capitalism
capitalismis a term freighted with heavy ideological baggage. For economists and historians working within a Marxist tradition (see Marxism and classical antiquity) it has a specific reference to an advanced socio-economic formation in which value, profit, and rationality are determined according to the productive modalities and mentalities of large-scale competitive businesses and price-fixing markets. On this view, the economies of Greece and Rome would be classed as pre- or non-capitalist. For non-Marxists of various stripes, capitalism in the sense of the productive deployment, especially investment, of fixed or variable capital assets may occur within a wider range of political, social, and economic contexts, including the societies of Greece and Rome.
The disagreement is not only ideological. To define Greece and Rome as pre-capitalist may imply also, for instance, the view that ‘the economy’ as a...
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