Discussions on the Essence of Capitalism in the Russian Social Thought of the Late 19th Century

Traditionally, capitalism as a phenomenon is comprehended in the framework of two approaches: civilizational and world-system. The research of capitalism, presented in the article, is based on the conceptual history methodology that allows reconstructing the discursive history of “capitalism”. This methodology open the opportunity to discover “Russian roots” in the history of the emergence of the concept “capitalism”, furthermore, to propose the opinion that “capitalism” is a Russian project. The starting point is that Marx never used the concept “capitalism”. It literally “grew” from the translation of Marx's Capital into Russian and the discussions around it initiated by the Narodnaya Volya [People's Freedom] members, Slavophiles and Marxists. It happened long before the emergence of Weber's and Sombart's works, which are given precedence in the popularization of the concept “capitalism”. The key thesis of the research is that Russian politicians, philosophers and writers laid the Russian-language foundation of the Marxist and liberal methodology of understanding capitalism. They “forged” this concept from Marx's Capital, fixed its meaning and content in Marxist (Russian Marxists) and liberal (liberal members of the Narodnaya Volya) terms; this is why the Marxist and partly liberal understanding of capitalism is Russian. The idea is discussed that the Slavophiles’ doctrine formed the special “spirit' of capitalism as a Western image of evil, which provided for the negative connotation of the capitalism concept. The research has shown that the concept “capitalism” became commonly used in Russian political literature (S.N. Rusanov, a Narodnaya Volya member and later a Socialist Revolutionary, is believed to be the first to start the popularization of the concept “capitalism” in the print media) and also emerged and was fixed in Russian dictionaries before it happened in European countries. It is likely that the concept “capitalism” was translated into other European languages based on the Russian original of the Marxist concept of capitalism, and with this meaning and content it entered into Western dictionaries. It means that the basis of the Marxist and partly liberal understanding of capitalism for the European world is Russian.

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