Capitalists in Spite of Themselves: Elite Conflict and Economic Transitions in Early Modern Europe . By Richard Lachmann. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. 314. $49.95.
本书探讨了欧洲从封建制度结束到启蒙运动兴起期间的经济转型，解释封建制如何被中央集权国家和地主精英取代，以及为何英国和法国超越西班牙和荷兰成为商业和帝国强国。
If you like a contentious book, ranging across wide swathes of history, you will enjoy this one. Although Richard Lachmann kicks a few fairly dead horses along the way, he takes on enough lively speculations and conventional wisdom to make the trip worthwhile. His subject is the changes that occurred in Europe from the end of feudalism down to the dawn of the Enlightenment. Lachmann undertakes to explain how feudalism gave way to centralized states with landlord elites; why the autonomous urban centers of the Renaissance were eclipsed by national territorial states as the foci of wealth and power; why England and France surpassed Spain and the Netherlands as commercial and imperial powers; and why none of these changes can be attributed simply to a Weberian process of greater “rationalization” of social and political life.