4 ms·
> Beware Marxist terms, but then he kinda coined the "capitalism" term too! The term "capitalism" (kapitalismus) does not appear even once in the entire corpus
by Perceval 3y ago
> Beware Marxist terms, but then he kinda coined the "capitalism" term too!
The term "capitalism" (kapitalismus) does not appear even once in the entire corpus of Marx's writings.
'Kapitalismus' first appeared as a term arrayed against socialism in Werner Sombart's 1902 book Der moderne Kapitalismus. It was only after this book that the term capitalism was incorporated bit-by-bit into Marxist theorizing.
'Capitalism' didn't appear in political science dictionaries/glossaries until after World War I, and didn't appear in the Encyclopedia Britannica until 1926.
- p_l 3y agoThe first use in English is from 1854, nine years before Sombart's birth, with use (as "private capitalism") in teaching and disputing about economy in USA since 1863 by Carl Adolph Douai. "Capitalism" in the modern sense is apparently attributed to Louis Blanc (1850) and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1861, explicitly calls out owners of capital being dissociated from actually working it). As a word with way less scientific rigour than some of the stricter mathematical sciences, the exact way of using it also has considerable variation due to differences in languages. Marx used "capital" and "capitalist", which are older terms. "Capitalism" as a term evolved from the same use that Marx learnt from, with earliest uses of "capitalists" being associated with 1633.