Sonenscher has written a short (174 pages of text), dense, and provocative book on the history of capitalism, or, more precisely, the idea of capitalism. Positioned as an intellectual historian, the author seeks to define capitalism, or to elucidate “the story behind the word,” as his subtitle puts it. He traces the word’s origins and its evolution into its widely accepted meaning in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He contextualizes it within related concepts, discusses what he sees as the problem of capitalism—inequality—and assesses the contributions of period thinkers to an understanding of capitalism and to a solution to the problem of inequality.

Sonenscher begins by showing that before the term capitalism was first used in the mid-nineteenth century, the French term capitaliste had a history going back well into the eighteenth century when it referred to those who financed wars by lending to the states that fought them....

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