Isn't unrestrained profit seeking what modernity is all about? Pre-modern societies had all sorts of customary/institutional restraints on profit seeking. * Th

Isn't unrestrained profit seeking what modernity is all about? Pre-modern societies had all sorts of customary/institutional restraints on profit seeking. * The classical Greek had their notions of temperance * Romans had the notion that a proper aristocrat needs to own an agricultural estate, idea of civil virtues (these cost a lot of money) and that one has to spend the money on a huge estate with a court of slaves (familia urbana) * China had their Imperial bureaucracy * the European middle ages had corporatism/guilds in the cities Once these restraints were gone we entered modernity. (here is an article why China didn't do modernity, despite having had all the big inventions that supposedly brought us capitalism - like the printing press, gun powder, paper money, big advances in materials, a fleet that discovered America. The authors say the structure of institutions was restraining entrepreneurship and progress : http://www.amphilsoc.org/sites/default/files/proceedings/1570101.pdf http://www.amphilsoc.org/sites/default/files/proceedings/157...