Revue Internationale de Philosophie - What Is Capitalism - Explaining Origins and Dynamics

What is Capitalism?
Explaining Origins and Dynamics

Richard Lachmann
Dans Revue internationale de philosophie 2018/3 (n° 285), pages 223 à 241
Éditions De Boeck Supérieur
ISSN 0048-8143
ISBN 9782930560366
DOI 10.3917/rip.285.0223
© De Boeck Supérieur | Téléchargé le 06/01/2024 sur www.cairn.info (IP: 92.89.167.97)
Article disponible en ligne à l’adresse

https://www.cairn.info/revue-internationale-de-philosophie-2018-3-page-223.htm
Découvrir le sommaire de ce numéro, suivre la revue par email, s’abonner...

Flashez ce QR Code pour accéder à la page de ce numéro sur Cairn.info.
Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour De Boeck Supérieur.

La reproduction ou représentation de cet article, notamment par photocopie, n'est autorisée que dans les limites des conditions générales d'utilisation du site ou, le
cas échéant, des conditions générales de la licence souscrite par votre établissement. Toute autre reproduction ou représentation, en tout ou partie, sous quelque
forme et de quelque manière que ce soit, est interdite sauf accord préalable et écrit de l'éditeur, en dehors des cas prévus par la législation en vigueur en France. Il est
précisé que son stockage dans une base de données est également interdit.
What is Capitalism?
Explaining Origins and Dynamics
RICHARD LACHMANN
Where should we look to find capitalism’s origins and dynamics? I, like many
American historical sociologists of my generation, came to the study of history
out of an interest in understanding and critiquing contemporary capitalism. At
that time (the 1970s, when I was a graduate student), much if not most critical
work still was done within a Marxist framework. Reading Marx and Marxists,
I saw that they framed their theories in historical terms, above all through an
examination of the origins and eventual global expansion of capitalism. My
own intellectual journey therefore began with hope that somewhere in those
tomes I would find answers to my questions about the doleful operation, and
hopefully the future demise, of American capitalism.
Instead of answers I was left with more questions, and increasing doubts that

Marxism offered a full explanation of capitalist origins. For Marx, capitalism
is private property and wage labor. Private property was the result of primi-
tive accumulation: the conversion of common lands and other sorts of collec-
tive property into domains with individual owners and the seizure of wealth
abroad through colonization and the slave trade. The exploitation of wage labor
maintains and expands the store of capital through the appropriation of surplus
value. Marx’s story simplified both history and the contemporary operation of
capitalism as it presented a clear moral lesson.
My concern in this article is to show how Marx and many of his successors
were limited in explaining the origins of capitalism and to use that understanding
to shed light on the complexities of present-day capitalism. My critique of past
work extends to Weber and Weberians as well. I do not find that analyzing capi-
talism as a manifestation of rational action is of much help in understanding its
origins or making sense of its current dynamics. Later Marxists and Weberians
have given Marx’s simple but clear story of primitive accumulation empirical
depth and theoretical complexity. At the core of their historical analyses is
the attempt to answer a single question: what disrupted a seemingly stable
feudalism?
224 RICHARD LACHMANN
From Feudalism to Capitalism:

Problems With Marxist and Weberian Explanations
Weber ([1922] 1978, p. 1086) described feudalism as “a chronic condition” of

fruitless conflicts among holders of fiefs- kings and nobles (to which I would
add clergy). Weber famously thought that ‘city air’ made men free and gave
merchants room to engage in capitalist practices. In his more detailed historical
accounts, Weber acknowledges that urban autonomy, and the resulting room
to engage in market exchange and non-feudal production, was the result of
a political process that often stymied capitalism and allowed the revival of
patrimonial practices.
In any event, the Protestant Reformation, a development that in Weber’s view
was sui generis, created a high degree of psychological anxiety among believers
that they sought to relieve through behavior that Weber labeled rational action.
Weber’s theory, like Marx’s, has the merit of elegance and parsimony. Again
like Marx, his work is at odds with what we now know about the history.
Fernand Braudel sums up the consensus among actual historians: “For Max
Weber, capitalism in the modern sense of the word was no more and no less
than a creation of Protestantism or, to be more accurate, of Puritanism. All
historians have opposed this tenuous theory, although they have not managed

to be rid of it once and for all. Yet it is clearly false. The northern countries
took over the place that earlier had so long and so brilliantly been occupied by
the old capitalist centers of the Mediterranean. They invented nothing, either
in technology or in business management” (1977, pp. 65-66).
Weberians and Marxists have built upon or compensated for Weber and
Marx’s shortcomings in different ways, creating traditions of theory building
and research that have yielded particular insights but also led to dead ends.
Weber’s Protestant Ethic thesis gave rise to modernization theory, an effort to
broaden Weber’s argument about a transformation in a single time and place
into “the search for equivalents of the Protestant ethic in non-Western societies”
(Eisenstadt 1968, p. 17). Modernization theorists divide societies into traditional
(where there is little social change because people are unable to imagine how
they could better their material condition and therefore do not attempt to rethink
or challenge the practices and beliefs they inherited from their ancestors did)
and modern. Modern societies are marked by a general “interest in material
improvement” (Levy 1966, p. 746). Once, thanks to the Protestant Ethic, Euro-
peans demonstrated that such improvement could be achieved through rational
action, people “will always seek to implement that interest if the opportunity
WHAT IS CAPITALISM? EXPLAINING ORIGINS AND DYNAMICS 225
seems afforded” (Ibid.). The task for modernization theorists, then, became
figuring out what obstacles had to be overcome to achieve the economic growth
and social transformation needed to become a modern society (Levy 1972).
There is very little contingency in modernization theory. Events are noticed
mainly when they contribute to overcoming obstacles and fostering moderni-
zation. This theory does not seek to explain variation, since the end result, a
desire for continual material improvement and the capacity to achieve that
desire, is assumed to be or eventually become the same everywhere. Lack of
modernization, or slow growth, are explained as failures to reform traditional
societies, failures that can be overcome anytime the people (or leaders, or
outside aid givers) decide to follow the steps taken by successful modernizers.
Modernization theorists have almost nothing to say about conflicting interests
or exploitation, largely because they believe everyone benefits from modernity.
Several recent works address Weber’s concerns with the role of religion in
historical change with careful historical research and rigorous analysis. Mary
Fulbrook (1983) offers an explanation for the diversity of Protestant ideologies
that Weber ignored. She finds English Puritans and German Pietists adapted their
purely theological doctrines to address economics and politics only when, and
to the extent that, rulers challenged their institutional freedoms. Philip Gorski
(2003) focuses Weber’s theory in a different way, finding that Calvinism was

