Leithart writes:
Joyce Appleby begins her The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism with a discussion of the definition of her subject. Is capitalism an expression of a basic, immutable human nature (Smith: everyone exerts “uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort . . . to better his condition”)? Is it exploitation, the seizure of the means of production from farmers by the new lords of production, and the confinement of the rest to the status of wage laborers (Marx)?
Neither. Following Weber more than Smith or Marx, Appleby argues that capitalism is not the natural form of human enterprise, nor fundamentally as an economic system, but a “cultural system” that took form in seventeenth-century England. Through an thorough examination of pamphlet literature of that period, she was able to trace the development of new views of human nature, which amounted to a shift from Calvinist man to economic man. Capitalism expanded as England did (she nicely notes that for much of the world capitalism, like English, is a second language). Continue reading “Leithart and Capitalism”