Mitchell Chatfield’s Reviews > The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View > Status Update

As the maxim rings true: those who reference ‘postmodernism’ don’t understand it, and the more attributed to the label the less understanding there is. The book flowed better without any detour into Lyotard’s murk, but the decision to include suggests that from the authors view the PoMo section shouldn’t simply be cut out.

Feels like the book has recently lost its tone. There is a proliferation of unwieldy comma-filled sentences. It’s also recently been seemingly repeating itself: yes, the Dutch, British and French each engaged with the markets in different ways. That was evident 40 or more pages ago?

So far: a little torturous (but necessary) in detailing of the models of development and their respective debunking. My main complaint, other than a generally one directional development (ie sometimes leaving the reader to do a lot of inference work about how a counter argument fails) is stylistic; it’s not sharp enough in style to be ‘hard’ nor polemic enough to be early-Marx/Baudrillard tier entertaining.