Abstract
As I confessed in the opening pages my approach may seem old-fashioned and unfashionable to many readers, especially because of my emphasis on the state, my particular brand of contextualizing political theory, and my stress on its utility. Whatever the merits or demerits of the approach, I shall conclude with some reflections on these three characteristics.
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Notes
For example: J. H. Burns, ed., The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought: c. 350–c.1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988);
and J. H. Burns, ed., with the assistance of Mark Goldie, The Cambridge History of Political Thought: 1450–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
James Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), esp. pp. 125–36. ‘Justification of Capitalism’, in what follows is Tully’s expression.
See my John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). In writing it I was influenced by the works of Eric Kerridge, Ann Kussmaul, Lawrence Stone, Joan Thirsk, Charles Webster, and especially by the perceptive essays of Robert Brenner now collected in The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, eds T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
On Locke and agrarian capitalism and improvement, also see Ellen Meiksins Wood, ‘Radicalism, Capitalism and Historical Context: Not only a Reply to Richard Ashcraft on John Locke’, XV (1994), History of Political Thought, pp. 323–72, for the relation of agrarian capitalism to subsequent English social and political thinkers,
particularly Adam Smith: David McNally, Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism: a Reinterpretation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
On the importance of agrarian capitalism: Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: A Historical Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States (London: Verso, 1991), ch. 6; and Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
On English agrarian capitalism in contrast to what occurred elsewhere: George Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution: Marxism and the Revisionist Challenge, Foreword by George Rudé (London: Verso, 1987), chs. 2, 4 and ‘Conclusion’;
Colin Mooers, The Making of Bourgeois Europe: Absolutism, Revolution, and the Rise of Capitalism in England, France and Germany (London: Verso, 1991).
It is no more questionable to refer to the ‘rise of capitalism’ than to the developing practices and ideas embraced by the expression, the ‘rise of Christianity’. See W.H.C. Frend’s brilliant work, The Rise of Christianity (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1984).
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Wood, N. (2002). Afterword: Toward the Future. In: Reflections on Political Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403907691_8
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