1 Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., with Takashi Hikino, Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, MA, 1990), 1-2. Our emphasis.

2 Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA, 1977), 10, 16. Chandler’s work, beyond its qualities as a work of business history, remains perhaps the most remarkable elogy for the manager’s role in transforming modern civilization. For the shadow version, equally certain of the manager’s epochal importance, see Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3^rd ed. (South Bend, 2007 [original 1981]), 25-32, where the character of “the manager” as a defining and troubling figure in modern life is presented. Though rarely analyzed, the importance of forms and sub-forms of capitalism in (indeed as) Chandler’s framework is routinely acknowledged. See, e.g., Michael S. Smith, “Putting France in the Chandlerian Framework: France’s 100 Largest Industrial Firms in 1913,” Business History Review 72, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 46-85, 47-48.

3 N.S.B. Gras, Business and Capitalism: An Introduction to Business History (New York, 1939), 371. More precisely, these are sub-types of private business, itself one of three types of capitalism along with pre-business and public business. See Gras, vii. On Gras, see Barry E.C. Boothman, “A Theme Worthy of Epic Treatment: N.S.B. Gras and the Emergence of American Business History,” Journal of Macromarketing 21, no. 1 (2001): 61–73, and Robert Fredona and Sophus A. Reinert, “The Harvard Research Center in Entrepreneurial History and the Daimonic Entrepreneur,” History of Political Economy 49, no. 2 (2017): 267–314. We focus on the economic historiography context, but Gras and the early generations of business historians must be also understood in an ethical framework. See Geoffrey Jones, Deeply Responsible Business: A Global History of Values-Driven Leadership (Cambridge, MA, 2023), 129-156. It was in Business and Capitalism that Gras fully developed his argument about the transition from traveling to sedentary merchants. See Gras, Business and Capitalism, esp. 67-74. Also see the discussion in Robert Fredona and Sophus A. Reinert, “Italy and the Origins of Capitalism,” Business History Review 94, no. 1 (Spring 2020): 5-38, 17-19. Similar schemes were common, in more and less likely places, over the next few decades. See, for one of many possible examples, Peter Maurin, “Easy Essay: Five Forms of Capitalism,” Catholic Worker 17, no. 9 (March 1951): 1-2, where the forms are mercantile capitalism, factory capitalism, monopoly capitalism, finance capitalism, and state capitalism. It would be impossible in this essay to trace the presence of forms of capitalism across the entire field of business history. We use Chandler and Gras for the reasons laid out by Barry Supple, that “even N.S.B. Gras, the founding father of American business history, hardly went beyond the devising of a provocative language and a purely descriptive stage ‘theory’ of business development,” leading to what Supple (wrongly in our opinion) sees as a “dead end,” whereas Chandler “imposed [his] concepts and analytical framework on the profession at large.” See “Scale and Scope: Alfred Chandler and the Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism,” Economic History Review 44, no. 3 (1991): 500-514, 500. Also important is Gras’s proximity to the traditions of historical economics, to the scholarship of the “commercial revolution” paradigm, and Chandler’s proximity to the developments of contemporary business history.

4 Gras and Larson, Casebook in American Business History (New York, 1939), discussed in William J. Hausman, “Business History in the United States at the End of the Twentieth Century,” in Business History around the World, ed. Franco Amatori and Geoffrey Jones (Cambridge, UK, 2003), 83-110, 86-87. On Larson, see Mary Yeager, “Mavericks and Mavens of Business History: Miriam Beard and Henrietta Larson,” Enterprise & Society 2, no. 4 (Dec. 2001): 687-768.

5 John U. Nef, review in American Historical Review 45, no. 4 (July 1940): 842-845, 842.

6 Review of George William Daniels, The Early English Cotton Industry, in History 6, no. 20 (Jan. 1922): 279-281, 280. Tawney elsewhere speaks of the need to identify the plural “species of capitalism.” See Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: A Historical Study (Harmondsworth, 1937), vii-viii.

7 Gras, Business and Capitalism, vii.

8 It goes without saying that one man’s simple analysis is another’s propaganda and vice versa. For Gras, private business is the bedrock of “the material and therefore the intellectual welfare of mankind.” See Gras, vii.

9 Sophus A. Reinert, Translating Empire: Emulation and the Origins of Political Economy (Cambridge, MA, 2011), esp. 287, for the Cold War trajectory.

10 “Bibliography: Studies in Bibliography. I. Mediæval Capitalism,” Economic History Review 4, no. 2 (April 1933): 212-227, 212. This acknowledgment has also been put to more clearly political purposes. F.A. Hayek wrote, for example, that “with its modern connotations [capitalism] is itself largely itself the creation of [the] socialist interpretation of economic history.” See Hayek, “History and Politics,” in Capitalism and the Historians, ed. Hayek (Chicago, 1954), 14-15.

11 “Capitalism—What’s in a Name?,” Past & Present 1 (Feb. 1952): 32-43, 32.

