Beginning with Engels, Marxist historiography viewed the absolute monarchy in France as mediating between the nobility and the emergent capitalist bourgeoisie. More recent Marxist accounts stress that the absolute monarchy reflected the interests of the nobility. Revisionist Marxist historians have taken this perspective to an extreme arguing that, at the height of the Bourbon monarchy in the seventeenth century, a capitalist bourgeoisie did not exist. This paper argues that, in taking such a view, these historians have ignored the ongoing dialectical (...) opposition between the forces of rent and profit in the early-modern period. As a result, they have severed the connection between the ancien régime and the Revolution of 1789. Despite being thrown on the defensive by the advance of rent and the crystallisation of the absolutist state, a capitalist bourgeoisie that emerged in sixteenth-century France survived and persevered during the seventeenth century. It resumed the initiative in the succeeding period of the Enlightenment. (shrink)

This debate with William Beik and David Parker concerns whether a capitalist bourgeoisie developed in the ancien régime. Parker asserts that, in 1789, this class at best was new and unfledged. Beik claims that it is unhistorical to speak of its existence. Addressing their arguments, I re-iterate that the existence of a capitalist bourgeoisie was of long standing. It emerged from the sixteenth century onwards, buoyed by primitive accumulation and strengthened itself even in the face of the so-called offensive of (...) rent under seventeenth-century absolutism. (shrink)

This paper addresses an article by Felix Klein of 1886, in which he generalized his theory of polynomial equations of degree 5—comprehensively discussed in his Lectures on the Icosahedron two years earlier—to equations of degree 6 and 7. To do so, Klein used results previously established in line geometry. I review Klein’s 1886 article, its diverse mathematical background, and its place within the broader history of mathematics. I argue that the program advanced by this article, although historically overlooked due to (...) its eventual failure, offers a valuable insight into a time of crucial evolution of the subject. (shrink)

This article argues that popular revolution was closely tied to the establishment of capitalism. Contrary to the revisionist George V. Taylor’s view that the Revolution had nothing to do with the advance of capitalism because financial and productive capital were divided from one another, this article contends that the Revolution played a critical role in tying them together. Prior to the Revolution financiers began to make limited investments in wholesale trade, manufacturing and mining. But during the revolutionary crisis the sans-culottes (...) pushed the Jacobins to create a national money and to curb speculation in order to foster production and exchange and reduce unemployment. With speculative activity blocked by popular resistance and state interference, bankers and other capitalists increasingly turned to productive investments and forged a link between financial and productive capital which proved crucial to further capitalist accumulation. (shrink)

Stephen Miller attempts to confute the idea that capitalist accumulation characterised the agriculture of the Île-de-France prior to the Revolution. Instead he tries to assimilate the agriculture of the north into theAnnalesmodel of neo-Malthusian agricultural cycles and Chayanovian subsistence economy which is supposedly characteristic of the Midi. I argue instead that the notion of a northern capitalist agriculture is rooted not only in the extensive modern research of Moriceau but in the political-economic writings of Turgot and Marx which have been (...) largely ignored. Accumulation in the sense of the growth of fixed and variable capital and emerging technological progress characterised northern agriculture. The persistence of small producers which Miller sees as an index of unchanging stasis might better be investigated in terms of the evolution over time of a reservoir of wage labour for larger-scale enterprises as pointed out by Kautsky. (shrink)

Bd.l. Orientierung und Entscheidung.--Bd. 2. Recht, Staat, Macht.--Bd. 3. Schriften zur Staatslehre.

In this panoramic survey Guy Lemarchand undertakes to outline the history of the feudal system which persisted across the European continent from the sixteenth until the second half of the nineteenth century. In the crisis of the seventeenth century, seigneurial reaction backed by the absolutist state enabled this feudal mode to reconsolidate and extend itself eastward. The eighteenth century represented the system’s apogee based on high food prices, increased rents and state support. Feudalism’s dissolution beginning with the French Revolution and (...) continuing until the emancipation of the Russian serfs came about as a result of revolution from below and from above under the increasing influence of capitalism and liberalism. Offering an enormous comparative perspective on this long-lived mode of production, Lemarchand’s work fails to articulate theoretically the relationship between this enduring mode and the concurrent rise of capitalism. (shrink)

This article contains the Spanish translation of the entry “Staat”, of Hermann Heller, with an introduction to his political and juridical thought.

Viewing the development of French trade and manufacturing between 1650 and 1820, Jeff Horn underscores their great success based largely on overseas markets. His evidence supports the view of Friedrich Engels and Perry Anderson that capitalism developed within the pores of the Old Regime. Yet Horn attempts to deny the leading role of the bourgeoisie in this advance. He claims that it was through the Old Regime system of economic privileges rather than the agency of bourgeois capital accumulation that such (...) progress was made. This article rejects Horn’s exclusive preoccupation with the positive economic role of the privileges granted by the state. It reasserts the importance of the agency of the bourgeoisie in furthering economic development. Moreover, it contends that for all the economic gains made by the system of state privileges, such privileges were more than offset by the weight of rents on the peasantry and to the benefit of the nobility and Church imposed by this same regime of privileges. The distorted development that privileges imposed on economic and social life became an important factor behind the outbreak of the Revolution. (shrink)