Jacques Bidet a Stathis Kouvelakis

462 • Frédérick Guillaume Dufour
of social reproduction. In turn, the interaction of these different antagonisms
lead to often unintentional trajectories of social development. Different socialproperty
relations, he emphasises, evolve neither systematically nor in a linear
way from one to another. They are not a structure from which another
structural outcome can be derived by conceptual necessity. A given socialproperty
régime, capitalist or precapitalist, is characterised by speci� c social
contradictions, but the ultimate outcome of these contradictions is a matter
of historically speci� c balance of class power. Brenner’s argument challenges
three in� uential views. First, he breaks away from the Malthusian explanation
of development through an emphasis on demographic trends (Le Roy
Ladurie). Second, he challenges Wallerstein’s explanation of the emergence
of capitalism through an emphasis on the modern world-system. Finally,
Brenner questions the economistic account of the transition from feudalism to
capitalism which emphasises the removal of the ‘obstacles’ to capitalist development
in precapitalist Europe (Guy Bois).
Reconstructing the comparative developments of social-property régimes
in Europe, Brenner, and later on Ellen M. Wood, George C. Comninel and
Colin Mooers, highlight the regional and national speci� cities of these developments.
They focus on how different rules of reproduction of power develop
in England, France and the Holy Roman Empire after the breakdown of feudalism.
These scholars note that while manorialism continues to structure life
in England, seigneurialism emerges in other regions of the continent. Finally,
they underscore the different strategies of reproduction of social power that
arise in different parts of Europe. Whereas capitalist reproductive strategies
emerge in England, France and Prussia become enmeshed in absolutist strategies
of social power reproduction. 44 This research programme clari� es important
paradoxes in Marxist social theory. The latter, for instance, struggles to
account for the fact that both Spain and Portugal, though sometimes considered
to be the � rst imperialist and capitalist states, were far behind in processes
of industrialisation and urbanisation during the nineteenth century.
However, the theory of social-property relations arrives at the conclusion that
these states were not capitalist during the � fteenth century. Marxist social
theory also had dif� culty explaining why despite its ‘bourgeois’ revolution,
capitalist development in France lagged far behind that of England during the
44 Brenner 1995b; Comninel 1990, 2000; Wood 1991; Mooers 1991.