The Origin of the Term "Intellectual Capital", 1842

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1275

  It seems that the first use of the term “intellectual capital” is seen to be with John Maynard Keynes in 1975; nice company of course, but the true first use seems to be much earlier.  It seems to appear in The Southern Literary Messenger (1834-1864) for September 1842, in an article "Geneaology of Ideas", (pp 548-557) and written by “E.W.J.”, who turns out to be Edward William Johnston, writer/editor, born in Culpepper County in 1799 (or 1804), and brother of Confederate General Albert Sydney Johnston.  (It is also available from our blog bookstore.)

Here it is:                   

To resume now our historical deduction of matter Intellectual capital appears to be as capable of being amassed among a nation as materia1 wealth but by no means to follow the same laws –page 552

If that isn’t what Keynes (and then everyone else) was talking about, I don’t know what is.

The article is interesting for its dipping into the history of plagairism and finding it comfortably nestled somewhat undisturbed, comfortably even, in the general history of ideas:

He who writes therefore steals as well as he can and as beggars when they can filch from no richer wardrobe purloin each others tatters so mean authors rob one another and go undetected partly because their works pass unscanned and parity because they from whom they borrow are unread So that after all the essential difference between the genius and the scribbler is not as to the fact of stealing nor even as to the quantity stolen but entirely as to the value of what they steal  (page 551)   

Long intellectual history of borrowing and building, collection of tropes wound through entirely original work, based on some common building blocks that have been used over and over agian across the centuries.  When looking at the geneaology of ideas, the business of utter stand-alones is slim.  Shakespeare built upon Plutarch in bits and starts, for example, but everyone who knew everything at that time would’ve recognized the Plutarch shining through, Shakespeare himself finding it unnecessary to say any more about it.  Albert Einstein had not one footnote in the SRT paper of 1905, yet owed some intellectual heritage to Lorentz and Poincare.   Anyway Johnston writes about the fluid nature of the history of ideas with many fine examples (though not the two listed above), all of which can be read here in the full text of the article. 

(This subject of plagiarism and forgery, of originality and copying, of recognizing what has come before and not, gets to be very knotty very quickly.  What is “real”, what is “original”, we are reminded, gets complicated and complex.)

Notes:
 
1.  The Southern Literary Messenger: Vols. I-XXXVI (August 1834 - June 1864, when it was eaten up by the war).  Even though it was an interesting journal with a good solid and long run, I guess many people will remember it for being edited for a short time by Edgar A. Poe, who also made a number of literary, critical reviews and poetical contributions to the magazine, though not in this issue for any of those three.

 

 

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Bad artists copy. Good artists steal. ~Pablo Picasso.

Yes, it's all about the value of what is stolen.