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More wrongheaded? “Phenomenology”, perhaps.
It’s a very impressive book. I’m more positive than Robin because of the scholarly breadth and depth of Beckert’s research.…
This looks like it was generated by A.I.
We are all agreed that this is AI-generated, right?
The image next to Wittgenstein is actually John Turturro saying ‘If pasta could talk, I’d understand it’.–On a lighter note:…
Although the hack occurred with less than 24 hours before our grades were due, our provost sent a pointless email…
And the image of eyeglasses in the linguistic turn panel are not eyeglasses. (oh wait, I thought we were playing…
That’s the upshot of this long and interesting review of Beckert’s most recent book by the political theorist Corey Robin. I’ve not read Beckert’s book, but welcome comments from those who know more about this topic. Please do not comment unless you have read Beckert’s book or read Robin’s review.
It’s a very impressive book. I’m more positive than Robin because of the scholarly breadth and depth of Beckert’s research. I’d also give Beckert more credit in terms of quality of writing. Robin is largely correct, however, about the lack of clarity of Beckert’s use of the term capitalism. I would say that Beckert does seem to have a somewhat better developed concept of capitalism than Robin’s description but does a rather poor job of presenting his conceptualization. In a very brief section early in the book, Beckert mentions that he was greatly influenced by Fernand Braudel’s conceptualization. Braudel had a tripartite pyramidal description of pre-industrial societies with a base of ordinary life dominated by non-market exchange, a super-imposed stratum of market exchange, and at the top, the type of long-distance mercantile activity that Braudel regarded as capitalism. As Robin quotes, Beckert does state that capitalism is about generating capital, but to my recollection, Beckert states this once in the >800 page text. Beckert never defines or discusses what capital means. I think that if you’re not familiar with Braudel’s work, or perhaps just as pertinent, the writings of individuals who were inspired by Braudel such as Immanuel Wallerstein or Giovanni Arrighi, it’s easy to get lost. As Robin points out, this is a significant defect.
I think there’s also another significant problem with Beckert’s analysis, which is the distinction between “war capitalism” and “industrial capitalism.” Beckert previously used the “war capitalism” term, a riff on Bolshevik “war communism,” in his Empire of Cotton. Robin flags Beckert’s distinction as problematic, but I think in the wrong way. Though this is controversial among economic historians, some scholars, notably Margaret Jacob and Joel Mokyr, see the 17th century emergence of what became the western scientific tradition as critical for the development of industrial capitalism. Crudely, no Newton, no industrial revolution. I would say that Beckert almost completely ignores this literature. As Robin points out, you really can’t differentiate “war” vs “industrial” capitalism on the basis of economic institutions or political economy. The industrial revolution may be better termed the Scientific-Industrial Revolution and it’s the contingent coincidence of the emergence of the western scientific tradition and the type of aggressive mercantilism of early modern Europe that drove European.
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