12 Millicent Garrett Fawcett, “Communism,” Encyclopædia Britannica, 9^th edition, volume 6 (Edinburgh, 1877), 211-219, 219, column a.

13 Podmore, “American Socialistic Communities,” The Practical Socialist 1, no. 4 (April 1886): 64-67, 65.

14 Clark, “Industrial [Basis of Socialism],” in Fabian Essays in Socialism, ed. Shaw (London, 1889), 62-101, 89.

15 Hobson, The Evolution of Modern Capitalism: A Study of Machine Production (London, 1894), ii.13, 40, and viii. The book appeared in a series edited by Havelock Ellis.

16 Ernest Belfort Bax, “Early Christianity and Modern Socialism,” in Outspoken Essays: On Social Subjects (London, 1897), 73-92, 74.

17 Examples: Theodor Hertzka, Freeland, a Social Anticipation, trans. Arthur Ransom (New York, 1891), 363, a translation of Freiland, ein sociales Zukunftsbild (Leipzig, 1890), 556, referring to a form in which “the solidarity of interest of the saver with that of the employer of capital takes the place of interest”; Achille Loria, “Economics in Italy,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 2/2 (1891), 59-80, 75, referring to mezzadria-based Italian agriculture as a “rachitic form of capitalism”; “Co-operation and its Goal,” The Speaker: A Review of Politics, Letters, Science, and the Arts, 19 May 1894; Paul de Rousiers, The Labour Question in Britain, trans. F.L.D. Herbertson (London, 1896), iii.1.1, 261, a translation of La question ouvrière en Angleterre (Paris, 1895), 350, referring to “the sweating system” as a “low form of capitalism.”

18 See, for example, Robert Baird, Religion in the United States of America (London, 1844), 657; John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 2^nd ed., 2 vols. (London, 1849), vol. I, 256, 260; Alexander Gordon, Impressions of Paris (London, 1854), 106.

19 This is a key argument in Jürgen Kocka, Capitalism: A Short History, trans. Jeremiah Riemer (Princeton, 2017), especially 162-169. Compare Michael Sonenscher, Capitalism: The Story Behind the Word (Princeton, 2022) for a complementary context for (and before) the emergence of the term. For the paradoxical prehistory of “socialism,” see Sophus A. Reinert, The Academy of Fisticuffs: Political Economy and Commercial Society in Enlightenment Italy (Cambridge, MA, 2018), 268-298.

20 “The Text-Book of Modern Socialism,” The Pall Mall Budget, 19 May 1887, 30; a review of the English translation by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling.

21 William Hurrell Mallock, Aristocracy and Evolution: A Study of the Rights, the Origin, and the Social Functions of the Wealthier Classes (New York, 1898), 173-174.

22 His word politeiai can by itself have the sense of “forms of government,” though he occasionally (and, naturally, without any redundancy) speaks also of “forms” (eidē) of politeiai. In Politics 1279a, when first introducing the number and forms of government, he expresses “forms” only pronominally: posai ton arithmon kai tines, i.e., “how many in number and what [kind]” of political constitutions (politeiai) exist. Likewise with Aristotle’s immediate source, Plato’s The Statesman, 302c-d. Only rarely, e.g. at 1289a, does he use an explicit eidē. Medieval translators and commentators closely adapted this language and usage with the Latinized Greek politiae and sometimes their species (or, in the Middle-French of the first ever vernacular translation, completed in 1377, policies and their especes). The thirteenth-century translation of William of Moerbeke introduced the Politics, unknown to the Arab commentators, into the Latin West. See Franz Susemihl, ed., Aristotelis Politicorum libri octo cum vetusta translatione Guilelmi de Moerbeka (Leipzig, 1872), parallel passages at 177, 375. Medieval commentators followed William’s terminology; e.g, Thomas Aquinas, In libros Politicorum Aristotelis expositio, ed. Raimondo Spiazzi (Turin, 1951), 202, column a, §51. Leonardi Bruni, in his Romanizing 1437 translation, uses res publica for politeia and sometimes interposes a clarifying species or forma; Politica Aristotelis a Leonardo Arethino e greco in latinum traducta (Würzburg, 1516), n.p. Nicole Oresme, “Maistre Nicole Oresme: Le Livre de Politiques d’Aristote. Published from the Text of the Avranches Manuscript 223,” ed. Albert Douglas Menut, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 60, no. 6 (1970): 1-392, 127, 164. For the importance of the early translations (Moerbeke, Oresme, and Bruni), see Eckart Schütrumpf, The Earliest Translations of Aristotle’s Politics and the Creation of Political Terminology (Paderborn, 2014).

23 Aristotle, A Treatise on Government, trans. William Ellis (London, 1778).

24 E.g, Sir Robert Filmer, Observations Upon Aristotles Politiques Touching Forms of Government Together with Directions for Obedience to Governours in Dangerous or Doubtfull Times (London, 1652), an attempt to press Aristotle into service for his monarchist cause. On which, see James Daley, Sir Robert Filmer and English Political Thought (Toronto, 1979), esp. 15-17.

