Dobb on the transition from feudalism to capitalism

Abstract

After some three decades Maurice Dobb's Studies in the Development of Capitalism (1946) continues to be a starting point for discussion of European economic development. It does so because it remains a powerful statement of the proposition that the problem of economic development must be approached historically, that any theory of economic development must be constructed in historically specific terms. Dobb thus follows Marx in rejecting any attempt to grasp economic transformations in terms of what might be called transhistorical economic laws based for example on the postulates of orthodox economic theory. It is the burden of his position that economic development, the growth of labour productivity and of per capita output, must be comprehended in terms of the limits and possibilities opened up by historically developed systems of social-productive relations specific to a given epoch, that the key therefore to the rise of new patterns of economic evolution is to be found in the emergence of new social relations of production. The Marxist idea of the mode of production thus provides the point of departure for Dobb's analysis. It is perhaps his central contribution that through developing the mode of production conception in relation to the long-term trends of the European feudal economy, he is able to begin to lay bare its inherent developmental tendencies or 'laws of motion'. Dobb argues that the formative impact of feudal surplus extraction relations characterised by extra-economic compulsion by feudal lords, in relationship to the potentialities and limits of its peasant forces of production, determined a distinctive pattern of economic evolution. In this way, he provides a basis in both method and historical analysis for surpassing the unilineal view of development, hitherto widespread among Marxists, in which the transition to capitalism is conceived as the gestation of an embryonic self-developing mode of production, alongside and external to a feudal agricultural mode—an approach characteristically bound up with techno-functionalist premises. In this classic conception, a trading bourgeoisie develops within the interstices of an essentially immobile feudal agrarian society on the foundations of technically dynamic productive forces. The needs of new, self-propelling productive forces impel the construction of new, more suitable (capitalist) class relations, and bring about the destruction of outmoded (feudal) ones. In contrast, Dobb is able in the first place to provide a powerful critique of the notion that economic development took place through the progressive and dissolving effects of trade and merchant capital upon feudal social productive relations, originating from outside it, by showing the way in which class relations themselves structured a distinctively feudal and non-capitalist development of