State capitalism has recently come to the fore as a transversal research object in the social sciences. Renewed interest in the notion is evident across several disciplines, in scholarship addressing government interventionism in economic life in major developing countries. This emergent field of study on state capitalism, however, consistently bypasses the remarkable conceptual trajectory of the notion from the end of the 19th century to the present. This article proposes an intellectual-historical survey of state capitalism’s many lives across different ensembles of writing: early Marxist pronouncements on state capitalism at the time of the Second International; theories of state capitalism evolved in the first half of the 20th century in response to the European experience of war and fascism; dissident portrayals of the Soviet Union as state-capitalist; post-Second World War theories of state-monopoly capitalism in the Western Bloc; examinations of state capitalism as a development strategy in ‘Third World’ nations in the 1970s and 1980s; and finally, today’s scholarship on new patterns of state capitalism in emerging economies. Having contextualized each of these strands of writing, the article goes on to interrogate definitional and conceptual boundaries of state capitalism. It then maps out essential institutional features of state-capitalist configurations as construed in the literature. In sharp contrast to 20th-century theories of state capitalism, present-day scholarship on the topic tends to retreat from the integrated critique of political economy, shifting its problematics of state-market relations to meso- and micro-levels of analysis.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Book
Viren Murthy;
Fabian Schäfer;
Max Ward;
(2017)
Confronting Capital and Empire: Rethinking Kyoto School Philosophy
(/isis/citation/CBB552795714/)
Book
Gorton, William A.;
(2006)
Karl Popper and the Social Sciences
(/isis/citation/CBB000772777/)
Book
Conway, Erik M.;
Oreskes, Naomi;
(2023-02-21)
The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market
(/isis/citation/CBB797392415/)
Article
Mischa Suter;
(2017)
Debt and Its Attachments: Collateral as an Object of Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Liberalism
(/isis/citation/CBB850632526/)
Article
Robert Fredona;
Sophus A. Reinert;
(Spring 2020)
Italy and the Origins of Capitalism
(/isis/citation/CBB952405438/)
Book
Avner Offer;
Gabriel Söderberg;
(2016)
The Nobel Factor: The Prize in Economics, Social Democracy, and the Market Turn
(/isis/citation/CBB932673235/)
Book
Rebecca E. Karl;
(2017)
The Magic of Concepts: History and the Economic in Twentieth-Century China
(/isis/citation/CBB898413640/)
Article
Werskey, Gary;
(2007)
The Marxist Critique of Capitalist Science: A History in Three Movements?
(/isis/citation/CBB000831585/)
Article
Trigg, Andrew B.;
(2004)
Kalecki and the Grossman Model of Economic Breakdown
(/isis/citation/CBB000471096/)
Thesis
McDonald, Ryan James;
(2012)
Reengineering Global Higher Education: American Polytechnics, Transnationalization, and Cultural Configuration
(/isis/citation/CBB001567374/)
Article
William H, Jr. Sewell;
(2020)
The Cultural History of Capitalism in France (With a Chicago touch)
(/isis/citation/CBB282715611/)
Book
Hein, Laura;
(2004)
Reasonable Men, Powerful Words: Political Culture and Expertise in Twentieth-Century Japan
(/isis/citation/CBB000550798/)
Article
Kean Birch;
(May 2017)
Rethinking Value in the Bio-economy: Finance, Assetization, and the Management of Value
(/isis/citation/CBB133617956/)
Book
Naomi Beck;
(2018)
Hayek and the Evolution of Capitalism
(/isis/citation/CBB470317386/)
Book
Ann Folino White;
(2014)
Plowed Under: Food Policy Protests and Performance in New Deal America
(/isis/citation/CBB624497168/)
Book
Jonathan Haskel;
Stian Westlake;
(2017)
Capitalism without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy
(/isis/citation/CBB376042726/)
Book
Tim Rogan;
(2017)
The Moral Economists: R. H. Tawney, Karl Polanyi, E. P. Thompson, and the Critique of Capitalism
(/isis/citation/CBB708276319/)
Article
William J. Novak;
(Winter 2019)
Institutional Economics and the Progressive Movement for the Social Control of American Business
(/isis/citation/CBB921649138/)
Book
Qin, Duo;
(2013)
A History of Econometrics: The Reformation from the 1970s
(/isis/citation/CBB001212957/)
Book
Mark Solovey;
Christian Dayé;
(2021)
Cold War Social Science: Transnational Entanglements
(/isis/citation/CBB237888537/)
Be the first to comment!