Nation, State and the Industrial Revolution: The Visible Hand (Routledge Explorations in Economic Hi
Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars. Want to Read saving… Error rating book. Pocketbiblioteket, 20 by Lars Magnusson 2. A Brief History of Political Economy: Nation, State and the Industrial Revolution: Mercantilist Economics by Lars Magnusson Editor 0. Crit Concepts V 2 by Lars Magnusson 0. Mercantilism by Lars Magnusson 0. Free Trade V 2 by Lars Magnusson 0. Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world.
This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting. Proponents of capitalism argue that it creates more prosperity than any other economic system and that its benefits are mainly to the ordinary person.
The term capitalism in its modern sense is often attributed to Karl Marx. However, Marx himself rarely used the term "capitalism" while it was used twice in the more political interpretations of his work, primarily authored by his collaborator Friedrich Engels. In the 20th century, defenders of the capitalist system often replaced the term capitalism with phrases such as free enterprise and private enterprise and replaced capitalist with rentier and investor in reaction to the negative connotations associated with capitalism. The majority of criticisms against the profit motive centre on the idea that the profit motive encourages selfishness and greed, rather than serve the public good or necessarily creating an increase in net wealth.
Critics of the profit motive contend that companies disregard morals or public safety in the pursuit of profits. Free market economists counter that the profit motive, coupled with competition, actually reduces the final price of an item for consumption, rather than raising it. They argue that businesses profit by selling a good at a lower price and at a greater volume than the competition. Economist Thomas Sowell uses supermarkets as an example to illustrate this point: If that sounds pretty skimpy, remember that it is collecting that penny on every dollar at several cash registers simultaneously and, in many cases, around the clock".
America economist Milton Friedman has argued that greed and self-interest are universal human traits. He continues by explaining that only in capitalist countries, where individuals can pursue their own self-interest, people have been able to escape from "grinding poverty". Wage labor has long been compared to slavery.
Similarities between wage labor and slavery were noted as early as Cicero in Ancient Rome, such as in De Officiis. Before the American Civil War , Southern defenders of African American slavery invoked the concept of wage slavery to favorably compare the condition of their slaves to workers in the North. According to Lawrence Glickman , in the Gilded Age "references abounded in the labor press, and it is hard to find a speech by a labour leader without the phrase". According to Noam Chomsky , analysis of the psychological implications of wage slavery goes back to the Enlightenment era.
In his book On the Limits of State Action , liberal thinker Wilhelm von Humboldt explained how "whatever does not spring from a man's free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness" and so when the laborer works under external control, "we may admire what he does, but we despise what he is".
According to Graeber, such arrangements were quite common in New World slavery as well, whether in the United States or Brazil. James argued in The Black Jacobins that most of the techniques of human organisation employed on factory workers during the Industrial Revolution were first developed on slave plantations.
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Adam Smith noted that employers often conspire together to keep wages low: The interest of the dealers But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labor above their actual rate… It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms.
Aristotle made the statement that "the citizens must not live a mechanic or a mercantile life for such a life is ignoble and inimical to virtue , nor yet must those who are to be citizens in the best state be tillers of the soil for leisure is needed both for the development of virtue and for active participation in politics ", [] often paraphrased as "all paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind". To Marxist and anarchist thinkers like Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin , wage slavery was a class condition in place due to the existence of private property and the state.
This class situation rested primarily on:. For Marxists, labor as commodity, which is how they regard wage labor, [] provides a fundamental point of attack against capitalism. Marx considered capitalism to be a historically specific mode of production the way in which the productive property is owned and controlled, combined with the corresponding social relations between individuals based on their connection with the process of production.
For Marx, the capitalist stage of development or " bourgeois society" represented the most advanced form of social organization to date, but he also thought that the working classes would come to power in a worldwide socialist or communist transformation of human society as the end of the series of first aristocratic, then capitalist and finally working class rule was reached.
Following Adam Smith , Marx distinguished the use value of commodities from their exchange value in the market. According to Marx, capital is created with the purchase of commodities for the purpose of creating new commodities with an exchange value higher than the sum of the original purchases. For Marx, the use of labor power had itself become a commodity under capitalism and the exchange value of labor power, as reflected in the wage, is less than the value it produces for the capitalist.
This difference in values, he argues, constitutes surplus value , which the capitalists extract and accumulate. In his book Capital , Marx argues that the capitalist mode of production is distinguished by how the owners of capital extract this surplus from workers—all prior class societies had extracted surplus labor , but capitalism was new in doing so via the sale-value of produced commodities.
