ABSTRACT
By turning to political economy or a theoretical understanding of the economy of bourgeois society the historical narrative can be made more profound. Indeed, Marxist political economy tries to understand the capitalist economy from a perspective that is both historical and materialist. The transition debate produced a political economy of primitive accumulation equivalent to that produced by Marx on nineteenth-century capitalism. Robert Brenner's view was compelling and subsequently hardened into a school of history known as Political Marxism. For him the class conflicts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were the starting point of both the demise of feudalism and beginnings of capitalism. Under the sway of the analytical Marxism of the post-1960s Brenner's positivism in principle rejects dialectical thought as metaphysical. Brenner and his school ignore the overall European perspective on the development of capitalism in favour of a parochial Anglo-centrism. There is little excuse for this kind of scholarship.
