t is by now a truism that “capitalism” has made a comeback in the historical profession. Although its impact on various regional subfields has been uneven, writing histories of capitalism has become an increasingly institutionalized endeavor during the past decade. The interest in economic matters has grown in the aftermath of the 2007 financial crisis, which provoked the feeling that in the wake of the cultural turn since the 1980s, historians had left themselves without a framework to engage with such issues. These are welcome developments. Nevertheless, like all returns and repetitions, this is a return with a difference. Writing in the aftermath of the cultural turn, historians are justifiably unwilling to view the “economic” as merely an objective domain of brute facticity and instead prefer to see it as constituted by human action. While this is an unobjectionable aim, practitioners in the field have not clarified precisely how the insights of the cultural turn might be incorporated into histories of capitalism. In fact, as one reviewer has acknowledged, “it is not even clear what defines capitalism,” and several working definitions that historians use “are inconsistent with each other.” It is clearly a problem if the object of historical investigation is nebulously and inconsistently grasped in conceptual terms. It makes it difficult to distinguish between capitalist and noncapitalist histories, and more fundamentally, it leaves unclear why the concept is needed at all. It may serve rhetorical purposes to revel in the
{"title":"Economic Theory without Historicity: The Relevance of Marxian Social Theory for a Critique of Capitalism","authors":"Anirban Karak","doi":"10.1086/713523","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/713523","url":null,"abstract":"t is by now a truism that “capitalism” has made a comeback in the historical profession. Although its impact on various regional subfields has been uneven, writing histories of capitalism has become an increasingly institutionalized endeavor during the past decade. The interest in economic matters has grown in the aftermath of the 2007 financial crisis, which provoked the feeling that in the wake of the cultural turn since the 1980s, historians had left themselves without a framework to engage with such issues. These are welcome developments. Nevertheless, like all returns and repetitions, this is a return with a difference. Writing in the aftermath of the cultural turn, historians are justifiably unwilling to view the “economic” as merely an objective domain of brute facticity and instead prefer to see it as constituted by human action. While this is an unobjectionable aim, practitioners in the field have not clarified precisely how the insights of the cultural turn might be incorporated into histories of capitalism. In fact, as one reviewer has acknowledged, “it is not even clear what defines capitalism,” and several working definitions that historians use “are inconsistent with each other.” It is clearly a problem if the object of historical investigation is nebulously and inconsistently grasped in conceptual terms. It makes it difficult to distinguish between capitalist and noncapitalist histories, and more fundamentally, it leaves unclear why the concept is needed at all. It may serve rhetorical purposes to revel in the","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":"8 1","pages":"115 - 136"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48963268","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article offers a new account of the rise of the ranked nation-state through a genealogy of the category of country risk, which emerged in the 1970s as part of a response to the explosion of sovereign borrowing of petrodollars by Global South and Eastern bloc countries. Incorporating intangible qualities like political stability and the social fabric through a version of environmental scanning, country risk ratings quantified both the ability and the willingness of sovereigns to repay their debts. Adopted by the US Federal Reserve as a means of imposing the rule of law on global finance in the run-up to the Third World debt crisis, country risk returned in the research of the 1990s as a proxy for good governance, transforming the subjective impressions of managers and bankers into objective realities with policy effects.
{"title":"World Maps for the Debt Paradigm: Risk Ranking the Poorer Nations in the 1970s","authors":"Q. Slobodian","doi":"10.1086/713524","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/713524","url":null,"abstract":"This article offers a new account of the rise of the ranked nation-state through a genealogy of the category of country risk, which emerged in the 1970s as part of a response to the explosion of sovereign borrowing of petrodollars by Global South and Eastern bloc countries. Incorporating intangible qualities like political stability and the social fabric through a version of environmental scanning, country risk ratings quantified both the ability and the willingness of sovereigns to repay their debts. Adopted by the US Federal Reserve as a means of imposing the rule of law on global finance in the run-up to the Third World debt crisis, country risk returned in the research of the 1990s as a proxy for good governance, transforming the subjective impressions of managers and bankers into objective realities with policy effects.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":"8 1","pages":"1 - 22"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/713524","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41669498","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article concerns how a critical theory of reification should be conceptualized to grasp the 2007 crisis, state-imposed austerity, and the rise of right-wing authoritarian populism. It argues that Jürgen Habermas’s, Axel Honneth’s, and Georg Lukacs’s interpretations of reification cannot provide a theoretical framework for a critical social theory of these developments due to their inadequate theories of domination, crises, character formation, and historical development. It then outlines a critical theory of reification that draws on Max Horkheimer’s notion of reified authority and contemporary Marxian critical theory’s interpretation of the critique of political economy to conceive of domination, crises, and character formation as inherent to the reproduction of capitalist society, which is characterized by a process of historical development that drives humanity into new types of barbarism. It concludes by indicating how such an approach, in contrast to Habermas’s, Honneth’s, and Lukács’s theories, provides a conception of reification that can grasp our present moment.
