The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation

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Duke University Press, May 3, 2000 - Business & Economics - 412 pages
The originators of classical political economy—Adam Smith, David Ricardo, James Steuart, and others—created a discourse that explained the logic, the origin, and, in many respects, the essential rightness of capitalism. But, in the great texts of that discourse, these writers downplayed a crucial requirement for capitalism’s creation: For it to succeed, peasants would have to abandon their self-sufficient lifestyle and go to work for wages in a factory. Why would they willingly do this?
Clearly, they did not go willingly. As Michael Perelman shows, they were forced into the factories with the active support of the same economists who were making theoretical claims for capitalism as a self-correcting mechanism that thrived without needing government intervention. Directly contradicting the laissez-faire principles they claimed to espouse, these men advocated government policies that deprived the peasantry of the means for self-provision in order to coerce these small farmers into wage labor. To show how Adam Smith and the other classical economists appear to have deliberately obscured the nature of the control of labor and how policies attacking the economic independence of the rural peasantry were essentially conceived to foster primitive accumulation, Perelman examines diaries, letters, and the more practical writings of the classical economists. He argues that these private and practical writings reveal the real intentions and goals of classical political economy—to separate a rural peasantry from their access to land.
This rereading of the history of classical political economy sheds important light on the rise of capitalism to its present state of world dominance. Historians of political economy and Marxist thought will find that this book broadens their understanding of how capitalism took hold in the industrial age.



 

Selected pages

Contents

The Enduring Importance of Primitive Accumulation
13
The Theory of Primitive Accumulation
25
Primitive Accumulation and the Game Laws
38
The Social Division of Labor and Household Production
59
Elaborating the Model of Primitive Accumulation
92
The Dawn of Political Economy
124
Sir James Steuarts Secret History of Primitive Accumulation
139
Adam Smiths Charming Obfuscation of Class
171
Adam Smith and the Ideological Role of the Colonies
229
Benjamin Franklin and the Smithian Ideology of Slavery and Wage Labor
254
The Classics as Cossacks Classical Political Economy versus the Working Class
280
The Counterattack
321
Notes on Development
352
Conclusion
369
References
371
Index
407

The Revisionist History of Professor Adam Smith
196

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About the author (2000)

Michael Perelman is Professor of Economics at California State University, Chico. His books include The Natural Instability of Markets: Expectations, Increasing Returns, and the Collapse of Markets.

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