25 Achille Loria, Analisi della proprietà capitalista: Le forme storiche della costituzione economica, vol. 2 (Turin, 1889), 5, 52, 66, 68, 107.

26 Albert Schäffle, Bau und Leben des sozialen Körpers, vol. 3 (Tübingen, 1878), 12.7.7., 460. On this, see Sophus A. Reinert, “Darwin and the Body Politic: A Note on Schäffle, Veblen, and the Shift of Biological Metaphor in Economics,” in Albert Schäffle (1821-1903): The Legacy of an Underestimated Economist, ed. Jürgen Backhaus (Hanau, 2010), 129–152. Schäffle’s earlier work had already pioneered thinking both about capitalism in relation to socialism and with organic “forms” of “business and wealth,” explicitly discussing “Formen des Kapitalismus.” See Kapitalismus und socialismus, mit besonderer rücksicht auf geschäfts- und vermögensformen (Tübingen, 1870), 496. It is worth considering in this context also Braudel’s rejection (a “necessary sacrifice”) of organic metaphors. See “L’histoire des civilisations: Le passé explique le présent [1959],” in Ecrits sur l’histoire (Paris, 1969), 255-314, 289; though, a great master of personification, he did not quite follow his own advice: Philippe Carrard, Poetics of the New History: French Historical Discourse from Braudel to Chartier (Baltimore, 1992), 205-206.

27 Achille Loria, Corso completo di economia politica, ed. Giulio Fenoglio (Turin, 1910), 3.

28 “Life Forms: A Keyword Entry,” Representations 112 (Fall 2010): 27-53.

29 Postan, “Bibliography,” 212.

30 The Wheels of Commerce, trans. Siân Reynolds (New York, 1982 [1979 original]), 237.

31 For a bird’s-eye view of the narratives, see Francesca Trivellato, “Renaissance Florence and the Origins of Capitalism: A Business History Perspective,” Business History Review 94, no. 1 (Spring 2020): 229-251, 229-30. The literature on Weber is too vast to even dip into, but for his engagement with the stages and forms of capitalism, see e.g., Guenther Roth, “Rationalization in Max Weber’s Developmental History,” in Max Weber, Rationality and Modernity, ed. Scott Lash and Sam Whimster (London and New York, 1987), 75-91.

32 Postan, “Bibliography,” 212.

33 Henri Pirenne, “The Stages in the History of Capitalism,” American Historical Review 19, no. 3 (1914): 494-515, 495-496. This article is a translation of a talk given by Pirenne in London in 1913. On the talk, J.F. Jameson writes, “Pirenne… discussed the social stages of the evolution of capitalism from the twelfth century to the nineteenth, but especially those of the medieval period, controverting Sombart, and setting forth brilliantly… his views of the origin of medieval cities… and of the growth of capitalism in them.” See Jameson, “The International Congress of Historical Studies, Held at London,” American Historical Review 18, no. 4 (1913): 679-691, 685. See also F.L. Ganshof, “Henri Pirenne and Economic History,” The Economic History Review 6, no. 2 (April 1936), 179-185, 183. Pirenne extended these arguments in his famous Medieval Cities, first published in 1925 in a poor English translation.

34 Gras, “Capitalism—Concepts and History,” and “Discussion by Raymond de Roover,” Bulletin of the Business Historical Society 16, no. 2 (1942): 21–34 and 34-39. De Roover was Gras’s student at Harvard Business School.

35 Frederic C. Lane, “Doubles [sic] Entry Bookkeeping and Resident Marchants [sic],” Journal of European Economic History 6, no. 1 (1977): 177-191, 178.

36 Charles Gide and Charles Rist, A History of Economic Doctrines from the Time of the Physiocrats to the Present Day, 2^nd ed., trans. R. Richards (Boston, 1948), 381–484, remains a valuable survey of the tumult in economics in the latter half of the nineteenth century. For an explicit use of the phrase “forms of capitalism” by Sombart, see his Luxus und Kapitalismus (Munich and Leipzig, 1913), 178.

37 The paper never appeared, as promised, in The Quarterly Journal of Economics. A two-page précis by Gay is followed by Katharine Coman, Ernest L. Bogart, Richard T. Ely, and Gay, “Stages of Economic Development—Discussion,” Publications of the American Economic Association, 3^rd series, 8, no. 1 (February 1907): 125-136. On Gay, see Herbert Heaton, A Scholar in Action: Edwin F. Gay (Cambridge, MA, 1952). Fritz Redlich called Gay “America’s first economic historian” and noted that Gras considered him his “intellectual father.” See Redlich, “N.S.B. Gras,” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 6, ed. David L. Sills (New York, 1968), 252-253, 252. For Redlich’s admiring but also critical view of Gras, see Fredona and Reinert, “The Harvard Research Center,” 279-280.