most affective in unleashing a desire for discipline in the faithful themselves,
and more vitally by the faithful as government officials and employers over their
subjects and employees. It is not that Calvinism created capitalism or states, in
Gorski’s model; rather Calvinism made states more effective and ambitious.
Gorski acknowledges that other Protestant denominations and Catholicism, also
fostered somewhat different and often lesser disciplinary impulses, and he is
careful not to assert that the linkages between Protestantism and the disciplinary
state also affected other realms of human action as Weber claimed. Similarly,
Eiko Ikegami (1995) traces how Japanese religion and samurai notions of
honor were transformed as the samurai were incorporated into the developing
Japanese state (and later into capitalist enterprises as well). Ikegami is not
claiming that Japan had a functional equivalent of Protestantism; instead she is
pinpointing how Japanese religion shaped specific forms of Japanese enterprise
and administration.
Fulbrook, Gorski and Ikegami are careful first to specify what behaviors and
institutions were affected by the new religious doctrines and then to delineate
what affect those behaviors and institutions had on states or capitalism. They
show how change can be confined to certain aspects of human action and don’t
assume that ideological or institutional change unleashes an all encompassing

rationality or modernity. Gorski, Fulbrook and Ikegami, in being so careful, shy
away from offering a general theory of the origins of capitalism. Fortunately,
that remained the goal of Marxist histories.
Marx’s vagueness about the timing of the beginning of capitalism and his
lack of attention to how early capitalism differed from its mature form (which
is what Marx was most interested in examining) left little guidance for the
Marxists who, beginning in the 1940s, engaged in a debate on “the transition
from feudalism to capitalism.” These Marxists, regardless of their differences,
agreed that their task was to explain how capitalism developed out of an existing
social system. This might seem like a minor accomplishment: after all, all social
systems and all social events are formed in whatever society existed before that
moment of transition. However, many (perhaps most) social scientists are so
eager to describe and analyze the event or social system they want to explain
that they lose sight of the historical context in which it occurred. This certainly
is a problem, as we saw above, with Weber and most Weberians who, convinced
that feudalism or traditional society was stagnant, ignore pre-capitalist dynamics
and instead construct theories of how Protestantism or modernization abruptly
created an entirely new social world.
Marxists took a very different approach from Weberians. Instead of identi-

fying a single path from multiple, though vaguely described, traditional societies
to capitalism or modernization, Marxists have drilled down into the historical
evidence to try to pinpoint the time and place where capitalism began. In
essence, Weberians (except for exemplars of careful history like Fulbrook,
Gorski and Ikegami) became less historical than Weber, while Marxists became
more historical than Marx.
Marxists, in their debates on the transition from feudalism to capitalism disa-
greed on what capitalism was, and therefore on what signs of its origins they
needed to identify. One position, first formulated by Paul Sweezy ([1950] 1976),
defined capitalism as production for the market. These Marxists were, in a sense
like Weber. They did not see how feudal class relations could generate capi-
talism. Instead, they saw cities, which they believed existed in a sector outside
of feudal society, as the source of markets and of a bourgeoisie.
The difficulty with this perspective is that there were extensive markets in
feudal Europe, as well as in other pre-capitalist societies (including ancient
Rome). However, the areas with the most extensive markets in medieval and
Renaissance Europe, such as urbanized Italy, did not become the loci of subse-
quent economic development, despite their advantages of greater capital accu-
mulation and their control over existing trade networks. The attempt to find the
engine of capitalist transition outside of feudalism was as much of a dead end
for Marxists as it was for Weber and modernization theorists.
Far more fruitful was the approach taken by Maurice Dobb (1947) whom
Sweezy’s argument was written to challenge. Dobb, following Marx more
closely, defined capitalism as a relationship of exploitation. Dobb and his intel-
lectual allies looked for evidence of when and where peasants were dispossessed
from the land and turned into wage laborers as landlords gained full control
over land as private property. The advantage of this approach is that it focused
analysis on an existing social system, and asked what was the dynamic within
feudalism that transformed it and did so in a way to ultimately yield capitalism.
The key historical moment for this school of Marxists was the Black Death
of 1348, which is seen by most historians as the great divide in the history of
feudal agrarian economies. The drastic decline in population made peasant
labor scarce and ended the shortage of arable land. Peasants tried to renegotiate
the terms of their tenancies or escape to where landlords offered better deals,
while landlords sought to compel tenants to remain on their estates. Landlords
succeeded in reenserfing most of their tenants in Eastern Europe, while most
English and French tenants won greater degrees of autonomy from their manor
lords.

