Corporations, Accounting, Securities Laws, and the Extinction of Capitalism

2Capitalists

DOI: 10.4324/9781003240969-3

Introduction

In 1954, Berle exclaimed, “The capital is there; and so is capitalism. The waning factor is the capitalist. He has somehow vanished …” (p. 39). Berle was wrong. While there can be, and obviously has been, capital for thousands of years, there can be no capitalism without capitalists.

Heilbroner (1974) defined capitalism first as an “economic order marked by the private ownership of means of production vested in a minority class called ‘capitalists’” (p. 63) and second as a market system that determines the income and distributes the output arising from its productive activities. But he also defined capitalism as “a social order characterized by a ‘bourgeois’ culture among whose manifold ...