Critical Historical Studies最新文献

{"title":"The Illusion of the Economic: Social Theory without Social Forms","authors":"Patrick Murray","doi":"10.1086/708005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/708005","url":null,"abstract":"Lacking a conception of the specific character of labor in capitalism, Critical Theory ascribed its consequences to labor per se. The frequently described shift of Critical Theory from the analysis of political economy to a critique of instrumental reason does not, then, signify that the theorists of the Frankfurt School simply abandoned the former in favor of the latter. Rather, that shift followed from, and was based upon, a particular analysis of political economy, more specifically, a traditional understanding of Marx’s critique of political economy. —Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/708005","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43078432","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":"Moishe on Value and Wealth","authors":"R. Meister","doi":"10.1086/708158","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/708158","url":null,"abstract":"homogeneous labor time in political economy as the a priori precondition of the social world it purports merely to describe. 8. Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1978), 53; emphasis in original. 118 | CRITICAL HISTORICAL STUDIES SPRING 2020 It is worth stressing that this specific critique of capitalism is ultimately epistemological rather than moral. Moishe acknowledged that distributive injustice tends to follow from concealed domination, just as it does from overt domination. So, the absence of overt domination would not make capitalism prima facie just. But Moishe thought that to focus on the spurious legitimation of injustice as capitalism’s defining feature would to be assimilate it to noncapitalist social formations, such as feudalism in which domination is mediated by social relations and religious practices that affect the distribution, but also the interpretation, of wealth. It is thus the concealment of injustice (as epistemic problem), and not injustice itself, that is historically specific to capitalism. But even if we set our concern for social justice aside, Moishe’s idea of direct mediation is puzzling on its face. How could it bemediation if it is direct? And inwhat sense could Moishe mean it to be direct, other than to deny that the value form is mediated by money and thus dominated by finance? Moishe’s stress on the directness of social mediation in capitalist production does, I think, require a diminished stress on the role of financial intermediaries and money markets. But even allowing for his choice to emphasize production, Moishe’s philosophical view that mediation can be direct within this realm is not extensively explained in his major book on capitalism, nor is it more fully developed in later papers. Like Ben and Ed, I have few stakes in the concept of direct mediation. We see finance as a form of indirect mediation that is historically specific to our present stage of capitalism and need have no quarrel with his tendency to assume that of financial valuation is a form of mediated sociality. But we do no regard this as a knock-down argument because for us the concept of direct mediation could, perhaps, be important in understanding capitalism only to the extent that there are spheres in which finance is not important. Otherwise, direct mediation appears to be something of an oxymoron, implying at the same time as it denies the existence of a third, or mediating, term through which the relation between two other terms can be interpreted. In Peircean semiotics, for example, there is always a third, mediating, sign that refers to the relation between a signifier and the object that it signifies. The relation of the third sign to the signifier-object relation can be one of self-similarity (as in a metaphor) or contiguity (as in a metonym); it can be one of causation or of abstraction in Moishe’s sense; such abstraction can take the form of sy","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/708158","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41389670","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":"A Capital for the Age of Growth: Paul Baran, Paul Sweezy, and the Critique of Keynesian Civilization","authors":"Benjamin Feldman","doi":"10.1086/705368","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/705368","url":null,"abstract":"A growing focus on inequality has given renewed relevance to both Keynesian political economy and its critics on the left. Cowritten by Marxian economists Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (1966) is one of the most comprehensive—and neglected—left critiques of Keynesianism. Monopoly Capital was written through hundreds of letters exchanged between 1955–64. Though inaccessible to historians for 50 years, this correspondence has recently been made available, and reveals Baran and Sweezy to be both methodologically ecumenical and engaged in the sort of cultural analysis normally associated with the critical theorists whom Perry Anderson and others have labeled “Western Marxists.” In offering an immanent critique of Keynesianism rather than a priori rejecting it for being insufficiently Marxist, Baran and Sweezy reveal a central paradox of the Keynesian vision: that the implementation of liberal-Keynesian economic policies in times of peace is impossible without socialist politics.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/705368","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42175635","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":"The Problem of Rent","authors":"Brett Christophers","doi":"10.1086/705396","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/705396","url":null,"abstract":"With rentier dynamics playing an increasingly central role in the economy across much of the advanced capitalist world, critiques of rent, the rentier, and rentierism have been gathering a head of steam. For the majority of critics of rentierism, it appears that the central problem of rent, and the reason we should be critical of it, is that it represents “unearned” income. In this critical reflection, I question this critique and, in its place, advance an alternative conceptualization of the problem of rent, centered not on the degree to which rent is or is not “earned” but rather on the monopoly power that the rentier, by her nature, enjoys, and which, I argue, substantially accounts for two of rentier capitalism’s negative features: low levels of innovation and high levels of worker exploitation.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/705396","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49279611","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":"The Double Life of Property: Mobilizing Land and Making Capitalism in Modern France","authors":"Alexia M. Yates","doi":"10.1086/705369","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/705369","url":null,"abstract":"Nineteenth-century France was host to a vigorous public debate on how real property—land and buildings—should function in the marketplace. Proponents of what was called the mobilization of land sought to enhance the circulation of real property, whereas its opponents aimed to prevent the dissipation of durable patrimonies in the unreliable world of commerce and finance. This article analyzes the articulation of the mobilization question by jurists, politicians, and political economists in early nineteenth-century France and argues for its importance—and the centrality of real property relations—to understanding the imaginative and institutional construction of modern capitalism. Focusing on contentious innovations in the financial life of real property of the 1789 and 1848 revolutions, it reconstructs the repetitive character of mobilization programs and argues that this mimetic quality stems from a persistent and enduring misapprehension regarding nature and the material as sources of economic value.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/705369","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47212012","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":"The Frontier of Hell: Sicily, Sulfur, and the Rise of the British Chemical Industry, 1750–1840","authors":"D. Cunha","doi":"10.1086/705370","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/705370","url":null,"abstract":"Sicilian sulfur was an important commodity for the Industrial Revolution (1750–1840). It was used for the finishing of textiles: Innovations in finishing were essential for the textile industry so that the productivity increases in spinning and weaving as well as in cotton plantations did not encounter a bottleneck. Eventually, it gave occasion to a spin-off, the chemical industry as a separate branch of production. These developments rested on the appropriation of uncommodified labor force and nature in Sicily. Such processes unfolded in a trajectory determined by value relations, in which the investment in fixed capital in Britain was tied to the supply of cheap circulating capital (raw material) in the commodity frontier. When necessary to guarantee the supply of cheap sulfur against price and supply regulation, the British mobilized their Royal Navy. It is argued that the Sicilian frontier should be incorporated into the history of the Industrial Revolution.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/705370","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46544641","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":"Primal Capital","authors":"Jonathan Levy","doi":"10.1086/705295","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/705295","url":null,"abstract":"Although the dynamics of capital are various, one dynamic is inescapably psychical. In this article, I argue in favor of a concept of what I call “primal capital,” in which capital is not only a “factor of production” but also consists of psychical processes. I proceed by way of reconstructing John Maynard Keynes’s account in The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936) of the owner of capital’s “propensity to hoard.” Keynes presents a model of psychical conflict under epistemic conditions of uncertainty, in which the owners of capital are perpetually torn between hoarding capital in the money form and long-term investment in wealth-generating economic production. To develop the psychical content of capital, I explore resonances between Keynes’s account of hoarding and Freud’s account of obsessional neurosis.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/705295","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43671170","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":"An Alternative Genealogy for Global Capitalism: The Rhine Becomes an Inland Sea, 1792–1815","authors":"J. Livesey","doi":"10.1086/705297","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/705297","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues that the change that opened the door to a capitalist world, one dominated by capitalist norms, was the alteration to the boundary between economic and public power that followed the era of the democratic revolution and in particular the French Revolution. There is consensus of the institutional creativity fostered by the resistance to Louis XIV. The role of the French Revolution and the Congress settlement in fostering capitalist innovation has not attracted the same attention. This article advances the view that the Congress settlement transposed the political universalism of the Revolution into an economic register. The article focuses on the evolution of the international legal regime regulating trade on the Rhine to illuminate the genealogy of capitalist universalism.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/705297","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46666861","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":"The Predestination of Capital: Projecting E. I. Du Pont de Nemours and Company into the New World","authors":"M. Giraudeau","doi":"10.1086/702607","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/702607","url":null,"abstract":"The article studies the role of entrepreneurial techniques in the capitalization of early industrial ventures. It focuses on the preparation and circulation of project proposals by the Du Pont de Nemours family, ahead of their transplantation to the United States: father Pierre Samuel’s 1797 plan for an agricultural colony and his son Irénée’s 1800 project for a gunpowder manufactory. The two men and the types of projects they proposed did not enjoy the same amount of credit in investor circles, leading them to rely on different territorialization techniques in their proposals. The father located the proposed colony in the geographical space of the United States to narrate a single and hesitant path into the future. The son relied on accounting simulations to prove that profits would ensue, whatever the circumstances, in the calculable space of American markets. His project was assigned not just a destination but also a destiny.","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/702607","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45840778","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":"Front Cover","authors":"","doi":"10.1086/704230","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/704230","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43410,"journal":{"name":"Critical Historical Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/704230","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47350045","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}