My focus on this however is that there is buried in the text somewhere a short paragraph contending that the expansion of the feudal system (in the AD period) led to an increase in demand which fueled the growth of towns. I note that this is a "demand-centric" *suggestion*--it can hardly be called a fully developed thesis--of the growth of early capitalism which differs from the v.1 Capital approach. There, we read that guilds held up (as opposed to promoted) the growth of capitalism in the towns and that it was a shift in the productive structure of the countryside which was the "impetus" to the development of capitalism.
But there is a hitch. The exogenous component of Marx's version of the transition is the market demand for wool emanating from overseas. But Marx focuses on the "forces of production" and I don't find much of his work very "Keynesian." However, there were major developments in economic thinking between the 1860s and the 1890s. The Marshallian and marginalist stuff I need not enumerate. But there was a strong undertow of underconsumptionist thinking that was the late 19th c's "anticipaiton" of Keynes (cf Hobson). However, Hobson is merely the most prominent exponent of a theory that was widely reported in the financial press and even advanced by English trade unionists in testimony to parliamentary committees.
So, I find Weber's attention to conditions of aggregate demand to be very surprising, but understandable. He does make repeated reference to it in arguing that slave labor depressed wages and therefore restricted or rendered impossible the grwoth of petty bourgeois urban capitalism (depending on the circumtances).
As for your focus on "what it means to be human," tribes, agrarian communism, etc., I can, after having gone through this text very carefully for the past three weeks, see why you advance materials related to it; but it is not my central concern with the book. Regardless of what primitive communism may or may not have looked like, there are some remarkable civilizational portraits in the book, including the contrast between Babylonian "capitalism" (carefully qualified) and Egyptian "command economy" (my term: warehouses, liturgical services dictating production, limited or no monetary exchange, etc.).
To get back to my other concerns, I note that Weber's distinction between the economic role of the polis in antiquity (in coastal civilizations) versus the town in the later feudal period does fall into the much worked over controversy concerning towns versus country as the "transitional mechanism." Adam Smith is big on the town role; Marx opposes it; Weber comes back to it; Perry Anderson seems to prefer it; Arrighi I think goes way to far in endorsing it (Long 20th Century). But in the end I simply have opinions about the various secondary texts. I don't have the ability to "prove" anything.
In any case your recommendations are always interesting and your command of this kind of material evidently vast. -gn
-- Gregory P. Nowell Associate Professor Department of Political Science, Milne 100 State University of New York 135 Western Ave. Albany, New York 12222
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