In order to understand the resilience of capitalism as a mode of production, social organization, and an intellectual system, it is necessary to explore its intellectual development and underlying structure. A Historical Political Economy of Capitalism argues that capitalism is based on a dominant intellectuality: a metaphysics. It proposes the construction of a history-based 'critique of political economy', capable of revealing the poverty of capitalism's intellectual logic and of its application in practice. This involves a reconsideration of several classical thinkers, including Smith, Marx, Berkeley, Locke, Hobbes, Hume and Rousseau. It also sketches an emancipative methodology of analysis, aiming to expose any metaphysics, capitalist or none. In doing so, this book proposes a completely new approach in materialist philosophy. The new methodology in political economy that is proposed in this volume is an alternative way to organize a materialist approach. Some basic aspects of what is argued by the author can be found in Marx. This book is well suited for those who study political economy and economic theory and philosophy, as well as those who are interested in Marxism.

In order to understand the resilience of capitalism as a mode of production, social organization, and an intellectual system, it is necessary to explore its intellectual development and underlying structure. A Historical Political Economy of Capitalism argues that capitalism is based on a dominant intellectuality: a metaphysics. It proposes the construction of a history-based 'critique of political economy', capable of revealing the poverty of capitalism's intellectual logic and of its application in practice. This involves a reconsideration of several classical thinkers, including Smith, Marx, Berkeley, Locke, Hobbes, Hume and Rousseau. It also sketches an emancipative methodology of analysis, aiming to expose any metaphysics, capitalist or none. In doing so, this book proposes a completely new approach in materialist philosophy. The new methodology in political economy that is proposed in this volume is an alternative way to organize a materialist approach. Some basic aspects of what is argued by the author can be found in Marx. This book is well suited for those who study political economy and economic theory and philosophy, as well as those who are interested in Marxism.

DIVRethinks the history of classical political economy by assessing the Marxian idea of “primitive accumulation,” the process by which a propertyless working class is created./div

The objective of this book is to construct an individually emancipatory economic and political philosophy. This means a concrete-based, man-centered, non-hypostatizing, anti-dialectical approach to the apprehension of the material, i.e. nature in general. This constitutes an emancipation from culture-based understandings of reality, and in particular from the metaphysically biased type of culture represented by capitalism. The proposed philosophical emancipation means individual liberation from the logically flawed, massifying character of the dominant mode of thought of capitalist times. From these bases, the social sciences can also be reformulated. Micocci argues that capitalism can be conceptualized as a limited and limiting socialized mode of thought, an intellectuality whose dialectical features are effectively identified by using the proxy of political economy, both marxist and mainstream. Political economy in fact, being a most representative instance of dialectical thinking, mirrors the dialectical nature of capitalist economic and political relationships. According to Micocci, non-dialectical occurrences in capitalism are simply excluded from normal social, economic, and intellectual activities, which are performed in a metaphysical, intellectually isolated environment. In capitalism, therefore, the materials, the concrete, i.e. nature itself, is not considered as a whole but only as occasional instances. Micocci describes capitalism, in sum, as an intellectually constructed culture (a metaphysics) which preserves itself, and props itself up, by means of its iterative (market-like) functioning.

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Mexico City's public markets were integral to the country's economic development, bolstering the expansion of capitalism from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. These publicly owned and operated markets supplied households with everyday necessities and generated revenue for local authorities. At the same time, they were embedded in a wider network of economic and social relations that gave market vendors an influence far beyond the running of their stalls. As they fed the capital's population, these vendors fought to protect their own livelihoods, shaping the public sphere and broadening the scope of popular politics. Vendors' Capitalism argues for the centrality of Mexico City's public markets to the political economy of the city from the restoration of the Republic in 1867 to the heyday of the Mexican miracle and the PRI in the 1960s. Each day vendors interacted with customers, suppliers, government officials, and politicians, and the multiple conflicts that arose repeatedly tested the institutional capacity of the state. Through a close reading of the archives and an analysis of vendors' intersecting economic and political lives, Ingrid Bleynat explores the dynamics, as well as the limits, of capitalist development in Mexico.

This volume offers a snapshot of the resurgent historiography of political economy in the wake of the ongoing global financial crisis, and suggests fruitful new agendas for research on the political-economic nexus as it has developed in the Western world since the end of the Middle Ages. New Perspectives on the History of Political Economy brings together a select group of young and established scholars from a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds—history, economics, law, and political science—in an effort to begin a re-conceptualization of the origins and history of political economy through a variety of still largely distinct but complementary historical approaches—legal and intellectual, literary and philosophical, political and economic—and from a variety of related perspectives: debt and state finance, tariffs and tax policy, the encouragement and discouragement of trade, merchant communities and companies, smuggling and illicit trades, mercantile and colonial systems, economic cultures, and the history of economic doctrines more narrowly construed. The first decade of the twenty-first century, bookended by 9/11 and a global financial crisis, witnessed the clamorous and urgent return of both 'the political' and 'the economic' to historiographical debates. It is becoming more important than ever to rethink the historical role of politics (and, indeed, of government) in business, economic production, distribution, and exchange. The artefacts of pre-modern and modern political economy, from the fourteenth through the twentieth centuries, remain monuments of perennial importance for understanding how human beings grappled with and overcame material hardship, organized their political and economic communities, won great wealth and lost it, conquered and were conquered. The present volume, assembling some of the brightest lights in the field, eloquently testifies to the rich and powerful lessons to be had from such a historical understanding of political economy and of power in an economic age.

This text brings together timely writings that reflect on the current trajectories of global capitalism, and consider likely, possible or desirable futures. Essays focus to varying degrees on developing distinctive theoretical frameworks and using them to clariffy both the histiry of the present political economy and how progressive political economic trends might be extended from the present into the future.

In one of the true classics of twentieth-century political economy, R. H. Tawney addresses the question of how religion has affected social and economic practices. He tracks the influence of religious thought on capitalist economy and ideology since the Middle Ages, shedding light on the question of why Christianity continues to exert a unique role in the marketplace. In so doing, the book offers an incisive analysis of the morals and mores of contemporary Western culture. "Religion and the Rise of Capitalism" is more pertinent now than ever, as today the dividing line between the spheres of religion and secular business is shifting, blending ethical considerations with the motivations of the marketplace.

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