Capitalism

Etymology: Latin caput → Medieval Latin capitale → French capitaliste → English capitalism

The Latin word caput meant head. In medieval Europe, capitale described the principal sum of a money loan, the head portion that a lender expected returned before any interest.¹ By the thirteenth century, Italian merchants were using it to refer to the assets of a trading firm.

The connection between heads and wealth ran deeper than metaphor. Livestock was counted by the head, and the same Proto-Indo-European root that produced caput also produced the English words cattle and chattel.²

The word capitalist appeared in French during the Revolution, around 1791, as a term of reproach for men of large property.³ The abstract noun capitalism entered English later. The Oxford English Dictionary traces its first appearance to Thackeray's novel The Newcomes in 1854, where it simply meant having ownership of capital.⁴

Louis Blanc used the French form in 1850 to describe a system in which capital is appropriated by some to the exclusion of others. Karl Marx referred extensively to capital and the capitalist mode of production in Das Kapital (1867), yet rarely used the word capitalism itself.⁵

1854, The year the word capitalism first appeared in English, in a novel by Thackeray.

Adam Smith, widely regarded as the intellectual architect of free-market thinking, never used the term. He called his preferred arrangement the system of natural liberty.⁶

J.L. Garvin, writing the entry for the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1929, observed that the word had come into general use only in the second half of the nineteenth century, signifying private enterprise free to seek profit by employing the mass of human labor for wages.⁷

Timeline

• 12th-13th century, Capitale emerged in medieval Latin to describe the principal sum of a money loan.
• 1791, French revolutionaries used capitaliste as a term of reproach for men of large property.
• 1854, Thackeray used capitalism in English for the first time, in his novel The Newcomes.
• 1867, Marx published Das Kapital, using capitalist mode of production extensively but rarely the word capitalism.

Endnotes

1. Frank A. Fetter, "Reformulation of the Concepts of Capital and Income in Economics and Accounting," in Capital, Interest, and Rent (Mission, KS: Sheed Andrews and McMeel, 1977), 154.
2. Harper, Douglas, "Etymology of capital," Online Etymology Dictionary.
3. Harper, Douglas, "Etymology of capitalist," Online Etymology Dictionary.
4. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. "capitalism."
5. Geoffrey M. Hodgson, "Capitalism and Its Usage," in Conceptualizing Capitalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 252-253.
6. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London, 1776), Book IV, Chapter IX.
7. J.L. Garvin, "Capitalism," Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th ed. (1929).