Capitalism

I'm reading "Moby Dick" as a book about striving within a certain system. 

Melville's technique is to be supra-intense about every subject he writes about, encyclopedic, as if he feels he must not only have an opinion but must show the underpinings of the opinion in order to try to demonstrate a certain understanding of a world that is otherwise beyond the reader. It's the great book of capitalism, of the restless spirit that animates capitalism and the situation that arises from its animation. I've never read a writer who so demanded to be listened to; I feel the striving as I read.

Joyce Appleby's, "The Relentless Revolution, A History of Capitalism" (Norton, 2010) is a fine companion read. She identifies capitalism as "a cultural system," a "historical development and not a discovery of universal principles." Traditional societies, she claims, were "built on the bedrock of scarcity." Fear of change ruled most social and economic behavior until the 15th century when the great voyages of the Spanish, Portuguese and English started opening up the world. 

But everything that was remarkable about Portuguese and Spanish voyages "got folded back into the old ways." It was England where the sequence of development "never stopped." England's "intellectual engagement with the meaning of economic change blocked a reversion to the old ways of thinking." By the 17th century capitalism had gained "critical momentum against the regime of status, stasis, and royal control."