Is this the moment when capitalism began, the Marxist counterpoint to
Weber’s Reformation? Not quite. Dobb contends that English peasants used
their new freedoms, and landlords adapted to their lesser control over tenants,
by creating a “petty mode of production” characterized by the commercial
leasing of land and limited proletarianization. Dobb argues that full-fledged
capitalism awaited the destruction of guild and aristocratic power in the 1640
English Revolution.
Dobb’s analysis of the transition from feudalism to capitalism suffers from
two major flaws. First, he is unable to explain why there was a two-to-three-
century lag from the abolition of servile labor after the Black Death to the
development of private property in land and the proletarianization of a plurality
of peasants in the century following the Henrician Reformation (Lachmann
1987, p. 17). Second, Dobb is unable to explain why similar petty modes of
production, and similar late feudal political systems, produced a bourgeois
revolution in England a century and a half earlier than in France. Dobb fails,
on this second count, because he never identifies a dynamic internal to the petty
(or feudal) mode of production that generated an English bourgeoisie capable
of defeating the aristocracy in 1640 while stunting the growth of a similar class
in France. While Dobb never specifies the actual sequence of contingent events
that led from the Black Death to English capitalism, he did focus research on
the three centuries from the 1348 Black Death to the 1640 English Revolution,
stimulating further debate, and paving the way for further comparative historical
research on class conflict and economic and political change in Europe.
The next major advances came from Robert Brenner (1976; 1982) and Perry
Anderson (1974). Brenner and Anderson, like Dobb, saw the Black Death
as a crucial turning point, but analyzed its effects differently. Unlike Dobb,
who focused almost exclusively on Britain, Brenner and Anderson compared
Eastern and Western Europe, and Britain and France. Brenner drew attention to
communal village institutions, which he argued determined peasants’ capacity
to resist landlord demands in the aftermath of the Black Death. Peasant strength,
or weakness, in turn affected “ruling-class self-organization” (Brenner 1982,
p. 69), i.e. the form of the state and the degree of merchant autonomy. Thus,
in Eastern Europe where peasant communal organization was weak, landlords
were able to force peasants into serfdom, but at the cost of economic stagna-
tion and backwardness.
Anderson’s picture of Eastern Europe is similar to Brenner’s, but his causal
sequence differs in one crucial respect. Anderson begins with the fact that
Eastern European landlords were disorganized and isolated before the Black

Death, which made them vulnerable to foreign armies, and to the armies of
powerful nobles within their own countries. As a result, Eastern nobles were
incorporated within powerful absolutist states. Those states had the capacity
to suppress autonomous towns and reenserf peasants and so better safeguarded
the aristocracy’s collective class interest than the more fragmented and decen-
tralized states in Western Europe. Brenner and Anderson both look to changes
in agrarian production to explain the organizational power of states, peasants,
and merchants. For Anderson, ruling class organization shaped peasant class
capacity, while for Brenner the causality runs the other way.
Anderson’s emphasis on the internal dynamic of the ruling class in Lineages
of the Absolutist State allows him to show, in a more convincing way than either
Dobb or Brenner, how feudalism was transformed into capitalism in Western
Europe in the centuries after the Black Death. Remember Dobb merely said
the petty mode of production became capitalism after the destruction of the
aristocracy, but offered no explanation for how the aristocracy was destroyed,
or where the bourgeoisie that destroyed the aristocracy came from. Brenner
is best at explaining why Eastern Europe’s economy remained backward, and
also why France developed more slowly than England. Brenner contends that in
France the aristocratic fraction with the greatest capacity to pursue its interests,
the clique located within the state, appropriated revenues in ways that retarded
the development of the forces of production. The high rate of extraction forced
French peasants to have large families, subdivide their holdings, and engage
in labor-intensive farming. The surplus extracted by the state-based aristocrats
was spent on political investment, perpetuating feudal relations of production.
Anderson argues that absolutist states, even as they perpetuated feudalism
in the East, transformed the class dynamic in Western Europe by fostering
autonomous towns, encouraging manufacture (initially for their armed forces)
protecting foreign trade, and creating state offices and state debt. In Anderson’s
view, townspeople, manufacturers, traders, state bureaucrats and state debt
holders became the nucleus of a bourgeoisie. Anderson advances his analysis
through comparisons between five Western and four Eastern European coun-
tries, as well as with the Islamic world and Japan. This gives him more leverage
to identify significant variables and identify different causal paths than Brenner
achieves by comparing East and West, and then France and England, or Dobb
who only looks at England.
Anderson identifies a five-step causal sequence that brought Europe (or
initially Britain) from feudalism to capitalism:
1. Landlord-peasant class conflict after the Black Death forced a reorganiza-

tion of the aristocracy.
2. Politico-legal coercion was displaced upward into absolutist states.
3. The different forms of those states in Eastern and Western Europe were
determined by three factors: the extent to which aristocrats were organized
into estates, the degree of urban autonomy, and the strength of foreign
military threats.
4. The form of each state determined the degree and extent to which a bour-
geois class developed under and subordinate to absolutism.
5. The bourgeoisie overthrew the absolutist states in Western Europe, making
possible the unfettered development of capitalism.
This is a significant advance over all previous Marxist, and indeed non-
Marxist, analyses of feudal dynamics and the origins of capitalism. Yet, prob-
lems remain with Anderson’s analysis. He never actually analyzes the English
Revolution. Although the French state was stronger, and cities and state officials
more powerful there, its revolution came more than a century after Britain’s,
while Anderson’s model would predict that the French state should have fostered
a larger and more assertive bourgeoisie than its weaker English counterpart.
Neither Brenner nor Anderson are able to explain how, in the absence of a
strong state in England, peasants who had been able to withstand aristocratic
demands after the Black Death, succumbed to landlord pressures two centuries
later. Instead, Brenner merely asserts that English landlords became capital-
ists: “Lacking the ability to reimpose some system of extra-economic levy on
the peasantry, the lords were obligated to use their remaining feudal powers to
further what in the end turned out to be capitalist development” (1982, p. 84).
What precisely those powers were beyond “their continuing control over the
land” (Ibid) or how landlords used such control, Brenner never says. Similarly,
Anderson never explains how the English Revolution transformed the absolutist
state or fostered capitalism. (Such an analysis was left for a promised but never-
published sequel to Lineages.) Instead, Anderson abruptly concludes his chapter
on England: “Before it could reach the age of maturity, English absolutism was
cut off by a bourgeois revolution” (1974, p. 142).
Anderson’s causal analysis is weakest where, not surprisingly, his methodo-
logical vagueness is greatest – in the specification of agents. Lineages highlights
broad categories of actors – aristocrats, peasants, bourgeois – all defined in
Marxian terms. Anderson’s theoretically derived comparisons work well enough
for Eastern Europe, where aristocratic agency was organized almost entirely
through estates, and where almost all bourgeois were holders of state-granted

