Nature Of Capitalism Analysis

Introduction

The Nature of Capitalism

The Capitalist system has been interpreted throughout the years as either, “moral, immoral or amoral”, depending on the various thinkers whom had associated themselves to a particular understanding of capitalism (Bassiry & Jones, 1993).Capitalism in its most basic sense, allows for, “commodity production, in which there is private ownership and/or control of the means of production”, in accordance with the Politics Oxford dictionary (McLean & McMillan, 2009).

Throughout history, Capitalism had undergone several phases before reaching the concept of what the notion is understood at present, or otherwise recognised as the “Stages of Capitalist Development”, and how the concept has shifted over time (Albritton,

Critiques of capitalism throughout the years has involved common aspects associated to the art of capitalism, such as: the exploitation if labour, mass materialism (mass production), unequal dispersal of resources as well as environmental deprivation (Bassiry & Jones, 1993).

A critique of capitalism and therefore capitalistic ways, Hirschman emphasises, is not only the self-destructing effects along with it, but that capitalism is too, “weak to play the progressive role [that] history has supposedly assigned to it” (Hirschman, 1986). Albert Hirschman elaborates on how morals within society are affected by ideologies such as capitalism and commerce. Capitalism is said to carry, “the seed of its own destruction”, as in connection to what Karl Marx would critique about the notion of Capitalism.

The Nature of

Hirschman’s (economist) writings within, “Rival Views of Market Society”, Hirschman evidently explains the rise of Capitalism coming out of the French Revolution during the nineteenth century (Hirschman, 1986), where the idea for the ‘perfecting’ of social order was seen during the French Enlightenment (seventeenth century). Capitalism came through with a bang into society, via the process of, “a perfectible society”, where it was structured, “in the guise of powerful critiques of the social and economic order”, thus defining capitalism (Hirschman, 1986). Market society takes on various definitions, such that a market society can either be interpreted as a ‘Free Market’, as initiated through Adam Smith’s writing, or as a ‘State Market’, where the market is controlled by the state, unlike that of a free market society. Hirschman introduces market society as the way in which markets are incorporated/influenced in all aspects of a person’s life. Market society consists of four similar yet contradictory theses known as the: Doux-Commerce Thesis, The Self-Destruction Thesis, and The Eclipse of the Doux-commerce thesis as well as The Feudal-Shackles Thesis. All origins of all four theses had derived from its “country of truth”, the country in which the theory was applied at that particular time (Hirschman,