ABSTRACT
AND FORMS OF DOMINATION •Commercial' or, as Adam Smith synonymously called it, 'civilized society' was founded upon a mode of production that had required a new formation of traditional social cleavages into 'the rich and the poor'. Contemporary observers with widely differing political perspectives were in agreement on this point. When, for example, Frederic M. Eden, William Thompson or John Wade described the situation of the English poor at the end of the eighteenth and at the beginning of the nineteenth century, 1 their evaluations diverged substantially, but they all noted that social inequality and the consequent ensions and conflicts had acquired a new quality. The dynamics of the developing' bourgeois society' in their view were determined by an antagonism that could not be overcome within the traditional social relations of production. Certainly the experiences gathered from market-oriented production in agriculture, in rural household production (proto-industry) and in factory-based industrial production in England could be summed up in this way.