In conjunction with his criticism of capitalism was Marx's belief that the working class, due to its relationship to the means of production and numerical superiority under capitalism, would be the driving force behind the socialist revolution. In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism , Vladimir Lenin further developed Marxist theory and argued that capitalism necessarily led to monopoly capitalism and the export of capital—which he also called "imperialism"—to find new markets and resources, representing the last and highest stage of capitalism.
To these thinkers, capitalist class processes are simply those in which surplus labor takes the form of surplus value, usable as capital; other tendencies for utilization of labor nonetheless exist simultaneously in existing societies where capitalist processes predominate. However, other late Marxian thinkers argue that a social formation as a whole may be classed as capitalist if capitalism is the mode by which a surplus is extracted, even if this surplus is not produced by capitalist activity as when an absolute majority of the population is engaged in non-capitalist economic activity.
In Limits to Capital , David Harvey outlines an overdetermined, "spatially restless" capitalism coupled with the spatiality of crisis formation and resolution. His work on contractions of capital accumulation and international movements of capitalist modes of production and money flows has been influential. Sociologists such as Ulrich Beck envisioned the society of risk as a new cultural value which saw risk as a commodity to be exchanged in globalized economies.
This theory suggested that disasters and capitalist economy were inevitably entwined. Disasters allow the introduction of economic programs which otherwise would be rejected as well as decentralizing the class structure in production. At least two assumptions are necessary for the validity of the standard model: If these conditions do not hold, then the Marshallian model cannot be sustained.
Sraffa's critique focused on the inconsistency except in implausible circumstances of partial equilibrium analysis and the rationale for the upward slope of the supply curve in a market for a produced consumption good. Samuelson 's comments and engagements with it over many years, for example:. Aggregate excess demand in a market is the difference between the quantity demanded and the quantity supplied as a function of price.
In the model with an upward-sloping supply curve and downward-sloping demand curve, the aggregate excess demand function only intersects the axis at one point, namely at the point where the supply and demand curves intersect. The Sonnenschein—Mantel—Debreu theorem shows that the standard model cannot be rigorously derived in general from general equilibrium theory.
The model of prices being determined by supply and demand assumes perfect competition. However, "economists have no adequate model of how individuals and firms adjust prices in a competitive model. If all participants are price-takers by definition, then the actor who adjusts prices to eliminate excess demand is not specified". Austrian School economists have argued that capitalism can organize itself into a complex system without an external guidance or central planning mechanism.
Friedrich Hayek considered the phenomenon of self-organisation as underpinning capitalism. Prices serve as a signal as to the urgent and unfilled wants of people and the opportunity to earn profits if successful, or absorb losses if resources are used poorly or left idle, gives entrepreneurs incentive to use their knowledge and resources to satisfy those wants. Thus the activities of millions of people, each seeking his own interest, are coordinated.
The novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand made positive moral defenses of laissez-faire capitalism, most notably in her novel Atlas Shrugged and in her collection of essays Capitalism: She argued that capitalism should be supported on moral grounds, not just on the basis of practical benefits. Although the term "liberalism" retains its original meaning in most of the world, it has unfortunately come to have a very different meaning in late twentieth-century America.
Hence terms such as "market liberalism," "classical liberalism," or "libertarianism" are often used in its place in America. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. This is the latest accepted revision , reviewed on 18 September This article is about the economic system. For the racehorse, see Capitalist horse. For other uses, see Capitalism disambiguation.
Anti-capitalism Capitalist state Consumerism Crisis theory Criticism of capitalism Cronyism Culture of capitalism Exploitation Globalization History History of theory Market economy Periodizations of capitalism Perspectives on capitalism Post-capitalism Speculation Spontaneous order Venture philanthropy. Common property Private Public Voluntary. Collective ownership Commons Private ownership Public ownership Social ownership.
This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. Academic perspectives on capitalism. Reserve army of labour. Competition regulator , Consumer protection , and Competition law. Capitalist mode of production Marxist theory.
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Free market and Laissez-faire. Social market and Nordic model. State monopoly capitalism and Crony capitalism. Anarcho-capitalism Community capitalism Neo-capitalism State monopoly capitalism Supercapitalism Technocapitalism Welfare capitalism. The slave, together with his labour-power, was sold to his owner once for all.
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Capital controversy Crisis theory Economic determinism Immiseration thesis Historical materialism Okishio's theorem Overaccumulation Overdetermination Overproduction Kondratiev wave Technological determinism Technological unemployment Temporal single-system interpretation. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of The Theory of Capitalist Development. Cambridge Journal of Economics. International Journal of Political Economy. Evolutionary economics Classical economics Marxism Marxist sociology Neoclassical economics Perspectives on capitalism Political economy Schools of economic thought Socialist economics Critiques of capitalism.