urban privileges. Anderson’s categories are sufficiently precise to analyze
landlord-peasant conflict in Western Europe through the first three steps of
his causal argument.
Anderson’s inattention to the specification of agents becomes most problem-
atic at the climax of his argument, in steps 4 and 5, when he seeks to explain how
a bourgeoisie with interests opposed to the aristocracy developed within abso-
lutism and why that bourgeoisie became revolutionary in its opposition to the
ruling aristocratic class. Anderson never offers a methodology for identifying
the new bourgeois. The sites of bourgeois class formation he identifies – state
offices, autonomous towns, manufacture, and foreign trade – also were inhabited
by aristocrats. How can we impute different class identities to occupants of the
same sites? What factors allow us to know when actors realign their interests
away from those of the absolutist states that once privileged them?
Anderson never answers those questions explicitly. When Anderson writes
of feudal power being redeployed within states, he opens up the possibility
that power within feudalism can be lodged in, and exercised through, various
institutional mechanisms. Clergies, provincial blocs of nobles, estates, corps
of officeholders, chartered merchants, and monarchs and their retainers all
thrived through the exploitation of feudal peasantries. They all were part of a
feudal ruling class. Yet, as Anderson shows in his sequential narratives of cases,
the forms of domination and exploitation can change. Because each type of
feudal privilege is institutionally grounded, and not always through manors, it
becomes possible to visualize the inhabitants of each type of absolutist institu-
tion as an elite.
This is the point at which I developed my own analysis of the origins of
capitalism. Capitalists In Spite of Themselves (Lachmann 2000) offers my
answer to the Marxist and Weberian question of how capitalism arose from
within feudalism. In so doing, I present a different view of how feudalism and
capitalism operate than do the contributors to either tradition, one that identi-
fies elites as the most important actors, and sees conflicts among elites as the
primary mover of feudal social structure and the first source of dynamic change
within both historic and contemporary capitalism.
What is an Elite?
An elite is a group of rulers who inhabit a distinct organizational apparatus
with the capacity to appropriate resources from nonelites. According to this
definition, elites are similar to ruling classes in that both live by exploiting

producing classes. However, elites differ from ruling classes in two signifi-
cant ways: First, although in Marx’s theoretical framework the fundamental
interest of the ruling class is to reproduce its exploitative relation vis-à-vis the
producing class, in my elite model this interest is complemented by an equally
vital interest in guarding its existing power from, and extending its power at
the expense of, rival elites. Second, each elite’s capacity to pursue its interests
derives from the structure of relations among various coexisting elites as much
as from interclass relations of production.
Elite conflict is the primary threat to elite capacities; yet, the interests each
elite seeks to defend are grounded in their relations with the producing classes.
Elite capacities change primarily when the overall structure of elite relations
changes.1 The outright defeat and elimination of a rival elite is rare, and when
it happens it produces a decisive change in overall social structure. More
commonly, elite conflict ends in stalemate or produces incremental changes
in elite powers and relations that only gradually transform the overall social
structure of a society. Oftentimes, elites resolved their conflicts, and fended off
1 For further discussion of this model see Lachmann (2000, chap. 1).
challenges from nonelites, by combining themselves and their organizational

capacities into a single institution. That was the main process that animated
state formation. States were not for the most part created when kings used force
to eliminate enemies on the battlefield or sent bureaucrats or soldiers from a
capital to tax and control the hinterland. Force played a much greater role in the
formation of empires than of states, yet elite combination and joint rule over
complex imperial institutions was as much a part of the dynamic of empires as
conquest and elimination. When multiple elites entered into a single institu-
tion, they often retained specific powers and exercised control over elements
of that institution. Thus, it is a mistake to see states or empires as unified and
operating under the direction of single ruler or elite, or setting policy according
to a single logic.
Elites assert and exercise through their institutions a combination of economic,
political, military and ideological powers as they seek to guard their interests
against both rival elites and the nonelites from whom they extract resources.
While the mix of those powers varies among elite institutions, almost never
does an elite survive by relying exclusively or even primarily on a single form
of power. It is an error, especially in the pre-capitalist world, to contrast political
and economic, institutions.2 Even in the modern era elites inhabit institutions
that simultaneously are state-like and imbricated in production in civil society.

However, elites combined and exercised those powers in quite different ways
in pre-state polities, ancient empires, modern empires, and nation-states. Those
differences produce the different dynamics of each of those social formations.
Similarly, we can understand differences among societies of each of those
types (for example between the ancient Greek or Roman empires, or between
the Dutch and British hegemon, or today between the South Korean and Indian
states [Chibber 2003]) by comparing the elite structures and conflicts of those
societies. Elites in each of those societies were able to mobilize particular
combinations of powers in their institutions. Their conflicts with each other
and with nonelites were fought on terrains that were in part and simultaneously
economic, political, ideological and military.
In sum, elites are defined by the organizations they inhabit, organizations that
mobilize a combination of powers. Ultimately, the capacities of those organi-
zations are determined by their position in the overall structure of a polity in
which multiple elites jostle to appropriate resources from nonelites.
2 Indeed that is an error Marx never made. Mann (1986-2013) builds his historical analysis upon
the ways in which the four forms of power that he identified are combined by various sorts of
elite and popular actors and the institutions they inhabit.
Elites, Elite Conflict and the Origins of Capitalism
Elites through their abilities to guard their interests against rival elites created
the feudal stasis, Weber’s chronic condition. Let’s focus on England since it was
the place that first underwent the transition for feudalism to capitalism. In the
medieval era, kings, great nobles, manor lords, and the Catholic Church each
operated a judicial system that protected each elite’s right to collect revenues
(and for some labor dues) from peasants. These overlapping jurisdictions had
the effect of dividing control over land and labor, preventing any actor from
asserting ownership over land. Absolutism mainly added a layer, or strength-
ened the royal system of courts and administrators, further encumbering rural
agrarian production.
Multiple elites and their organizational capacities also affected peasant
communities and their degree of solidarity. Brenner’s notion of unitary peasant
communities defending their interests against manor lords glosses over the
complex ways in which peasants were drawn into alliances with some elites
against the demands of others. In England, tenants and tenancies were of two
types: freehold and villein (later copyhold). The former enjoyed personal
freedom, permanent rights to their farms, and fixed rents. These privileges were
guaranteed against the depredations of local landlords by a system of common

law judges under control of the crown (Gray 1963). Monarchs protected free-
holders’ income and autonomy to provide a source of military services and
taxes independent of the local landlords. Villeins, by contrast, were excluded
from common law protection- their land rights and tenant obligations were
determined in manorial courts. These courts were presided over by the local
manor lord or his agent and were the forum at which peasants gathered as a
collectivity (Kosminsky 1956, pp. 319-59).
While villeins did not enjoy protection from the crown through common law,
the terms of their tenancies were guarded by clerical courts that intervened
against the demands of lay landlords for higher villein rents under the rubric of
protecting peasants’ abilities to pay tithes to the church (Hill 1963, pp. 84-92;
Houlbrooke 1979, pp. 117-50). Although king and clergy held manor lord-
ships (until the sixteenth century the crown held a tenth, and the Church one-
quarter, of all English manors [Cooper 1967, pp. 419-40]), their interest in tax
and tithe payments and in preserving an institutional presence in each locality
independent of lay landlords led them to maintain court systems that guarded
peasant income and land tenure from expropriation by manor lords (Dyer 1980).
They did this, even at the cost of reducing their incomes and undermining the
opportunity for all manor lords-- royal, lay, and clerical-- to restrict peasant
rights and increase their total income.
The salience of elite versus class capacities and conflicts, and of my elite
conflict model versus the theories of Brenner and Anderson, can best be
judged by their ability to explain changes in the organization of production, the
outcomes of landlord-peasant conflicts, and the emergence of new “bourgeois”
interests in England in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Brenner is
unable to explain why English peasants lost their capacity to resist landlord
demands between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. Similarly, Anderson
cannot explain how in the seventeenth century an English “bourgeoisie” that
was dependent upon royal patronage became a class with independent interests.
The explanation, in a word, is the Reformation. The Reformation mattered,
not in the psychological or ideological ways Weber and Weberians posit but
as an elite conflict that transformed the structure of English elite and class rela-
tions. The English Reformation under Henry VIII eliminated the clergy as a
separate elite, subordinating clerical offices to the crown and allowing Henry
to appropriate monastic lands and income rights. The Church lost its ability to
regulate class relations on manors.
Henry and his advisors viewed the Dissolution of the Monasteries as the founda-
tion for royal financial independence from Parliament. If, indeed, the crown had

secured the full income of the monastic properties seized from the Church, those
revenues, combined with the receipts from long-held royal estates and custom
duties, would have produced a royal income equal to a third of the national surplus,
enough to develop a bureaucracy independent of urban and rural elites. Monastic
resources were thus the potential basis for an English absolutism.
The promise of absolutism could not be realized for two reasons. First, the
elimination of most clerics from Parliament forced Henry and his successors
to lavish patronage on the lay landlords who dominated that legislative body
to win support for the Reformation and for the crown’s wars. The only source
of sufficient resources to buyoff Parliament were the former monastic lands, a
majority of which were sold at highly favorable prices to lay buyers. Second,
with the abolition of most clerical offices the crown lacked an administrative
corps capable of administering the former monastic lands to realize the potential
revenues or even to match what the church had received. This forced the crown
to sell almost all the remaining lands to finance wars. As a result, the crown’s
revenues from church properties declined as they were sold, or as they were
leased on highly favorable terms to politically powerful lay landlords. By the
end of Elizabeth I’s reign the monastic windfall was lost.
Elizabeth did succeed in recasting the balance of power among lay land-
lords. Her campaign, started under Henry VIII, to disarm the magnates, the
largest lay nobles with fortified castles and companies of armed men under their
command, succeeded through a combination of enticements (gifts of money
and land) and the threat and use of royal armed forces against the magnates’
independent armies. Magnate control of county governments was undermined
by Elizabeth’s move to expand the size of Commissions of the Peace, the main
administrative organ in each county. However, while the crown broke magnate
control of county governments it did so at the cost of empowering the majority
of locally based gentry.
The crown’s moves from the Dissolution of the Monasteries to the disarming
and disempowering of magnates had the effect of creating a “horizontal abso-
lutism.” Sixteenth century elite conflict transformed a tripartite elite structure
in which crown, clergy and lay landlords shared authority and revenues at the
national and local levels into a dual elite structure of crown dominance at the
national level while the gentry became the sole elite with direct control over
peasants and access to the agrarian surplus.
The gentry’s hegemony within the counties was challenged by the crown,
by the Church of England, and by resurgent and aspiring magnates time and
again from the Reformation through the Civil War. The gentry’s paramount

interest was in fending off claims to the income from their estates by the crown
and the clergy. The main challenges came from the crown in efforts to guard
peasant incomes and land tenures so as to better tax that majority of subjects,
and from the clergy in an attempt, aided by the Stuart kings, to reassert rights to
the lands, tithes, benefices, and advowsons that once belonged to monasteries
and had been sold to laymen in the aftermath of the Henrician Reformation.
The gentry responded to royal and clerical assertions by obliterating the mano-
rial institutions that provided the juridical bases for the claims of those elites to
agrarian resources. The gentry used five strategies to extinguish peasant land rights
and to convert their income and use rights on manors into private property: They
denied clerical courts jurisdiction on manors where laymen held benefices (tithe
rights), they limited royal judges’ interventions into landlord-tenant disputes,
they allied with free- holders to boycott manor courts, they used the process of
ascertainment to extinguish copyholders’ land rights, and they used enclosure to
convert common lands into private property (see Lachmann 2000, chapter 6 for
a detailed discussion of how gentry carried out these strategies).
Landlords combined those five strategies to obliterate the institutional bases
for determining ancient crown and clerical claims upon manorial resources
as well as to undermine tenant rights. Once enclosure was completed, with

each landowner’s holding marked by fences or hedges, the very ground upon
which feudal elites or peasants could challenge the gentry’s land rights had
been scoured of the farming strips, the commons, and often the very villages
that embodied feudal elite and class relations. The clean lines of private prop-
erty, the landless peasants, the lost villages, the abrogated customs, the county
commissions of the peace, and the suppressed clerical and manorial courts all
combined to ensure that kings, magnates, clerics, and peasants never would be
able to reassert their medieval rights to land or its products.
These gentry’s strategies created capitalism by expelling a majority of peas-
ants from their status as tenant farmers by 1688 (Chambers 1972, pp. 38-39) and
by creating genuine private property in land. Thus, the core aspects of Marx’s
definition of capitalism – capitalists’ ownership of the means of production
(which in seventeenth century England remained above all land) and proletarian
labor – were the end result of a chain of contingent events: the Henrician Refor-
mation, fiscal crises caused by foreign wars, and crown success in disarming
and politically neutering magnates. Capitalism thus was the inadvertent product
of elite conflict.
The gentry did not proletarianize peasants and create private property in
land because they thought that was the path to riches. Virtually everyone in

the seventeenth century believed that the only way to get rich as a landlord,
short of conquering new territory, was to intensify exploitation of peasants.
Since agrarian capitalism did not yet exist there was no reason anyone should
have expected that these new land tenure arrangements constituted a new and
better way to profit from land. Rather, the steps that the English gentry took
were responses to political problems, and threats to their very existence as an
elite, created by previous elite conflicts.
We now can address the problems posed, but not adequately solved, by
Brenner and Anderson. English landlords were unable to “reimpose some
system of extra-economic levy on the peasantry” because that system had
been disrupted by the Reformation and subsequent elite conflicts. The gentry’s
ability to “further what in the end turned out to be capitalist development” was
not derived from “their remaining feudal powers” (Brenner 1982, p. 84). Rather,
gentry control over land and their power over peasants within counties were
created by that sequence of elite conflict. Seventeenth century English gentry
were not feudal holdovers but instead were a new class created by feudal elite
conflict. Anderson is closer to the mark in seeing the bourgeoisie as a creation
of absolutism. However, in England the gentry were not officeholders in an
absolutist bureaucracy. England’s weak thrust at absolutism under Tudor and

Stuart monarchs create bourgeoisie by disrupting feudal elite and class rela-
tions and pushing the gentry to protect themselves from the crown by recasting
agrarian class relations, making them capitalists in spite of themselves.
The English gentry’s absolute ownership of land ensured that a parasitic state
elite did not appropriate the profits of agriculture. Nor were the fruits of the
agricultural revolution eaten up by population growth, as happened in much of
France where secure peasants invested their surplus in extra children who could
then be used to generate cash income for the family through wages.
The gentry, with rare exceptions, did not themselves become industrial capi-
talists. The gentry instead generated and protected an unprecedented surplus
against unproductive state elites above and reproductive peasants below. The
gentry created an agricultural revolution as an inadvertent by-product of strate-
gies to protect land from rival elites and from peasants. Private property in land,
and the related structures of agrarian capitalism and gentry local rule, combined
to protect the growing profits of the dominant sector of the early modern English
economy from the state and other rival elites, from consumers who continued
to pay high food prices, and from the yeomen and agricultural laborers who
made the agricultural revolution that led to the dramatic increase in English
food output. The gentry, by high-jacking the yeomen’s revolution in the course

of protecting their own structural positions from above and below, accumulated
the capital, proletarianized the labor force, and formed the state best suited for
protecting the domestic economy while conquering foreign markets. It was in
this way that feudal elite and class conflicts led to an English state and agrarian
mode of production that provided the preconditions for Britain’s first making
of industrial capitalism.
Capitalism Past, Present and Future
What does my explanation of capitalism’s first origins in England tell us about

