紀要論文

マルクスは"monied capital"という語をどこからとったのか : 『資本論』第3部第5篇のキーワードの出どころを探る

Where did Marx adopt the word "monied capital" from?: exploring the source of the key word in section 5 of Book 3 of Capital

jpn

00229741

https://doi.org/10.15002/00007731

法政大学経済学部学会

79

2

19

89

2011-09-15

Version of Record

Marx used the term “monied capital” (or “moneyed capital”) very frequently in Chapter 5 of the first manuscript for Book III of Capital (used by Engels for Sec. 5 of Vol. III of Capital which he edited). In an article published in 1982, the author offered the conjecture that Marx must have adopted the term consciously as one that was practically as well as theoretically already in use at the time by capitalists, businessmen, or economists. But the author had no reliable evidence for this assumption. In opposition to this view, Prof. Masanari KOBAYASHI stated in a 2006 article that it was more likely that Marx himself coined the term. In 2009 Prof. Toshiaki OTOMO suggested in an article that Marx critically inherited the concept of monied capital from Thomas Tooke. The author began to investigate the use of the term by political economists and others who preceded Marx using the search engine provided by Google Books to obtain a great deal of information. In this article he presents his findings based on the analysis of that information. The term monied (moneyed) capital, far from being coined by Marx, was already used widely in the English-speaking world of the time in a variety of fields. Examples of the use of the term can be found as early as the eighteenth century. The term also appeared often in economic texts as well as in the Parliamentary Papers of England and Ireland which Marx is likely to have read. The meaning of the term varies considerably, resulting in a great deal of conceptual confusion, but Marx seized on the cases where it meant interest-bearing capital and he characterized this usage as “monied capital in the English sense.” In Chapter 5 of the first manuscript for Book III of Capital Marx used the term solely in this meaning. The term monied capital takes on different meanings in the two stages of the theoretical development of interest-bearing capital. First, in conceptually grasping interest-bearing capital, the term appears as the English word that expresses this capital itself. Next, in the subsequent analysis of interest-bearing capital in its more concrete forms under the credit and banking system, the term often refers to the loanable money capital centralized in the bankers’ hands from various sources of unemployed money and money capital and then put at the disposal of productive and commercial capitalists according to the needs of their reproduction process. In other words, in the former stage the term is used in the broad sense of interest-bearing capital in general, while in the latter stage it has the narrower meaning of interest-bearing capital under the credit and banking system.

Article

AN00071028