{"title":"Reification and the Critical Theory of Contemporary Society","authors":"Chris O’Kane","doi":"10.1086/713522","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/713522","url":null,"abstract":"This article concerns how a critical theory of reification should be conceptualized to grasp the 2007 crisis, state-imposed austerity, and the rise of right-wing authoritarian populism. It argues that Jürgen Habermas’s, Axel Honneth’s, and Georg Lukacs’s interpretations of reification cannot provide a theoretical framework for a critical social theory of these developments due to their inadequate theories of domination, crises, character formation, and historical development. It then outlines a critical theory of reification that draws on Max Horkheimer’s notion of reified authority and contemporary Marxian critical theory’s interpretation of the critique of political economy to conceive of domination, crises, and character formation as inherent to the reproduction of capitalist society, which is characterized by a process of historical development that drives humanity into new types of barbarism. It concludes by indicating how such an approach, in contrast to Habermas’s, Honneth’s, and Lukács’s theories, provides a conception of reification that can grasp our present moment.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":"8 1","pages":"57 - 86"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48491485","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
After drawing parallels between the methods of mapping and those of economic modeling, this article seeks to uncover the implicit world map in J. M. Keynes’s 1933 essay “National Self-Sufficiency.” A close reading of that essay demonstrates that Keynes’s articulation of the concept of the national economy rested on a specific political-economic geography, which often obscured a view of the global and indeed imperial distribution of power and resources. The article then suggests that those epistemological and spatial assumptions helped shape the conceptual infrastructure on which subsequent models of macroeconomic intervention grew after World War II.
{"title":"Keynesian Metageography and Its Afterlives","authors":"C. Biltoft","doi":"10.1086/713521","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/713521","url":null,"abstract":"After drawing parallels between the methods of mapping and those of economic modeling, this article seeks to uncover the implicit world map in J. M. Keynes’s 1933 essay “National Self-Sufficiency.” A close reading of that essay demonstrates that Keynes’s articulation of the concept of the national economy rested on a specific political-economic geography, which often obscured a view of the global and indeed imperial distribution of power and resources. The article then suggests that those epistemological and spatial assumptions helped shape the conceptual infrastructure on which subsequent models of macroeconomic intervention grew after World War II.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":"8 1","pages":"23 - 55"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46296816","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Sartre’s visit to the Middle East turned into a fiasco, and the French philosopher ultimately signed a public letter in support of Israel. A few years later, the situation had changed completely: the French Left overwhelmingly took sides with the Palestinians, and Arab militants in France were key in triggering this turnaround. This was but one consequence of the multilayered interactions between Arab and European left-wing militant landscapes during the May ’68 momentum. The Arab New Left was a constitutive part of this global moment. Yet the Arab Left and “May ’68” have long been set apart from the growing literature on the revolutionary Left during the long sixties. Following three militant paths between France and the Arab East, I decipher the reconfigurations of geographies of resistance and the processes of resignification as symbols and know-how were displaced and transformed through ever more complex itineraries.