38 Liberal critics could thus lump together the Marxists and historical economists under the label historismus. See Walter Eucken, “Die Überwindung des Historismus,” Schmollers Jahrbuch 62 (1938): 191–214. Eucken attended the founding meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society and is associated with the beginnings of Ordoliberalism. Much later, the German tradition remained the point of reference: Walt Rostow’s famous stages of growth—traditional society, the preconditions, take-off, maturity; high mass-consumption—are explicitly compared to and set against Marx’s feudalism, bourgeois capitalism, socialism, and communism. See Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, 2^nd ed. (Cambridge, UK, 1971), 145. Also see Birsen Filip, The Early History of Economics in the United States: The Influence of the German Historical School of Economics on Teaching and Theory (London, 2022).

39 But see David F. Lindenfeld, “The Myth of the Older Historical School of Economies,” Central European History 26, no. 4 (1993), 405–416. The meaning of historical economics and the confusion around the so-called “Historical School” is best sketched in Erik Grimmer-Solem, The Rise of Historical Economics and Social Reform in Germany 1864-1894 (Oxford, 2003), 23-35.

40 Rise of Historical Economics, 33. The meaning of “realistic” economics can be brought into starker relief when compared to Austrian economics, which was formulated in reaction to historical economics. On the famous Methodenstreit between Schmoller and Carl Menger, see Reginald Hansen, “Der Methodenstreit in den Sozialwissenschaften zwischen Gustav Schmoller und karl Menger,” in Beiträge zur Entwicklung der Wissenschaftstheorie im 19 Jahrhunder, ed. Alwin Diemer (Meisenheim am Glan, 1968), 135-173. On the role of historical economics in the early decades of business history, see Matthias Kipping, Takafumi Kurosawa, and R. Daniel Wadhwani, “A Revisionist Historiography of Business History: A Richer Past for a Richer Future,” in The Routledge Companion to Business History, ed. John F. Wilson, Steven Toms, Abe de Jong, and Emily Buchnea (Abingdon, 2017), 19-35, esp. 21-22. Many excellent scholars have failed to follow the threads in the business historical tapestry back to their origins in historical economics. See, e.g., Richard N. Langlois, The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism: Schumpeter, Chandler, and the New Economy (London and New York, 2007), 32, n.4. Chandler engages with Schumpeter who engages with Weber, but barely anything is said of the richer historical-economic context against which Weber (and indeed Schumpeter) wrote.

41 For Gay’s education, see Edwin F. Gay, “The Tasks of Economic History,” The Tasks of Economic History, supplement to Journal of Economic History 1 (Dec. 1941): 9-16, 9.

42 Industrial Evolution, trans. S. Morley Wickett (New York, 1901 [original 1893).

43 Coman, Bogart, Ely, and Gay, “Stages of Economic Development,” 125-126.

44 Coman, Bogart, Ely, and Gay, 135-136. See, relatedly, Sophus A. Reinert, “Historical Political Economy,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Political Economy, ed. Ivo Cardinale and Roberto Scazzieri (London, 2018), 133-169.

45 See, among others, Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge, UK, 1976); Frank Palmieri, State of Nature, Stages of Society: Enlightenment Conjectural Histories and Modern Social Discourse (New York, 2016); Sophus A. Reinert, The Academy of Fisticuffs, esp. 130-131.

46 N.S.B. Gras, An Introduction to Economic History (New York, 1922), xxi.

47 Gras, however, presents a strong criticism of Bücher’s scheme. See Gras, 340, n.28. Also see Henrietta Larson, “Business History: Retrospect and Prospect,” Bulletin of the Business Historical Society 21, no. 6 (1947): 173–199, at 184-185. Gras’s fervor created dissension between him and his teacher Edwin Gay and his colleague Arthur Cole, as described in Fredona and Reinert, “Harvard Research Center.” Adumbrating the future of the field, Geoffrey Jones, the current Straus Professor, has—though his vision is far more capacious than Gras’s—similarly stressed the importance of business history remaining a “discrete field.” See Jones, “The Future of Business History” in “The Future of Economic, Business, and Social History,” ed. Jones, Marco H. D. van Leeuwen, and Stephen Broadberry, Scandinavian Economic History Review 63 (2012), no. 3, 225–235, 231-232.

48 A good introduction to the debates can be found in Mohammed Nafissi, Ancient Athens and Modern Ideology: Value, Theory and Evidence in Historical Sciences (London, 2005).

49 Richard Swedberg, Economics and Sociology: Redefining Their Boundaries: Conversations with Economists and Sociologists (Princeton, 1990), 215-232 for the Bell interview, 217 for the quotation.

50 A proper footnote here would overwhelm the entire text, so instead we cite Umberto Eco, The Infinity of Lists, trans. Alistair McEwan (New York, 2009), an aesthetic and philosophical paean to the list and the catalogue.

51 Fleming, The Death of Homo Economicus: Work, Debt, and the Myth of Endless Accumulation (London, 2017). Forms with a potentially positive valence are routinely given a negative one, like “green capitalism” which is declared a “confidence game.” See Fleming, 4.

52 Fleming, 128. “Deep capitalism” has also been identified, without any precision, as one of the most important contemporary issues alongside “environmental justice, global health issues, immigration (transnational citizenship)… structural violence, and institutionalized racism.” See Michelle Hall Kells, Vicente Ximenes, LBJ’s Great Society, and Mexican American Civil Rights Rhetoric (Carbondale, IL, 2018), 260.

53 “Introduction: Slavery’s Capitalism” in Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development, ed. Beckert and Rockman (Philadelphia, 2016), 1-28, quotation at 1. For a recent set of perspectives on slavery’s capitalism, see the special issue on “Business, Capitalism, and Slavery” guest-edited by Marlous van Waijenburg and Anne Ruderman in Business History Review 97, issue 2 (Summer 2023). Although it is proper to speak of a revolution, this should not discount the steady accumulation of important work on the subject in earlier decades. See Isabel Cole and Walter Friedman, “A Guide to the History of Industrial Slavery in the United States,” Business History Review 97, no. 2 (Summer 2023): 385-409.

54 Why We Bite the Invisible Hand: The Psychology of Anti-Capitalism (Toronto, 2014), in a chapter entitled “Cardboard Cut-out Capitalism,” 13-36, quotations at 28. See also his discussion of reviews of the 2007 film American Gangster, whose reviewers coined their own forms of capitalism, like “addiction capitalism” and “rat-race capitalism,” 14-15. In an interview with Simon Schama, Foster takes the historian to task for his expression “scoundrel capitalism,” and Schama notes that he uses “qualifying adjectives” in order to “not writ[e] off the whole concept,” 19. Although Foster’s stated commitments are more restrained and humane, it is easy to find parallels between his “psychology of anti-capitalism” and works like Ludwig von Mises, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, with its lunatic caricatures of capitalism’s critics as ignorant and/or resentful. See von Mises, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality (Princeton, 1956).

55 This particular “form” appears in Vicky Osterweil, In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action (New York, 2020), 112. The book mounts a defense of violent revolution against “the violence of the state, capitalism, white supremacy, imperialism, cisheteropatriarchy, and settler colonialism.” See Osterweil, 181. Far from startling, the idea that capitalism is, e.g., waging “war… against human beings and ‘nature’” has almost become a commonplace in critical theory circles. See Silvia Federici, Beyond the Periphery of the Skin: Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism (Oakland, 2020), 11.

56 Nick Montgomery and Carla Bergman, Joyful Militancy: Building Resistance in Toxic Times (Chico and Edinburgh, 2017), 48.

57 Three notable works from a vast literature: Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York, 2014); Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York, 2014); and Caitlin C. Rosenthal, Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management (Cambridge, MA, 2018). Without addressing Rosenthal’s evidence here, we suggest that her book might be read profitably also in the light of Eve Chiapello’s argument that the idea of capitalism itself developed within and in relationship with a particular accounting regime in nineteenth-century Europe. See Chiapello, “Accounting and the Birth of the Notion of Capitalism,” Critical Perspectives on Accounting 18, no. 3 (2007): 263-296. That “slave-owning was a form of capitalism, and in its later phases a form of ‘big business,’” has rarely been doubted; that sentence is now well over a century old. See Andrew C. McLaughlin, “American History and American Democracy,” American Historical Review 20, no. 2 (January 1915): 255-276, 270. Similarly, Robert Fogel described slavery in the American South as a “a flexible, highly developed form of capitalism.” For Fogel, this fact follows from the responsiveness of slaveholders to “market signals.” See Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York, 1989), 64. For an overview, see Sophus A. Reinert and Cary Williams, “Capitalism, Slavery, and Reparations,” Harvard Business School Case 721-044, April 2021 (Revised Dec. 2022).

58 The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York, 2019), vii.

59 “Most of the seemingly irreducible necessities of human life—hunger, thirst, sexual desire, and recently the need for friendship—have been remade into commodified or financialized forms;” and capitalism is incompatible with “any inherent structure of differentiation: sacred-profane, carnival-workday, nature-culture, machine-organism, and so on.” See; Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London and New York: Verso, 2013), 10, 13. Crary posits sleep as a final radical affront to capitalism. On this in relation to the longer history of coffee in the context of capitalism and socialism alike, see Reinert, Academy of Fisticuffs, esp. 539 and passim.

60 Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (London: Zero, 2014). Eli Zaretsky, Political Freud: A History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), has also delved into the neurotic character of American capitalism, whose ideals of freedom, consumerism, and technological progress cannot keep the Freudian unconscious of slavery and Jim Crow from bubbling up to the surface.

