Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction: The ‘Method’ of Ellen Meiksins Wood

Chapter One Capitalism

The ‘economic’ and the ‘political’in capitalism

Class-power and state-power

Feudalism and private property

Capitalism as the privatisation of political power

The localisation of class-struggle

England vs. the dominant model of capitalism

The bourgeois paradigm

Begging the question

Opportunity or imperative?

The commercialisation-model

Marx on the transition

Towns and trade

Agrarian capitalism

Market-dependent producers

A different kind of market-dependence?

Competitive markets

Chapter Two Precapitalist Societies

Class and state in China and Rome

Rome and the empire of private property

The city-states of Florence and Venice

Master and slave vs. landlord and peasant

Free producers and slaves

Slavery and the ‘decline’ of the Roman Empire

The ‘logic’ of slavery vs. the logic of capitalism

The ‘slave-mode of production’

Agricultural slavery and the peasant-citizen

The nexus of freedom and slavery in democratic Athens

Chapter Three The State in Historical Perspective

Class and state in ancient society

The emergence of the polis in ancient Athens

The ‘essence’ of the polis

Class in the democratic polis

Village and state, town and country, in democratic Athens

The rise and fall of Rome

The culture of property: Roman law

From imperial Rome to ‘feudalism’

Absolutism and the modern state

The idea of the state

The peculiarities of the English state

Contrasting states: France vs. England

Chapter Four Social and Political Thought

The social history of political theory

Political theory in history: an overview

Plato

The Greek concept of freedom

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

John Locke

Revolution and tradition, c. 1640–1790

Chapter Five Democracy, Citizenship, Liberalism, and Civil Society

Labour and democracy, ancient andmodern

From ancient to modern conceptions of citizenship

Capitalism and democratic citizenship

The American redefinition of democracy

A democracy devoid of social content

From democracy to liberalism

Capitalism and ‘liberal democracy’

Liberal democracy and capitalist hegemony

The idea of ‘civil society’

The civil-society argument

‘Civil society’ and the devaluation of democracy

Chapter Six The Enlightenment, Postmodernism, and the Post-‘New Left’

Modernity vs. capitalism: France vs.England

From modernity to postmodernity

Modernity and the non-history of capitalism

Themes of the postmodern Left

Enlightenment vs. capitalism: Condorcet vs. Locke

Enlightenment-universalism

The periodisation of the Western Left

Left intellectuals and contemporary capitalism

Chapter Seven Globalisation and Imperialism

Globalisation and the nation-state

Nation-states, classes, and universal capitalism

The indispensable state

Precapitalist imperialism

The classic age of imperialism

Globalisation and war

Globalisation and imperial hegemony

The contradictions of capitalist imperialism

Chapter Eight Socialism

The end of the welfare-state ‘compact’

There are no social democrats now

Market-dependence vs. market-enablement

Left strategies of market-enablement

The political implications of competition

The working class and the struggle for socialism

Class-conflict and the socialist project

Socialism and democracy

The state in classless societies

Liberalism vs. democracy

‘Universal human goods’

The self-emancipation of the working class

The socialist movement

Democracy as an economic mechanism

Bibliography of Works by Ellen Meiksins Wood,1970–2012

References

Index