The Ellen Meiksins Wood reader

Content: Preface
 Acknowledgements
 Introduction: The 'Method' of Ellen Meiksins Wood
 Chapter One Capitalism
 The 'economic' and the 'political'in capitalism
 Class-power and state-power
 Feudalism and private property
 Capitalism as the privatisation of political power
 The localisation of class-struggle
 England vs. the dominant model of capitalism
 The bourgeois paradigm
 Begging the question
 Opportunity or imperative?
 The commercialisation-model
 Marx on the transition
 Towns and trade
 Agrarian capitalism
 Market-dependent producers
 A different kind of market-dependence? Competitive marketsChapter Two Precapitalist Societies
 Class and state in China and Rome
 Rome and the empire of private property
 The city-states of Florence and Venice
 Master and slave vs. landlord and peasant
 Free producers and slaves
 Slavery and the 'decline' of the Roman Empire
 The 'logic' of slavery vs. the logic of capitalism
 The 'slave-mode of production'
 Agricultural slavery and the peasant-citizen
 The nexus of freedom and slavery in democratic Athens
 Chapter Three The State in Historical Perspective
 Class and state in ancient society. The emergence of the polis in ancient AthensThe 'essence' of the polis
 Class in the democratic polis
 Village and state, town and country, in democratic Athens
 The rise and fall of Rome
 The culture of property: Roman law
 From imperial Rome to 'feudalism'
 Absolutism and the modern state
 The idea of the state
 The peculiarities of the English state
 Contrasting states: France vs. England
 Chapter Four Social and Political Thought
 The social history of political theory
 Political theory in history: an overview
 Plato
 The Greek concept of freedom
 Jean-Jacques Rousseau
 John Locke. Revolution and tradition, c. 1640-1790Chapter Five Democracy, Citizenship, Liberalism, and Civil Society
 Labour and democracy, ancient andmodern
 From ancient to modern conceptions of citizenship
 Capitalism and democratic citizenship
 The American redefinition of democracy
 A democracy devoid of social content
 From democracy to liberalism
 Capitalism and 'liberal democracy'
 Liberal democracy and capitalist hegemony
 The idea of 'civil society'
 The civil-society argument
 'Civil society' and the devaluation of democracy. Chapter Six The Enlightenment, Postmodernism, and the Post-'New Left'Modernity vs. capitalism: France vs. England
 From modernity to postmodernity
 Modernity and the non-history of capitalism
 Themes of the postmodern Left
 Enlightenment vs. capitalism: Condorcet vs. Locke
 Enlightenment-universalism
 The periodisation of the Western Left
 Left intellectuals and contemporary capitalism
 Chapter Seven Globalisation and Imperialism
 Globalisation and the nation-state
 Nation-states, classes, and universal capitalism
 The indispensable state
 Precapitalist imperialism.