Capitalism

Following my brief stint in academic policy consulting as part of the Alliance for Jobs (1998–2000), and especially since the global financial crisis of 2008, I have been working toward a sociologically informed, historical-institutionalist theory of capitalism as a social system. I am more convinced than ever that without drawing on fundamental categories of capitalist theory—in a broad sense, from Marx to Schumpeter—the development of contemporary modern societies worldwide cannot be adequately understood. Of particular importance here is the historical-political—that is, the decidedly non-economically deterministic—element of the Marxist tradition. The texts included in this collection outline the research program and reflect on its development to date.