Capitalismo. Apuntes sociológicos

Abstract

The text tries to make us aware of the tremendous strength of capitalism as a social fact which has utterly transformed western societies over the last 600 years. It uses the categorical framework of Marx’s theory of surplus- value, though only in order to show the capitalist enterprise as a political group, in which a new servitude arises. For that purpose we apply a sociological method of analysis which is very close to Durkheim’s concept of ‘punitive reaction’ –even in the proposal we make for its empirical confirmation.

We also wonder about the historical and structural relationship between our social middle classes and their government by representative assemblies, voted by them. Therefore we focus on the history of the English Parliament, from its remote social origins, which we situate in the Norman Conquest (1066), to its precocious accomplishment in the American Constitution (1787). However, this is a sociological text, not a historical one: so we search for the meaning of that particular and impressive history, and we find an implicit answer in the contrast between the ideal-types of Community and Society, as established by the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies.

In our pages we also analyze from where (within the social structure) individualism generates and propagates itself so as to become the only ideology considered capable of adjusting our behaviour to social expectations.