Authors: Duhamel & Mény
Summary: Capitalism is an economic and social system in which, as a general rule, capital does not belong or accrue to those who produce it but to a social category: capitalists. Historically, the rise of capitalism required the division of labor and of the means of production, the existence of free laborers, and the large-scale accumulation of capital. While not necessarily tied to any particular political theory, capitalism finds its truest ideological justification in liberalism's commitment to individual rights, natural law, and private property. John Locke's Second Treatise of Government (1690), the French Declaration of Rights of 1789 with its assertion of the "inviolable and sacred" right of property, and especially Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776) all evince this elevation of liberty, natural rights, and property. Concomitant to this is liberalism's skepticism about the role of government in interfering with economic transactions, and thus about regulating the whole economy.
The keenest ideological attack on capitalism has come from socialism, both in its classical form (Marx, Luxemburg, Lenin) and in more recent theories of dependency. The socialist critique explains the birth of the modern State, of colonialism, and of imperialism, as direct consequences of the triumph of the capitalist system of production, first domestically and then internationally-a process which has resulted in the division of the world between dominant and dependent countries. Much criticism of capitalism has focused on the economic problems of the third world, and on the more spiritual afflictions within western capitalist nations, in particular alienation. But despite the widespread nature of criticisms of capitalism, in recent years the fall of socialist regimes and the "crisis of the welfare state," have had the effect of reinforcing the basic ideas of capitalism.
French socialism, which once envisioned the destruction of capitalism, has come to limit its ambition to the development of a "tempered" capitalism (M. Rocard).