Growth in Power

“The power of the state grew in concert with the rise of capitalism, because of direct state subsidies for business and international trade, the development of state sanctioned standardized monetary and taxation systems, and the emergence of a centralized legal system which made possible the commodification and contractualization of land, goods, and especially labour. In other words, the impersonal and centralized state accompanied the invention of the autonomous individual liberated from the confines of the traditional group and now relating to other individuals on the basis of contract. Property – including one’s own self in the form of one’s labour – became alienable. Thus was born both the capitalist and the wage labourer.” William T. Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination (New York: T&T Clark, 2002), 74.