Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> That
> makes her the opposite of a capitalist in some ways - an
> old-fashioned rich person who enjoyed hoarding and/or spending, but
> not throwing her capital into the M-C-M' circuitry.
>
Yes she was. She didn't live off principal. I suspect but off of dividends, interest, etc. She was a rentier. Now there was a time in which rentiers (or some rentiers, more in some nations than others) could be considered a non-capitalist class. Something like this distinction informs Ellen Wood's arguments in _The Pristine Culture of Capitalism_ in respect to the French "bourgeoisie" in contrast to the English _capitalists_ in the 17th-18th-early 19th c. (This oversimplifies her argument -- so if someone wants to argue with her, read her book not my top-of-the head paraphrase.) But today rentiers -- e.g. one of the Mellon heirs who just died a few years ago after living his whole life as a retired (imitation) English Country Gentleman -- are merely a sub-division of the capitalist class. I'm not sure whether the sub-dividing of the class is of much political and/or economic importance.
Jane Austen's rural gentry are quite clearly capitalists.
I agree with a point you made earlier about not focusing on individual cases but on groups -- individual cases can illustrate\clarify an analysis which has to be made however without reference to individual cases.
Carrol