It is easy to forget that
capitalism was coined not so long ago, in the mid-19th century, when the Industrial Revolution was in full swing, and individual entrepreneurs were creating new industries and amassing wealth. Terms for the other two major competing economic systems of the past two centuries—
socialism and
communism—were also coined around the same time. Also, about the same time it became common to designate all such coinages as “isms”: terms formed by adding the suffix
-ism to a root word in order to expand its meaning to encompass a related system, theory, or practice. Thus from a fairly old word,
capital, the relatively newer word,
capitalism, was formed to describe the then emerging economies of the West. (Another towering ism coined later in the 19th century was, of course,
Darwinism. )
On the surface, the meaning of
capitalism seems straightforward, referring to an economic system in which private individuals, rather than governments, own property and businesses. But beneath the surface, strong currents of opinion and theory swirl about the term. Many people fiercely espouse capitalism as an economic freedom inseparable from democracy, as reflected in several books considered classics and still avidly read today: for example,
Capitalism and Freedom by Nobel laureate Milton Friedman (first published in 1962), and
Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy by Joseph A. Schumpeter (first published in 1943). So it may be a challenge to use the term without triggering a discussion of its broader political context.