RAPPORTI SOCIALI E CONFLITTI DI CLASSE NELL'INGHILTERRA DEL XVIII SECOLO: VERSO UNA NUOVA TEORIA MATERIALISTA DELLA TRANSIZIONE AL CAPITALISMO

This work has two main aims: it wants, from one side, to revive the debate on the Transition to Capitalism, whereas, on the other side, it proposes a new political approach to historical materialism. Triggered by social concerns about our times - which are characterised by growing inequality and poverty, by class polarisation, climate emergences, economic crises and new wars - the research devotes theoretical attention to the dialectics between political present and the writing of history. While the world leaves behind thirty years of neo-liberal unipolarism, and History, in its magnitude, gets back into the scene, the paper, critically focusing on the origins of Capitalism and on the praxis of change, shakes the hypostatization of the present social system and, highlighting the specific features that make it finite and superable, historicises it. The work challenges those academic studies which have dealt, in the wake of several cultural trends, with the history of economic and social development, counterposing to micro-specialisation, post-modern fragmentation and the multiplication of perspectives, a systematic contestation of the whole bulk of relations which Capitalism entails. Devoting a new importance to class paradigm - even with respect to materialist traditional approaches - the essay contributes to Marxist historiography, originally investigating theoretical nodes such as the relationship between base and superstructure, history and theory, materiality and ideology, objectivity and subjectivity. Group interests, class relations and conflicts in XVIII century England are inspected with the goal of defining a new method for historical investigation: the social praxis, as a methodological criterion, does not only permit us to reframe the dynamics relating economic (structural) and social transformations, but proves to be a valid guide to preserve the researcher’s writing from from the ideological influence of his time hegemony.