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120 pp. |
"Outstanding Academic Book"—Choice
(American Library Association)
THE ORIGIN OF CAPITALISM
by Ellen
Meiksins Wood
“In most accounts of capitalism and
its origin, there really is no origin. Capitalism seems always to
be there, somewhere, and it only needs to be released from its
chains—for instance, from the fetters of feudalism—to be allowed to
grow and mature. Typically, these fetters are political: the parasitic powers
of lordship, or the restrictions of an autocratic state. Sometimes they are
cultural or ideological—perhaps the wrong religion. These constraints
confine the free movement of economic actors, the free expression of economic
rationality. The `economic' in these formulations is identified with exchange
or markets, and it is here that we can detect the assumption that the seeds of
capitalism are contained in the most simple acts of exchange, in any form of
trade or market activity. That assumption is typically connected with the other
presupposition, that history has been an almost natural process of
technological development. One way or another, capitalism more or less
naturally appears when and where expanding markets and technological
development reach the right level. Many Marxist explanations are fundamentally
the same—though they add attention to bourgeois revolutions to help break
the fetters.” — from the Introduction Few questions of
history have as many contemporary political implications as this deceptively
simple one: how did capitalism come to be? In this incisive study,
Ellen Meiksins Wood refutes most existing accounts of the origin of capitalism,
which, she argues, fail to recognize capitalism's distinctive attributes as a
social system, making it seem natural and inevitable. Wood begins with
searching assessments of classical thinkers ranging from Adam Smith to Max
Weber. She then explores the great Marxist debates among writers such as Paul
M. Sweezy, Maurice Dobb, Robert Brenner, Perry Anderson, and E.P. Thompson. She
concludes with her own account of capitalism's agrarian origin, challenging the
association of capitalism with cities, the identification of
"capitalist" with "bourgeois," and conceptions of modernity
and postmodernity derived from those assumptions. Only with a proper
understanding of capitalism's beginning, Wood concludes, can we imagine the
possibility of it ending.
About the Author
ELLEN MEIKSINS WOODis the author of numerous
books including The Retreat from Class (1986, winner of the Isaac
Deutscher Memorial Prize), The Pristine Culture of Capitalism (1991),
and Democracy Against Capitalism (1995), co-author with Neal Wood of
A Trumpet of Sedition (1997), and co-editor of In Defense of
History (1997), Capitalism and the Information
Age (1998), and Rising from the Ashes?: Labor
in the Age of "Global" Capitalism (1999).
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