Yves here. Please welcome Michael Perelman, a economics professor who is more an economistmanque than the conventional sort. Perelman now focuses particularly on economic history, which consist in large measure of describing not just how older economic theories have been distorted or misrepresented, but how the conventional accounts of economic development too often contain significant omissions and misrepresentations. For instance, his book The Invention of Capitalism describes how proto-capitalists managed to seize former community resources (the best known being pastureland, but hunting and other rights also came to be restricted). Part of the legitimation of this effort was to present free peasants, who could live comfortably without working very hard, as being made morally deficient by having too much leisure time. They’d clearly become better people if they were made by their betters to apply themselves.Michael Perelman takes a historical and geopolitical-geostrategic view of economics that differs greatly significantly from the usual analysis of 20th century economic history.
The post that follows is excerpted from a yet-to-be-published book by Perelman, The Matrix: An Exploration of the Surprising Interactions Between War, the Economy, and Economic Theory.
Naked Capitalism
Michael Perelman: The Rise of Free-Trade Imperialism and Military Keynesianism
Yves Smith
1 comment:
Thanks for posting this, Tom. Perelman's book on capitalism is on my to-read list.
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