kelley wrote:
>
> Weber follows Marx in this, except for two components. Both argued that
> capitalism requires a pool of formally free but economically propertyless
> labor; the sale of factors of production on the market; and the
> concentration of factors of prod in the hands of entrepreneurs.
This won't do. We are talking about the *origins* of capitalism -- and if you list these factors as "requirements" in this sense, then you are saying that capitalism has to exist before capitalism could exist. That is the whole argument which I referred to in my original post. I'm not too interested in judgments of Weber right now, but I'm extremely interested in non- circular explanations of the *origin* of capitalism. And by your own account, Weber was obviously clueless in respect to that question. And so was Marx at first. You can certainly find passages in the (early) Marx which are quite Weberian.
The question can also be phrased as "Under what circumstances did 'the market' *cease* being an opportunity and *become* a compulsion? Markets had been around for thousands of years, in many technologically, intellectually, and culturally advanced cultures, but capitalism never appeared until 15th/16th century England.
See not only the Brenner workds Yoshie referred to but three works by Wood: *Pristine Culture of Capitalism*, *Democracy against Capitalism*, and the *Origin of Capitalism*.
Carrol