The Reign of the Capital

Abstract

The article examines some constitutive aspects of capitalism from a historical and institutional point of view. The basic argument developed in the article is that the constitution of a specifically capitalist mode of  roduction entails the imposition of some institutions whose general meaning is the dissolution of the particularities that  are typical of the pre-modern world. The result of this process is a pseudo-universal sociability whose main instance is the fetishism of commodities.

JEL Classification: B14.