Shortly after the financial crisis of 2008, Wolfgang Streeck emerged as a highly influential and ambitious critical theorist of capitalism and crisis. Streeck's crisis theory of capitalism is built around an account of neoliberal policy reform as a family of responses to economic upheavals that first emerged during the 1970s. Based on an analysis of four major shocks all occurring in that decade, I argue that Streeck's crisis theory is excessively economistic in its understanding of the crisis tendencies (...) that first propelled neoliberal reform and insufficiently attentive to the global context of their emergence. Theorising the significance of this pivotal historical moment requires more attention to the conflictual entanglements between societies of the Global South and North in the context of decolonisation, war and revolution, and a more nuanced appreciation of the political context of economic reform. (shrink)

Both Adam Smith and Herbert spencer, albeit in quite different ways, have been enormously influential in what we today take to be philosophies of modern capitalism. Surprisingly it is Spencer, not Smith, who is the individualist, perhaps an egoist, and supports a "night watchman" theory of the state. Smith's concept of political economy is a notion that needs to be revisited, and Spencer's theory of democratic workplace management offers a refreshing twist on contemporary libertarianism.

Scholars have argued that transnational networks of right-wing economists and activists caused the worldwide embrace of neoliberalism. Using the case of an Italian think tank, CESES, associated with these networks, the author shows that the origins of neoliberalism were not in hegemony but in liminality. At CESES, the Italian and American right sought to convert Italians to free market values by showing them how Soviet socialism worked. However, CESES was created in liminal spaces that opened up within and between (...) Soviet socialism and Western capitalism after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. Scholars from East and West at CESES developed new knowledge about actually existing socialism, which, due to the shifting context of the Cold War, seemed to provoke left-wing sympathies among the scholars and the students involved. CESES in fact required left-wing scholars, who had necessary skills and a fascination with a common project of democratic or market socialism, to create this new knowledge. The new knowledge that developed out of an East–West dialogue not only helped right-wing transnational networks to reorient their hegemonic projects, but also helped those on the left to understand actually existing socialism and what socialism might become. This knowledge could not be obtained without this dialogue and had to travel through liminal spaces. (shrink)

The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), was a provocative and profoundly influential critique of the Victorian nuclear family. Engels argued that the traditional monogamous household was in fact a recent construct, closely bound up with capitalist societies. Under this patriarchal system, women were servants and, effectively, prostitutes. Only Communism would herald the dawn of communal living and a new sexual freedom and, in turn, the role of the state would become superfluous.

This book discusses how rational choice theory grew out of RAND's work for the US Air Force. It concentrates on the work of William J. Riker, Kenneth J. Arrow, James M. Buchanan, Russel Hardin, and John Rawls. It argues that within the context of the US Cold War with its intensive anti-communist and anti-collectivist sentiment, the foundations of capitalist democracy were grounded in the hyper individualist theory of non-cooperative games.

Since historians first began explaining the emergence of capitalism, there has scarcely existed an explanation that did not begin by assuming the very thing that needed to be explained. Almost without exception, accounts of the origin of capitalism have been fundamentally circular: they have assumed the prior existence of capitalism in order to explain its coming into being. My intention here is to sketch a kind of potted history of these question — begging explanations and to consider (...) their implications. I shall start with what has been called the ‘commercialisation model’, which has its origins in classical political economy and Enlightenment conceptions of progress. This model is arguably still the dominant one, even among its harshest critics, including both the demographic explanations that claim to have displaced the commercialisation model, and also most Marxist accounts, from the transition debate which started in the ‘50s until today. But there does now exist an important alternative account, and I shall end by considering that too. (shrink)

Some years ago Ed Freeman and William Evan wrote an article offering a Kantian stakeholder theory of corporate responsibility. Ed was kind enough to allow Tom Beauchamp and me to publish that previously unpublished piece in the second edition of Ethical Theory and Business. That article has appeared in every subsequent edition. But a Kantian theory of stakeholder relationships is not, I believe, a complete Kantian theory of the modem corporation. I believe Ed originally intended to expand that paper into (...) a larger project but Ed’s philosophical interest in pragmatism has distanced him from Kantianism and his writings in stakeholder theory have gone in a different direction. Indeed in this postmodem feminist anti-foundationalist age, Kant is very much out of fashion. Since I am always out of fashion I had no trouble promising Ed I would complete the Kantian piece of the project. This essay is the condensed version and a partial fulfillment of my promise. A Kantian always keeps his promises. (shrink)

