Download or read book Foundations of Political Economy written by Neal Wood and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-09-01 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conventional wisdom claims that the seventeenth century gave birth to the material and ideological forces that culminated in the Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism. Not true, according to Neal Wood, who argues that much earlier reformers—Dudley, Starkey, Brinklow, Latimer, Crowley, Becon, Lever, and Thomas Smith, as well as the better-known More and Fortescue—laid the groundwork by fashioning an economic conception of the state in response to social, economic and political conditions of England. Wood's innovative study of these early Tudor thinkers, who upheld the status quo yet condemned widespread poverty and suffering, will interest historians, political scientists, and social and political theorists.