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

422 Pages·2000·1.05 MB·English

by  Michael Perelman

the invention of capitalism
Michael Perelman
the invention of capitalism
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THE INVENTION OF CAPITALISM
Classical Political Economy and the
Secret History of Primitive Accumulation
michael perelman
Duke University Press • Durham & London 2000
∫ 2000 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper $
Typeset in Trump Mediaeval by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear
on the last printed page of this book.
Contents
Introduction: Dark Designs 1
1 The Enduring Importance of Primitive Accumulation 13
2 The Theory of Primitive Accumulation 25
3 Primitive Accumulation and the Game Laws 38
4 The Social Division of Labor and Household Production 59
5 Elaborating the Model of Primitive Accumulation 92
6 The Dawn of Political Economy 124
7 Sir James Steuart’s Secret History of Primitive Accumulation 139
8 Adam Smith’s Charming Obfuscation of Class 171
9 The Revisionist History of Professor Adam Smith 196
10 Adam Smith and the Ideological Role of the Colonies 229
11 Benjamin Franklin and the Smithian Ideology of Slavery and Wage
Labor 254
12 The Classics as Cossacks: Classical Political Economy versus the
Working Class 280
13 The Counterattack 321
14 Notes on Development 352
Conclusion 369
References 371
Index 407
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the invention of capitalism
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Introduction: Dark Designs
In order to develop the laws of bourgeois economy . . . it is not necessary to write
the real history of the relations of production. But the correct observation and
deduction of these laws . . . always leads to primary equations . . . which point
toward a past lying behind the system. These indications . . . then offer the key to
understanding the past—a work in its own right.—Karl Marx, Grundrisse
Preface
In the development of a theory, the invisible of a visible field is not generally
anything whatever outside and foreign to the visible defined by that field. The
invisible is defined by the visible as its invisible, its forbidden vision: the invisible
is not therefore simply what is outside the visible (to return to the spatial meta-
phor), the outer darkness of exclusion—but the inner darkness of exclusion, inside
the visible itself.—Louis Althusser, ‘‘From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy’’
The Laissez-faire Message of Classical Political Economy
Classical political economy, the core works of economic literature from
the time of William Petty through that of David Ricardo, presents an
imposing facade. The towering figures of early political economy forged a
new way of thinking systematically about economic affairs in the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries with little more than the writ-
ings of business people and moral philosophers to guide them. Every one,
from Karl Marx, who created the term ‘‘classical political economy,’’ to
modern-day conservatives, recognizes the enormous intellectual achieve-
ment of these early economists.
For more than two centuries, successive generations of economists
have been grinding out texts to demonstrate how these early theorists
discovered that markets provide the most efficient method for organizing
production. An uncompromising advocacy of laissez-faire is, ostensibly,
the intended lesson of classical political economy.
Most contemporary readers of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and the
other classical political economists accept their work at face value, as-
suming these early writers to be uncompromising advocates of laissez-