“Pure science” and “applied science” have peculiar histories in the United States. Both terms were in use in the early part of the nineteenth century, but it was only in the last decades that they took on new meanings and became commonplace in the discourse of American scientists. The rise in their currency reflected an acute concern about the corruption of character and the real possibilities of commercializing scientific knowledge. “Pure” was the preference of scientists who wanted to emphasize their (...) nonpecuniary motives and their distance from the marketplace. “Applied” was the choice of scientists who accepted patents and profits as other possible returns on their research. In general, the frequent conjoining of “pure” and “applied” bespoke the inseparable relations of science and capitalism in the Gilded Age. (shrink)

The Protestant Ethic not only had behavioral implications, as Max Weber and others have pointed out, it also had ideological implications in providing a moral legitimacy for capitalism. The Protestant Ethic provided a moral justification for the pursuit of profit and the distribution of income that are a part of the system. Currently there is a good deal of intellectual concern about the moral legitimacy of the capitalist system. Thus it is important to trace the origins of the (...) Protestant Ethic and recover the ideological functions it performs in a capitalistic society. (shrink)

What is the source of the antipathy of Catholic intellectuals toward free markets? That is the issue addressed in the present paper. We see the antecedents of this viewpoint of theirs in terms of secular humanism, Marxism and mistaken views of morality and economics. One of the explanations for this phenomenon are the teachings of St Augustine. He greatly distrusted the City of Man, seeing it as anarchic and chaotic. In contrast, his City of God is more orderly, but far (...) removed from the hurly burly of free enterprise. Another source of the rejection of capitalism on the part of Catholic intellectuals is liberation theology, which is Marxism minus the atheism of that doctrine. Both economic and cultural Marxism have played a role in the alienation of such intellectuals from the tenets of laissez faire capitalism. Are there any counter currents? Yes, the School of Salamanca, which has been all but forgotten in this community. (shrink)

Marxist notions of the origins of capitalism are still largely structured by the famous debate on the transition from feudalism to capitalism. This essay suggests that that tradition of historiography locates capitalism too late and sees it in essentially national terms. It argues that capitalism began, on a European scale, in the important transformations that followed the great revival of the eleventh century and the role played by mercantile élites in innovating new forms of business (...) organisation. However, with this starting point, it becomes important to bring Islam into the picture in a central way, since the Mediterranean was the common heritage of many cultural and religious groups. Islam shaped the tradition of early capitalism both by preserving monetary economy and through its own precocious development of the partnership form. The essay periodises this early capitalism into a 'Mediterranean' and an 'Atlantic' phase, and concludes by looking briefly at the ways in which merchants dominate labour. (shrink)

Based on qualitative analysis of the Soviet press and official state documents, this article argues that the Communist Party was, counter intuitively, an agent of capitalist dispositions in the Soviet Union during 1970s-1980s. Understanding the spirit of capitalism not simply as an ascetic ethos but in broader terms of the cult of individualism, I demonstrate that the Soviet party-state promoted ideas and values of individuality, self-expression, and pleasure seeking in the areas of work and consumption. By broadening our conception (...) of the spirit of capitalism, tracing the formation of capitalist dispositions as well as institutions, and showing that the culture of capitalism can come from within the old regime, I further the agenda of neoclassical sociology of studying varieties of origins, paths, and destinations of modern capitalisms. (shrink)

This essay examines the concept of criticism in the early works of Walter Benjamin. Critique is for Benjamin an attitude toward objectivity that treats it as a medium of reflection, and embodies a politics of ‘sobriety.’ This critical posture provides the early Benjamin with an original method of critiquing capitalism as a form of religion. Capitalist religion is characterized by the proliferation of ‘debt’ that robs the subject of the capacity for critical experience. Art critique and the critique of (...) capitalism are two valences of the concept of critique: positive critique, and negative critique. (shrink)

Martin J. Sklar's The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, a revisionist account of the early antitrust laws in particular and the political economy of the Progressive Era in general, offers a wealth of detailed research and a particularly valuable reinterpretation of the jurisprudence of antitrust law during the period 1890?1911. A neo?Marxist framework of analysis, however, detracts from the work and causes Sklar to misread the valuable evidence he has compiled. By misinterpreting standard economic models of market structure, he (...) incorrectly concludes that the large corporations could?regulate? the market if the government did not do so. By viewing the political economy as a comprehensively and tightly integrated structure of technologies, property rights, political powers, ideology, and social classes, he fails to give due weight to the diversity of influential interests contending within the political economy, especially within the?capitalist class,? and shaping its historical transformation. (shrink)

