Capitalism

The analysis of capitalism — including its historical development, its core institutional structures, and its underlying social and cultural logics — was central to the concerns of the classical sociological theory of Marx, Durkheim, Weber and Simmel, and to critical sociologies, which were mainly Marxist or Weberian in orientation, that emerged from the mid-20th century onwards. But with the collapse of the Soviet bloc in the late-1980s and the accompanying postmodern turn, sociological analyses and critiques of capitalism slipped somewhat out of fashion (there were, of course, important exceptions: Jameson, 1991; Callinicos, 1991; Lash and Urry, 1987, 1994). This situation was reinforced by the next generation of ‘modernity’ thinkers, in particular Ulrich Beck and Zygmunt Bauman, who rarely theorised their respective ‘reflexive’ or ‘liquid’ modernities as being explicitly capitalist in form (see Chapter 7). Sociological theories of globalisation, in particular those that emerged throughout the 1990s and early-2000s, also have had a tendency to address the complexities of transnational social and cultural forms in isolation from a broader analysis of capitalist development (Immanuel Wallerstein’s extensive work on the capitalist world-economy is one notable exception, see for example Wallerstein, 2001). And a comparable situation can be found in new media theory which, inspired by figures such as Marshall McLuhan and more recently Friedrich Kittler and Katherine Hayles, has raised important questions of materiality and embodiment but has often done by making no reference whatsoever to capitalist society or culture (see Gane and Beer, 2008: 106–20).

Aesthetics · Capitalism · Epistemology · Globalization · Late capitalism · Marxist philosophy · Materiality (auditing) · Modernity · Political science · Politics · Postmodernism · Social science · Sociology · Critical Theory and Philosophy · Elite Sociology and Global Capitalism · Law · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism