Article ID: CBB912917538

Organizing the Marketplace (2018)

unapi

This essay engages a classic debate about the way nineteenth-century biology was informed by contemporaneous developments in political economy, and vice versa. However, rather than argue for a convergence between classical liberalism and Darwinian evolution, this essay traces the way that the concept of organization moved between both fields of discourse. Compared to the theory of evolution by natural selection, the logic of organization was far more teleological and, often, authoritarian. Instead of asserting that competition for access to scarce resources among autonomous agents yields adaptive outcomes in the population at large, it held that organic entities inexorably tend to develop from a state of simplicity to one of complexity. Moreover, it stressed the production of hierarchical structures wherein the whole was privileged over its constitutive parts, in biology as well as society. It is my thesis that the logic of organization proved especially attractive in debates about the transition from free-market to corporate capitalism, providing a powerful means to describe, discuss, and dispute the centralization, rationalization, and bureaucratization that contemporary observers often took to be characteristic of a distinctly modern political economy.

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Article Lukas Rieppel; Eugenia Lean; William Deringer (2018) Introduction: The Entangled Histories of Science and Capitalism. Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 1-24). unapi

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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB912917538/

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Authors & Contributors
Rockel, Stephen J.
Jin, Xiaoxing
Rosenthal, Caitlin
Söderberg, Gabriel
Mattig, Ruprecht
Thompson, Andrew S
Concepts
Science and politics
Social Darwinism
Capitalism
Biology
Liberalism
Evolution
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, early
18th century
20th century, late
Places
United States
Germany
Great Britain
Atlantic world
Tanzania (Tanganyika, Zanzibar)
Argentina
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