61 This is the “naked reality” of “the age of financial capitalism,” under which the older relationship between social welfare and financial profit has been inverted so that “financial indicators go up only if social welfare crumbles and salaries fall,” and of “absolute capitalism,” whose “only effective principles are those of value accumulation, profit-growth and economic competition,” these being the “all-encompassing priorities” and “overwhelming impetus at its core.” See Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Heroes (London and New York, 2015), 2, 89-92.

62 David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism (London, 2010), 6.

63 Beckert, “History of American Capitalism,” in American History Now, ed. Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr (Philadelphia, 2011), 314-335, 314. For our purposes, this line is also worth noting: “Building upon, but also disagreeing with, Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.’s “managerial capitalism,” Thomas McCraw’s “modern capitalism,” and Joyce Appleby’s “revolutionary capitalism,” some scholars now identify themselves as historians of capitalism, a new subfield in the professional roster.” Beckert, 315.

64 Before capitalism’s roaring comeback after the financial crisis, Robert Heilbroner had lamented the fact that the word “capitalism” no longer even appeared in introductory economics textbooks, which he saw as indicative of a trend away from thinking holistically about “all the complexities of an economic system—the political, the sociological, the psychological, the moral, the historical.” Heilbroner, quoted in Louis Uchitelle, “Robert Heilbroner: An Economic Pioneer Decries the Modern Field’s Narrow Focus,” New York Times, 23 Jan. 1999. Capitalism’s return within the ivory tower was soon enough conspicuous beyond it. See Jennifer Schuessler, “In History Departments, It’s Up with Capitalism,” New York Times, 6 April 2013. See also Walter A. Friedman, “Recent Trends in Business History Research: Capitalism, Democracy, and Innovation,” Enterprise & Society 18, no. 4 (2017): 748-771, on the rise of capitalism as a topic in business history in this period.

65 John Bitzan, 2023 American College Student Freedom, Progress and Flourishing Survey, Sheila and Robert Challey Institute for Global Innovation and Growth, North Dakota State University, accessed 2 May 2024, https://www.ndsu.edu/fileadmin/challeyinstitute/Research_Briefs/American_College_Student_Freedom_Progress_and_Flourishing_Survey_2023.pdf, 46. The survey was conducted 11 May-2 June 2023.

66 Simon Tormey, Anti-Capitalism: A Beginner’s Guide, rev. ed. (London, 2013), ix. Tormey and others stress the continuities between the anti-globalization movements, Occupy, and the new “anti-capitalism.” See, e.g. Paul Mason, Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions (London, 2012).

67 “This means,” he continues, “that every attempt to construct a model of capitalism… will be a mixture of success and failure: some features will be foregrounded, other neglected or even misrepresented”; “unrepresentable” does not, however, mean that it’s “ineffable and a kind of mystery beyond language and thought” but “that one must redouble one’s efforts to express the inexpressible in this respect.” See Jameson, Representing Capital: A Commentary on Volume One (London and New York, 2011), 6-7.

68 More speculative is his argument that capitalism will not be supplanted by another system like socialism but is instead giving way to the “social entropy” of a “postcapitalist interregnum.” See Streeck, How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System (London and New York, 2017), 12, 13.

69 Friedman, Fortune Tellers: The Story of America’s First Economic Forecasters (Princeton, 2014), 8.

70 “Who knows the names knows also the things” (“Hos an ta onomata epistētai, epistasthai kai ta pragmata”). Plato, Cratylus, 435d5-6.

71 Erikson, “Michael Sonenscher, Capitalism: The Story Behind the Word (review),” Œconomia 14, no. 2 (2024): 95-98, 95.

72 Sonenscher, Capitalism, 40-51, 168.

73 Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis, 1993), 79.

74 See Streeck, How Will Capitalism End?, 1-2, n.3, for some essential examples.

75 Weber, The Sociology of Religion (Boston, 1991 [original 1920]), 1.

76 Gras, Business and Capitalism, vii.

77 Deirdre McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (Chicago, 2010), 16, 260.

78 Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible, trans. Siân Reynolds (New York, 1981 [1979 original]), 24. See also the essential pages of Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce, 232-239.

79 Gilles Dauvé, From Crisis to Communisation (Oakland, 2019), 30.

80 David Schweickart, After Capitalism (Lanham, MD, 2011), 26.

81 Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (London and New York, 2017 [original 1999]), 193. Her own definition: “a system in which goods and services, down to the most basic necessities of life, are produced for profitable exchange, where even human labour-power is a commodity for sale in the market, and where all economic actors are dependent on the market.” Wood, 2.

82 Jonathan Tepper, with Denise Hearn, The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition (Hoboken, NJ, 2019).

