Capitalism

Abstract

With roots extending back to Dutch, French, and English thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the notion of capitalism has an impeccable intellectual pedigree and has been a mainstay of some of the most important philosophers of the nineteenth century, including Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and Karl Marx. Despite this impressive historic cache, it is high time for academics to abandon it (and perhaps polemicists might one day follow). How could a notion that is so steeped in ideology be useful for academic discourse? For some, it is an economic system rooted in the crudest form of exploitation, always pregnant with injustice and inequality. For others, it is the unadulterated ideal of efficiency and dynamism, the best recipe for a fair society.