The fundamental flaws in the British economy are not just the symptoms of arrested development but the contradictions of the capitalist system itself. Britain today, Wood maintains, is the most thoroughly capitalist culture in Europe. Weaving together economic and political history with the history of ideas, Wood ranges across a broad spectrum of current debates, from the "Nairn-Anderson theses" to the contribution of J.C.D. Clark and Alan Macfarlane, and over a wide variety of topics: the development of British capitalism and French absolutism; the state, the nation and their symbolic representations; revolution and tradition; the cultural patterns of English speech, urbanism, ruralism and the landscape garden; ideas of sovereignty, democracy, property and progress. This book will be as interesting and provocative to observers of contemporary capitalism as to historians of early modern Europe or Western political thought.

Ellen Meiksins Wood is Professor of Political Science at York University, Toronto. Among her books are Peasant-Citizen and Slave: The Foundations of Athenian Democracy and The Retreat from Class, winner of the Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize in 1886.