Economic Theory without Historicity: The Relevance of Marxian Social Theory for a Critique of Capitalism

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