Radical Demon

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The Birth of Capitalism

A Twentieth-Century Perspective
Henry Heller

In the light of the deepening crisis of capitalism and continued non-Western capitalist accumulation, Henry Heller re-examines the debates surrounding the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Europe and elsewhere. Focusing on arguments about the origin, nature and sustainability of capitalism, Heller offers a new reading of the historical evidence and a critical interrogation of the transition debate. He advances the idea that capitalism must be understood as a political as well as an economic entity. This book breathes new life into the scholarship, taking issue with the excessively economistic approach of Robert Brenner, which has gained increasing support over the last ten years. Heller concludes that the future of capitalism is more threatened than ever before. The new insights in this book make it essential reading for engaged students and scholars of political economy and history.

Henry Heller is Professor of History at the University of Manitoba, Canada. He is the author of The Cold War and the New Imperialism: A Global History, 1945-2005 (2006); The Bourgeois Revolution in France (2006) and Labour, Science and Technology in France 1500-1620 (1996).

Subject areas:Humanities, History, Social Sciences, Politics

Heller places the development of the state at the centre of the birth of capitalism. For Heller, Brenner is guilty of economic determinism in his disregard of the importance of the state as “the ultimate linchpin of capitalism”. By placing the state back into the centre of the analysis of the emergence of capitalism, Heller suggests we overcome the false contrast between the “European” path to capitalism, which is caricatured as a purely economic development, and the alternative development of capitalism elsewhere driven by state intervention. The state was important in nurturing capitalism in its beginnings and in overseeing its development through mercantilism. As well as helping to reject an overly economistic view of capitalism and a false distinction between economics and politics, Heller’s book emphasises the continued importance of the state in capitalism today.

- Sarah Young, Socialist Review, December 2011
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