Is Capitalism Kaput?

Abstract

In this article, we examine metaphors in economics, specifically looking at the term capital and its family of metaphors, and investigate the role they play in a capitalist economy. Serving as a means of communicating complex ideas and outstripping their literal meanings, metaphors become a part of the developing knowledge in a discipline. We demonstrate how a metaphor constitutes an active interchange between a word and the complex idea it signifies, and, by extension, the formation of yet another idea results. We show how, from the parent metaphors capital and capitalism, there developed a number of derivative (i.e., sibling or relational) metaphors that describe the different functions and forms of capital in capitalism. And we point out metaphors related to different types of goods and property that exist in a capitalist economy. Are the family of metaphors of capital helpful or harmful to capitalism? To the extent that metaphors enrich and expand its language, we submit that they do indeed contribute to the survival of the capitalist society which spawns them.