دانلود کتاب سرمایه داری – داستان پشت کلمه

before the existence of both the concept and the reality of capitalism, there was once something called “commercial society.” This book is about the similarities and differences between the two terms, starting with the one that is the more recognisable. Capitalism, wrote the author of a book that was published with much the same title as this one, first in 1917 and then in 1927, is a “political and polemical” term that has no place in the language of scholarship. But, as one of his reviewers pointed out caustically, the assumptions underlying the claim seemed to mean, therefore, that words like “religion,” “liberty,” or “patriotism” also had no place in the language of scholarship because they too could be taken to be political and polemical terms. Nor, the same reviewer continued, did the polemical character of the term, or the fact that the word itself could not be found in the first volume of Karl Marx’s Capital, amount to anything like a real obstacle to finding out how to understand the difference between a capitalist and a noncapitalist society.1 Capitalism might well be hard to define, but it was still quite easy to see. Nothing much, it seems, has changed. Capitalism is a nineteenth-century word with a twenty-first- century charge. Although it is still quite hard to define, it remains quite easy to see. One reason for this mixture of the obvious and the opaque is the range of subjects encompassed by the word. Capitalism certainly calls for capital, but it is not quite so obvious that it also has to call for capitalists rather than, for example, organised businesses, managerial hierarchies, paid workers, multiple consumers, limited liability, incorporated stock, financial services, competitive markets, and bureaucratic states. Capitalism also seems to call for industrial organisation, technical specialisation, and the division of labour, but it is not quite so obvious that it also has to call for markets, prices, profits, and dividends. Capitalism, finally, seems to call for producers, products, and processes, but it is not quite so obvious that it also has to call for coercion, classes, and conflict.