Alfred Sohn-Rethel did not just elaborate a materialist theory of knowledge, he also introduced the term ‘real abstraction’ into Marxist debate. However, he locates the origin of commodity abstraction solely in the sphere of circulation, conceiving of production itself as a mere metabolism with nature. This conception, in which the critique of capitalism aims exclusively at distribution, and which rejects the Marxian concept of ‘abstract labour’, remains widespread. It is our express intention here to undertake a critique of such (...) a conception for the benefit of a critique of the very mode of capitalist production. (shrink)

This essay explores the original political significance of the posters of May ’68 as a critique of capitalism, as well as extending this approach to a critique of contemporary capitalism in 2020. The slogans of ’68 are deceptively simple and we look to the importance of the political ideas expressed aesthetically as having immediate impact in the late 1960s, but also the underlying Situationist philosophy which influenced them.We also explore the contemporary significance of Situationist theory, especially in the (...) context of the renewal of Marxist thought in the 21st century. This renewed Leftist critique of capitalism emerges as articulated through newer social and political movements of the current times, particularly through the political philosophy of Slavoj Žižek and his auto-critique of the former Yugoslavia. (shrink)

Daniel Gaido’s The Formative Period of American Capitalism provides a thorough accounting of classical Marxist writing on the history of US capitalism. He combines insights from the classical Marxist and US Trotskyist traditions with an engagement with a selection of recent historical research to produce a provocative interpretation of the origins and rise of capitalism in the US. However, his failure to critically interrogate the classical Marxist and US Trotskyist traditions on the US or engage with (...) the growing historical research on the origins and trajectory of US capitalism weakens his contribution. (shrink)

Marxism has often been associated with two different legacies. The first rests on a strong exposition and critique of the logic of capitalism, grounded in a systematic analysis of the laws of motion of capitalism as a system. The second legacy refers to a strong historicist perspective grounded in a conception of social relations that emphasises the centrality of power and social conflict to the analysis of history. This article challenges the prominence of structural accounts of capitalism (...) by showing how the tension between these legacies has played out within Political Marxism, both orientations already having co-existed, somewhat uneasily, within Robert Brenner’s original contributions to the Transition Debate. Through this internal critique and re-formulation of Political Marxism, we wish to open a broader debate within Marxism on the need for a more agency-based account of capitalism, which builds more explicitly on the concept of social relations, to recover the historicist legacy of Marxism. (shrink)

What can the actions of stockbreeders, as they select the best individuals for breeding, teach us about how new species of wild animals and plants come into being? Charles Darwin raised this question in his famous, even notorious, Origin of Species (1859). Darwin's answer - his argument by analogy from artificial to natural selection - is the subject of our book. We aim to clarify what kind of argument it is, how it works, and why Darwin gave it such prominence. (...) As we explain more fully in our Introduction, we believe that the argument becomes much more intelligible when set, contextually, in a story stretching from classical Greek mathematics to modern evolutionary genetics: a long story, and a broad one too, encompassing everything from Darwin's earliest notebook theorising on the births and deaths of species, to agrarian capitalism as a distinctive form of economic life, to shifting Western reflections on art-nature relations. (shrink)

This short but highly ambitious book asks us to rethink the evolution of the ideas on which modern states are built. Larry Siedentop argues that the core of what is now our system of beliefs, liberalism, emerged much earlier than generally recognised, established not in the Renaissance but by the arguments of lawyers and philosophers in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. There are large parts of the world--fundamentalist Islam; quasi-capitalist China--where other belief systems flourish. Faced with these challenges, understanding our (...) own ideas' origins is more than ever an important part of knowing who we are."--Publisher's Web site. (shrink)

Labor is something everyone hates, and something everyone longs to escape. Labor Avoidance explores American capitalism, the only social system that openly avoids labor, and how it has become responsible for so much human struggle and misery throughout history.

