Origins of Capitalism in Western Europe: Economic and Political Aspects

Recent scholars have drawn upon the insights of Marx and Weber in a renewed effort to explain the origins of capitalism in Western Europe. Few Weberians or Marxists have addressed the specific role of Protestantism in fostering rational economic action; instead they speak of modernization or of the rise of the West. Marxists are divided over whether capitalism developed out of conflicts among classes in feudal society or whether an external market sector served to undermine feudalism and to stimulate new forms of production. Analyses of the world system, proto-industry, and the seventeenth century crisis attempt to explain the concentration of capital and of production in a few Western European countries. Studies of agrarian class conflict and of absolutism address the formation of the bourgeoisie. The most valuable recent syntheses have come from scholars who combine class analysis with an examination of the particular interests of those actors who inhabited the complex of institutions that cohered into nation-states.