{"id":27479,"date":"2017-10-31T06:42:09","date_gmt":"2017-10-31T11:42:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=27479"},"modified":"2017-10-31T06:42:09","modified_gmt":"2017-10-31T11:42:09","slug":"the-return-of-the-peasant-or-the-history-of-the-world-in-10%c2%bd-blog-posts-7-capitalism-the-state-and-historical-progress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=27479","title":{"rendered":"The return of the peasant: or, the history of the world in 10\u00bd blog posts. 7. Capitalism, the state and historical progress"},"content":{"rendered":"<header id=\"branding\" role=\"banner\"><a href=\"http:\/\/smallfarmfuture.org.uk\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/smallfarmfuture.org.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/cropped-Vallis-veg-from-the-air5.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1000\" height=\"287\" \/><\/a><\/header>\n<div id=\"main\">\n<div id=\"primary\">\n<div id=\"content\" role=\"main\">\n<article id=\"post-1303\" class=\"post-1303 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-history\">\n<header class=\"entry-header\">\n<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a href=\"http:\/\/smallfarmfuture.org.uk\/?p=1303\">The return of the peasant: or, the history of the world in 10\u00bd blog posts. 7. Capitalism, the state and historical progress<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<p>Continuing with my history of the world\u2026<\/p>\n<p>Earlier, I characterised the emergence of capitalism in relation to the transformation of the four medieval figures of the lord, the peasant, the merchant, and the king. But I haven\u2019t yet said anything about the king \u2013 except in relation to the strengthening of royal houses under absolutist state-forming enterprises which prefigured capitalist development. By the time the star of capitalism was rising, kings had largely lost their medieval role as military strongmen. And as we enter the early modern epoch, the idea of royal sovereignty in the form of an embodied individual \u2013 the monarch \u2013 started giving way to something more figurative, the fertile but troublesome idea of the sovereignty of the people. Classics of early modern political philosophy such as Thomas Hobbes\u2019 <em>Leviathan<\/em> enable us to peek under the bonnet and watch the workings as the king was thus turned into the modern state. So, likewise, I\u2019ll interpret the question of the role of the \u2018king\u2019 in capitalism more figuratively in terms of the role of the state.<\/p>\n<p>The basic point is that despite our contemporary post-socialist tendency to counterpose \u2018the market\u2019 of the capitalist economy with \u2018the state\u2019, capitalist development has always been a state project, albeit in partnership with private actors. Without the state, there\u2019d certainly be no capitalism, and probably not even all that much of a \u2018market\u2019 in the sense of places where people come together to buy and sell goods. The commercial ventures of early European capitalism both within and beyond the subcontinent\u2019s borders were joint public-private efforts. Their success made countries like Britain and the Netherlands the richest tax-states the world had yet seen.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The return of the peasant: or, the history of the world in 10\u00bd blog posts. 7. Capitalism, the state and historical progress Continuing with my history of the world\u2026 Earlier, I characterised the emergence of capitalism in relation to the transformation of the four medieval figures of the lord, the peasant, the merchant, and the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[111,16802,9739,9738,1309],"class_list":["post-27479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-capitalism","tag-historical-progress","tag-peasantry","tag-small-farm-future","tag-state"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27479"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27479\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27480,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27479\/revisions\/27480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}