capitaliste

French capitaliste derived from capital, from Medieval Latin capitalis (of the head, chief), from caput (head). Capital in finance originally meant the principal sum — the head sum, the primary amount from which interest grew. A capitaliste was someone who possessed such funds: a person of means, an investor, a lender of money. The word was descriptive, not polemical.

English adopted the word by the early 18th century. Samuel Taylor Coleridge used capitalist in 1823 to describe investors, and the word circulated among writers who were beginning to analyze the new industrial economy. It was not yet a term of abuse — simply a category of person: one who held capital and deployed it in commercial ventures.

The polemical charge came from the socialist tradition. Henri de Saint-Simon used capitaliste in a critical sense in the early 19th century, and Karl Marx's analysis of capitalism — published most fully in Das Kapital (1867) — made capitalist an ideological term: the class that owned the means of production and extracted surplus value from workers. The descriptive became the accusatory.

Cold War politics made capitalist the defining term for one side of a global conflict. Capitalism versus communism, the free market versus state planning: the word moved from accounting to geopolitics. Since 1991 and the fall of the Soviet Union, capitalist has become less a slur and more a simple description again — the resting state of most of the world's economies.