ABSTRACT
Up to this point, we have been concerned with the theory of the capitalist economy. In this chapter we turn to the wider historical materialist framework, in which capitalism appears as the culmination of a much longer evolutionary process. To assess the development in the field since the classical Marxist formulations, we begin with the now historic debate in the pages of Science & Society on the transition from feudalism to capitalism (1977; Hilton, 1979). We then continue by taking up the critical questions raised more recently concerning the larger issue of whether social evolution is "law governed" in general, and in what sense.