Pure capitalism is defined as a system wherein all of the means of production physical capital are privately owned and run by the capitalist class for a profit, while most other people are workers who work for a salary or wage and who do not own the capital or the product. Comparative Economics in a Transforming World Economy.
In capitalist economies, land and produced means of production the capital stock are owned by private individuals or groups of private individuals organized as firms. Durlauf and Lawrence E. The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, doi: The Global Economy and its Economic Systems. Capitalism is characterized by private ownership of the factors of production. Decision making is decentralized and rests with the owners of the factors of production. Their decision making is coordinated by the market, which provides the necessary information.
Material incentives are used to motivate participants.
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Retrieved 23 March Real-world capitalist systems are mixed, some having higher shares of public ownership than others. The mix changes when privatization or nationalization occurs. Privatization is when property that had been state-owned is transferred to private owners. Nationalization occurs when privately owned property becomes publicly owned. Archived from the original on 6 April Retrieved 6 April An Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory.
Retrieved 29 January The Review of Metaphysics. Roget's 21st Century Thesaurus, Third Edition. Philip Lief Group Retrieved 6 November Archived from the original on 11 February Interviewed by Paul Jay. When we speak of neoliberalism, we speak of contemporary capitalism. Neoliberalism, it's a new stage of capitalism which began around It began in big countries like United Kingdom and the United States. Then it was implemented in Europe, and later in Japan, and later around the world in general. So this is a new phase of capitalism. Beyond the Profits System: Possibilities for the Post-Capitalist Era.
The Wheels of Commerce: Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. John Murray Publisher, 3rd edition. It forms the general groundwork of the capitalist system , and the starting-point for the production of relative surplus-value.
University of Minnesota Press. Macroeconomics from the beginning: Paris, Recherches et Publications, Retrieved 17 December The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics. A Dictionary of Sociology. Archived from the original on 2 December Globalization and Economy, Vol. Global Markets and Capitalism. Oxford University Press, Retrieved 31 July Bordo , Barry Eichengreen , Douglas A. New York, Oxford University Press, Retrieved 9 February The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism".
Journal of Information Technology. Social Science Research Network. Archived from the original on 28 January Archived from the original on 20 February Retrieved 26 February Weinstein, Michael; Halperin, Morton Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Retrieved 20 September The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. A History of the Indonesian Massacres, I — Chapter Thirty Two". A complete understanding of the nature and value of human economic life.
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Microeconomics and Basic Mathematics. A Refutation of the Schumpeterian Great Gap". In Biddle, Jeff E. A Companion to the History of Economic Thought. Scroll to chapter link. The Road to Serfdom. University Of Chicago Press. Freedom in the World: Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution 2 p. A Voight, Unto Caesar p. Derluguian, Business as Usual p. Retrieved 7 July Utopian and Scientific Chpt. Retrieved 8 January The Tax in Kind.
To the Russian Colony in North America. The Soviet Union Versus Socialism. Retrieved 9 July Wolff 27 June An Economic and Sociological Analysis. Retrieved 31 May The socialist movement takes great pains to circulate frequently new labels for its ideally constructed state. Each worn-out label is replaced by another which raises hopes of an ultimate solution of the insoluble basic problem of Socialism — until it becomes obvious that nothing has been changed but the name.
The most recent slogan is 'State Capitalism. Retrieved 25 March I — Chapter Twenty-Five". That is one of the principal purposes of labor contracts. Marx , p. A vocabulary of culture and society, revised edition. Ragan and Richard G. Twelfth Canadian Edition ed. Toronto, Pearson Education Canada, Global problems and the culture of capitalism. Minneapolis Federal Reserve, Working Paper See also Karl Hardach, "Germany —", in: Government policy toward business.
Living in a Socialist USA. In the year's scariest economics book, Thomas Piketty argues that capitalism, left unchecked, subverts democracy by always and everywhere concentrating wealth at the tippy-top. That creates a class with so much economic power that they begin wielding tremendous political power, too.
And then they use that political power to further increase their wealth, and then they use that wealth to further increase their political power, and so on. You might call this the Doom Loop of Oligarchy: You can see it playing out over the last two weeks in American politics. What the Right and the Left Get Wrong". Council of Foreign Relations. Inequality is indeed increasing almost everywhere in the postindustrial capitalist world. But despite what many on the left think, this is not the result of politics, nor is politics likely to reverse it, for the problem is more deeply rooted and intractable than generally recognized.
Inequality is an inevitable product of capitalist activity, and expanding equality of opportunity only increases it—because some individuals and communities are simply better able than others to exploit the opportunities for development and advancement that capitalism affords. Retrieved 6 April — via Academia.
