Ben Fox has started a website, Shepherd.com, that promotes, advertises, and distributes books on specific topics by asking authors who have written on them. He picks your book and you give him a list of cognate books, ones that informed or relate to your arguments, with a brief introduction and explanatory remarks about each. He suggested that I provide him such a list pertaining to Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850-1940 (1994). Here’s the introduction and the list, with incomplete blurbs for the books, just hints for now.
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Capitalism seems to be under siege just now, after forty years of smug triumphalism under neoliberal auspices. But as Kim Stanley Robinson suggests in The Ministry for the Future (2021), it's harder to imagine the end of capitalism than it is to imagine the end of the world. No better time, then, to think through its origins and evolution, so that, by understanding its birth and maturation, we might begin to grasp the details of its decay and death. That way, we can see what is worth salvaging from it, learn to navigate a passage beyond it, and sketch the contours of the new society that is already being born from within it.
Here are ten books that I keep returning to when I feel the need, as now, to ground myself in the history of capitalism, to remind myself that it is neither a trans-historical mode of production nor an inevitable elaboration of human nature. As anybody who’s read Marx and/or Weber knows, the presence of money, markets, merchants, commodities, and greed does not amount to capitalism—these phenomena have been with us for millennia. What, then, distinguishes it as a mode of production from slavery, feudalism, socialism, communism, etc.?
You will notice that most of these books were published long before 1981, when the strident theories of neoliberal orthodoxy—supply-side economics, for example—were embodied in the “Reagan Revolution,” whose tax-cutting mania created a bipartisan world of serial crises which culminated in the Great Recession of recent memory. I have another “ten best” list in the works that will supplement these ancient texts with more recent attempts at periodizing capitalism. But this original hit list is, I think, indispensable; for the language these writers invented is the vernacular we still think with, and speak without thinking.
If you’re starting from scratch, I’d recommend that you read these books in the order I’ve placed them here (but the two novels, marked with asterisks, can be sampled at random, as useful antidotes to the solemnity of the treatises).
(1) Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (1946, rev. ed. 1963). This remains the best introduction to the “transition question,” which explores various definitions of capitalism and different explanations of how it emerged from the wreckage of feudalism in Western Europe. New answers to the same question are mustered in T. S. Ashton, ed., The Brenner Debate (1985).
(2). Karl Marx, Grundrisse (ca. 1856-58, trans. 1973). The notebooks that recorded Marx’s epoch-making break with his youthful ideas about the moral emptiness of capitalism, and his mind-bending encounter with the “most modern bourgeois society,” the USA. A rough draft of his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) as well as Das Kapital (1867 and following).
(3) Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904, trans. 1930). On the new personality type that defined necessary labor as the theater of freedom and unbound individuality rather than the scene of bondage, thus creating the possibility of a civilization that treated the unlimited accumulation of wealth as consistent with the highest possible morality. A polemic aimed at Werner Sombart, among others, who claimed that (the spirit of) capitalism is a trans-historical phenomenon, and, more notoriously, that socialism was an exotic foreign import in the USA.
(4) Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (1958). A second clinical opinion on the new personality type created and enforced by the emergence and development of capitalism. In effect, a diagnosis of the all too human “compulsion to work” which comports with that of both Marx and Freud.
(5) *John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960, 1967). What the everyday life of a 17th-century Virginia tobacco planter/merchant felt like. Serious, boisterous, hilarious, and historically accurate, best read alongside Edmund Morgan’s brilliant study of slavery’s origins in the Chesapeake, American Slavery/American Freedom (1975) and Rhys Isaac’s equally brilliant sequel, The Transformation of Virginia (1982)
(6) C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (1962). A reconstruction of the unspoken assumptions political thinkers and actors (like the Levellers who were the backbone of Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army) brought to their debates about the relation between the modern, post-monarchical state and the modern, self-mastering individual: the social-intellectual origins, we can now say, of what we call liberalism. Alternative but ultimately reconcilable approaches to the same period and issues are J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (1975) and Quentin Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought (1978).
(7) Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (1944). How the profits from the slave plantations of the Caribbean sugar islands fueled the industrial revolution in England. The start of a debate that is still producing impeccable monographs and political controversy. Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power (1985) is a useful counterpoint and supplement.
(8) Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1944). How the idea of a self-regulating market took hold in 18th and 19th-century England, and why the making of a propertyless working class was the turning point in the making of modern politics. Arguably a preface to the theoretical apprehension of fascism. Best read alongside Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (1958) and Jacques Ranciere, The Politics of Literature (trans. 2011), brilliant studies of how the maturation of modern-industrial capitalism forced intellectuals to comprehend and accommodate a new reading public, which is to say a new “marketplace of ideas.”
(9) *Richard Powers, Gain (1998). A novel, and yet the best historical account I know of the hesitant 19th-century transition from proprietary to corporate capitalism, told as the story of one firm located originally in Illinois. A poetic concordance, as it were, to Philip Scranton, Proprietary Capitalism (1983), Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand (1977), and Martin J. Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism (1988).
(10) J. K. Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism As We Knew It (1996). A brilliant feminist critique of political economy which draws on all kinds of post-structuralist theory to deconstruct the Left’s assumptions about its intellectual and political failures. Also to deflate the preposterous claims of neoliberal economic theory. Best read alongside Linda Nicholson, Gender and History (1986), which follows out the consequences and implications of women at work.
I'll leave the read and fix to more brilliant minds. I can only add that work and capital are mass killers.
Three months = about one book a week from your list. Really? And it culminates in reading your book, right? Does this include Zoom discussions?