Elements of a Pragmatic Theory of Capitalism

Abstract

This paper offers a review of the recent literature on capitalism in history and sociology inspired by the Pragmatist perspective. In historical sociology and economic sociology, capitalism has largely been discussed in terms of its institutional attributes, e. g. property rights, money, markets, proletarianization of labor, supportive governments, etc. This approach can tentatively be called "attribute-based.” In contrast to the "attribute-based" approach, the pragmatic approach takes a different perspective on capitalism, treating it as a set of practices rather than a set of institutions. Thus, capitalism appears as a set of historically specific valuation practices, whereby legal property is transformed into income-generating assets. The first part of the paper describes the origins of the "pragmatic turn” in the study of capitalism in economic sociology and the "new” history of capitalism. For the former, the emergence of the pragmatic approach to capitalism resulted from the development of the research program on "economization” elaborated by Koray Caliskan and Michel Callon. For the latter, the impetus came from the necessity to rethink the economic characteristics of chattel slavery in the history of American capitalism, as well as the history of the trans-Atlantic economy more generally. The second part of the paper focuses on the divergences between "attribute-based” and pragmatic approaches to capitalism. The latter presupposes a turn from representation to action, putting the temporal organization of capital as a process into the centre of analysis, a turn from commodification processes to the processes of capitalization or assetization, as well as the role of competent agents in these processes. In conclusion, several tentative generalizations are offered regarding the prospects of the pragmatic approach to capitalism.