This article proffers an invitation to neoclassical sociology. This is understood as a Habermasian reconstruction of the fundamental vision of the discipline as conceptualized by classical theorists, particularly Weber. Taking the cases of Eastern and Central Europe as a laboratory, we argue against the idea of a single, homogenizing globalizing logic. Currently and historically what we see instead is a remarkable diversity of capitalist forms and destinations. Neither sociological theories of networks and embeddedness nor economic models of rational action adequately (...) comprehend this diversity. A neoclassical approach enjoins an empirical research agenda comparing capitalisms, and an ironic, historical approach to analysis to inform an immanent critique of capitalist possibilities. (shrink)

Abstract This essay argues that one way of understanding Gramsci today is as an organic intellectual of a class of managerial cadre which develops in advanced capitalism. With the growth of monopolistic structures and a deepening state role in capitalist society, a separate class of mediating functionaries emerges, entrusted with managerial tasks in running the economy and the state. The problems of conquering power from the perspective of this ?new middle class? that concerned Gramsci, were also those of the neo?Machiavellian (...) thinkers, Mosca, Michels, Pareto and Sorel around the turn of the twentieth century. From opposed political angles, they and Gramsci shared the concern with occupying the centre ground and mediate the extremes in a complex society. Today?s Gramscianism appeals to the same set of concerns. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

The current global economic crisis concerns the way in which contemporary capitalism has turned to financialisation as a double cure for both a falling rate of profit and a deficiency of demand. Although this turning is by no means unprecedented, policies of financialisation have depressed demand (in part as a result of the long-term stagnation of average wages) while at the same time not proving adequate to restore profits and growth. This paper argues that the current crisis is less the (...) ‘normal’ one that has to do with a constitutive need to balance growth of abstract wealth with demand for concrete commodities. Rather, it marks a meta-crisis of capitalism that is to do with the difficulties of sustaining abstract growth as such. This meta-crisis is the tendency at once to abstract from the real economy of productive activities and to reduce everything to its bare materiality. By contrast with a market economy that binds material value to symbolic meaning, a capitalist economy tends to separate matter from symbol and reduce materiality to calculable numbers representing ‘wealth’. Such a conception of wealth rests on the aggregation of abstract numbers that cuts out all the relational goods and the ‘commons’ on which shared prosperity depends. (shrink)

Seventy years ago James Burnham (1905–1987) was a well-known American intellectual figure. Burnham’s 1941 book The Managerial Revolution, a cause célèbre, provided some of the conceptual framework for George Orwell’s 1984. Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997) at the time was an obscure Greek-French political intellectual, writer and small-group organizer. He co-founded the left-wing Socialisme ou Barbarie in Paris in 1949 while Burnham was already on a rightward intellectual trajectory. The two, though, shared certain traits. Both emerged from Trotskyist milieus as critics of (...) bureaucratic collectivism. Both were anti-communists. Both were gifted writers and thinkers who were distinctly unorthodox in their approach, notably their scepticism about 20th-century managerial society and bureaucratic forms of capitalism. Then there were the divergences. At its inception in 1955 Burnham joined National Review, the principal organ of modern centre-right conservative opinion in the United States. Castoriadis became a leading figure of the French self-management left. Based on his Christian Gauss Seminar at Princeton, Burnham’s 1964 book Suicide of the West offered the most potent intellectual critique of left-liberalism ever produced. In ‘Proletariat and Organization 1’ (1959), Castoriadis referred to Burnham’s ‘pseudoanalysis’ of bureaucracy. Burnham was not a self-management advocate. As he abandoned Marxism his social philosophy drew on Vilfredo Pareto and other Machiavellian social theorists. The paper explores the affinities and the divergent political trajectories of two of the 20th century’s most interesting anti-bureaucratic thinkers. (shrink)

Explanation of inversions in Russian history causes major conceptual problems. The traditionally used conceptual apparatus and its theoretical schemes does not seem to really “grasp” this reality, at best, it only describes the Russian reality to some extent. It simply fails to capture the nature and mechanisms that lie in the specifics of Russian society and its dynamics. Hence, there are widespread conclusions about “pathology,” historical “rut,” constant matrix, and endless reproduction of the “predetermined” characteristics of social life in Russia. (...) However, expanding the conceptual apparatus with a constructive approach, combined with a specific historical approach, makes it possible to single out more than one agent of modernization processes (political elite, merged with state authorities), but at least two - authority and society taken discreetly. From this point of view, the inverse nature of Russian modernization has two causes. One of these is social, associated with the peculiarities of Russian society, where underdeveloped social forces are dominated by the imperious will. The second cause is related to modernization attempts based on external historical experience. However, due to the former cause, these attempts turn out to be premature and ill-conceived, giving rise to new conflicts and deformations in society. Both causes are complementary and intertwined. At the same time, there are general civilizational processes, such as urbanization and formation of a mass society, modernization processes in Russian society, including the formation of national identity. This creates prerequisites for a qualitative change in the development of society. If the main factors of inversion “from top down” are hasty and imitative, then doing things “from bottom up” presupposes slow development of the middle class, which, nevertheless, creates conditions for real mediation. (shrink)

The article reviews the social theory of Harry Redner with particular reference to his view of the relationship between high literacy (book culture) and civilization. The question is posed whether, alongside book culture, an axial-type metaphysical culture is also key to the definition of civilization.