>>> cbcox at ilstu.edu 12/06/00 09:18PM >>>
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.
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CB: You seem to be saying that we must state something that was not capitalism that immediately preceded capitalism, and caused general non-capitalism to turn into capitalism.
It's really not such a mystery, is it ? Before capitalism was feudalism with certain class struggles involving the feudal lords, church officials, bourgeois sectors and peasants. If the change you are looking for is the market becoming a compulsion, isn't it clear that it was an expansion of the activities and dominance of the marketeers, the bourgeoisie, caused by their pursuit of their material interests in competiton with especially the feudal ruling class that caused the market to become a compulsion on all , and even to burst out all over the globe ?
We all have had "world" history. It is merely a matter of fitting our facts into the pattern we now know better.
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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