Excerpt from Werner Sombart's Modern Capitalism Vol. II (currently editing)

[k_a_nitz]

From the start of Section 7: The Procurement of the Labour Force:

Without a suitable labour force in sufficient quantity — no modern capitalism. Hence the “emergence of a class of wage labour” forms one of the necessary conditions of the capitalist economy. On closer inspection, it is revealed that the problem is twofold. It concerns on the one hand the question of how, when, and why a sufficient quantity of propertyless people (wageworkers in potentia) developed; on the other hand, however, as we will see, the far more important question of how the entrepreneur got hold of a sufficient and willing labour force (wageworkers in actu). The second part of this problem forms a part of the state policy in the mercantilist age.