Père Goriot’s pasta may have become Steve Jobs’s tablet, and investments in the West Indies in 1800 may have become investments in China or South Africa in 2010, but has the deep structure of capital really changed? Capital is never quiet: it is always risk-oriented and entrepreneurial, at least at its inception, yet it always tends to transform itself into rents as it accumulates in large enough amounts—that is its vocation, its logical destination.