the operation and prospects for capitalism as it spread beyond its first country
to encompass the globe? My key finding is that the particular structure of
capitalism in England was determined by elites’ dual need to guard their inter-
ests both from rival elites and from producing classes. The ways in which the
English gentry, the original capitalist class, achieved security for themselves
and protected their economic and political interests was determined by the
nature of English feudalism as it was transformed by a chain of elite conflicts,
beginning with the Reformation.
It is beyond the scope of this article to specify the different paths the other
original European capitalist states took or to compare early modern Europe
with capitalism elsewhere in the world in the nineteenth and subsequent centu-
ries.3 In any case, my focus on the contingency of elite conflict challenges the
dominant view, held by Marxist as well as Weberian scholars, that capitalism
or ‘development’ or ‘modernization’ proceeds through stages along the path
that England pioneered.
I, of course, am not the first to counter the stage theories of development. That
view is challenged most persuasively by world systems theory, as developed
by Immanuel Wallerstein (1974-2011) and Giovanni Arrighi (1994; 2007).
Wallerstein views capitalism as a system of production for sale in a market
designed to maximize profit. His definition is similar to Weber’s of “capitalistic
economic action as one which rests on the expectation of profit by the utilization
of opportunities for exchange” ([1916-17] 1930, p. 17), and explicitly follows
Sweezy rather than Dobb. However, Wallerstein’s great innovation is to show
that the unit of the economy is the world rather than the states or cities that
are seen as self-contained economies by earlier and rival theorists. Capitalist
production and exchange are organized in commodity chains that extend from
the growing or mining of raw materials to the sale of finished goods. Following
dependency theorists, Wallerstein shows that the greatest profit is made at the

top of the chain. Areas that realize this greatest profit are core regions, in Waller-
stein’s terminology. Ranged below the core is a semi-periphery and periphery.
Wallerstein argues that different regions end up in the core, semi-periphery,
and periphery based on when they were incorporated into the world system;
e.g. Russia became semi-peripheral rather than peripheral because it stayed out
of a world system dominated by Britain longer than Eastern European areas
that were drawn into commodity chains earlier. Wallerstein posits and Arrighi
develops more fully the mechanisms by which new areas are pulled into the
world system during the inevitable recessions (what they describe as ‘phase B’
Kondratieff cycles). David Harvey describes this as the ‘spatial fix’ to crises
of world capitalism.4
Peripheral zones rarely develop further to become semi-peripheral or core.
Thus, Wallerstein and Arrighi argue that the most fruitful analyses should focus
on the dynamic of the world system as a whole rather than looking to draw gener-
3 Interested readers can find my comparison of England with France, the Netherlands, Spain and
Florence in Lachmann 2000.
4 Arrighi made use of Harvey’s in his 2007 book. See Jessop 2006 for the most sophisticated
critique of Harvey’s concept.
alizations from the rare cases when peripheral regions for rare and impossible to
duplicate paths a few places navigated through capitalist crises to rise from the
periphery. Their theory explains much about the world: the reasons for the world
system’s expansion, the timing and consequences of periodic crises, and the ways
in which position in the world system shapes each locale’s political system and
the relative mix of various types of exploitation – wage labor, sharecropping,
tenant farming, even slavery – that co-exist within the capitalist world, even today.
World systems research, however, is unable to account for what they correctly
observe are the rare changes in the relative position of portions of the world. For
example, why did South Korea rise from periphery to semi-periphery and now to
core while other, semi-peripheral and peripheral places, such as India, remained
stuck or even declined? Why was it Britain that succeeded the Netherlands as
hegemon, and why was Britain then replaced by the US rather than Germany?
Arrighi is excellent in describing the wars that determined the competition for
hegemony, but not why certain countries got to contend for primacy or why
one or the other contender won. From his global perspective, Arrighi often
ignores the internal conflicts within each core country that set the policies that
determine its (changing) position in the world system. Instead, the countries
themselves are often presented as unified actors as we read about the interests
and actions of “the Netherlands,” “Britain,” and “the United States.”

Here is where my elite conflict theory can make its contribution. Elites’ efforts
to protect their interests shaped the ways in which the lands they controlled and
the non-elites they exploited were drawn into the world capitalist economy.
World systems authors document how ruling groups in peripheral areas profit
from their incorporation into global commodity chains. While much of the
expansion of the world system was accomplished by military means, above
all through colonization, peripheral elites variously gained or were harmed,
economically and politically, by that incorporation. We can understand the
uneven and variable ways in which areas outside the world system were incor-
porated if we analyze local elites in conflict with rival elites, who in a world
system came from afar rather than being nearby monarchs, clerics or nobles,
and the non-elites whom those local elites continued to exploit by finding ways
to operate in global commodity chains.
World systems theory rightly forces elite conflict theory, and indeed all theo-
ries, to acknowledge the global character of capitalism and of power politics.
However, the particular ways in which the cycles of the world system were
manifested in zones around the globe, and the effects of that incorporation upon
class relations and political structures require attention to elite as well as class
conflicts. Elites must be studied as actors in simultaneous and interacting local,

national, and global political and military conflicts.
Arrighi (2007), and Wallerstein in his more recent essays on contemporary
politics, recognize that the nature and even survival of the world system in the
twenty-first century, after the end of American hegemony, cannot be predicted
from past patterns. The world system can no longer expand since it encompasses
the entire world. The space for agency may be found in an unpredictable mass
popular uprising. But if the past patterns hold, elites are most likely to be the
key actors. They are less constrained than non-elites who are dominated by
multiple elites. The dynamics of elite conflict, within political units and in
complex interactions on a global scale, need to be the focus of analysis.
REFERENCES
Anderson, Perry. 1974. Lineages of the Absolutist State. London: New Left
Books.
Arrighi, Giovanni. 1994. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and
the Origins of Our Times. London: Verso.
Arrighi, Giovanni. 2007. Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First
Century. London: Verso.

