Eric Wolf: Other

Eric Wolf was American anthropologist. Explore interesting quotes on other.
Eric Wolf: 48   quotes 0   likes

“The major vehicle of for the transition to the capitalist mode of production was the textile industry of eighteenth - century England. In cloth production mercantile wealth was visibly transformed into capital, as it acquired the dual function of purchasing machines and raw materials, on the one hand, and buying human energy to power their operation on the other.”

Eric Wolf

Source: Europe and the People Without History, 1982, Chapter 9, Industrial Revolution, p. 267.

Clothes , Wealth

“By turning names into things we create false models of reality. By endowing nations, societies or cultures, with the qualities of internally homogeneous and externally distinctive bounded objects, we create a model of the world as a global pool hall in which the entities spin off each other like so many hard and round billiard balls.”

Eric Wolf

Source: Europe and the People Without History, 1982, Chapter 1, Introduction, p. 6.

World , Reality , Falseness

“Although I wrote as an anthropologist rather than as a professional historian, I think history matters. It is also important to understand how an why these systems develop and extend their sway over people, and I located the rationale in the ways power and the economy sustain and drive each other on.”

Eric Wolf

Preface (1997), p. ix.
Europe and the People Without History, 1982

People , Way , History , Understanding

“The essence of capital is its ability to mobilize social labor by buying labor power and setting it to work. This requires a market in which the capacity of human beings to work can be bought and sold like any other commodity: buyers of labor power offer wages, which sellers accept in return for a commodity, their own labor.”

Eric Wolf

Source: Europe and the People Without History, 1982, Chapter 12 The New Laborers, p. 354.

“Only when the stock of wealth can be related to human energy by purchasing living energy as "labor power", offered for sale by people who have no other means of using their labor to ensure their livelihood: and only when it can relate that labor power to purchased machines - embodiments of past transformation of nature by human energy expended in the past - only then does "wealth" become "capital."”

Eric Wolf

Source: Europe and the People Without History, 1982, Chapter 10, Crises and Differentiation in Capitalism, p. 298.

People , Nature , Past , Wealth