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In the eighteenth century, “capitalist” was understood by social philosophers, by economic thinkers, and by the educated public as a person who invests money in public debt or in stock, and expects an annuity or a dividend. A capitalist was someone who did not have to work for a living, nor live off land revenue, nor have profits from manufacture or trade. His revenue was derived from the financial securities he owned and traded. At the dawn of the modern era, being a capitalist meant being an investor . Only toward the end of the century did Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations give a new, abstract twist to the term “capitalist.”

A superficial observer could say that Adam Smith has not depicted a central figure of capitalism, being too busy with the grand tableau of the national economy. Yet Smith’s economic landscape is not empty, but populated by a whole array of figures, some of which are of central importance. Increasing the nation’s wealth is, in Adam Smith’s eyes, the ultimate aim of economic life. While agriculture, trade, and other economic activities may contribute to increases in wealth, manufacture remains the key branch of the economy. Great nations excel in manufacture , this latter, superior in skills and productivity to agriculture, is the core of the economy. All other economic activities—like banking and trade—are subordinated to increasing the industry of the country.

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An investigation of the boundaries of finance emerging at about the same time as sociology cannot avoid questioning how the latter saw the former: how do emerging sociological views on the capitalist order deal with financial markets? This question goes beyond the mere exercise in the history of sociological ideas: it concerns both conceptualization (what notions have explanatory force) and observational mode (how shall we see finance in the context of capitalism).1 It also concerns the nature and character of financial knowledge and its relationship to other forms of social knowledge, as well as to specific social groups.

For many theorists, observation of (economic) knowledge in action meant, among other things, identifying its manifestations on the individual level, its expressions in human types and the related categories of action. It meant finding paradigmatic figures embodying the main principles of finance, figures which constitute the link between this domain and the larger sphere of life and connect individual modes of action to broader social processes. And indeed we encounter in the sociological tradition a continuous preoccupation with the figures generated by the modern order: the expert, the public man, the consumer, the intellectual, the scientist, the writer, the artist—these are only some major examples.

Yet the feeling persists that no account of life under capitalism would be complete without taking into account the main figures of economic life,simply because, since the eighteenth century, these figures have been in creasingly perceived as the focal point of both society and individual lives. In the words of Charles Taylor, “the affirmation of ordinary lives is part of the background to the central place given to the economic in our lives” .

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