Framing his essay, Sklansky explains the difference between the "old" and "new" histories of capitalism, being very careful throughout to avoid any claim that the new is better or smarter, or anything of the sort: it is simply a new avenue of investigation that raises interesting research questions and speaks to our contemporary sensibilities and concerns. The old history of capitalism, dominant only a few decades ago, focused on "proletarianization," on the process of making wage laborers. The new history of capitalism, Sklansky argues, shifts its emphasis toward "commodification":
The ceaseless process of churning work and wealth into prices and profits effectively converts qualities into quantities, rendering all things countable and commensurable by subjecting them to a single standard of pecuniary value. Joining material life to the abstract power of capital, commodification requires for its comprehension a more capacious kind of historical inquiry, transcending the old division of labor between intellectual and social history. (234)He goes on to explain attention to commodification forces historians to think about "implicit notions and norms" alongside "formal intellectual systems such as Newtonian mechanics and neoclassical economics."(234)
Why make this shift? For one, it allows for some productive synthesis. Take for example, the idea of commodified labor. Unlike proletarianization, which assumed a move toward wage labor, applying commodification as a lens for thinking about labor allows for narratives of capitalism that include non-wage labor, including chattel slaves, as well as "paupers, prisoners, 'coolies,' peons, sailors, servants, contract laborers, sharecroppers...."(237) Given the significance of slavery historiography over the last generation, it makes sense that any history of capitalism should be capable of thinking about slavery as part of the system, rather than as something exceptional.
A more important reason for the shift may have to do with our prevailing political economies. The story of proletarianization meant more to historians bringing to the past questions raised by their own experience of post-WWII industrial unionism. In our own financialized times, as industrial corporations increasingly and worryingly recede into the past, historians have begun to ask more about the importance of finance, and really of money, over the last few hundred years.
Sklansky divides the existing scholarship into three categories: works "conceiving capitalism" as a:
- "form of selfhood or way of being,"
- "a system of representation or way of seeing, and"
- "a framework of trust or way of believing." (234)
Sklansky closes the essay with a call for increased attention to capitalism as a "way of ruling, of establishing and exercising social power."(246) His idea here is not so much that we should imagine William Graham Sumner's "captains of industry" to be in charge of everything as it is that we should recognize the way that capitalism created new social and cultural forms that mediate power relations, for everyone from the wealthiest financier to the poorest whaleman. This looks to me like a Foucauldian approach, with the "microphysics of power" originating and evolving in shifting political economies. More specifically, Sklansky points to Ken Alder's Engineering the Revolution to suggest the ways that states shape industries, markets, and ideology all at once; he points as well to work that shows capital to act as a kind of quasi-state, and to histories of social thought like those by Howard Brick and Dan Rodgers that tie political/economic and intellectual change together.
On the whole, the trend Sklansky sees appears to have been made possible in large part by creative intellectual appropriation: Daston, Porter, Carson, Alder etc. are not "historians of capitalism." But Sklansky is right in seeing their work as consonant with and constitutive of the project of the history of capitalism. Up to this point, history of capitalism seems largely to have been working in parallel to or even borrowing from the science-studies-turn in history of science.
But I have high hopes that the history of capitalism will increasingly be a resource for us to draw upon, that in the process of appropriating STS for its own purposes, the history of capitalism will show us new ways to think about changes in science, medicine, and technology that are more aware of political economy.
Thanks for this post, Dan. I had not seen Sklansky's piece, but sat down to read it right after seeing your post.
ReplyDeleteThere are two questions I have, both historiographical I guess.
First, I was pretty surprised to see that he does not cite the bourgeoisie literature, such as the *Monied Metropolis*. Do you think this is just an issue of taste / space, or do you think Sklansky does not see that as being a part of the new history of capitalism?
Second, I quite like his characterization of the recent literature as parsing capitalism as a way of being, seeing, and believing in turns. I agree with you that he primarily associates the history of science / STS literature as intersecting with the notion of capitalism as a way of seeing (as an epistemic framework, of sorts). And this makes sense to me. But it struck me that much of the Hist Sci / STS literature also has a great deal to say about instruments of trust and credibility (ways of believing). I'm *especially* thinking about Shapin here, both the Social History of Truth and the more recent Scientific Life. But others have written a great deal about this as well, from Porter's Trust in Numbers (which he does cite) to (in it's own way) Objectivity.
As I said, I find his three organizing principles (being, seeing, believing) very useful and evocative. There is a question though about whether it is useful to view these as drawing relevant distinctions in the literature. To my mind, they do much more to make connections. For example, the literature on epistemic virtues and norms of sociability is all about cultivating oneself as the kind of person who can be trusted to see the world aright. As Matt Jones puts it, modern science is as much about creating reliable knowledge as it is about creating reliable knowers.
Hey Lukas--Thanks for both of those questions. On the first, I'm not sure about the absence of Monied Metropolis and its ilk---I can't imagine excluding it from the new history of capitalism since I gather that its proponents are more or less in favor of the label. I suppose that at some level it fits in the "being" category: creating capitalists is similar to creating clerks. But I also think a book like Monied Metropolis attempts to get more at the "ruling"---if I recall, Beckert tries to explain how the New York capitalists come to see themselves as having similar interests that they express politically, economically, and socially.
ReplyDeleteSecond: I had a very similar thought about the trust and risk distinction, and even about the three categories. In fact, the first time I read the essay, I wanted the "believing" category to be the culmination of the other two. I thought (and still think to some degree) that instead of "believing," we might talk about modes of social organizing. Given the world of plural identities and historicized facts that the "being" and "seeing" threads explain, I thought Sklansky's final category might in fact be explaining works (like Shapin's, or some of Schaffer's stuff too in STS) that show how people still manage to go on living (or knowing) together despite messy, plural social and epistemological worlds. In that reading, trust or risk are simply two of the solutions that people came up with. Yet I am aware that it might be possible to choose any one of Sklansky's categories and attempt more or less successfully to see it as the culmination of the other two, precisely because they are all overlapping and interlinked.