83 Thiel, “Competition is for Losers,” Wall Street Journal, 12 Sep. 2014.

84 E.g., Geoffrey M. Hodgson’s in Conceptualizing Capitalism: Institutions, Evolution, Future (Chicago, 2015), chapter 10, 251-261. He also outlines two alternative definitions worth grappling with, what he calls M-Capitalism (M for Marx) and S-Capitalism (S for Schumpeter).

85 Immanuel Wallerstein, “Structural Crisis, Or Why Capitalists May No Longer Find Capitalism Rewarding,” in Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, Georgi Derluguian, and Craig Calhoun, Does Capitalism Have a Future? (Oxford, 2013), 9-36, 10.

86 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (New York, 1958), I, §§66-67, 33.

87 Frederic C. Lane, “Meaning of Capitalism” in Profits from Power: Readings in Protection Rent and Violence-Controlling Enterprises (Albany, 1979), 66-71, 70. Lane’s earlier definition of capitalism, “a society so organized that men can make money by investing their capital,” was not far from Gras’s. See Lane, “At the Roots of Republicanism,” American Historical Review 71, no. 2 (1966): 403-420, 404.

88 William Gibson in conversation with David Brin, “The Science in Science Fiction,” Talk of the Town, National Public Radio, 30 Nov. 1999, accessed 2 May 2024, https://www.npr.org/2018/10/22/1067220/the-science-in-science-fiction. We called attention to the spatial unevenness of capitalism, and quoted Gibson, in Fredona and Reinert, “Italy and the Origins of Capitalism,” 8-9.

89 Schumpeter, “The Sociology of Imperialisms” in Imperialism and Social Classes: Two Essays by Joseph Schumpeter, trans. Heinz Norden (Cleveland and New York, 1955 [German original 1919]), 2-98, 66. This essay has never been fully grappled with by sociologists or economists. On the essay, see Paul M. Sweezy, “Schumpeter on ‘Imperialism and Social Classes,’” in Schumpeter: Social Scientist, ed. Seymour E. Harris (Cambridge, MA, 1951), 119-124.

90 Tarun Khanna and Krishna G. Palepu, with Richard J. Bullock, Winning in Emerging Markets: A Road Map for Strategy and Execution (Boston, 2010), quoting 13-14, but see 13-26. Note too the spatio-geographical (and even geological) language of landscapes, lacunae, and striations. Reinert discusses how market voids were filled by human and institutional action in the emerging market that was Enlightenment Italy. See Reinert, Academy of Fisticuffs, esp. 393. Quinn Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World without Democracy (New York, 2023), has more recently stressed the uneven and lumpy nature of contemporary global capitalism and sovereignty. See the forthcoming review essay in this journal by Fredona and Reinert, entitled, “In the Zone: On Quinn Slobodian’s Crack-Up Capitalism and the Spaces of Political Economy,” which calls attention to some of these issues and the importance of Slobodian’s themes.

91 Braudel, “Will Capitalism Survive?,” Wilson Quarterly 4, no. 2 (Spring 1980), 108-116, 108.

92 Scranton, Endless Novelty: Specialty Production and American Industrialization, 1865-1925 (Princeton, 1997), quotation at 354; see also 355 for an elegant summation of this case.

93 Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, 2015), 4-5. She continues, “the concentration of wealth is possible because value produced in unplanned patches is appropriated for capital.” See also Donna J. Haraway, “Staying with the Trouble: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene,” in Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, ed. Jason W. Moore (Oakland, CA, 2016), 34-77, 40-41, for an important early appreciation of this approach.

94 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Andrew S. Mathews, and Nils Bubandt, “Patchy Anthropocene: Landscape Structure, Multispecies History, and the Retooling of Anthropology,” Current Anthropology 60, supplement 20 (Aug. 2019): 186-197, 186. See also the assertion, on 187, that “everything is arguably different in every place now.”

95 Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge, UK, 2010), quotations at xii, 290, but see also 279-399. We cannot here do justice to Benton’s argument, which presses against what she sees as Giorgio Agamben’s “purposeful confusion,” between “the rule” (as in the rule and the exception) and “the rule of law,” and challenges the Italian philosopher’s once very fashionable notion of “states of exception” as extra-legal spaces rather “experiments in other kinds of law,” Benton, 286, 290.

96 Peter Hall and David Soskice, eds., Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage (Oxford, 2001). For “varieties of capitalism” and business history, see the special issue on “Business History and Varieties of Capitalism,” in Business History Review 84, no. 4 (Winter 2010), especially the roundtable at 637-674. William Lazonick’s potent critique of the “Liberal market economy” tag for the United States suggests both the radical complexity of schematizing large-scale socio-economic phenomena and the productivity of Hall and Soskice’s model; “Innovative Business Models and Varieties of Capitalism: Financialization of the U.S. Corporation,” 675-702, 676-677. See also Keetie Sluyterman and Gerarda Westerhuis, “International Varieties of Capitalism: The Case of Western Europe,” in The Routledge Companion to Business History, 220-238.

