The Many Concepts of Capitalism

Mark Cohen, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

The recent resurgence of academic research oriented towards the concept of ‘capitalism’ is a little surprising. As a concept closely associated with Marxism, that theoretical tradition’s academic critics have repeatedly tried to offer replacements, and for some time in the recent past, they seemed to have succeeded in pushing discussion of it into a small academic niche. The fact that the term has been revived does suggest that it captures something important about social and economic history, but this does not mean that there is consensus on what it means, let alone how to theorize it. However vociferously they disagree with mainstream research that abandoned the concept, radical theorists of capitalism — especially within the Marxian tradition — are even more fractious in their disagreements amongst themselves over how to understand it. As for the “new historians of capitalism,” to say nothing of the economic historians who begrudgingly engage with them, they are generally at pains to disavow the intellectual baggage of earlier debates on the historical origins, dynamics, and limits of capitalism. This reluctance to engage with the challenge of developing a theory of capitalism has been criticized by scholars more sympathetic to Marxism, who contend that trying to talk about ‘capitalism,’ without settling on a definition that narrows it down to something in particular, robs the concept of its analytical incisiveness. In this paper, I argue that definitional debates about capitalism are apparently interminable because different conceptions of capitalism are trying to do different things. Scholars gravitate to using the term ‘capitalism’ because of a shared intuition that it represents a “historical mode of economic life,” but attempts to pursue the various facets of this intuition lead in quite distinct directions, with the result that debates can involve different approaches’ proponents seeming to talk past one another.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 54. States, Elite, and Capital