True Story of the Ambiguous Idea of Capital

Description

This book discusses the development of the idea of capital that emerged in Genoa in the twelfth century and that, after a long and honourable career over the next six hundred years in the corridors of trading companies and their finances, became the subject of a grandiose but illusory transmutation into the capital of an entire country in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations.
On this transmutation, a typical product of the ambitious intellectuals of the Age of Enlightenment, we will have to say, indeed to repeat, something clear and well documented that, albeit already published, has so far eluded the attention of the absent-minded scholars of economic thought.
The fact is that the transformation of capital from a mere accounting concept into a ‘deeper’ idea, was able to provide a powerful ideological weapon for the ‘capitalist’ bourgeoisie of the XIX century in its struggle with socialists and Marxists, and consequently asserted itself, albeit severely flawed, but at the cost of driving economic science into a dead end.