Veblen used anthropological data as evidence to support and to develop his economic theory. He adopted many of Marx's categories and assumptions to explain the problems of modern capitalist society. Among them were class, alienation, and the essential benevolence of man. Unlike Marx, however, Veblen believed that man has to comprehend before he can act. Man can also not tolerate the disenchantment caused by a purely scientific and rational understanding of the world. Thus, man has a propensity to view the (...) world anthropomorphically, and this separates him from reality. In addition, the instinct toward workmanship which enables man to produce goods to improve his world, also generates new perceptions of and desires for ownership and status. From his study of emulation and comparison among primitive peoples, Veblen concluded that alienation results from the forces of production rather than of consumption. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Historical‐Dialectical Thought in Hegel and Marx Marx's Onto‐formative View of Human Nature Capitalism As a Counter‐ontological, Fetishizing Force Gramsci's Historical and Dialectical Campaign against Capitalism Conclusion Notes References.

For more than 100 years, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism has set the parameters for the debate over the origins of modern capitalism. Now more timely and thought-provoking than ever, this esteemed classic of twentieth-century social science examines the deep cultural "frame of mind" that influences work life to this day in northern America and Western Europe. Stephen Kalberg's internationally acclaimed translation captures the essence of Weber's style as well as the subtlety of his (...) descriptions and causal arguments. Now, for the first time in one volume, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism with Other Writings on the Rise of the West integrates Weber's exploration of the spirit of capitalism's origins with his larger project: a multi-causal analysis of the West's distinctiveness and its sources. Weber's texts present wide-ranging discussions on the Western city, state, forms of rulership and law, and modes of economic innovation. Moreover, in many selections Weber offers in-depth and insightful comparisons to China and India. Readings on the "economic ethics" of Confucianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and Catholicism further illuminate the distinct qualities of the West's trajectory and its diverse causes. A separate section examines the long-range influence of the ascetic Protestant sects and churches on American society.To draw readers into the material, this engaging volume includes extended introductions by the editor, many new translations, a chronology of Weber's life, an expanded glossary and bibliography, and numerous clarifying endnotes. In addition, Kalberg addresses a variety of debates concerning the central elements of contemporary life. Ideal for courses in sociology, anthropology, political science, history, international relations, and economics, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism with Other Writings on the Rise of the West is an essential resource for anyone seeking to understand the origins and endurance of the modern West. (shrink)

I dedicate this essay to the memory of the late Wolfgang Mommsen—the subject would have been congenial to him. It is one of a series of offshoots from a central project: a scholarly edition of Max Weber's Protestant Ethic with commentary. When I first told Prof. Mommsen of my plan in 1994 he looked me full in the face and gave a characteristic growl: “All that work!” Here was a man who knew what he was about. My thanks to Ross (...) McKibbin and Keith Tribe for reading this paper in draft. The article begins by examining Max Weber's relations with Lujo Brentano, much the most important “precursor” to Weber in the field of economics. In particular, Brentano conducted a form of parallel inquiry into the rise of ‘the spirit of capital’ in England 35 years before Weber looked for the origins of “spirit” of capitalism there, and the contrast between these two ideas casts much light both on Brentano and on Weber's Protestant Ethic. This personal history leads into a broader history of the transition in German economic thought between the 1860s – the formative decade for Brentano but also the era of Marx's Capital – and that of Weber's generation coming to maturity c.1890. Marx and Weber remain the two great canonical thinkers and original minds; but any authentic historical comparison between Marx and Weber must take in Brentano. The essence of the contrast between the generations is that between Weber's novel conception of an ethical ‘capitalism’, and the materialism and naturalism underpinning Brentano's and Marx's ‘capital’, although Weber and Brentano are alike as liberals, democrats and bourgeois. ☆ Some abbreviations for Weber: AfSS for Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik; GARS for Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie (Tübingen, 1920) vol. i; WL for Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre (Tübingen, 1968); Grundriss for Grundriss zu den Vorlesungen über Allgemeine (“theoretische”) Nationalökonomie [1898], repr. Tübingen, 1990; MWG for Max Weber Gesamtausgabe ed. Horst Baier et al. (Tübingen, 1984); Briefe for letters by Weber in this edition; ‘Nachlaß Max Weber’ for unpublished letters from the Geheimes Staatsarchiv, Berlin-Dahlem, VI. HA Nachlaß Max Weber. Lebensbild for Marianne Weber, Max Weber: Ein Lebensbild (Tübingen, 1926); Zohn for idem, Max Weber. A Biography (New Brunswick, 1988) tr. Harry Zohn. For Brentano: Der wirtschaftende Mensch for Der wirtschaftende Mensch in der Geschichte (Leipzig, 1923); Konkrete Grundbedingungen for Konkrete Grundbedingungen der Volkswirtschaft (Leipzig, 1924); Der tätige Mensch for Der tätige Mensch und die Wissenschaft von der Wirtschaft (Marburg, 2006) ed. R. Bräu, H.G. Nutzinger. ‘Die Entwickelung der Wertlehre’ for ‘Die Entwickelung der Wertlehre’, Sitzungsberichte der Königlich Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Philosophisch-philologische und historische Klassen. Jahrgang 1908, 3. Abhandlung (15 Feb. 1908), 1–84; ‘Theorie der Bedürfnisse’ for ‘Versuch einer Theorie der Bedürfmisse’, ibid., 10. Abhandlung (5 Dec. 1908), 1–79; ‘Die Malthussche Lehre’ for ‘Die Malthussche Lehre und die Bevölkerungsbewegung der letzten Decennien’ [1909], Abhandlungen der historischen Klasse der Königlich Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften XXIV (1906–1909), 565–625, 1*–39*. (shrink)

