French Revolutionary regimes in the 1790s through an examination of the fraught relationship between public credit and social inequality as debated in contemporary political thought. . . . [A] fascinating reconstruction of the sophisticated, contradictory dynamics of eighteenth-century French political thought."—David McCallam, French Studies