{"title":"The Arab New Left and May ’68: Transnational Entanglements at a Time of Disruption","authors":"Laure Guirguis","doi":"10.1086/713518","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/713518","url":null,"abstract":"Sartre’s visit to the Middle East turned into a fiasco, and the French philosopher ultimately signed a public letter in support of Israel. A few years later, the situation had changed completely: the French Left overwhelmingly took sides with the Palestinians, and Arab militants in France were key in triggering this turnaround. This was but one consequence of the multilayered interactions between Arab and European left-wing militant landscapes during the May ’68 momentum. The Arab New Left was a constitutive part of this global moment. Yet the Arab Left and “May ’68” have long been set apart from the growing literature on the revolutionary Left during the long sixties. Following three militant paths between France and the Arab East, I decipher the reconfigurations of geographies of resistance and the processes of resignification as symbols and know-how were displaced and transformed through ever more complex itineraries.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":"8 1","pages":"87 - 113"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/713518","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43804773","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Capitalist development since the 1940s has been fueled by global oil extraction. Cheap oil was the core energy input in the post–World War II expansion. By the 1970s, the limits of this oil-fueled accumulation regime began to appear. During that decade, a series of oil price hikes combined with other sources of tension to form a deep accumulation crisis. The crisis of the 1970s showed the effects that a strategic circulating capital—in this case, petroleum—has in shaping profitability trends. Today, the possible recessionary effects caused by oil price hikes are joined on the environmental side by another problem: the continued burning of fossil fuels exacerbates the climate crisis. To address this double contradiction, I revisit the Marxian theory of crisis in a world-historical and world-ecological framework. With this framework, I unpack the historical connections between petroleum, uneven development, accumulation crises, and climate change.
{"title":"Oil-Fueled Accumulation in Late Capitalism","authors":"R. Ortiz","doi":"10.1086/710799","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/710799","url":null,"abstract":"Capitalist development since the 1940s has been fueled by global oil extraction. Cheap oil was the core energy input in the post–World War II expansion. By the 1970s, the limits of this oil-fueled accumulation regime began to appear. During that decade, a series of oil price hikes combined with other sources of tension to form a deep accumulation crisis. The crisis of the 1970s showed the effects that a strategic circulating capital—in this case, petroleum—has in shaping profitability trends. Today, the possible recessionary effects caused by oil price hikes are joined on the environmental side by another problem: the continued burning of fossil fuels exacerbates the climate crisis. To address this double contradiction, I revisit the Marxian theory of crisis in a world-historical and world-ecological framework. With this framework, I unpack the historical connections between petroleum, uneven development, accumulation crises, and climate change.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":"7 1","pages":"205 - 240"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/710799","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41337345","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The article discusses Lebanese Marxist philosopher Mahdi Amel’s formulation of the concept of “colonial mode of production” as a differential mode from capitalism that is linked to it through “structural causality.” Amel theorized the colonial mode of production as a singular mode that was seen to be specific to some social formations like Lebanon, Algeria, and Egypt. The article draws out the Althusserian influences in Amel’s theoretical work and explains the contours of his main argument to show how the colonial mode of production was employed as a critique of national liberation movements in the 1970s. In his theoretical works, Amel also provides a substantive critique of structuralism by arguing for a notion of political practice as the determinant of social struggle in the last instance.
{"title":"Mahdi Amel’s Colonial Mode of Production and Politics in the Last Instance","authors":"N. Ali","doi":"10.1086/710800","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/710800","url":null,"abstract":"The article discusses Lebanese Marxist philosopher Mahdi Amel’s formulation of the concept of “colonial mode of production” as a differential mode from capitalism that is linked to it through “structural causality.” Amel theorized the colonial mode of production as a singular mode that was seen to be specific to some social formations like Lebanon, Algeria, and Egypt. The article draws out the Althusserian influences in Amel’s theoretical work and explains the contours of his main argument to show how the colonial mode of production was employed as a critique of national liberation movements in the 1970s. In his theoretical works, Amel also provides a substantive critique of structuralism by arguing for a notion of political practice as the determinant of social struggle in the last instance.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":"7 1","pages":"241-269"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/710800","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60713602","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Edmund Burke is commonly understood as having championed free markets, thereby revealing debts to his contemporary Adam Smith. Numerous scholars have identified a tension between this aspect of Burke’s thinking and his politics of tradition and conservation. This article argues that this reading of Burke is untenable because it relates Burke and Smith in doctrinal terms, at the cost of ignoring the divergent ways in which they constructed their arguments. Once this phenomenon is brought to view, the supposed contradiction in Burke’s thought dissolves: Burke’s so-called political economy was just as indebted to common-law legal thought as was his thinking on government. Thus, instead of construing phenomena such as wages in relation to price-setting markets, Burke described wages as determined by time and convention, the same forces at the center of his account of political institutions. The recovery of abstraction as an object of study may lead to a general revision of the historiography of political economy, not least because its status was contested then and remains so now.
