Reviews for The Promise of history

The average rating for The Promise of history based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-07-23 00:00:00 Claude Mathess Wood explores one of the great paradoxes of European history – the birth of capitalism in England and modernity in mainland Europe – to challenge the idea of the capitalist state as pure and new to argue that it retains large elements of pre-capitalist social relations. This is an analysis that has profound implications for our understanding of contemporary politics and activism. One of Wood's real strengths is her ability to get beyond the narrow disciplinary conventions of contemporary scholarship and weave together, in this case, history, politics and legal studies to argue that much of what we take to be modernity (ideas of the modern nation state grounded in the bourgeoisie, for instance) is a continuation of pre-modern and pre-capitalist social and economic forms. Challenging and unsettling of much of the taken-for-granted of current scholarship and many of the orthodoxies of the left as well.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-08-09 00:00:00 Jeffrey Keeney "The inherent logic of capitalism is not, of course, an impulse to produce but a drive to produce capital, which need not take the form of material commodities; and even when it does take this material form, the impulse to improve the forces of production is determined not by a compulsion to produce efficiently, nor to alleviate toil, nor to create general prosperity, but simply, as Marx so sharply put it, to increase the ratio of unpaid labour to paid."