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The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: A Historical Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States
A historical essay on old regimes and modern states
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, signaled the persistence of pre-capitalist 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.
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, signaled the persistence of pre-capitalist 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.
212 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1991
About the author
Ellen Meiksins Wood
38 books220 followersEllen Meiksins Wood FRSC (April 12, 1942 – January 14, 2016) was an American-Canadian Marxist historian and scholar. From 1967 to 1996, she taught political science at Glendon College, York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
With Robert Brenner, Ellen Meiksins Wood articulated the foundations of Political Marxism, a strand of Marxist theory that places history at the centre of its analysis. It provoked a turn away from structuralisms and teleology towards historical specificity as contested process and lived praxis.
Meiksins Wood's many books and articles, were sometimes written in collaboration with her husband, Neal Wood (1922–2003). Her work has been translated into many languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, German, Romanian, Turkish, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. Of these, The Retreat from Class received the Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize in 1988.
Wood served on the editorial committee of the British journal New Left Review between 1984 and 1993. In 1996, she was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada, a marker of distinguished scholarship. From 1997 to 2000, Wood was an editor, along with Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy, of Monthly Review, the socialist magazine.
With Robert Brenner, Ellen Meiksins Wood articulated the foundations of Political Marxism, a strand of Marxist theory that places history at the centre of its analysis. It provoked a turn away from structuralisms and teleology towards historical specificity as contested process and lived praxis.
Meiksins Wood's many books and articles, were sometimes written in collaboration with her husband, Neal Wood (1922–2003). Her work has been translated into many languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, German, Romanian, Turkish, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. Of these, The Retreat from Class received the Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize in 1988.
Wood served on the editorial committee of the British journal New Left Review between 1984 and 1993. In 1996, she was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada, a marker of distinguished scholarship. From 1997 to 2000, Wood was an editor, along with Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy, of Monthly Review, the socialist magazine.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
February 16, 2016
Wood explores one of the great paradoxes of European history – the birth of capitalism in England and modernity in mainland Europe – to challenge the idea of the capitalist state as pure and new to argue that it retains large elements of pre-capitalist social relations. This is an analysis that has profound implications for our understanding of contemporary politics and activism.
One of Wood's real strengths is her ability to get beyond the narrow disciplinary conventions of contemporary scholarship and weave together, in this case, history, politics and legal studies to argue that much of what we take to be modernity (ideas of the modern nation state grounded in the bourgeoisie, for instance) is a continuation of pre-modern and pre-capitalist social and economic forms. Challenging and unsettling of much of the taken-for-granted of current scholarship and many of the orthodoxies of the left as well.
One of Wood's real strengths is her ability to get beyond the narrow disciplinary conventions of contemporary scholarship and weave together, in this case, history, politics and legal studies to argue that much of what we take to be modernity (ideas of the modern nation state grounded in the bourgeoisie, for instance) is a continuation of pre-modern and pre-capitalist social and economic forms. Challenging and unsettling of much of the taken-for-granted of current scholarship and many of the orthodoxies of the left as well.
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May 27, 2021I should have read this before Origins of Capitalism...
March 8, 2026
Kapitalizmin beşiği olan İngiltere'de, burjuva kültürünün neden kıta Avrupası'ndaki gibi "akılcı" veya devrimci bir aydınlanma üretmediğini, aksine monarşi ve aristokratik geleneklerle uzlaştığını anlatan eşsiz bir Marksist incelemedir. Wood, İngiliz kapitalizminin toprakta (tarımsal kapitalizm) doğduğu için ekonomik ve siyasi zorun (devletin) birbirinden ayrıldığını, bu yüzden kültürün "arkaik" kaldığını kanıtlar. Burjuvazinin devrimci rolünün sanıldığı kadar "saf" olmadığını, sınıf ittifaklarının kültürü nasıl şekillendirdiğini gösteren dâhice bir tarih okumasıdır. Türkiye kapitalizminin çarpık kültürünü anlamak için de harika bir kıyaslama sunar.
