This article was originally published in Synposium Magazine, July 8, 2013. The author, Louis Hyman, is a professor of history at Cornell University at Cornell University, a Ph.D. in American History at Harvard University, and a bachelor's degree from Columbia University. His main research and teaching areas are labor history, corporate history, consumer history and capitalist history. His publications include Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink (2012), Borrow: The American Way of Debt (2012), American Capitalism: A Reader (co-edited with Edward E. Baptist, 2014, 2017), Temp: The Real Story of What Happened to Your Salary, Benefits, and Job Security (2019), among others.
Translator's profile: Li Hongyan, 2018 undergraduate student, School of History and Culture, Shaanxi Normal University, And Associate Professor, School of History and Culture, Shaanxi Normal University.
Earlier this spring, I got a call from a reporter from The New York Times. Because I've written several books about the history of personal debt in the United States, it's no surprise that journalists occasionally inquire about the situation, but usually they want to hear about the top five recipes for financial success, not the "real" history.
This unusual journalist, Jennifer Schuessler, asked me a very unexpected question: What was the purpose of writing the history of capitalism? I froze, paused, and then asked her where she had heard the term. She avoided answering—"Oh, it's talked about everywhere"—and I began to tell her where, in my opinion, this emerging subfield came from, and my answers were filled with "agency," "contingency," and other historical terms. She told me she understood.
As I said these words, I kept thinking about why she was paying attention to this. After all, the New York Times doesn't usually cover subfields of academic disciplines, especially history. So, you can imagine how surprised I was the next Sunday when I woke up to the headline on the front page of The New York Times: "In the history department, the study of capitalism is on the rise." "In days, the article became the most emailed report on the New York Times website, with hundreds of people suddenly commenting on the question of 'what is capitalism?'"
In many ways, the discussions on the forum were more enlightening than the article itself. While the Internet trolls have their say, I was even more shocked by the divergent views on the forum. Many readers point out what they think all scholars have left out or ruled out, all in an effort to figure out whether we are apologists for the supporting enterprises that have received huge sums of money (which we certainly are not) or communist "fifth columnists" (a much more interesting accusation, but neither are we).
What's more noteworthy to me than the personal attacks is that it's simply a novel discussion of capitalism. For most readers involved in this discussion, capitalism is simply what Karl Marx or Adam Smith explained (occasionally John Maynard Keynes or Joseph Schumpeter). That is, capitalism is a system that can be universally explained through one theory or another, whether you understand it or not. Either you read the author, or you're a layman. According to this view, the history of capitalism is nothing more than a logical manifestation of the laws of nature, like an apple falling from a tree. As one reader put it, "The 'history of capitalism' is as revealing as the 'history of gravity.'" ”
Karl marx
How nice it would be if what happened to us was as predictable as Isaac Newton's "Apple"! Historiography is not intended to prove a universal theory, but to understand, over time, how change occurs. As an academic practice, history is used to explain how events actually happened, and all the irregularities that arise with them. The key question here is not to define capitalism rigidly, as female pedantry does, but to think about why capitalism seems so simple, but it is difficult to define it simply. Over the past decade, historians have rekindled an interest in not only challenging established definitions of capitalism, but also trying to explain these very confusing definitions from a historical perspective (much to the shock of nominalists around the world).
As the United States recovers from its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, it is not difficult to understand this sudden sense of urgency. Booms and busts hit us with astonishing frequency. It is worth noting, however, that the term "history of capitalism" began to catch on in historiography sometime in the mid-decade of the 21st century, between the collapse of technology and the Great Recession. While the Great Recession rekindled public interest in capitalism, this new research began before 2008 and marked an important shift in intellect and generations.
In the past two generations, almost none of the historians who want to succeed have devoted themselves to economic issues. The research of New Left scholars in the 1960s and 1970s emphasized various movements (such as those of laborers, women, and African Americans) that fought for social change. The postmodern turn of the 1980s and 1990s squeezed the traditional topic of economic history out of the field of history, along with the lifeless subdiscipline of quantitative historiography (i.e., the quantitative orientation of economic history research). If a scholar writes a history of business, or worse, a history of business, then he/she seems to be exposing his or her right-wing tendencies. If you're writing about real business, many leftist scholars will feel that it's just a tribute to business leaders, as most historians write about the singing and weeping history of the oppressed. Some staunch scholars (all political factions) still exist, but overall, they are marginalized.