The thing is, capitalism runs on profits. And profits are optimized when they're monopolized. A good capitalist will try to monopolize the means of production therefore maximizing profits. And when profits are monopolized then you are very likely to get inequality because only a handful of people own the means of production. So capitalism has a natural tendency towards monopolization because capitalists naturally want to maximize profits. Archived from the original on 17 December An Interview with Greg Grandin".
Interviewed by Alex Gourevitch. There's many ways this happens. Deceit, through contraband , is absolutely key to the expansion of slavery in South America. When historians talk about the Atlantic market revolution, they are talking about capitalism. And when they are talking about slavery, they are talking about corruption and crime. Not in a moral sense, in that the slave system was a crime against humanity. But it was also a crime in a technical sense: Basic Books , September The Courage of Hopelessness: A Year of Acting Dangerously.
The Cancer Stage of Capitalism. The last generation of economic policies may have been a complete failure". Neoliberalism—which IMF researchers Jonathan Ostry , Prakash Loungani , and Davide Furceri loosely define as the opening of economies to foreign capital along with a reduction in government debt burdens—has been the dominant trend in economic policymaking over the past 30 years.
In their paper, Ostray, Loungani, and Furceri argue that these goals have both hampered the economic growth that neoliberalism champions and exacerbated the rise of inequality. Journal of Post Keynesian Economics. Retrieved 4 June The role of deregulation and related neoliberal policies as a both a source of massive financialization of the economy and cause of the Great Recession is widely recognized in the literature David M.
Some authors aptly call it the 'crisis of neoliberal capitalism' Kotz Steger and Ravi K. A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press , The New York Times. He noted that the immense and largely unregulated business of spreading financial risk widely, through the use of exotic financial instruments called derivatives , had gotten out of control and had added to the havoc of today's crisis. As far back as , Mr. Greenspan staunchly and successfully opposed tougher regulation on derivatives. But on Thursday, he agreed that the multitrillion-dollar market for credit default swaps , instruments originally created to insure bond investors against the risk of default, needed to be restrained.
Pressed by Waxman , Greenspan conceded a more serious flaw in his own philosophy that unfettered free markets sit at the root of a superior economy. The Social Doctrine of the Church".
The second change I would like to have seen is an expanded discussion of the impact that the Van Sweringens had on the city of Cleveland. Why Capitalism is the Solution and Not the Problem. As the military controls in Western Germany were nearly all relinquished and the Germans were allowed to rebuild their own economy with Marshall Plan aid things rapidly improved. Here competition rages [ The system put pressure on both landlords and tenants to increase the productivity of agriculture to make profit; the weakened coercive power of the aristocracy to extract peasant surpluses encouraged them to try better methods; and the tenants also had incentive to improve their methods in order to flourish in a competitive labor market. Report wrong cover image.
The Sydney Morning Herald. It's certainly true that Jesus was always blessing the poor, challenging the rich, mixing with despised tax-gatherers and speaking of a time when the social order is overturned and 'the last shall be first'. It's also true, as Myers reminds us, that many of Jesus's parables deal with clearly economic concerns: Pope Francis attacked unfettered capitalism as 'a new tyranny' and beseeched global leaders to fight poverty and growing inequality, in a document on Tuesday setting out a platform for his papacy and calling for a renewal of the Catholic Church.
A Year History of a Dangerous Idea". They See Greed as Good". The New York Sun. Friedman responds, 'What is greed? Of course none of us are greedy; it's only the other fellow who's greedy. The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests. In the only cases in which the masses have escaped from the kind of grinding poverty you're talking about So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear: The term is not without its critics, as Roediger b , p.
Their challenge was mercilessly concrete. Douglass, who tried out speeches in work places before giving them in halls, was far from unable to speak to or hear white workers, but he and William Wells Brown did challenge metaphors regarding white slavery sharply. They noted, for example, that their escapes from slavery had left job openings and wondered if any white workers wanted to take the jobs. De Officiis [ On Duties ].
Translated by Miller, Walter Digital ed. Hitherto, these important processes have been treated in isolation to each other. This book argues that in order to get a better understanding of this period and the rise of modern industrial capitalism it is necessary to link the industrial revolution in its various forms to a political and institutional context of state-making and the creation of modern national states.
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Lars Magnusson demonstrates that industrial transformation was very much connected to state and military interests and was bolstered by elite groups who served such interests. The book acknowledges the important role of re-regulation for the emergence of modern industrial and market economies. Instead of being exceptions to the rule countries like Germany - which are acknowledged for the important role of the state in their industrial transformations - are shown to be typical. Even the industrial revolution in the UK is shown in the wider context of the emergence of modern and more effective forms of regulation.
In this book the author disentangles the numerous but highly important ways in which the state intervened in order to create the foundations - and to stimulate growth - of the modern industrial economy.