In this new book, David Harvey seeks to determine what is meant by the term in its different contexts and to identify how accurate and useful it is as a description of contemporary experience.

Building on discussions originating in post-humanism, the non-philosophy of François Laruelle, and the science of 'species being of humanity' stemming from Marx's critique of philosophy, Katerina Kolozova proposes a radical consideration of capitalism's economic exploitation of life. This book uses François Laruelle's work to think through questions of 'practical ethics' and bring the abstract tools of Laruelle's non-philosophy into conversation with other critical methods in the humanities. Kolozova centres the question of the animal at the very heart of what (...) it means for us as human beings to think and act in the world, and the mistreatment of animality that underpins the logic of capitalism. (shrink)

Within the context of today’s world overwhelmed by the increasing importance of capitalism, the need to analyse the relationship between man and capital in order to better understand the transformations culture has been undergoing. This endeavour relies on the idea that many concepts and phenomena whose presence in our lives is increasingly felt, and which are defining for what we call postmodernism, have originated in the modern times. The capital is an illustrative example to this purpose: it was discovered (...) during the modern era at the time of the emergence of the production process and underlay all transformations of later modernism. The growth of capital circulation speed has resulted in leaving aside its relationship with production and in its being re-rethought from the viewpoint of man’s desires. Thus, the transition has been made from the becoming being paradigm, theorised by the modernists, to the concept of volatile being, whose effects are being experimented in postmodernism. (shrink)

Conventional wisdom situates the historical origins of social movements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by attributing their emergence to the rise of democracy, capitalism, and the nation-state. In this article, I challenge this scholarly orthodoxy by presenting primary sources and historical scholarship that demonstrate how the German Peasants’ Revolt of 1524 and 1525 meets Charles Tilly’s criteria for a modern social movement. By challenging the standard narrative of social movements as a product of modernity, this article breaks (...) with the dichotomy between modern and premodern social movements and encourages us to rethink the concept of social movements. (shrink)

In The Scientific Intellectual, Lewis S. Feuer traces the evolution of this new human type, seeking to define what ethic inspired him and the underlying emotions that created him. Under the influence of Max Weber the rise of the scientific spirit has been viewed by sociologists as an offspring of the Protestant revolution, with its asceticism and sense of guilt acting as causative agents in the rise of capitalism and the growth of the scientific movement. Feuer takes strong issue (...) with this view, pointing out how it is at odds with what we know of the psychological conditions of modern societies making for human curiosity and its expression in the observation of and experiment with nature. (shrink)

The ongoing critical redeployment of primitive accumulation proceeds under two premises. First, it is argued that Marx, erroneously, confined primitive accumulation to the earliest history of capit...

