Blackwell Reference Online

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The economic practices, institutions and relationships that exist within and between societies have always played a central role in shaping the political arrangements of human societies, including which people run political and social life and how they do it. In the study of such political economy, various derivations of Marxist thought have cast an enormous shadow. For Marx, man was an inescapably economic being and his history was a definable process of socio-economic development. The ultimate destination of Marx's theory of historical materialism has been greatly disputed, but the idea that societies go through a process of development has become a basic assumption in western or westernized political economy. What seems indisputable is that the practice of capitalism has driven the process of ‘modernization’ since the eighteenth century, whereby new forms of technology and organization have transformed the way that many humans live. Many societies that were dominated by an agricultural mode of production were transformed by the advent of urbanization and industrialization. Technology managed the natural environment, while the economics of production, trade and exchange became much more complex and specialized. In many places, modernization also transformed the politics of human societies. Traditional forms of social organization and governance, based on kinship or religion, gradually ... log in or subscribe to read full text