Abstract
Any study of the rise of capitalism, of its origins and evolution, necessarily presupposes a certain conception of capitalism. It is the purpose of this chapter to put forth the conception upon which this book’s study of capitalism is based, namely: Capitalism is an indirect system of governance for economic relationships.
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Notes
- 1.
Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, trans. Siân Reynolds, vol. 2: The Wheels of Commerce (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).
- 2.
A lucid description of some of the history, though mostly in a US context, may be found in Michael Merrill, “Putting ‘Capitalism’ in Its Place: A Review of Recent Literature,” The William and Mary Quarterly 52, no. 2 (April 1995): 322 ff.
- 3.
Merrill, “Putting ‘Capitalism’ in Its Place: A Review of Recent Literature.” 317.
- 4.
Ibid., 317.
- 5.
Ibid.
- 6.
Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, 40th anniversary ed. (1962; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 4.
- 7.
Ibid., 15.
- 8.
See Robert Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
- 9.
Douglass C. North, “For the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Honor of Alfred Nobel,” in Nobel Lectures, Economics 1991–1995, ed. Torsten Persson (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co., 1997).
- 10.
Douglass C. North, “Institutions,” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 5, no. 1 (Winter 1991): 97.
- 11.
For a similar perspective, arrived at independently, see Reinert, How Rich Countries Got Rich and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor.
- 12.
Margaret M. Blair, “Locking in Capital: What Corporate Law Achieved for Business Organizers in the Nineteenth Century,” UCLA Law Review 51, no. 2 (2003): 387–455.
- 13.
For a good discussion of this, see Reinert, How Rich Countries Got Rich and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor.
- 14.
North, “Institutions,” 98.
- 15.
North, Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance, 52.
- 16.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2 (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 611.
- 17.
See, for example, Peter Hall and David Soskice, eds., Varieties of Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
- 18.
The achievement of capitalism in Australia, New Zealand, and the US was arguably exceptional because feudalism never was strongly entrenched in these countries, and this was only slightly less true in Canada. Canada started out in the feudal land holding pattern along the St. Lawrence River, but most of its territory was developed under British laws following British takeover early in the 18th century. For much the same reason these same countries were also early to achieve democracy.
- 19.
Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, 9.
- 20.
Ibid., 21.
- 21.
Ibid., 27.
- 22.
Ibid., 25.
- 23.
Ibid., 13.
- 24.
Ibid. Italics original.
- 25.
In the United States, the National Football League is widely recognized as the most socialistic of the organized sports because the league authorities have the power to distribute the television revenues approximately equally among teams despite the difference in the markets that they directly serve.
- 26.
Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, 25.
- 27.
Ibid.
- 28.
Ibid.
- 29.
Ibid., 21, 27.
- 30.
Ibid., 13.
- 31.
The emergence of capitalism does not require democracy; in fact, it appears to be a necessary precondition for the latter.
- 32.
Almond, “Capitalism and Democracy,” 467.
- 33.
Quoted in Gregory Mankiw, “Repeat After Me,” The Wall Street Journal, January 3, 2006.
- 34.
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 291–292.
- 35.
Garrett Hardin, an eminent biologist, wrote a famous paper on The Tragedy of the Commons, only to recognize later that the tragedy came not from the concept of the common per se but from the lack of effective regulation in how it was used, maintained, and developed through time. See Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162, no. 3859 (December 1968): 1243–1248.
- 36.
The United States is an important exception in that its Supreme Court can and has overturned legislative decisions that were explicitly designed to reshape market frameworks (e.g., those of the New Deal in the mid-1930s, elaborated on in Chap. 13).
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© 2012 Bruce R. Scott
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Scott, B.R. (2012). The Concept of Capitalism. In: Capitalism. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-1879-5_2
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