Mother of Capital : How Rent Gave Birth to Modernity

Costa, Matthew

Pluto Press（2025/12発売）

• 製本 Paperback:紙装版/ペーパーバック版／ページ数 304 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9780745350547

Full Description

Rent, or unearned income, is a pervasive concept in contemporary economics. Economists of all stripes see today's global economy as riddled with harmful rents, but most deny these are intrinsic to capitalism, and insist they can be eliminated with the right policies. It begs the question, why is rent theory so critical of the present but so optimistic about the future?

In Mother of Capital, Matthew Costa delves into the intellectual and social history of rent to solve this puzzle. Centring rent as the engine of capitalism's historical emergence in medieval Europe, he offers a groundbreaking, systematic history of rent and rent theory. The book also traces the history of resistance to rent from below, and unearths a neglected body of critical rent theory.

Weaving complex strands of social and intellectual history into a vivid, lively, and original explanation of how the society we live in came to be, Costa makes a bold intervention into contemporary debates about the origins and future of capitalism, the nature of social change, and of history itself.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. Rent and the engine of history

2. The tributary rent relation

3. Tributary tendencies and contradictions

4. Tributary ideology, resistance, and critique

5. From tributary to capitalist rent

6. Resistance and critique in transition

7. The political economy of capitalist rent

8. Resistance to rent under capitalism

9. The critical social theorists

10. The critique of differential rent

11. Capitalist rent as proletarianization

12. Rent and capitalist domination

13. The ideology of capitalist rent

14. Proletarian imaginaries

15. Deproletarianization

16. Conclusion: Capital, mother of what?