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In The Making of Capitalism in France, Xavier Lafrance offers the first thorough analysis of the origins of French capitalism, understood as distinct type of historical society and implying a new mode of class exploitation.
Historians, since the 1960s, argue that the French economy performed as well as did any economy in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries thanks to the opportunities for profit available on the market, especially the large consumer market in Paris. Whatever economic weaknesses existed did not stem from the social structure but from exogenous forces such as wars, the lack of natural resources or slow demographic growth. This book challenges the foregoing consensus by showing that the French economy performed poorly relative to its rivals because of noncapitalist social relations. Specifically, peasants and artisans controlled lands and workshops in autonomous communities and did not have to improve labor productivity to survive. Merchants and manufacturers cornered markets instead of being subject to the market’s competitive imperatives. Thus, distinctive features of capitalism—primitive accumulation (the dispossession of peasants and artisans) and the competitive obligation faced by merchants and manufacturers to reinvest profits in order to keep the profits—did not prevail until the state imposed them in a process lasting for a century after the 1850s. For this reason, it was not until the 1960s that France caught up to (and in some cases surpassed) its economic rivals.
"Historians, since the 1960s, argue that the French economy performed as well as did any economy in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries thanks to the opportunities for profit available on the market, especially the large consumer market in Paris. Whatever economic weaknesses existed did not stem from the social structure but from exogenous forces such as wars, the lack of natural resources, or slow demographic growth. This book challenges the foregoing consensus by showing that the French economy performed poorly relative to its rivals because of non-capitalist social relations. Specifically, peasants and artisans controlled the lands and workshops in autonomous communities and did not have to improve labor productivity to survive. Merchants and manufacturers cornered markets instead of being subject to the market's competitive imperatives. These distinctive features of capitalism, primitive accumulation (the dispossession of peasants and artisans) and the competitive obligation faced by merchants and manufacturers to reinvest profits in order to keep the profits, did not prevail until the state imposed them in a process lasting for a century after the 1850s. For this reason, it was not until the 1960s that France caught up to (and in some cases surpassed) its economic rivals"--
Neoliberalism and deregulation have come to dominate national and international political economy. This major book addresses this convergence and analyzes the implications for the future of capitalist diversity. It considers important questions such as: Is the preference for free markets a well-founded response to intensified global competition? Does this mean that all advanced societies must all converge on an imitation of the United States? What are the implications for the institutional diversity of the advanced economies? Political Economy of Modern Capitalism provides a practical and informed analysis of the public policy choices facing governments and business around the world.
A century after the publication of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the "Spirit" of Capitalism , a major new work examines network-based organization, employee autonomy and post-Fordist horizontal work structures.
