Beckert Sven - American capitalism: New histories

CONTENTS

WOODY HOLTON

JULIA OTT

KIM PHILLIPS-FEIN

RICHARD WHITE

AMY DRU STANLEY

SETH ROCKMAN

CHRISTOPHER TOMLINS

MARY POOVEY

PETER KNIGHT

MICHAEL RALPH

ELIGA H. GOULD

PETER A. COCLANIS

MICHAEL ZAKIM

KRIS MANJAPRA

T his book has been made possible by many people and institutions. First, and most important, we want to thank the students, scholars, and other participants who have animated the Workshop on the Political Economy of Modern Capitalism for many years. Their creativity, energy, and insight drove the discussions that made this book possible. A special thanks to Alexander Keyssar, who helped create the Workshop, and to Arthur Patton-Hock, who has provided the managerial prowess that keeps the Workshop going. We are grateful to Larissa Kennedy, Monnikue McCall, and the directors of the Charles Warren Center, Liz Cohen, Joyce Chaplin, Nancy Cott, Walter Johnson, and Vince Brown for their support. We have also benefited from the support of the Harvard Law School, the Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the David Howe Fund for Business and Economic History for the resources that have enabled us to run the Workshop for so many years. A big thank-you also to the Harvard History Department, including Mary McConnell, for long-running support of the Workshop in general, and of this book in particular.

Many people contributed to the production of this volume, including Shaun Nichols, Rachel Steely, and Martha Shulman. Peter Knight at the University of Manchester, Christopher McKenna at the University of Oxford, and Julia Ott at the New School convened a series of conferences that stimulated the book. We also greatly appreciate the energy and dedication that the speakers and commentators at the 2011 Conference on the New History of American Capitalism brought to Harvard University. Thanks particularly to Seth Rockman, Amy Dru Stanley, and Suzanne Desan for essential help during formative stages. We are especially grateful to Ashley Fournier Davis and Susan Jane Smith for their adept coordination and support of the entire process.

Bridget Flannery-McCoy was an amazing editor throughout. We appreciate the invaluable support of Christian Winting and Marielle Poss at Columbia University Press; the series editors, Devin Fergus, Louis Hyman, Bethany Moreton, and Julia Ott; and Erin Davis and the team at Westchester Publishing Services for their great work.

Finally, we thank friends and family who coached and cajoled. We imagine that each contributing author would agree. We take the occasion here to thank particularly Robert Husson and Lisa McGirr.

O ver the last decade, attention to capitalism as a political economic form has skyrocketed. Newspapers of all political stripes debate the future of capitalism. Pope Francis has made capitalism a central theme of his papacy. A French economist, Thomas Piketty, has attained rock star status for publishing a book on the manifold inequalities he attributes to capital. And a cottage industry producing books predicting the end of capitalism

Since the early 2000s, however, debates on capitalism have returned with a vengeance. And historians, ever attentive to the world they live in, have taken note. Driven by student interest, the focus on the history of capitalism emerged first as a teaching field at American universities. Soon the history of capitalism became a framework that organized a burgeoning wave of research perhaps best demonstrated by a surge of conferences on the topic.

The attention to capitalism among historians flows from a convergence of events. Most obviously, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, capitalism has come to predominate throughout much of the worldthe end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union having undermined competing modes of organizing economic activity. Capitalism of a wide variety of institutional and ideological stripes now characterizes all developed economies. Many in the postcolonial world join in recognizing capitalisms impact, whether they identify it as a model for engendering economic growth or target it as an impediment to sustainable development. The international institutions that most powerfully coordinate financial, trade, and economic relations today overwhelmingly assume capitalist economies as their paradigm. So much has the political economy of capitalism and Western liberalism come to dominate that in 1992 an American political theorist, Francis Fukuyama, argued that we had reached the end of history. To him, it seemed that the contemporary political economy would structure economic, social, and political relations into the foreseeable future.