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INTRODUCTION 43

Church) could check economic progress and Parliament was in the hands of the
class that was economically dominant.
There is plenty to criticize in the detail here. A few points of intermediate
generality relevant to Moore’s method must suffice. His discussion of the early
role of monarchy and the weakness of English absolutism is much inferior to
Perry Anderson’s recent version, typically in the neglect of international
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determinations. His interpretation of the Puritan Revolution—a revolution for
capitalism and parliamentary rule—is heavily based on Tawney’s researches, yet
still convinces. It is arguable that he overstates the significance of the Revolution
(as a violent passage) to strengthen his overall thesis. He certainly is incurious
about religious issues, and this matches his tendency to neglect the cultural and
ideological forms of political struggles. Later, concerned to show that peace was
built on violence in the shape of enclosure, he post-dates the persistence of social
groups that can be usefully described as peasantry. The people who undoubtedly
were proletarianized by enclosure were less ‘peasants’, more independent small
agrarian producers (peasants without a lord; little yeomen?) or semi-proletarians,
living mainly on wages but with some marginal access to land. The difficulty of
finding a language for these and similarly placed industrial groups is testimony
to the continued crudity of our concepts (between ‘peasant’ and ‘working class’)
and to the actual complexity of formations (between feudalism and industrial
capitalism).
A more serious criticism is Moore’s loose and uncertain use of the key
concept —capitalism. Despite his close attention to agrarian formations
throughout the book, the distinction between a merely commercial and actually
capitalist agriculture remains unclear. In the English chapter at least Moore’s
implicit definitions of capitalism appear Weberian or Tawneyesque rather than
Marxist. It is perhaps a case in which the quite studied avoidance of a Marxist
language actually leads to a loss of clarity and explanatory force. Thus capitalism
appears in Moore’s account less a distinctive mode of production than a rather
random scatter of elements of organization or attitude. He writes about the
‘capitalist principle’, a ‘commercial and even a capitalist outlook’, an attitude to
land as ‘modern capitalist private property’, a belief in ‘self-interest and
economic freedom as the natural basis of human society’, the adoption of
revolutionary agrarian techniques and so on. He misses the historical centre of
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the system. Though he illustrates the social logic of capitalism in revolutionizing
relations on the land from the sixteenth century onwards, he does not fully
express the fact that capitalist requires proletarian and that capitalism creates
the political problem of the proletarian presence and the means of class control.
Although there were groups of proletarian and semiproletarian workers long
before the nineteenth century (and also sets of characteristic class relations) the
one-sided definition of capitalism is most seriously defective when applied to the
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nineteenth century. We shall return to this in discussing ‘freedom’.
Moore’s basic point, however, is surely correct: all the problems characteristic
of the transition to industrial capitalism in France and Germany were, in England,