middle and lower – which has most significance in feudal and immediately post-feudal society and which, in the sense of the later uses, would have little or no relevance as a description of a developed or fully formed bourgeois society. A ruling class, which is the socialist sense of bourgeois in the context of historical description of a developed capitalist society, is not easily or clearly represented by the essentially different middle class. For this reason, especially in this context and in spite of the difficulties, bourgeois will continue to have to be used.
See CAPITALISM, CIVILIZATION, CLASS, SOCIETY
Bureaucracy appears in English from mC19. Carlyle in Latter-day Pamphlets (1850) wrote of ‘the Continental nuisance called “Bureaucracy”’, and Mill in 1848 wrote of the inexpediency of concentrating all the power of organized action ‘in a dominant bureaucracy’. In 1818, using an earlier form, Lady Morgan had written of the ‘Bureaucratie or office tyranny, by which Ireland had been so long governed’. The word was taken from fw bureaucratie, F, rw bureau – writing-desk and then office. The original meaning of bureau was the baize used to cover desks. The English use of bureau as office dates from eC18; it became more common in American use, especially with reference to foreign branches, the French influence being predominant. The increasing scale of commercial organization, with a corresponding increase in government intervention and legal controls, and with the increasing importance of organized and professional central government, produced the political facts to which the new term pointed. But there was then considerable variation in their evaluation. In English and North American usage the foreign term, bureaucracy, was used to indicate the rigidity or excessive power of public administration, while such terms as public service or civil service were used to indicate impartiality and selfless professionalism. In German Bureaukratie often had the more favourable meaning, as in Schmoller (‘the only neutral element’, apart from the monarchy, ‘in the class war’), and was given a further sense of legally established rationality by Weber. The variation of terms can still confuse the variations of evaluation, and indeed the distinctions between often diverse political systems which ‘a body of public servants’ or a bureaucracy can serve. Beyond this, however, there has been a more general use of bureaucracy to indicate, unfavourably, not merely the class of officials but certain types of centralized social order, of a modern organized kind, as distinct not only from older aristocratic societies but from popular DEMOCRACY (q.v.). This has been important in socialist thought, where the concept of the ‘public interest’ is especially exposed to the variation between ‘public service’ and ‘bureaucracy’.
In more local ways, bureaucracy is used to refer to the complicated formalities of official procedures, what the Daily News in 1871 described as ‘the Ministry … with all its routine of tape, wax, seals, and bureauism’. There is again an area of uncertainty between two kinds of reference, as can be seen by the coinage of more neutral phrases such as ‘business methods’ and ‘office organization’ for commercial use, bureaucracy being often reserved for similar or identical procedures in government.
See DEMOCRACY, MANAGEMENT
Capitalism as a word describing a particular economic system began to appear in English from eC19, and almost simultaneously in French and German. Capitalist as a noun is a little older; Arthur Young used it, in his journal of Travels in France (1792), but relatively loosely: ‘moneyed men, or capitalists’. Coleridge used it in the developed sense – ‘capitalists … having labour at demand’ – in Tabletalk (1823). Thomas Hodgskin, in Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital (1825) wrote: ‘all the capitalists of Europe, with all their circulating capital, cannot of themselves supply a single week’s food and clothing’, and again: ‘betwixt him who produces food and him who produces clothing, betwixt him who makes instruments and him who uses them, in steps the capitalist, who neither makes nor uses them and appropriates to himself the produce of both’. This is clearly the description of an economic system.
The economic sense of capital had been present in English from C17 and in a fully developed form from C18. Chambers Cyclopaedia (1727–51) has ‘power given by Parliament to the South-Sea company to increase their capital’ and definition of ‘circulating capital’ is in Adam Smith (1776). The word had acquired this specialized meaning from its general sense of ‘head’ or ‘chief’: fw capital, F, capitalist L, rw caput, L – head. There were many derived specialist meanings; the economic meaning developed from a shortening of the phrase ‘capital stock’ – a material holding or monetary fund. In classical economics the functions of capital, and of various kinds of capital, were described and defined.
Capitalism represents a development of meaning in that it has been increasingly used to indicate a particular and historical economic system rather than any economic system as such. Capital and at first capitalist were technical terms in any economic system. The later (eC19) uses of capitalist moved towards specific functions in a particular stage of historical development; it is this use that crystallized in capitalism. There was a sense of the capitalist as the useless but controlling intermediary between producers, or as the employer of labour, or, finally, as the owner of the means of production. This involved, eventually, and especially in Marx, a distinction of capital as a formal economic category from capitalism as a particular form of centralized ownership of the means of production, carrying with it the system of wage-labour. Capitalism in this sense is a product of a developing bourgeois society; there are early kinds of capitalist production but capitalism as a system – what Marx calls ‘the capitalist era’ – dates only from C16 and did not reach the stage of industrial capitalism until lC18 and eC19.
There has been immense controversy about the details of this description, and of course about the merits and workings of the system itself, but from eC20, in most languages, capitalism has had this sense of a distinct economic system, which can be contrasted with other systems. As a term capitalism does not seem to be earlier than the 1880s, when it began to be used in German socialist writing and was extended to other non-socialist writing. Its first English and French uses seem to date only from the first years of C20. In mC20, in reaction against socialist argument, the words capitalism and capitalist have often been deliberately replaced by defenders of the system by such phrases as ‘private enterprise’ and ‘free enterprise’.
These terms, recalling some of the conditions of early capitalism, are applied without apparent hesitation to very large or para-national ‘public’ corporations, or to an economic system controlled by them. At other times, however, capitalism is defended under its own now common name. There has also developed a use of post-capitalist and post-capitalism, to describe modifications of the system such as the supposed transfer of control from shareholders to professional management, or the coexistence of certain NATIONALIZED (q.v.) or ‘state-owned’ industries. The plausibility of these descriptions depends on the definition of capitalism which they are selected to modify.