On his book Foretelling the End of Capitalism: Intellectual Misadventures since Karl Marx
Cover Interview of September 16, 2020
The wide angle
Foretelling the End of Capitalism looks back into the past to answer key questions for our time. But
this has nothing to do with the uses of the past one often finds in American newspapers
these days, namely the search for historical precedents for current problems.
This craze for continually comparing situations of the present with situations
of the past, which are always the product of unrepeatable circumstances, is
good for writing likable op-eds but has little scientific basis.
The way the book uses history is different
and this certainly has to do with my biography. I come from an intellectual tradition,
that of continental thought, where history is considered to be a social
science. The study of the past serves to identify regularities in human behavior
but also the principles that govern social change. It helps to explain why
human institutions are time- and place-specific, but at the same time why they
change only very slowly and resist attempts to destabilize them.
If I were to think of the authors and
currents that have influenced me the most over the years, these would
definitely include classics of social theory such as Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim,
and Max Weber. They created categories that are still indispensable for
understanding the world we live in. Equally important would be the later French
and German historical scholarship, with its emphasis on structures rather than
events, and cultural anthropology, which offers the tools for decoding the
grammar of societies. Finally, I drew important methodological lessons from
hermeneutics, a non-naïve approach to “truth,” and from Frankfurt’s critical
theory, a powerful antidote against irrational faith in progress.
While my book unquestionably bears the
signs of all these influences, it’s also the result of more practical concerns.
In fact, during the past decade my research and teaching interests have
increasingly focused on the relationship between politics and the economy, and
on how the former intervenes in human societies to regulate the latter.
Capitalism is the terrain on which this relationship is most conflictual and
where more extensive forms of regulation are needed.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
The wide angle
Foretelling the End of Capitalism looks back into the past to answer key questions for our time. But this has nothing to do with the uses of the past one often finds in American newspapers these days, namely the search for historical precedents for current problems. This craze for continually comparing situations of the present with situations of the past, which are always the product of unrepeatable circumstances, is good for writing likable op-eds but has little scientific basis.
The way the book uses history is different and this certainly has to do with my biography. I come from an intellectual tradition, that of continental thought, where history is considered to be a social science. The study of the past serves to identify regularities in human behavior but also the principles that govern social change. It helps to explain why human institutions are time- and place-specific, but at the same time why they change only very slowly and resist attempts to destabilize them.
If I were to think of the authors and currents that have influenced me the most over the years, these would definitely include classics of social theory such as Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber. They created categories that are still indispensable for understanding the world we live in. Equally important would be the later French and German historical scholarship, with its emphasis on structures rather than events, and cultural anthropology, which offers the tools for decoding the grammar of societies. Finally, I drew important methodological lessons from hermeneutics, a non-naïve approach to “truth,” and from Frankfurt’s critical theory, a powerful antidote against irrational faith in progress.
While my book unquestionably bears the signs of all these influences, it’s also the result of more practical concerns. In fact, during the past decade my research and teaching interests have increasingly focused on the relationship between politics and the economy, and on how the former intervenes in human societies to regulate the latter. Capitalism is the terrain on which this relationship is most conflictual and where more extensive forms of regulation are needed.