​One of Han’s most well-known essays. Han positions contemporary society in the post-immunological paradigm, where the Other and the foreign has disappeared (see his other essay, The Expulsion of the Other), leaving only the positivity of the Same. Unlike an immunological paradigm, where the viral violence of a foreign Other is fought off by the Self, violence in a post-immunological paradigm is immanent to the system and expresses itself as psychic infarctions.
 
Han contrasts Foucault’s disciplinary society with the achievement society of the 21st century. We move from “prohibitions, commandments, and the law… [and] madmen and criminals” to “projects, initiatives, and motivation… [and] depressives and losers” (p. 9). Instead of the negativity of the disciplinary modal verb Should, we have the positivity of achievement society’s Can. The disciplinary subjects of the past are turned into the achievement subjects—the go-getting entrepreneurs—of today. Without external domination, the achievement subject experiences a paradoxical liberty, which Han calls “compulsive freedom—that is, to the free constraint of maximizing achievement” (p. 11): the achievement subject freely engages in auto-exploitation.
 
Han compares the achievement subject and animal laborans, the beast of burden. Without external domination, the achievement subject is master of itself, but it expresses itself as Nietzsche’s Last Man, not one who is sovereign. The achievement subject lacks the negative ability of making pause, which is crucial for the vita contemplativa; instead, it surrenders itself to the ocean of distractions and external stimuli in contemporary society, to the unthinking, gapless, restlessness of mere activity, mere labour.
 
The psyche of the achievement subject is different from the psyche of the disciplinary subject; old psychoanalytic theories must be revised accordingly. For Han, “Freud’s psychic apparatus is a repressive apparatus with commandments and prohibitions that subjugate and repress” (p. 36)—he calls for a post-Freudian conception of the ego. Without negativity, which gives form and definition—or “character”—to an individual, the individual is left flexible and undefined, and able to perform and play any function. Han remarks that this “shapelessness… creates a high degree of economic efficiency” (p. 4). The disciplinary society’s superego is transformed into the achievement society’s ego ideal, which, instead of repressing, seduces and liberates. The gap between the ego and the unachievable ego ideal leads to auto-aggression, self-destruction, and finally, the burnout society. 

​An amazing, accessible work of scholarship. Wood’s The Origins of Capitalism contests the dominant “commercialization model” of economic development, which “begs the question” by assuming the development of capitalism as an inevitable result while recounting the origins of capitalism. In the “commercialization model,” rationally self-interested individuals exchanged goods and services with each other for all of human history; a specialized division of labour develops; this is supplemented by technological development in production. Capitalism becomes the end stage of a natural evolution in the narrative—a quantitative increase and not a qualitative break—when homo economicus is liberated from “unnatural” limitations (i.e., feudalism). Free from political, cultural, societal, etc. obstacles to economic rationality, the market and commercial society signifies “the perfection of freedom” (p. 16) for the rational self-interested human being.
 
Towns and their inhabitants—the town-dwellers or burghers (bourgeois)—occupy a special place in the commercialization model. In this narrative, towns and their rational bourgeois inhabitants are thought to have been relatively autonomous; their pursuit of mercantile activity is said to have slowly broken through and overcome the unnatural imposition of feudalism on “human nature.” Following this logic, a strange slippage occurs and the bourgeois (town dweller) becomes conflated with the capitalist, as it is in the contemporary usage of the word.
 
In her history, Wood locates the origins of capitalism in a specific time and place: in the English countryside. Prior to capitalism, rural peasants had their surplus labour appropriated from them through extra-economic means, or “by means of direct coercion, exercised by landlords or states employing their superior force, their privileged access to military, judicial, and political power” (p. 95-96). Extra-economic appropriation can be distinguished from appropriation under capitalism, which happens by “purely ‘economic’ means” (p. 96). In the latter system of appropriation, direct producers must sell their labour-power on the market for a wage to access the means of production and for their own reproduction (basically, to live); in this system, capitalists do not need direct coercion (or extra-economic powers) to appropriate surplus labour.
 
Very specific structural aspects of English agriculture weakened the extra-economic powers of the English elite class while giving them increased economic powers of surplus extraction. Additionally, in English agriculture, a large tenant farmer population was dependent on renting land, which increasingly became priced according to the market, not tradition. Given these circumstances, tenant farmers competed on the market for access to land and for access to consumers; these market imperatives obligated tenants to improve productivity. As Wood remarks, the market is an imposition, not a vehicle for liberty. Tenant farmers who were more productive gained additional access to land while others lost access completely; rural England became a society of larger landowners and the dispossessed, leading to the “famous triad of landlord, capitalist, tenant, and wage labourer” (p. 103).
 
The concept of “improvement” (the word “improve” finds its origins in acting for profit—one can think of it roughly as “into-profit”) formed alongside the new ideology of agrarian capitalism. The new ideology brought forth its philosophers and philosophy. Wood demonstrates this with an extended discussion of John Locke’s Theory of Property, which justifies enclosure of the commons if it is done to improve the property in terms of exchange value, or commercial profit.
 
Contrary to prevalent histories, agrarian capitalism then supported the development of industrial capitalism—the former preceded the latter. Dispossessed wage labourers (without access to land and social reproduction) sold their labour in the market and formed the first market of mass consumer goods and were sustained with a more productive agricultural sector. As capitalism and its exigencies for profit and productivity spread outward from England, Wood claims that this “compelled other countries to promote their own economic development in capitalist directions” (p. 142). A single spark can start a prairie fire.
 
After her rereading of the origins of capitalism and her dismantling of the commercialization model, Wood devotes the final section of the book to discuss the implications for studies on capitalism and imperialism, capitalism and the development of the modern nation-state, and modernity and post-modernity (she wants to salvage the Enlightenment tradition)—this goes beyond the scope of the present book review