The great student of capitalism Karl Marx quotes approvingly from Shakespeare's Timon of Athens:

Shakespeare describes how wealth and money – “gold” – alter our attitude towards others. He believes in money's reflexive power: it is not under our control; it affects us. But Shakespeare is not moralizing, as Marx wants to imply. The conventional attitudes of his time towards lepers and thieves were hardly noble. He reveals our hypocrisy, and he observes that money reveals it too. Marx is an insightful and stirring writer himself, although his argument often cedes to rhetoric. Like any great thinker struggling with original thoughts, he is particularly interesting when self-contradictory. He is critical, and ambiguous. His comment on this excerpt from Shakespeare is very revealing: “It [money] is the visible deity, the transformation of all human and natural qualities into their opposite, the universal confusion and inversion of things; it brings incompatibles into fraternity” ([1956] 1986: 181, emphasis added).