Ellen Meiksins Wood

In this groundbreaking work, Ellen Meiksins Wood rewrites the history of political theory. She traces the development of the Western tradition from classical antiquity through to the Middle Ages in the perspective of social history - a significant departure not only from the standard abstract history of ideas but also from other contextual methods. Treating canonical thinkers as passionately engaged human beings, Wood examines their ideas not simply in the context of political languages but as creative responses to the social relations and conflicts of their time and place. She identifies a distinctive relation between property and state in Western history and shows how the canon, while largely the work of members or clients of dominant classes, was shaped by complex interactions among proprietors, labourers and states. Western political theory, Wodd argues, owes much of its vigour, and also many ambiguities, to these complex and often contradictory relations. From the Ancient Greekpolis of Plato, Aristotle, Aeschylus and Sophocles, through the Roman Republic of Cicero and the Empire of St Paul and St Augustine, to the medieval world of Averroes, Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham, Citizens to Lords offers a rich, dynamic exploration of thinkers and ideas that have indelibly stamped our modern world. -- Book jacket.

Q微信171922772办理毕业证成绩单、留学回国人员证明.教育部教育部学历认证【诚招代理】

"In The Origin of Capitalism, Ellen Meiksins Wood challenges most existing accounts of capitalism's origins, arguing that they fail to recognize its distinctive attributes as a social system by making its emergence seem natural and inevitable."--BOOK JACKET. "Only with a proper understanding of capitalism's beginning, Wood holds, can we imagine the possibility of it ending."--BOOK JACKET.

A Trumpet of Sedition surveys canonical texts by thinkers such as Thomas More, Richard Hooker, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke, as well as the ideas of radicals like the Levellers and Gerrard Winstanley and less well known but important figures. The authors explain these texts in clear and lively prose, while situating them in their social and political context in new and original ways and contrasting the English case to others in Europe. By examining political ideas not merely as free-floating abstractions but as living encounters with historical experience - the formation of the English state and the rise of agrarian capitalism - A Trumpet of Sedition illuminates the roots of contemporary Western political thought.

"Ellen Meiksins Wood argues that, with the collapse of Communism, the theoretical project of Marxism and its critique of capitalism are more timely and important than ever. Current intellectual fashions of the left which emphasize 'post-modern' fragmentation, 'difference', contingency and the 'politics of identity' can barely accommodate the idea of capitalism, let alone subject the capitalist system to critique. In this book she sets out to renew the critical programme of historical materialism by redefining its basic concepts and its theory of history in original and imaginative ways, using them to identify the specificity of capitalism as a system of social relations and political power. She goes on to explore the concept of democracy in both the ancient and modern world, examining the concept's relation to capitalism, and raising questions about how democracy might go beyond the limits imposed on it by capitalism"--Unedited summary from book cover.

La burguesía es también y sobre todo la hegemonía de su relato histórico. Según términos bien conocidos, se asegura que derrotó al absolutismo y trajo las libertades económicas y políticas que acabarían en las democracias actuales. La reconocida historiadora marxista Ellen Meiksins Wood vuelve a los orígenes históricos del primer capitalismo, esto es, a la Inglaterra en tránsito de la Edad Media a la llamada Modernidad para revisar este «paradigma burgués». Su objetivo son también las diversas corrientes historiográficas que, al calor de la crisis de los años setenta en Gran Bretaña, buscaban explicaciones a su aparente declive económico. La razón se debatía en torno a la «prístina / originaria cultura del capitalismo» inglesa y la pervivencia de instituciones (monarquía, religión, aristocratismo) demasiado caducas como para servir a un nuevo proyecto de modernización. En este análisis histórico, comparativo, agudo y erudito, Wood pretende revisar la relación entre democracia y capitalismo, tan ambigua que para la autora presenta incompatibilidades estructurales. En su estudio, el único fundamento radical del capitalismo es el paso de formas de propiedad y renta políticamente constituidas (propias del feudalismo y también del absolutismo) a un régimen de propiedad y medios de extorsión fundamentalmente económicos. Su conclusión es radical: el único medio para la emancipación no reside en la confianza en el «progreso» asociado al empuje capitalista sino en la lucha política y social.