One of the contributions made by The New Spirit of Capitalism is that it put the word ‘capitalism’ back into circulation in France. The term had almost completely vanished from the public sphere during the neo-liberal decades of the 1980s and 90s, the naturalization of the system (‘there is no alternative’) having entailed the disappearance of the word referring to it. Boltanski and Chiapello define capitalism in minimal fashion as the ‘unlimited accumulation of capital by formally peaceful means’. It is a profoundly absurd system. The ‘unlimited’ character of accumulation is without foundation or justification: why should it be necessary for capital to be infinitely accumulated, given that human needs are by definition limited? Aristotle called the unlimited accumulation of goods as an end in itself ‘chrematistics’. He condemned it and contrasted it with ‘economics’, or accumulation for a purpose. The essence of capitalism, affirm Boltanski and Chiapello, is chrematistic.