Finally back to our old routine. Holidays are over. It is back to business as usual again.
I am happy to see you all again, and I wish you all good health for 2026, so that we can continue our intellectual journey.
To put you back on track again, we are still on a journey to discover how capitalism could seem to have become the only durable economic system of today.
Chronologically, we have arrived at the 1700s. And we learned about the difference between being rich and being wealthy.
To refresh your memory, in our context, rich means that you have a lot of gold and silver in your treasury, a static condition.
Wealthy means that you are rich, but in a dynamic way. There is an uninterrupted flow of income.
What do you prefer, a rich state or a wealthy state? When the rich state spends all its money, it becomes a poor state, while the wealthy enjoy a constant influx of money that they can spend.
We also learned how this is realized. The source of the wealth is production, created by labour.
So, the root of capitalism is not possessing a lot of money, but possessing production and subsequently the labour force.
This is probably the most concise description of the roots of capitalism. The next question is: how did this economic frame evolve through time?
To explore that, we can turn to a fundamental idea from a group of economic thinkers in France.
They were known as the Physiocrats, from the Greek "physis" , nature, and "kratos", power or rule. They advanced a radical, systematic doctrine
that sought to re-found political economy on the immutable laws of the natural order.
Flourishing between the 1750s and 1780s, they were more than mere economists. They were philosophers of society who offered a comprehensive vision
of wealth, governance, and human flourishing derived from a deep belief in a harmonious natural system.
I'll spare you the historical background, but their influence is still palpable. They were firmly convinced of natural law, the natural order, and this was reflected in their basic economic convictions.
While they placed land, not labour in general, at the very center of wealth creation, their greater contribution was the framework they proposed for letting that wealth grow.
That framework was captured in their famous slogan, which is still at the center of economic and political debates.
They coined the phrase "Laissez-faire, laissez-passer". It encapsulated a radical doctrine: economic prosperity would flourish maximally
if the state refrained from interfering in production, "laissez-faire", and commerce, particularly foreign trade, "laissez-passer".
This was not merely a policy suggestion but a principle derived from their belief in a harmonious Natural Order.
Doesn't this sound like music in the ears of all liberals and neo-liberals? This will be the background music for us for all that will come next.
Main Sources:
MacMillan The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2nd edition
of Economic Thought (2012)
TABLE OF CONTENT -----------------------------------------------------------------
1 - 100 Philosophers 9 May 2009 Start of
2 - 25+ Women Philosophers 10 May 2009 this blog
3 - 25 Adventures in Thinking 10 May 2009
4 - Modern Theories of Ethics 29 Oct 2009
5 - The Ideal State 24 Febr 2010 / 234
6 - The Mystery of the Brain 3 Sept 2010 / 266
7 - The Utopia of the Free Market 16 Febr 2012 / 383
8. - The Aftermath of Neo-liberalism 5 Sept 2012 / 413
9. - The Art Not to Be an Egoist 6 Nov 2012 / 426
10 - Non-Western Philosophy 29 May 2013 / 477
11 - Why Science is Right 2 Sept 2014 / 534
12 - A Philosopher looks at Atheism 1 Jan 2015 / 557
13 - EVIL, a philosophical investigation 17 Apr 2015 / 580
14 - Existentialism and Free Will 2 Sept 2015 / 586
15 - Spinoza 2 Sept 2016 / 615
16 - The Meaning of Life 13 Febr 2017 / 637
17 - In Search of my Self 6 Sept 2017 / 670
18 - The 20th Century Revisited 3 Apr 2018 / 706
19 - The Pessimist 11 Jan 2020 / 819
20 - The Optimist 9 Febr 2020 / 824
21 - Awakening from a Neoliberal Dream 8 Oct 2020 / 872
22 - A World Full of Patterns 1 Apr 2021 / 912
23 - The Concept of Freedom 8 Jan 2022 / 965
24 - Materialism 7 Sept 2022 / 1011
25 - Historical Materialism 5 Oct 2023 / 1088
26 - The Bonobo and the Atheist 9 Jan 2024 / 1102
27 - Artificial Intelligence 9 Feb 2024 / 1108
28 - Why Am I Here 6 Sept 2024 / 1139
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