Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: The 'Method' of Ellen Meiksins Wood -- Chapter One Capitalism -- The 'economic' and the 'political'in capitalism -- Class-power and state-power -- Feudalism and private property -- Capitalism as the privatisation of political power -- The localisation of class-struggle -- England vs. the dominant model of capitalism -- The bourgeois paradigm -- Begging the question -- Opportunity or imperative? -- The commercialisation-model -- Marx on the transition -- Towns and trade -- Agrarian capitalism -- Market-dependent producers -- A different kind of market-dependence? -- Competitive markets -- Chapter Two Precapitalist Societies -- Class and state in China and Rome -- Rome and the empire of private property -- The city-states of Florence and Venice -- Master and slave vs. landlord and peasant -- Free producers and slaves -- Slavery and the 'decline' of the Roman Empire -- The 'logic' of slavery vs. the logic of capitalism -- The 'slave-mode of production' -- Agricultural slavery and the peasant-citizen -- The nexus of freedom and slavery in democratic Athens -- Chapter Three The State in Historical Perspective -- Class and state in ancient society -- The emergence of the polis in ancient Athens -- The 'essence' of the polis -- Class in the democratic polis -- Village and state, town and country, in democratic Athens -- The rise and fall of Rome -- The culture of property: Roman law -- From imperial Rome to 'feudalism' -- Absolutism and the modern state -- The idea of the state -- The peculiarities of the English state -- Contrasting states: France vs. England -- Chapter Four Social and Political Thought -- The social history of political theory -- Political theory in history: an overview -- Plato -- The Greek concept of freedom -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau -- John Locke.

Revolution and tradition, c. 1640-1790 -- Chapter Five Democracy, Citizenship, Liberalism, and Civil Society -- Labour and democracy, ancient andmodern -- From ancient to modern conceptions of citizenship -- Capitalism and democratic citizenship -- The American redefinition of democracy -- A democracy devoid of social content -- From democracy to liberalism -- Capitalism and 'liberal democracy' -- Liberal democracy and capitalist hegemony -- The idea of 'civil society' -- The civil-society argument -- 'Civil society' and the devaluation of democracy -- Chapter Six The Enlightenment, Postmodernism, and the Post-'New Left' -- Modernity vs. capitalism: France vs.England -- From modernity to postmodernity -- Modernity and the non-history of capitalism -- Themes of the postmodern Left -- Enlightenment vs. capitalism: Condorcet vs. Locke -- Enlightenment-universalism -- The periodisation of the Western Left -- Left intellectuals and contemporary capitalism -- Chapter Seven Globalisation and Imperialism -- Globalisation and the nation-state -- Nation-states, classes, and universal capitalism -- The indispensable state -- Precapitalist imperialism -- The classic age of imperialism -- Globalisation and war -- Globalisation and imperial hegemony -- The contradictions of capitalist imperialism -- Chapter Eight Socialism -- The end of the welfare-state 'compact' -- There are no social democrats now -- Market-dependence vs. market-enablement -- Left strategies of market-enablement -- The political implications of competition -- The working class and the struggle for socialism -- Class-conflict and the socialist project -- Socialism and democracy -- The state in classless societies -- Liberalism vs. democracy -- 'Universal human goods' -- The self-emancipation of the working class -- The socialist movement -- Democracy as an economic mechanism.

Bibliography of Works by Ellen Meiksins Wood,1970-2012 -- References -- Index.