Feudalism and the Origins of Capitalism

In spite of preoccupation with the war, there began in 1940 a lively discussion among English Marxists about the origins of the capitalist mode of production, its political system and its culture. Seminal to this discussion was Christopher Hill's short book The English Revolution: 1640*, published for the tercentenary of the Long Parliament, the beginning of the end of England's ancien regime. Naturally the discussion did not get properly under way until 1946 but from that year began a series of debates many of them focussing on the problem of the nature of late feudal society in England and the timing of its transformation. Some took the view that there was already a bourgeois state in the 16th century and that consequently the civil war of mid-17th century was the defeat of a counter-revolution. The strongest current of opinion was that which identified the so-called Puritan Revolution as a bourgeois revolution of the same kind as the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century. In addition, however, to these debates which were concerned mainly with the interpretation of events in the 17th century, problems about the nature of feudal society were also raised and no work was more influential than Maurice Dobb's Studies in the Development of Capitalism. This book, in turn, provoked the critical review of Dobb's ideas about feudalism by Paul Sweezy in the American Marxist journal Science & Society, giving rise to the famous Dobb-Sweezy controversy, which has been re-edited, with additions, including this introduction, and is being published this year by New Left Books.

Ancien regime · Bourgeoisie · Capitalism · Economic history · English Revolution · Feudalism · Interpretation (philosophy) · Marxist philosophy · Parliament · Political science · Politics · State (computer science) · Classics · History · Law · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism

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