Braudel, Fernand. 1977. Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capi-
talism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Brenner, Robert. 1976. “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development
in Pre-Industrial Europe,” pp. 30-75 in Past and Present #70.
Brenner, Robert. 1982. “The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism.” Past
and Present 97: 16-113.
Chambers, Jonathan. 1972. Population, Economy, and Society in Pre-Indus-
trial England. London: Oxford University Press.
Chibber, Vivek. 2003. Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industriali-
zation in India. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Cooper, J. P. 1967. “The Social Distribution of Land and Men in England,
1436-1700.” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 20.3:419-40.
Dobb, Maurice. 1947. Studies in the Development of Capitalism. New York:
International Publishers.
Dyer, Christopher. 1980. Lords and Peasants in a Changing Society: The
Estates of the Bishopric of Worchester, 680-1540. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Eisenstadt, S. N. 1968. “The Protestant Ethic Thesis in an Analytical and

Comparative Framework,” pp. 3-45 in Eisenstadt, ed. The Protestant Ethic
and Modernization. New York: Basic Books.
Fulbrook, Mary. 1983. Piety and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Gorski, Philip. 2003. The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise
of the State in Early Modern Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hill, Christopher. 1963. Economic Problems of the Church. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Houlbrooke, Ralph. 1979. Church Courts and the People during the English
Reformation, 1520-1570. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ikegame, Eiko. 1995. The Taming of the Samurai: Honorific Individualism
and the Making of Modern Japan. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Jessop, Bob. 2006. “Spatial fixes, temporal fixes, and spatio-temporal fixes,”
pp. 142-66 in N. Castree and D. Gregory, eds, David Harvey: a Critical Reader.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Kosminsky, E. A. 1956. Studies in the Agrarian History of England in the
Thirteenth Century. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Lachmann, Richard. 1987. From Manor to Market: Structural Change in
England, 1536-1640. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Lachmann, Richard. 2000. Capitalists In Spite of Themselves: Elite Conflict
and Economic Transitions in Early Modern Europe. New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press.
Levy, Jr., Marion J. 1966. Modernization and the structure of societies: a
setting for international affairs. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Levy, Jr., Marion J. 1972. Modernization: latecomers and survivors. New
York: Basic Books.
Mann, Michael. 1986-2013. The Sources of Social Power. Volumes 1-4.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sweezy, Paul. [1950] 1976. “A Critique.” Pp. 33-56 in Rodney Hilton, ed.,
The Transition From Feudalism to Capitalism. London: Verso.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1974-2011. The Modern World System. volumes 1-4.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Weber, Max. [1916-17] 1930. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capi-
talism. Trans. Talcott Parsons. New York: Scribner’s.
Weber, Max. [1922] 1978. Economy and Society. Edited by Guenther Roth
and Claus Wittich. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Revue Internationale de Philosophie - What Is Capitalism - Explaining Origins and Dynamics

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Revue Internationale de Philosophie - What Is Capitalism - Explaining Origins and Dynamics

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

What is Capitalism?

Explaining Origins and Dynamics

© De Boeck Supérieur | Téléchargé le 06/01/2024 sur www.cairn.info (IP: 92.89.167.97)

Article disponible en ligne à l’adresse

Découvrir le sommaire de ce numéro, suivre la revue par email, s’abonner...

Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour De Boeck Supérieur.

© De Boeck Supérieur | Téléchargé le 06/01/2024 sur www.cairn.info (IP: 92.89.167.97)

From Feudalism to Capitalism:

Weber ([1922] 1978, p. 1086) described feudalism as “a chronic condition” of

© De Boeck Supérieur | Téléchargé le 06/01/2024 sur www.cairn.info (IP: 92.89.167.97)

© De Boeck Supérieur | Téléchargé le 06/01/2024 sur www.cairn.info (IP: 92.89.167.97)

assume that ideological or institutional change unleashes an all encompassing

© De Boeck Supérieur | Téléchargé le 06/01/2024 sur www.cairn.info (IP: 92.89.167.97)

© De Boeck Supérieur | Téléchargé le 06/01/2024 sur www.cairn.info (IP: 92.89.167.97)

© De Boeck Supérieur | Téléchargé le 06/01/2024 sur www.cairn.info (IP: 92.89.167.97)

© De Boeck Supérieur | Téléchargé le 06/01/2024 sur www.cairn.info (IP: 92.89.167.97)

© De Boeck Supérieur | Téléchargé le 06/01/2024 sur www.cairn.info (IP: 92.89.167.97)

© De Boeck Supérieur | Téléchargé le 06/01/2024 sur www.cairn.info (IP: 92.89.167.97)

challenges from nonelites, by combining themselves and their organizational

© De Boeck Supérieur | Téléchargé le 06/01/2024 sur www.cairn.info (IP: 92.89.167.97)

Elites, Elite Conflict and the Origins of Capitalism

© De Boeck Supérieur | Téléchargé le 06/01/2024 sur www.cairn.info (IP: 92.89.167.97)

© De Boeck Supérieur | Téléchargé le 06/01/2024 sur www.cairn.info (IP: 92.89.167.97)

© De Boeck Supérieur | Téléchargé le 06/01/2024 sur www.cairn.info (IP: 92.89.167.97)

as well as to undermine tenant rights. Once enclosure was completed, with

© De Boeck Supérieur | Téléchargé le 06/01/2024 sur www.cairn.info (IP: 92.89.167.97)

absolutist bureaucracy. England’s weak thrust at absolutism under Tudor and

© De Boeck Supérieur | Téléchargé le 06/01/2024 sur www.cairn.info (IP: 92.89.167.97)

Capitalism Past, Present and Future

What does my explanation of capitalism’s first origins in England tell us about

© De Boeck Supérieur | Téléchargé le 06/01/2024 sur www.cairn.info (IP: 92.89.167.97)

© De Boeck Supérieur | Téléchargé le 06/01/2024 sur www.cairn.info (IP: 92.89.167.97)

conflicts. Elites must be studied as actors in simultaneous and interacting local,

© De Boeck Supérieur | Téléchargé le 06/01/2024 sur www.cairn.info (IP: 92.89.167.97)

Eisenstadt, S. N. 1968. “The Protestant Ethic Thesis in an Analytical and

© De Boeck Supérieur | Téléchargé le 06/01/2024 sur www.cairn.info (IP: 92.89.167.97)

You might also like