Description
Book SynopsisExamines diaries, letters, and the practical writings of the classical economists to show how Adam Smith and the other classical economists appear to have deliberately obscured the nature of the control of labour and how policies attacking the economic independence of the rural peasantry were essentially conceived to foster primitive accumulation.
Trade Review“After reading Michael Perelman's excellent book we see our world in different colors. The origin of market capitalism is the product of strategies pursued to take away from people the conditions for developing alternative ways to live and produce. We also discover that classical political economy has been so instrumental in guiding these strategies. The book leaves us to wonder how the same mechanisms are reproduced today. This critical question pervades the book.”—Massimo De Angelis, University of East London
“This study is to be admired for its comprehensiveness, scope, and the amount of unearthing and excavation Perelman provides. The indictment of political economists who addressed themselves to the matter of primitive accumulation is masterful.”—H. T. Wilson, York University
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Dark Designs
1. The Enduring Importance of Primitive Accumulation
2. The Theory of Primitive Accumulation
3. Primitive Accumulation and the Game Laws
4. The Social Division of Labor and Household Production
5. Elaborating the Model of Primitive Accumulation
6. The Dawn of Political Economy
7. Sir James Steuart’s Secret History of Primitive Accumulation
8. Adam Smith’s Charming Obfuscation of Class
9. The Revisionist History of Professor Adam Smith
10. Adam Smith and the Ideological Role of the Colonies
11. Benjamin Franklin and the Smithian Ideology of Slavery and Wage Labor
12. The Classics as Cossacks: Classical Political Economy versus the Working Class
13. The Counterattack
14. Notes on Development
Conclusion
References
Index
