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Product Description: The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the rise of capitalism and the modern nation-state, the establishment of an increasingly international economy, and the beginnings of modern colonialism. It was a turbulent time, marked by revolutionary developments in culture and religion, social conflict, political upheaval, and civil war...read more

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Ellen Meiksins Wood argues that with the collapse of Communism the theoretical project of Marxism and its critique of capitalism is more timely and important than ever. In this book she sets out to renew the critical program of historical materialism by redefining its basic concepts and its theory of history in original and imaginative ways, using them to identify the specificity of capitalism as a system of social relations and political power. She goes on to explore the concept of democracy in both the ancient and modern world, examining the concept's relation to capitalism.

Capitalism was born in England, yet the dominant Western conceptions of modernity have come from elsewhere, notably from France, the historical model of “bourgeois” society. In this lively and wide-ranging book, Ellen Meiksins Wood argues that what is supposed to have epitomized bourgeois modernity, especially the emergence of a “modern” state and political culture in Continental Europe, signalled the persistence of precapitalist social property relations. Conversely, the absence of a “modern” state and political discourse in England testified to the presence of a well-developed capitalism. The fundamental flaws in the British economy are not just the symptoms of arrested development but the contradictions of the capitalist system itself. Britain today, Wood maintains, is the most thoroughly capitalist culture in Europe.Weaving together economic and political history with the history of ideas, Wood ranges across a broad spectrum of current debates, from the “Nairn–Anderson theses” to the contribution of J.C.D. Clark and Alan Macfarlane, and over a wide variety of topics: the development of British capitalism and French absolutism; the state, the nation and their symbolic representations; revolution and tradition; the cultural patterns of English speech, urbanism, ruralism and the landscape garden; ideas of sovereignty, democracy, property and progress.This book will be as interesting and provocative to observers of contemporary capitalism as to historians of early modern Europe or Western political thought.

Discusses recent developments in socialist theory, examines the influence of Poulantzas, Laclau, and Mouffe, and considers the relation between class, politics, and ideology

Discusses recent developments in socialist theory, examines the influence of Poulantzas, Laclau, and Mouffe, and considers the relation between class, politics, and ideology