3 - Capitalism, Absolutism, Jacobinism

Summary

This chapter argues that rather than a unilinear extension of the market project from England to France, the Anglo-French contestation, and the concomitant processes of uneven and combined development during the early modern period sharpened and restructured existing sociohistorical differences, ultimately leading to the formulation of a qualitatively different regime of property and modernization in France. Jacobinism was neither absolutism nor capitalism, but combined and bypassed both based on a new form of sociality and political economy. It produced novel social, economic and geopolitical dynamics that gave modernity a radically multilinear texture.