II
NOT MANY WIDELY USED political concepts have come down from the nineteenth century. Republicanism, we now know, was either Greek or Roman or Hebrew in origin. Liberty, we have learnt, existed before liberalism. The concept of representative government can be found in Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau, while the idea of the separation of powers is usually attributed to the American Founders. Modern democracy, it is said, started with Spinoza. The distinction between sovereignty and government began, apparently, with Bodin, Hobbes, or Rousseau, while theories of human rights, perpetual peace, and international relations began with Kant, Sieyès, Wollstonecraft, Paine, and Bentham.1 Only two concepts now seem to belong unequivocally to the nineteenth century. One is the distinction, first made by Benjamin Constant but amplified substantially by Isaiah Berlin, between positive and negative liberty and, in an overlapping sense, between ancient and modern liberty.2 The other is the concept of capitalism. The concept is now usually associated with the thought of Karl Marx and, in Marx’s wake, with Max Weber.
In fact, however, Marx made no use of the term “capitalism” because in his eponymous book he relied instead on the noun das Kapital to indicate the object of his analytical and political investigations. Weber’s famous essay “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” clearly made more frequent use of the term, but he approached the subject of capitalism from a distinctly Nietzschean and value-oriented starting point, not only because of his own scepticism towards Marxism but also because of his still-underexplored intellectual engagement with the thought of his contemporaries and near contemporaries, notably Sombart, Schmoller, Dilthey, Simmel, and Jellinek.3 They too were students of capitalism (Sombart, with his Der moderne Kapitalismus of 1902, is still sometimes associated with the German-language origins of the word), but they were also the intellectual heirs of several earlier investigations of its nature and attributes.
FIGURE 2. Karl Marx, Das Kapital (1867)
FIGURE 3. Max Weber, “Die protestantische Ethik und der ‚Geist‘ der Kapitalismus,” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik (1905). Left: the title page of the issue of the periodical in which Weber’s essay appeared. Right: the table of contents of that issue.
Capitalism, in fact, began as capitalisme, or as a French-language term that began to become current at about the same time in the nineteenth century as the overlapping distinctions between positive and negative liberty and ancient and modern liberty also became current. The coincidence was more than chronological. It formed the substance of a discussion of the relationship between capitalism and liberty that began in France around the time of the July revolution of 1830 and seems to have continued ever since. In this discussion, one argument was repeated recurrently. This was that the type of liberty that is compatible with capitalism was not actually compatible with liberty itself. In this argument, the type of liberty that—with many still frequently unrecognised reservations—Constant called negative liberty, or the liberty of the moderns, was bound to be trumped by capitalism. The reason for this was that capitalism gave rise to forms and levels of inequality—between rich and poor, propertied and propertyless, rulers and ruled, colonisers and colonised—that clashed radically with justice, freedom, welfare, decency, or any of the many other ways of describing human entitlement that have been defended or defined. If negative liberty was bounded liberty, with limits imposed upon state power and government interference, capitalism itself was unbounded. Ultimately, according to this argument, the unbounded would undermine the bounded, generating crisis, oppression, or worse and leaving revolution as the one real alternative to the negative version of liberty that was all that was housed by existing arrangements. On the terms built into this argument, states, laws, governments, constitutions, institutions, organisations, and associations were all, ultimately, causally dependent upon the relentless vicissitudes of capitalism.
The coincidence between the new formulation of liberty as either positive and ancient, or negative and modern, and the emergence of capitalism as both a word and a concept was, therefore, substantive as well as chronological. Although the coincidence has usually been recognised in most historical writing more implicitly than explicitly, its significance has usually been described in two different but considerably better-known ways. One approach has been to claim that the coincidence highlights a real problem about capitalism that has been either intermittently forgotten or recurrently glossed over by capitalism’s apologists. A second approach, however, has been to argue that it is not so much the essential properties of capitalism that have been forgotten or glossed over as its mutability, adaptability, and plasticity. The name might be the same but the thing itself has changed. In this rendition, capitalism, like almost all words ending in -ism, was not so much an entity in its own right as the name given to a nexus of economic, moral, and political problems whose content has changed radically and continuously over time. Their content changed, it is also usually claimed, largely under the impact of the various local or partial solutions produced by the magnitude, variety, or complexity of the different types of problem that capitalism has housed. Some problems were connected to wealth and power or the relationship between private power and public accountability. Others were bound up with markets and prices and their bearing on human capabilities and choices. Others were built into mechanised forms of industry and the interrelationship of work, wages, and different types of ownership. Some were related to the subject of political economy or the relationship between individual resources and the wealth of the state. Others were linked to the ownership or absence of ownership of property, whether individual, collective, or indeterminate. Yet others were associated with the relationship between morality and self-interest, while others were bound up with differences of race, class, gender, dependency, and empire. The list is long but could be much longer, because there is no reason to think that the proliferation of ever-transforming problems will end.
Capitalism, in this second rendition, was—and still is—heterogeneous, not uniform. Some problems, like bankruptcy and liability for bankruptcy, which were once taken to be intrinsic to capitalism, have been solved and, consequently, integrated into what, retrospectively, now seems to be part of its systemic properties. Some solutions on the other hand, such as those centred on the nature of property or money, have, inversely, given rise to new and unforeseen problems that cannot be found in earlier iterations of capitalism’s problem-driven history. In this sense, capitalism could simply be said to be a word used intermittently to refer to a range of discrete and episodically connected issues bound up as much with politics and power as with class, industry, markets, or profits. From a third point of view, however, capitalism, despite its plasticity, has, somewhat surprisingly, remained the same word notwithstanding the many different issues and problems that it seems to have encompassed. From this perspective, what is unusual about capitalism is not so much that it has changed, but that the name itself still remains the same. Mercantilism and adventurism have come and gone, as too have industrialism, individualism, entrepreneurialism, or even commercialism, but capitalism has kept its charge. There is, therefore, a real question lying somewhere between capitalism’s apparent heterogeneity and capitalism’s putative uniformity. It is a question about whether, irrespective of any positive or negative evaluation, the subject of capitalism comes down to the same old story, or whether, perhaps, there is a better story to be told.
The better story calls initially for a switch of perspective. Instead of starting with capitalism and the question of its apparent heterogeneity or putative uniformity, the better, and more authentically historical, story calls for beginning with a question about the origins and nature of both these different characterisations of capitalism and the radically different types of telos that they appeared to entail. In the old versions of the story, capitalism was either one big problem heading towards a catastrophic outcome, or a compound of many heterogeneous problems with no determinate outcome. In the third version, it is not so much the subject of capitalism but the subject of catastrophe that came first. From this perspective, the real question is not so much whether capitalism was headed for catastrophe because, as it was put in a later phrase, of its internal contradictions, but rather whether the concept of capitalism, for all its apparent indeterminacy, was originally a more focused attempt to capture and describe a now-forgotten, but once better-known, cluster of conjectures about the nature of the modern world and the potential for catastrophe that it housed. Right from the start, in other words, something about capitalism was bound up with a more nebulous, but still quite specific, set of claims about history, teleology, and the several possible verdicts of history that the future promised to hold.