By contrast, the world looks very different for the generation of graduate students who grew up in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Decades ago, social movements had either succeeded or failed. In the seemingly never-ending economic stagnation, radical reforms seem like an illusion. The one-or distinction of the Cold War doesn't seem to matter that much. The questions that have inspired much of the study of social history have become childish. The old question of why there is no socialism in America has become, "Since we are in America, why should we talk about socialism?" We know too much about the deviant Trotskyites, but we know nothing about the bankers who dominate the world.
This cognitive divide stems from the belief that there is nothing worth knowing about. Alfred Chandler's The Visible Hand is the only book on corporate history that most graduate American history students continue to read. And the book reiterates all of the New Left's views on capitalism: that capitalism is inevitable, mechanical, efficient, and tedious. Capitalists operate according to an unstoppable logic, while the rest of us are "temporary agents" in the pursuit of free will. Few scholars would have expressed this hypothesis in such a way if asked, but it glorifies the questions that are raised. In the 1970s, cultural studies scholars borrowed the term "hegemony" from Antonio Gramsci, which has since been diluted into a silly analysis of advertising campaigns. In a sense, historians believe that when they read the works of Marx or Smith, they "understand" what capitalism is, so there is not much more to say.
The Visible Hand : The Managerial Revolution in American Business
Our generation of scholars, deeply influenced by all the historians of the New Left social movement, made race, gender, and class an important analytical perspective. If you're trained by reading Judith Butler's book, the business profile will look very different to you. When you look at banks like Michel Foucault, they look different. This historiographical paradigm begins with the assumption that marginalized people are important, that culture is essential, and that questions about gender and racial power cannot be discussed separately from questions about class. To borrow the title of Bell Hooks' book, the writing of capitalism must also be "from the periphery to the center." In any case, people must write history this way, even if the people we write about are not our heroes (our generation has never really had real heroes).
These stories begin to change when capitalist institutions such as banks and corporations are seen as real places with real people. The need to make a profit remains, but the choice of how to make a profit (if you really have one) is starting to become less inevitable. Beyond that, it's impossible to ignore how these choices are shaped, influenced not only by competition between firms, but also by cultural and political factors. While profit is important, it's just one of many factors that guide managers in making choices. The decisions managers make, in determining our daily lives, especially those at the bottom, may be more important than the decisions anyone makes.
In short, scholars like me, who will study the history of capitalism in the future, are doing the opposite. When I was an undergraduate at Columbia, Joshua Freeman's labor history class was held in a large auditorium, but it was still packed. In contrast, also when I was an undergraduate, I went to J.W. Smit) taught a course on the history of capitalism, but there were only four students in the class. He was a great scholar, but such courses were very unpopular. When my undergraduate thesis advisor, Elizabeth Blackmar, told me that I should stop studying labor and start studying capital (my thesis was about the radical conflict between syndicalism and Prohibition in the No Beer, No Work movement of 1919), I looked at her as if she were an alien. But over time, as I was in graduate school, I realized that she was right, that to understand the history of labor, I really needed to understand the history of capital.
Almost all historians of capitalism I know today have had a similar process of awakening. Kim Phillips-Fein, a historian of business leaders, supply-siders, and financial crises, pointedly: "If it were for another generation, we might all be labor historians." "When we went to graduate school, we felt at odds with normal research projects that excluded business and finance. We often met in the archives, when we asked each other about each other's research work. The first time I met Julia Ott was when we were waiting at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., for the end of the storm, and now she has long been my long-term partner. I've never met a self-proclaimed "financial historian" before I met her, and financial history sounds like something boring in the world. But then, as I began to write more about the bond market, I also began to think of myself as a financial historian (maybe neither of us was so boring). Still, when I told people in the early 2000s that I was doing research on the history of personal debt, the most common response I got was the tired, sluggish eyes of people. (Believe me, before the financial crisis, no one wanted to talk about mortgage-backed securities.) ）
Friendship can bring friendship, even across generations, like the likes of Blackma and Richard John, who felt isolated in the 1980s and 1990s, who now find themselves as bridges between the historiography of capitalism today and the old historiography of political economy, which placed great emphasis on the power of the organization of the capitalist system. Historians who have devoted themselves to these issues for many years have seen a surge in academic interest in the study of the "history of capitalism." What began as a small seminar on the history of capitalism, organized by graduate students, grew to strength, and by 2012, a national academic conference on American history identified its theme as "Frontiers in the Study of Capitalism and Democracy."
As the response on the New York Times forum reminded me, simply showing that capitalism has changed over time is in itself a major shift. Capitalism is not the end of history (as Francis Fukuyama famously asserted at the end of the Cold War), capitalism is the history of our time. The changes that have taken place in capitalism need to be interpreted. Even in our lifetimes, we have seen how the fundamental processes of capitalism, such as work and investment, have been transformed by policies, cultures, and inventions. Topics such as inequality, unemployment and debt fill our newspapers and blogs.
