The originators of classical political economy--Adam Smith, David
Ricardo, James Steuart, and others--created a discourse that
explained the logic, the origin, and, in many respects, the
essential rightness of capitalism. But, in the great texts of that
discourse, these writers downplayed a crucial requirement for
capitalism's creation: For it to succeed, peasants would have to
abandon their self-sufficient lifestyle and go to work for wages in
a factory. Why would they willingly do this?
Clearly, they did not go willingly. As Michael Perelman shows,
they were forced into the factories with the active support of the
same economists who were making theoretical claims for capitalism
as a self-correcting mechanism that thrived without needing
government intervention. Directly contradicting the laissez-faire
principles they claimed to espouse, these men advocated government
policies that deprived the peasantry of the means for
self-provision in order to coerce these small farmers into wage
labor. To show how Adam Smith and the other classical economists
appear to have deliberately obscured the nature of the control of
labor and how policies attacking the economic independence of the
rural peasantry were essentially conceived to foster primitive
accumulation, Perelman examines diaries, letters, and the more
practical writings of the classical economists. He argues that
these private and practical writings reveal the real intentions and
goals of classical political economy--to separate a rural peasantry
from their access to land.
This rereading of the history of classical political economy sheds
important light on the rise of capitalism to its present state of
world dominance. Historians of political economy and Marxist
thought will find that this book broadens their understanding of
how capitalism took hold in the industrial age.
General
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