Elements of a Pragmatic Theory of Capitalism

This paper offers a review of the recent literature on capitalism in historyand sociology inspired by the Pragmatist perspective. In historical sociology and economic sociology, capitalism has largely been discussed interms of its institutional attributes, e. g. property rights, money, markets,proletarianization of labor, supportive governments, etc. This approachcan tentatively be called “attribute-based.” In contrast to the “attributebased” approach, the pragmatic approach takes a different perspective oncapitalism, treating it as a set of practices rather than a set of institutions.Thus, capitalism appears as a set of historically specific valuation practices,whereby legal property is transformed into income-generating assets. Thefirst part of the paper describes the origins of the “pragmatic turn” in thestudy of capitalism in economic sociology and the “new” history of capitalism. For the former, the emergence of the pragmatic approach to capitalismresulted from the development of the research program on “economization”elaborated by Koray Çalışkan and Michel Callon. For the latter, the impetuscame from the necessity to rethink the economic characteristics of chattel slavery in the history of American capitalism, as well as the history ofthe trans-Atlantic economy more generally. The second part of the paperfocuses on the divergences between “attribute-based” and pragmatic approaches to capitalism. The latter presupposes a turn from representationto action, putting the temporal organization of capital as a process into thecentre of analysis, a turn from commodification processes to the processesof capitalization or assetization, as well as the role of competent agents inthese processes. In conclusion, several tentative generalizations are offeredregarding the prospects of the pragmatic approach to capitalism

Capitalism · Economics · Epistemology · Neoclassical economics · Political science · Economic Theory and Institutions · Elite Sociology and Global Capitalism · Law · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism