Competition

The Latin verb competere combined com (together) and petere (to seek, to aim at, to strive for).1 The original sense was not adversarial. To compete was to seek the same thing together, to strive alongside. The root petere also produced petition, appetite, and impetus.

By the seventeenth century, English competition had narrowed to describe rivalry, the condition of multiple parties striving against each other for the same prize. The cooperative origin was forgotten.

Adam Smith made competition the regulating mechanism of the market in The Wealth of Nations (1776). Sellers competing for customers would drive prices toward their natural level. Buyers competing for goods would allocate resources toward their most valued uses.2

Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) extended the concept to the natural world. Competition for resources, Darwin argued, drove the evolution of species through natural selection.3 Social Darwinists subsequently applied this framework to human societies, arguing that economic competition was natural and beneficial.

The economist Peter Thiel argued in 2014 that competition is overrated, that the most successful businesses seek monopoly rather than rivalry, and that the ideology of competition obscures the fact that differentiation creates more value than imitation.4