4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST life constructing a theoretical model of capitalism, unravelling its inherent contradictions and suggesting the means of overcoming those contradictions. They indicated a social agency, namely the working class, which in its own collective interest would overcome those contradictions and give birth to a new order of society, namely a socialist society—an order that would be superior to the capitalist system that had been overthrown. However, neither Marx nor Engels ever thought that there was a pure capitalism on earth. They took the British economy and society as their primary object of study. I have to talk about these things because sometimes both the lovers of capitalism and the opponents talk as if somewhere there is pure capitalism—as if all those free market forces really act freely and as if all individuals are free-floating atoms. We have always to understand that they are all the time bounded by various kinds of social forces transcending markets and circumscribing freedom. Marx and Engels took the British economy and society as their primary object of study mainly because it had in their time progressed farthest in the direction of unfolding of capitalist relations. Even in the case of Britain, as Marx's and Engels* extensive comments on the British political scene demonstrate, aristocratic ideologies and interests of powerful landlords were often mixed up with the pursuit of capitalist goals and diffusion of ideologies more directly associated with capitalism. And not only in Marx and Engels* time^you can see how religion has played havoc with the society of Northern Ireland, which was one of the earliest colonies of the new British capitalist empire. Neither colonialism nor religious wars have gone away because of the flowering of capitalism. If pure capitalism did not obtain even in the Britain of the 1850s and 1860s, it certainly did not exist in other countries of Europe or the United States at that time. Some people take capitalism to be the final flowering of a free social system and this free social system, they think, was just born (like Venus) in Europe and the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Nothing like that happened. Capitalism was given a more explicit constitutional form in France and the U.S.A. than in England. The hegemony of capitalists or bourgeois ideologies had also been recognised more explicitly in those countries than in Britain. In England, the Parliament was dominated by the class of landlords until 1832. In France, after the French Revolution, the bourgeoisie definitely came to be the dominant force but the monarchy remained. The Americans had to fight a bloody Civil War in the 1860s in order to establish the dominance of industrial capitalism over a slave-holding landlord group. In France, after the revolution of 1789 there were four monarchies and two major civil wars before the claims of capitalism and its most advanced form of governance, ie., parliamentary democracy, could be firmly established.