Przedsiębiorstwo jako kapitał. Kapitał jako majątek i jako fundusz

Abstrakt

The article is devoted to a discussion and analysis of the two basic meanings of the concept of `capital': the material meaning, understood as a set of economic factors; and the financial meaning understood as a financial fund which may be invested in any combination of economic factors. We owe this differentiation to J. R. Hicks (Nobel Prize for economics in 1972). He points to the fact that economists often talk about the capital in two different meanings, which may lead to misunderstandings. In the history of the economic thought also two schools of thinking about the capital may be distinguished: those of `materialists' and of `financiers'. This differentiation is crosswise to the classical divisions. Hicks includes economists belonging to the neo-classical school of economics (A. Marshall) in the category of materialists; and both Smith and Marx (with his classical definition of the capital as „value which profits additional value”) to financiers. In finance the one-sided approach of the fund capital is the dominant one. The conclusion of the article is that both approaches are useful.