97 Sluyterman and Westerhuis, 4, n.4. Michel Albert, Capitalisme contre capitalisme (Paris, 1991); English translation (London, 1993).

98 Gras, Business and Capitalism, vii-viii. It should go without saying that Chandler too engaged with national forms of capitalism, which structured Scale and Scope: personal capitalism in Britain, competitive managerial capitalism in the United States, cooperative managerial capitalism in Germany, etc.

99 One of the dangers of “critical” approaches overtaking “analytical” ones in business history is the loss of the perspective of the entrepreneur and of the perspective from inside the business enterprise itself, what has been called the Chandlerian “internal perspective”; the phrase belongs to Walter A. Friedman, in “Recent Trends in Business History Research,” 750. The internal perspective remains important, even as we acknowledge its inadequacies. See, e.g., the important argument of Christine Meisner Rosen and Christopher Sellers that “the emergence of Chandlerian institutional history perpetuated [the] neglect” of the environment in business history due to its internal and organization focus in “The Nature of the Firm: Towards as Ecocultural History of Business,” Business History Review 73, no. 4 (Winter 1999): 577-600, 578. At the same time, though, they note that an externalist perspective—environmental historian’s critique of capitalism—“has entailed surprisingly little scrutiny of managers or corporations.” Rosen and Sellers, 579. A rigorously critical-analytical approach in business history in the age of environmental catastrophe might need to be both internal and external. We are similarly in a moment when capitalist subitism seems triumphant. One need look no further than the widespread acceptance of the “Great Divergence” paradigm. Some essential works in forming this consensus are Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, 2000); Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley, 1998); and Roy Bin Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Ithaca, NY, 1997).

100 For this expression, see Penelope J. Corfield, Time and the Shape of History (New Haven and London, 2007), 182-183. Corfield writes that “over time, historical concepts become overstretched and, as that happens, lose meaning. And ‘capitalism’/’communism’ as stages in history, along with ‘modernity,’ and all their hybrid variants, have now lost their clarity as ways of shaping history.” Nor can we reject out of hand the possibility that capitalism is now and increasingly more fertile in producing or manifesting in different forms. R.P. Dore’s argument that “types of capitalism are not static,” even over a relatively short period like the 1960s-1990s, has only become more apparent in the last two decades. See Dore, “Stock Market Capitalism and its Diffusion,” New Political Economy 7, no. 1 (2002): 115-127, 116.

101 There is perhaps reason for cautious hope: even as political will remains elusive, outside a shrinking class of “free market” die hards, agreement seems to be slowly forming around the idea that, to quote the late Amartya Sen, the solution to problems of “inequality… and of ‘public goods’ (that is, goods people share together), like the environment … will almost certainly call for institutions that take us beyond the capitalist market economy.” See Sen, Development as Freedom (New York, 1999), 167. Likewise, Michael Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (New York, 2012), delineated with almost common sense lucidity where ethical boundaries around markets might and should be drawn.

102 Gay, “Stages of Economic Development,” 134. Gay slightly misremembered the saying. See George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel: A History of a Father and Son (London, 1909 [original 1859]), 537, “A proverb is the half-way house to an idea… and the majority rest there content,” uttered by Sir Austin Feverel.

103 To extend our metaphor perhaps too far, Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, UK, 1988), sketches brilliantly how historians have continued to productively travel even after the realization that no destination exists.

104 This is the compelling argument in nuce of Branko Milanovic, Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System that Rules the World (Cambridge, MA, 2019).

105 A recent survey of business history journals showed that between 2000 and 2016, 90% of the articles published covered post-1800 topics, with 68% of those covering post-1900 topics. See Oscar Gelderblom and Francesca Trivellato, “The Business History of the Preindustrial World: Towards a Comparative Historical Analysis,” Business History 61, no. 2 (2019): 225-259, 228, table 1.

106 For an extended discussion of the issues at stake in this clash, see also Jones, Deeply Responsible Business, especially 301-341.

107 Pankaj Mishra, “Grand Illusions,” New York Review of Books 67, n. 18 (Nov. 2020): 31-32, provides an especially trenchant take on the break-up of this narrative.

108 A snapshot of the debates of a decade ago can be found in John Williamson, “Is the ‘Beijing Consensus’ Now Dominant?,” Asia Policy 13 (2012): 1-16; Dominique de Rambures, The China Development Model: Between the State and the Market (London, 2015), esp. 197; Stefan A. Halper, The Beijing Consensus: How China’s Authoritarian Model Will Dominate the Twenty-First Century (New York, 2010); and Weitseng Chen, The Beijing Consensus?: How China Has Changed Western Ideas of Law and Economic Development (Cambridge, UK, 2017).

109 Business and Capitalism, 67. Gras believed that his identification of the sedentary merchant provided the key to seeing that pattern that would require rewriting European economic history from 1200-1800. Grass, viii. See also Fredona and Reinert, “Italy and the Origins of Capitalism,” 17-19, esp. n.31.