The Early Modern State and Capitalism

Christopher Hill is pretty much dismissed these days as a fusty old Marxist historian. Still, I wonder whether there'd be many on the liberal Right who'd be inclined to disagree with his view that the Early Modern English state was a block on development precisely because it was posing as “an instrument of economic power, maintaining monopolists and customs farmers, fining enclosures, [and] endangering property by arbitrary taxation”? [Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the 17th Century (London, 1958), p. 28]


Francis Fukuyama, and Niall Ferguson, of course, are happy to take the bull by the horns (and they do so most impressively), by re-casting the old Marxist (and older Whiggish) narrative in neo-liberal terms. Marx's emancipatory classes are replaced by something a bit closer to Hegel's World Spirit of transcendant reason, animated by contingency and transhistorical rational economic man. Still, there's been something of a reversion to the idea of the 'bourgeois as hero' in recent historical writing, though with the rider that, at the end of history, everyone is bourgeois.