{"title":"Conservative Politics and Laissez-Faire Economics?","authors":"Ryan Walter","doi":"10.1086/710696","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/710696","url":null,"abstract":"Edmund Burke is commonly understood as having championed free markets, thereby revealing debts to his contemporary Adam Smith. Numerous scholars have identified a tension between this aspect of Burke’s thinking and his politics of tradition and conservation. This article argues that this reading of Burke is untenable because it relates Burke and Smith in doctrinal terms, at the cost of ignoring the divergent ways in which they constructed their arguments. Once this phenomenon is brought to view, the supposed contradiction in Burke’s thought dissolves: Burke’s so-called political economy was just as indebted to common-law legal thought as was his thinking on government. Thus, instead of construing phenomena such as wages in relation to price-setting markets, Burke described wages as determined by time and convention, the same forces at the center of his account of political institutions. The recovery of abstraction as an object of study may lead to a general revision of the historiography of political economy, not least because its status was contested then and remains so now.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":"7 1","pages":"271 - 295"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/710696","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46882121","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Considering Frederick Crews’s Freud: The Making of an Illusion","authors":"Linus Recht","doi":"10.1086/710695","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/710695","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":"7 1","pages":"297 - 339"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/710695","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46491688","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
n 1984Moishe Postone returned from Frankfurt and became a fellow at the Center for Psychosocial Studies in Chicago; he would immediately run a two-year seminar on volume 1 of Capital that would become Time, Labor, and Social Domination. Three of the contributors to this issue of Critical Historical Studies, Craig Calhoun, Edward LiPuma, and myself, were participants in that now legendary seminar. Moishe was talking about a book on volume 2 of Capital even when he left the center to become a Harper Fellow at the University of Chicago in 1987; it would remain unfinished at his death, but another contributor to this issue, Robert Meister, would attend Moishe’s penultimate seminar on volume 2 in the spring of 2015, which would (finally) determine whether volume 2 was written in the form of an immanent critique, as Moishe maintained volume 1 was. In 1988, the center began a collaboration with Pierre Bourdieu that introduced an anthropological perspective on the development of capitalism. Moishe would join Craig and Ed in editing Pierre Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives, and Ed and I, inspired by Bourdieu and Moishe, would write Financial Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk, which would set us down the path of derivative finance; we would ultimately join Bob Meister and Randy Martin in a working seminar on derivatives organized by Arjun Appadurai at New York University. Ed, Bob, and I often argued with Moishe about the role of derivative finance in late capitalism, and as Bob relates in his essay, although Moishe saw derivatives as producing unprecedented wealth, he did not see them as producing a new form of value even as value became increasingly anachronistic in an age of finance-driven capitalism; it was the contradiction between value and wealth that was propelling late capitalism.
{"title":"From Primitives to Derivatives","authors":"Benjamin Lee","doi":"10.1086/708008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/708008","url":null,"abstract":"n 1984Moishe Postone returned from Frankfurt and became a fellow at the Center for Psychosocial Studies in Chicago; he would immediately run a two-year seminar on volume 1 of Capital that would become Time, Labor, and Social Domination. Three of the contributors to this issue of Critical Historical Studies, Craig Calhoun, Edward LiPuma, and myself, were participants in that now legendary seminar. Moishe was talking about a book on volume 2 of Capital even when he left the center to become a Harper Fellow at the University of Chicago in 1987; it would remain unfinished at his death, but another contributor to this issue, Robert Meister, would attend Moishe’s penultimate seminar on volume 2 in the spring of 2015, which would (finally) determine whether volume 2 was written in the form of an immanent critique, as Moishe maintained volume 1 was. In 1988, the center began a collaboration with Pierre Bourdieu that introduced an anthropological perspective on the development of capitalism. Moishe would join Craig and Ed in editing Pierre Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives, and Ed and I, inspired by Bourdieu and Moishe, would write Financial Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk, which would set us down the path of derivative finance; we would ultimately join Bob Meister and Randy Martin in a working seminar on derivatives organized by Arjun Appadurai at New York University. Ed, Bob, and I often argued with Moishe about the role of derivative finance in late capitalism, and as Bob relates in his essay, although Moishe saw derivatives as producing unprecedented wealth, he did not see them as producing a new form of value even as value became increasingly anachronistic in an age of finance-driven capitalism; it was the contradiction between value and wealth that was propelling late capitalism.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":"7 1","pages":"127 - 144"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/708008","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46826177","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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