Francis Fukuyama
The crux of all this lies in the strange divide between economists and historians who seem to naturally share our interest in economic history. By the 1990s, economists had enormous influence in academia with their robust models, high salaries, and public image. Americans, at least in elite forums, actually trust their opinions. We, the humanists, abandoned the public sphere and retreated into obscure journals, but we are convinced that critical theory is still much more fashionable than mathematics, even if the White House has not summoned us.
In the aftermath of the Great Recession, voices opposed to market orthodoxy suddenly found new opportunities. After years of economic stagnation in the United States, we can no longer blindly accept the assumption that the free market is effective in the long run. Some of those ideas that prevail among marginalized groups are now widely discussed by more people. As historians have observed, most economists fail to provide an explanation that convinces people. In most cases, the story is more convincing than regression analysis. Historians clearly deserve to be better than economists; after all, Americans hate math to the same degree that they like the History Channel.
Historians, however, have failed to impart this lesson to the wider public. Readers love stories, but the narratives we provide about capitalism are left barely heeding. Some historians still try to impress people with clever terminology. Other historians cling to Marxist rhetoric or argue that to discuss how the economy works is to support it, as if whenever we discuss anything controversial, we automatically become its apologists. For the most part, this is not so much a matter of politics as it is a matter of imagination. We have not yet fully realized that the stakes have changed. We live in a time when it is highly likely that new ways of explaining economic problems will be created.
The study of the history of capitalism certainly uses statistics (and it should, of course), but what makes it fascinating is that it tells the story of real people. Policymakers make decisions to change regulations. Business leaders take risks in fearless risks. Workers have tried to boycott giant companies. Economic theory, for example, would tell us that depressions are the worst time for strikes and organizational strikes. However, the Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1936 took place in the middle of the Great Depression. A group of auto workers took part in a strike against the world's most powerful company at the time, General Motors, and won the victory. It is this reality, not any theory, that makes the history of capitalism different from the history of economics. The most significant events are precisely those that cannot be fully predicted. In this sense, the most fascinating history is that of entrepreneurs who challenged market balance and common sense.
Almost all of our economic theories about development stem from our history of capitalist development over the past 500 years. Only by understanding the development of capitalism can we hope to promote the development of emerging economies and guide them to the path of sustainable growth. Most importantly, historians must remind everyone that everything is changing, and capitalism is no exception. In a sense, this view is more radical than any pamphlet promoting the communist millennium. While the basic rules of capitalism may seem fixed (excess profits should be used for investment, productive work needs to be organized, private property needs to be protected), the forms possible are endless.
Even in the last two centuries, in our country alone, the many forms of capitalism have shown that even a simple concept as "investment" can be ever-changing. In the early 19th century, for example, the riskiest investment was factory investment, while the general investment went into the realm of commercial ventures. The return on your travel investment is guaranteed. Many friends (usually private) can get together to share a ship and a shipment, and after the trip, the ship can be sold and the profits can be shared. How should a factory be divided? When will its "journey" end? This long investment period seems too risky. If you want to invest in production, the safest bet is not a factory, but a slave. Because slaves could not only work, but also give birth to new labor. As the frontier expanded, slaves could also be sold for money. If someone wanted to borrow money, slaves could easily be used as collateral or even securities. What we think of as the factory representing capitalist investment was, to some extent, a secondary choice for investors in the 1820s and 1830s, which complicated our understanding of capitalism.
New Left historians know this history as well as we do. The distinction is not so much at the factual level as it is at the level of interpretation. In this sense, the "history of capitalism" may be less of an interruption in The historiography of the New Left as a continuation of the historiography of the New Left – just as every new generation wants to overthrow the previous generation. Agency is still important to us, but we limit it to the few powerful people who influence business and industry. We're looking more at companies that are still influential today than about social movements that don't. The agency we see is a problem that needs to be explained, not a hypothetical proposition.
Would we expect modern capitalism to evolve in other ways? Absolutely. But the historian's task is to confront the cold reality, not to create heroic legends. In our reality, ordinary people can only drive real change under special circumstances. The Flint sit-in strike is possible, but rather than seeing it as another example of everyday agency, it is better to understand it as a special event so that its lessons can be understood and applied. Fortunately, archives always provide more guidance on the peculiarities of the past, although they also prompt us to question our assumptions about how capitalism works. Every day, even if not everyone makes a choice, both then and now, and every day someone makes a choice that determines not only the past of capitalism, but also its future. The history of capitalism is not a temporary trend, but something we should seriously study so that we can make better choices when we have better choices in the future.