The Origin of Capitalism; By Ellen Meiksins Wood.

Ellen Meiksins Wood has written a little book with big ideas. The Origin of Capitalism stimulates and engages at a time when specialization and intellectual inertia have generated a flood of inflated texts with undernourished ideas. Where so much radical and left writing turns on nitpicking, marginal issues, and tedious and infertile scholarship, Wood tackles meaty questions with passion and commitment.

The economy of Wood's writing belies its clarity and rigor. Conflating obtuseness with profundity, many contemporary authors write as though insights must be dredged from a muddy, murky pit--a kind of twisted labor theory of intellectual value. But Wood, like Marx, states her views with a notable transparency, the product of a disciplined and diligent mind.

At first glance, The Origin of Capitalism is about the Transition Debate, the sometimes contentious dispute over how capitalism came to be, how it emerged from feudalism. Wood stakes out the various positions, paying particular homage to the great Marxist political economist Maurice Dobb, and the insightful non-Marxist Karl Polanyi. She takes a position close to that of the historian Robert Brenner--the view that capitalism emerges first in the English countryside with the development of the landlord/tenant/wage worker relationships and the attendant markets.

But her study probes beyond the specific, historic moment of capitalism's birth to explore what it means for a new political-social-economic system to emerge. Wood stresses that capitalism is a system and not merely a historical milepost; she argues that capitalism was truly unique and not merely the modification of an earlier socioeconomic formation; and she...