By Julia Ott and William Milberg
Public Seminar - April 17th, 2014
It seems odd now to recall that up until a few years ago, the concept of
capitalism largely had fallen out of favor as a subject of academic
inquiry and critique. Most scholars in the humanities and social
sciences regarded the term as too broad, too vague, too encumbered by
associations with either Marxism or laissez-faire. Following
the collapse of the Soviet Union, capitalism could be taken for granted,
it seemed. No person or nation could escape the discipline of
efficient, spontaneous, self-regulating, globalizing markets.
Economists cut economies loose from society, institutions, culture, and
history. They repositioned their discipline upon models that assumed
that rational, utility-maximizing individual parts represented and
explained the behavior of the economy-as-a-whole. Many social scientists
— especially in political science — embraced these rational-actor
models. Others joined historians and humanities scholars in the
“cultural turn.” They struck out for new worlds of culture, those
ever-shifting systems of language and meaning, symbols and signifiers,
identity and consciousness that produce and reproduce power. In doing
so, however, these academics largely abandoned questions of class and
ceded the terrain of economics.
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