In this work, Lachmann shows that relations among elites rather than class struggle, or any other set of factors proposed by other historians, primarily determined the creation or non-creation of capitalism in early modern Europe.
Even then, well before the piggishness of the Reagan and Clinton eras and still far from the unrestrained and boastful viciousness of the current George W. Bush administration, I was stunned at what I read in the New York Times (and even more so when I saw the fuller reality presented in small leftist outlets).
At Harvard, which gave graduate students almost total freedom to design and pursue their own research projects, Lachmann could focus on the question that interested him most: the genesis of capitalism.
As he developed his own theory, Lachmann realized "that Marx and later Marxists asked the right questions but that the answers required a heavy dose of Weberian and elitist analysis".
[8] The most critical was a well-known British historian, an expert on agrarian history of England, Joan Thirsk, whom Lachmann had critiqued in the book for neglecting to take the high inflation of that era into her analysis.
[9] In his next book, "Capitalists in Spite of Themselves: Elite Conflict and Economic Transitions in Early Modern Europe" (2000), Lachmann consistently applies his theoretical model to cases beyond that of England: France, Spain, the Netherlands, and Renaissance Florence.
Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein, the authors of the world-system analysis, in turn, do not explain why the Italian city-states, which dominated European trade, did not realize the full potential of capitalist development, and instead stagnated and then lost economic leadership to the Netherlands and Britain.
He shows how the fights against the French and Burgundian kings, the German emperors and the Roman Papacy, combined with geopolitical stalemate to provide the conditions for the autonomy of the Italian cities in the Renaissance, and then at the local level conflict elites launched the development of urban trade and efficient business techniques by defining the institutional specificity of mature institutions and the limits of urban capitalism.
Critically important here is the case of Florence: cut off from the super-profits of transnational trafficking, Florentine elite were forced to focus on the production of wool and silk, as well as on the financial support of the Pope.
Dutch elites quickly grabbed trade routes and colonies but their settlement through Contracts of Correspondence immobilized resources and power preventing the reallocation of military force needed to defend their commercial hegemony from Britain.
French monarchs were unable to overcome the clergy and magnates at the national level and were forced to create an apparatus of multiple 'state' offices in an effort to manipulate competing elites in their struggle for lucrative positions.
This generated a power structure different from that in England, where the crown achieved dominance at the national level at the cost of severing links down to local offices.
He argued that even if a new hegemon doesn't emerge, the U.S. will not be able to mobilize the resources and channel state power to ensure that it can govern the world geo-politically or manage the global economy.
The U.S. created financial bubble that led to the 2008 crash is likely to be repeated in different forms, further undermining America's ability to finance hegemonic projects or to win the consent of other nations to its policies.
Lachmann reviews and critiques historical studies of the origins of capitalism, revolutions and social movements, states, empires, inequality, and gender.