[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Capitalism & Democracy
Throughout his career, Karl Marx was absorbed in the study of capitalism; a study that resulted in his formulation of a firm view on the system. According to Marx captalists are "vulgar economists" who seek "plausible explanations of the crudest phenomena for the domestic purposes of the bourgeoisie" [Marx, 1977(a), p. 175n]. Does the above-quoted statement by Marx imply that his view on capitalism was truly alternative in the sense that the acceptance of this view is tantamount to a rejection of the other? Marx conceptualized realities. The economist was led to his conceptualization of reality as a basis for his analysis because he had a "vision" of a potentially realizable good society. Marx's vision was that of a "higher phase of communist society" in which the "productive forces [will] have" made it possible for "wealth [to] flow ... [so] abundantly" that society can "inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" [Marx, 1951, p. 23]
The socioeconomic actuality in which a pioneering economist lives cannot be 'known' in the same way as natural objects get to be 'known". The pioneer is, therefore, forced to substitute something knowable for the essentially unknowable actuality. Such a surrogate may be dubbed conceptualized reality. By this term, it is understood that a leading economist's conceptually formulated and mentally designed similitude of the contemporary economic actuality is a proxy for that actuality. A conceptualizer uses three principal sets of inputs in the process of building an image of the economic actuality: hypothetical-philosophical-theoretical elements (hypothetical for short); historical components; and observations and data pertaining to the contemporary economic scene.
The chief hypothetical inputs employed by Marx consisted of propositions about human nature and behavior. He formulated these on the basis of his reading of works authored by G. W. F. Hegel, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Charles Darwin................
