Colleagues:  
  
Yuichi Shionoya, in ECONOMY AND MORALITY: THE PHILOSOPHY OF  
THE WELFARE STATE, sets out three stages of which I had not  
thought:  the achievement of negative liberalism in the form  
of private property rights in the revolutions that formally  
ended feudalism in the late seventeenth century and the  
eighteenth century; the achievement of the independence of  
the private sector and efficiency with utilitarianism and  
laissez-faire about the middle of the nineteenth century;  
the achievement of economic egalitiarian rights with the  
advent of the welfare state some time about the middle of  
the twentieth century.  
  
Of course there are also the stages from gathering,  
agriculture, commerce, manufacturing, finance, (and  
information ?)'  Then one could run through the sequence of  
so-called industrial revolutions, or the sequence of broad  
technologies such as the Age of Sail, the Canal Era, the  
Railway Epoch, the Internal Combustion Engine and the  
Electric Dynamo, and the Time of Telematics.  
  
One could also construct stages based on the institutional  
form of the firm, that is, the agent of exchange and  
productive activity, from medieval guilds and the great  
mercantilist trading companies to the transnational  
manufacturing corporation.  
  
What are you looking for?  
  
Robin Neill