Capitalism
NOTE: Although the following article has not been revised for this edition of the Encyclopedia, the substantive coverage is currently appropriate. The editors have provided a list of recent works at the end of the article to facilitate research and exploration of the topic.
Sociology has no complete, formal consensus on a specific definition of capitalism. The discipline of sociology itself arose as an attempt to understand and explain the emergence and nature of modern capitalist societies. Sociology's founding theorists were very much concerned with the development of capitalism. Émile Durkheim sought to find the bases of new forms of morality and social solidarity in the division of labor, which capitalism both expanded and accelerated (Durkheim 1984). Karl Marx, of course, spent his adult life analyzing and criticizing capitalist society. Marx's project was guided by his hope and expectation that capitalism would be displaced as history moved toward a socialist, and then communist, future. Max Weber, too, devoted considerable attention to the origins of modern capitalism and the historically specific character of Western society under capitalist expansion. Contemporary sociology's treatment of capitalism is grounded in the works of these theorists. The works of Marx and Weber, insofar as they more explicitly focused attention on the dynamics of capitalism, provide a point of departure for discussing modern sociology's approaches to capitalism.
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