The originators of classical political economy—Adam Smith, David
Ricardo, James Steuart, and others—created a discourse that explained
the logic, the origin, and, in many respects, the essential rightness of
capitalism. But, in the great texts of that discourse, these writers
downplayed a crucial requirement for capitalism’s creation: For it to
succeed, peasants would have to abandon their self-sufficient lifestyle
and go to work for wages in a factory. Why would they willingly do this?
Clearly, they did not go willingly. As Michael Perelman shows, they
were forced into the factories with the active support of the same
economists who were making theoretical claims for capitalism as a
self-correcting mechanism that thrived without needing government
intervention. Directly contradicting the laissez-faire principles they
claimed to espouse, these men advocated government policies that
deprived the peasantry of the means for self-provision in order to
coerce these small farmers into wage labor. To show how Adam Smith and
the other classical economists appear to have deliberately obscured the
nature of the control of labor and how policies attacking the economic
independence of the rural peasantry were essentially conceived to foster
primitive accumulation, Perelman examines diaries, letters, and the
more practical writings of the classical economists. He argues that
these private and practical writings reveal the real intentions and
goals of classical political economy—to separate a rural peasantry from
their access to land.
This rereading of the history of classical political economy sheds
important light on the rise of capitalism to its present state of world
dominance. Historians of political economy and Marxist thought will find
that this book broadens their understanding of how capitalism took hold
in the industrial age.
