Francesco Boldizzoni. Means and Ends: The Idea of Capital in the West, 1500–1970. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2008. Pp. viii, 221. $69.95

An enormous historical and conceptual gap separates the claim that money is not a living plant, and therefore it is unnatural to expect it to bear fruit, from the claim that money as such is not capital. As Francesco Boldizzoni demonstrates in his engaging survey, it took Western thought a long time to free itself from the distinction between the sterility of money and the fecundity of organic nature, which had its authoritative source in Aristotle, and arrive at an understanding of how it is possible to make money out of money. The idea of capital has a technical history central to the development of economics as a discipline, and Boldizzoni ably traces the broad contours of this progress in the understanding of how money can be productive. His story encompasses late medieval and Renaissance figures, seventeenth-century Jesuits, William...