Formation and Transformation of Economic Systems: The Conquest of Rights and Its Impact on Women

Economic history is the history of economic facts: it records the actions performed by men in order to procure the necessary goods and satisfy possible needs and explains their rationality. Actions are not isolated but organized between members of small and large communities in order to solve the problems of production and consumption together. Institutions and relationships must not hinder but rather must favor the optimal combination of production factors. When they are efficient, economic systems present themselves as structures of institutions adapted to the current production relations in turn adapted to the available means and methods of production. The economic forms characteristic of the world in which we live, or of most of it, have definite origins in those that took place in central Western Europe between the twentieth and nineteenth centuries, conventionally referred to as feudalism and capitalism. The reasonable hope that history stands meaning and that the direction is progressive and tends toward an increasing improvement of human conditions for more and more people is supported by the progressive development and extension of rights throughout human history. For instance, “liberalism,” albeit in a troubled manner, has brought about the practical realization of a postulate of legal equality of citizens considered as natural bearers of political and civil rights. Liberalism is an ideology or even just an ideal principle that interprets human history as the history of freedom. This conception goes back to Hegel who outlines it in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1837, p. 62). Freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, the protection of private property, and the right to vote became established in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, affecting ever larger portions of the population on our continent and in certain countries outside Europe. To this day, if capitalism cannot be combined with a strong recognition of social rights, it can lead to misery, marginalization, and death on a large scale. On the other hand, regimes of real socialism, inclined to protect, at least in principle, social rights, erase all reference to political rights and almost always lead to large-scale forms of repression. Finally, both ideologies, liberal and socialist, are themselves emptied of meaning when they irreparably compromise our ecosystem, disregarding the demands of environmentalism. The essay will address these issues with the methodology of economic history and look at how the globalized context and capitalism have affected and are affecting human rights and the role of women, which are closely linked to the transformation of economic systems.