August 9, 2020
"The inherent logic of capitalism is not, of course, an impulse to produce but a drive to produce capital, which need not take the form of material commodities; and even when it does take this material form, the impulse to improve the forces of production is determined not by a compulsion to produce efficiently, nor to alleviate toil, nor to create general prosperity, but simply, as Marx so sharply put it, to increase the ratio of unpaid labour to paid."
September 25, 2022
In this book, Wood launches an assault on what she calls "bourgeois paradigm Marxism" -- the popular understanding of capitalism which essentially confuses it with a long list of categories and antinomies that in fact have little or nothing to do with capitalism as such, logically or historically.
Despite the popular imagining of the French Revolution as a capitalist revolution, this was simply not the case. It may have been a bourgeois revolution, though even this is too simple, but bourgeois is not synonymous with capitalist. As Wood repeatedly points out, not only in this book but in all of her other work, capitalism originated as a rural phenomenon in the English countryside, with capitalist tenant farmers, propertyless agricultural wage laborers, and rentier landlords. England never had a "bourgeois revolution" of the sort seen in France that is usually assumed to be the condition of capitalist development, yet England was the first, and according to Wood most thoroughly, capitalist society. Capitalism coexisted smoothly with cultures and institutions typically thought to be "premodern" or associated with the ancient regime, whereas quintessentially "modern states and cultures stemming from the French Enlightenment, for example, developed in a non-capitalist context.
In sum, capitalism, logically speaking, has nothing to do with the bourgeoisie, industry, commerce, markets, urbanism or democracy. Yet for a multitude of historiographical reasons, the public, and many or most scholars, confuse capitalism with these trips of modernity, placing it on one side of a series of antinomies: bourgeoisie vs aristocracy, urban vs rural, industry vs agriculture, reason vs superstition, democracy vs monarchy, etc. In this view, all good things go together, and they comprise modernity's grand march of progress, as set against the backward tug of premodern tendencies. To be sure, Marx himself is partially guilty of this, but there is another Marx that more cautiously disentangles the logic of capitalism from its common associations. The result of all this mystification is to portray capitalism as an unambiguously progressive force, attributing all of its failures to premodern remnants and therefore the incompletenesss of its development, rather than to its inherent contradictions. As Wood puts it:
“Some kinds of Marxist arguments intersect with the bourgeois paradigm, sharing with it a model of capitalism as unambiguously progressive, a model in which the bourgeoisie is by nature capitalist and forward-looking, capital is in its essence productive and industrial, and the ‘bourgeois’ state is ‘rational’ and tendentially liberal, even democratic. Where some might see the inherent contradictions of capitalism, this model sees its imperfect development. The weaknesses of British capitalism are then attributed to its imperfect suppression of pre-capitalist remnants; the strengths of other capitalisms are ascribed to the more perfect completion of their bourgeois revolutions; the working class is castigated for failing to advance the historic mission of capitalist productivity and progress; progressive forces, including and above all socialists, are charged with the task of completing the bourgeois revolution; and so on.”
Despite the popular imagining of the French Revolution as a capitalist revolution, this was simply not the case. It may have been a bourgeois revolution, though even this is too simple, but bourgeois is not synonymous with capitalist. As Wood repeatedly points out, not only in this book but in all of her other work, capitalism originated as a rural phenomenon in the English countryside, with capitalist tenant farmers, propertyless agricultural wage laborers, and rentier landlords. England never had a "bourgeois revolution" of the sort seen in France that is usually assumed to be the condition of capitalist development, yet England was the first, and according to Wood most thoroughly, capitalist society. Capitalism coexisted smoothly with cultures and institutions typically thought to be "premodern" or associated with the ancient regime, whereas quintessentially "modern states and cultures stemming from the French Enlightenment, for example, developed in a non-capitalist context.
In sum, capitalism, logically speaking, has nothing to do with the bourgeoisie, industry, commerce, markets, urbanism or democracy. Yet for a multitude of historiographical reasons, the public, and many or most scholars, confuse capitalism with these trips of modernity, placing it on one side of a series of antinomies: bourgeoisie vs aristocracy, urban vs rural, industry vs agriculture, reason vs superstition, democracy vs monarchy, etc. In this view, all good things go together, and they comprise modernity's grand march of progress, as set against the backward tug of premodern tendencies. To be sure, Marx himself is partially guilty of this, but there is another Marx that more cautiously disentangles the logic of capitalism from its common associations. The result of all this mystification is to portray capitalism as an unambiguously progressive force, attributing all of its failures to premodern remnants and therefore the incompletenesss of its development, rather than to its inherent contradictions. As Wood puts it:
“Some kinds of Marxist arguments intersect with the bourgeois paradigm, sharing with it a model of capitalism as unambiguously progressive, a model in which the bourgeoisie is by nature capitalist and forward-looking, capital is in its essence productive and industrial, and the ‘bourgeois’ state is ‘rational’ and tendentially liberal, even democratic. Where some might see the inherent contradictions of capitalism, this model sees its imperfect development. The weaknesses of British capitalism are then attributed to its imperfect suppression of pre-capitalist remnants; the strengths of other capitalisms are ascribed to the more perfect completion of their bourgeois revolutions; the working class is castigated for failing to advance the historic mission of capitalist productivity and progress; progressive forces, including and above all socialists, are charged with the task of completing the bourgeois revolution; and so on.”
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September 3, 2021Wood, New Left Review'a yazdığı bir makalesinde, kapitalizm ve ulus devletler arasındaki ilişkiyi gözler önüne sererken kapitalizmin doğuşuna odaklanmak gerektiğine dair analitik bir seyir sunuyor bizlere: "To understand the current relations between capitalism and the nation-state, we need to know something about their earlier connections. The emergence of capitalism was closely tied to the rise of the nation-state, and that close link shaped the development and expansion of capitalism thereafter. So I’ll begin by taking readers on a short historical excursion, before considering where we are today."
https://monthlyreview.org/1999/07/01/...
https://monthlyreview.org/1999/07/01/...
September 30, 2022
in questo saggio emw si interroga sul ruolo che lo "stato" ha avuto nella transizione dal feudalesimo al capitalismo concentrandosi sui due casi opposti di francia e gb.
sicuramente molto più da addetti ai lavori rispetto a retreat from class si lascia comunque leggere.
sicuramente molto più da addetti ai lavori rispetto a retreat from class si lascia comunque leggere.
May 17, 2025
Meiksins Wood stands the Nairn-Anderson theses on their head - the results may surprise you!
October 29, 2024
England: the world's most capitalist society. Or, why Nairn-Anderson got it back to front.
September 13, 2022
Çoğunlukla marksizm içi bir tartışma gibi görünse de çok güçlü bir kitap bu. Bu tartışma hali zaman zaman okuyucuyu sıksa da yazarın düşüncelerini başkalarının iddialarıyla karşılaştırarak aktarması belki daha yararlı olmuş. İki bakımdan çok etkileyici buldum kitabı; birincisi İngiltere'de kapitalizmin ortaya çıkışının kıta Avrupası ile karşılaştırmalı olarak ele alınması tartışmayı çok daha akılda kalıcı yapıyor. İkincisi, 1991 gibi geç bir tarihte bile kapitalizmin ortaya çıkış dinamiklerinin ve ülkeler arası farklılıkların çoğunluk tarafından kabul gören bir sonuca bağlanamamış olduğunu görmek, genel olarak sosyal bilimlerde (ve aslında kontrollü deneylerin mümkün olmadığı tüm alanlarda) varılan yargılara (argümanlar ne kadar ikna edici şekilde ifade edilmiş olursa olsun) her zaman temkinli yaklaşmak gerektiğini bir kez daha hatırlatıyor.
Pek çok kitapta olduğu gibi bu kitap da çeviri kurbanı olmuş. Sayın Oya Köymen, virgül kullanımı konusunda biraz enflasyon olmamış mı acaba?
Pek çok kitapta olduğu gibi bu kitap da çeviri kurbanı olmuş. Sayın Oya Köymen, virgül kullanımı konusunda biraz enflasyon olmamış mı acaba?
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September 5, 2017A brilliant book.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews