The first part of my trilogy on the prerequisites and the ways of making of private business – THE ROUTINE NATURE OF RADICAL INNOVATION (The Origins and Making of Private Share Company in Ancient Rome) – has appeared. However astonishing it may seem, just in Ancient Rome were laid the foundations of capitalism as well as the basic forms of now well-known enterprises. And I try to retrace how they were formed in the response to the requests of society as a whole and the entrepreneurial class in particular.
But this is only one of the research lines. The other – perhaps much more important – consists in demonstrating by a specific, but fundamental from the standpoint of social progress, case the internal mechanism of radical innovations. Despite all their seeming revolutionariness, they contain no leaps and are built from the elements not merely available, but thoroughly familiar and many times tested. That means not in the least that revolutionary novelties are never advanced. Are known a lot of cases they were forcedly implanted in an unprepared ground. The only snag is that, for lack of suitable material they might be embodied in, such novelties are not taken as a potential part of reality and, therefore, not assimilated. Any revolution ends in “miscarriage”, engendering, instead of a sound child, a nonviable cripple.
In this paper (“I. From Publicans to Negatiotores”), the conditions and forms of running business in Ancient Rome are considered. A special attention is paid to the beginnings of capitalism and the place of private entrepreneurship in Roman economy. Lastly, the role played by slaveholding as the precursor of the modern system of wage labor is brought to light.