Читать книгу Wealth - Yuval Elmelech - Страница 19

Elaborated more than a century ago, the sociological theories that we now call “classical” were motivated by the major social, political, and economic transformations that took place in Europe and America in the nineteenth century. In the aftermath of political revolutions in the US and France, the nineteenth century was characterized by a growing reliance on science and positivism, the spread of industrialization from Britain to Europe and North America, and the advent of capitalism as the dominant economic system (Lemert 2013). This period also witnessed an increase in the concentration of wealth that reached its peak on the eve of World War I. One of the main contributions of the early sociological canon to twenty-first-century understandings of wealth is its emphasis on the interplay between economic and social processes. Specifically, early theorists viewed property ownership and wealth accumulation as products of the social processes of exclusion, exchange, and transfer that, when combined, drew up boundaries among social and economic groups.