Nicholas Kaldor was one of this century's most original thinkers on economics, his influence on British economic policy second only to that of Keynes. This book traces the development of Kaldor's thought as it underwent a remarkable evolution from his membership of the Austrian neoclassical school to his embracing of radical Keynesianism. He was also extremely quick to grasp essential changes in economic reality and to forge analytical tools to explain them. Although he was innovative from 1938 onwards, much of (...) his seminal work belongs to a coherent project of research which made him, together with Joan Robinson and Micha/l Kalecki, a leading representative of the post-Keynesian school, an outstanding critic of the neoclassical theory of equilibrium, growth, and distribution, and a convinced opponent of the monetarist school. The book also seeks to show how economic policy and political economy were closely connected in Kaldor's work. It was this that made Kaldor one of the most lucid and radical champions of the economic policies which, by blending political freedom with social justice, have been the outstanding feature of the great European tradition of social democracy. (shrink)

This article provides a history of private sector tracking technologies, examining how the advent of commercial surveillance centered around a logic of data capitalism. Data capitalism is a system in which the commoditization of our data enables an asymmetric redistribution of power that is weighted toward the actors who have access and the capability to make sense of information. It is enacted through capitalism and justified by the association of networked technologies with the political and social benefits (...) of online community, drawing upon narratives that foreground the social and political benefits of networked technologies. I examine its origins in the wake of the dotcom bubble, when technology makers sought to develop a new business model to support online commerce. By leveraging user data for advertising purposes, they contributed to an information environment in which every action leaves behind traces collected by companies for commercial purposes. Through analysis of primary source materials produced by technology makers, journalists, and business analysts, I examine the emergence of data capitalism between the mid-1990s and mid-2000s and its central role in the contemporary information economy. (shrink)

Breckman’s intention, as his title suggests, is to trace the development—or, more tendentiously, the origin—of Marx’s thought through his relation to the Young Hegelians, the principle figures of the Prussian left just prior to Marx. Though Marx engaged in frequent acts of polemical distinction between himself and these earlier thinkers, Breckman suggests we have been too quick to take Marx at his own word and to locate the source of his theory in “his opposition to the private property regime of (...) capitalism and the doctrine that underpins classical political economy and liberal bourgeoisie society”. This source, Breckman suggests, would be better sought in Marx’s appropriation and development of the Young Hegelian’s religious debates with conservative critics of Hegel who defended a personalist conception of God. It is one of Breckman’s central and most convincing contentions that these religious debates over the nature of God must be read equally as political debates between a defense of monarchal sovereignty modeled on the personalist God and a leftist critique of this conception, which struggles to construct out of Hegel’s “World Spirit” a secularized conception of social unity that might establish the grounds for a noncoercive political form. (shrink)

This article reviews Alex Anievas and Kerem Nişancıoğlu’sHow the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism(2015). It argues that the book offers a stimulating and ambitious approach to solving the problems of Eurocentrism and the origins of capitalism in growing critical scholarship in historical sociology and International Relations. However, by focusing on the ‘problem of the international’ and proposing a ‘single unified theory’ based on uneven and combined development, the authors present a history of (...) international relations that trades off methodological openness and legal complexity for a structural and exclusive consequentialism driven by anti-Eurocentrism. By misrepresenting the concept of social-property relations in terms of the internal/external fallacy, and by confusing different types of ‘internalism’ required by early-modern jurisdictional struggles, the book problematically conflates histories of international law and capitalism. These methodological problems are contextualised by examples from the Spanish, French and British empires’ conceptions of sovereignty and jurisdiction and their significant legal actors and processes. (shrink)

Since the crisis of Fordism, capitalism has been characterised by the ever more central role of knowledge and the rise of the cognitive dimensions of labour. This is not to say that the centrality of knowledge to capitalism is new per se. Rather, the question we must ask is to what extent we can speak of a new role for knowledge and, more importantly, its relationship with transformations in the capital/labour relation. From this perspective, the paper highlights the (...) continuing validity of Marx's analysis of the knowledge/power relation in the development of the division of labour. More precisely, we are concerned with the theoretical and heuristic value of the concepts of formal subsumption, real subsumption and general intellect for any interpretation of the present change of the capital/labour relation in cognitive capitalism. In this way, we show the originality of the general intellect hypothesis as a sublation of real subsumption. Finally, the article summarises key contradictions and new forms of antagonism in cognitive capitalism. (shrink)

Giddens's analysis of the writings of Marx, Durkheim and Weber has become the classic text for any student seeking to understand the three thinkers who established the basic framework of contemporary sociology. The first three sections of the book, based on close textual examination of the original sources, contain separate treatments of each writer. The author demonstrates the internal coherence of their respective contributions to social theory. The concluding section discusses the principal ways in which Marx can be compared with (...) the other two authors, and discusses misconceptions of some conventional views on the subject. (shrink)