Word: capitalisme
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(4 of 17) how close the precapitalist world was to the Middle Ages in most material conditions of life. Some statistics: world production of pig iron soared from 10 million tons in 1867 to 357 million tons a century later. As late as 1850, human muscle and animal power accounted...
But capitalism also proved to be a disruptive force on an equally gigantic scale. It subjected humanity to the psychological shock of living with continuous and accelerating technological and social change. The Industrial Revolution covered Europe and America with what Smith's contemporary, Poet William Blake, called "dark Satanic mills...
Some of the thinkers who followed Adam Smith had made capitalism seem heartless indeed. The Rev. Thomas Malthus grimly announced that no person has any claim on society for a "right to subsistence when his labor will not fairly purchase it." David Ricardo worked out what became known as the...
The science seemed especially dismal to Karl Marx, who damned capitalism as an inhuman system in which "all that is holy is profaned." He charged that it tended to "mutilate the laborer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of appendage of a machine." In The...
Capitalism, Marx reckoned, would pour out more goods than workers could buy