Max Weber claimed that while Protestantism provided the proper ethos necessary to spur capitalism, Eastern religions did not. Japan’s economic success has belied his hypothesis, and while there have been various theories explaining its rise, perhaps Weber’s own claims regarding the connection between embeddedness and capitalism best explain Japan’s rise. Simply put, Japanese capitalism was born...

Th e dynamics of the emerging transnational stage in world capitalism cannot be understood through the blinkers of nation-state-centric thinking. In her study Empire of Capital, Ellen Meiksins Wood exhibits the reification and outdated nation-state-centric thinking that plagues much recent work on world capitalism and US intervention, expressed in the confusing notion of a ‘new imperialism’. Th...

W E A L T H AND POVERTY* according to the preface is the culmination of a ten-year study of economics that began when the author read Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom.’ Gilder’s study led through the works of economists Schumpeter and Keynes and into the “supply-side” school of economics. The book itself (hereafter, sometimes denoted by WP) sprang from an earlier sociological study of p...

The literature on political economy has over the years divided into two reasonably distinct areas of concern: international and comparative political economy. International political economy tends to concern itself with global trends—in terms of global flows of investment and trade—and with global actors and industries—including multinational corporations, international regulatory regimes and b...

Maurizio Lazzarato argues that contemporary capitalism functions through two central apparatuses: Social subjection and machinic enslavement. Social subjection equips individuals with a subjectivity, assigning them identities, sexes, bodies, professions, and other markers of identity, along with a sense of their own individual agency within society. Machinic enslavement arises out of the growin...

In an Arts and Sciences conference held in St. Louis, United States, in 1906, Max Weber offered a remarkable interpretation of the expansion of modern capitalism in Germany’s countryside1. Establishing the historical characteristics of the different types of capitalism consolidated in the rural areas of East and West Germany, as well as their distinctions in relation to the North American exper...

This article describes an emergent logic of accumulation in the networked sphere, ‘surveillance capitalism,’ and considers its implications for ‘information civilization.’ The institutionalizing practices and operational assumptions of Google Inc. are the primary lens for this analysis as they are rendered in two recent articles authored by Google Chief Economist Hal Varian. Varian asserts four...

(NLR 146), Fredric Jameson argues that pastiche, rather than parody, is the appropriate mode of postmodernist culture. ‘Pastiche’, he writes, ‘is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar mask, speech in a dead language; but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongsid...

Humans are exploiting the Earth in an unsustainable manner, which is accelerating both environmental degradation and loss of biodiversity. Moreover, owing to global climate change, the rates of deterioration and extinction will probably increase in the near future. The scientific community has been highly sensitive to this alarming development and increased the number of baseline and ecological...