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Introducing Critical Historical Studies

2014; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 1; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/675083

2326-4470

Manu Goswami, Moishe Postone, Andrew Sartori, William H. Sewell,

Political Economy and Marxism

Next article FreeIntroducing Critical Historical StudiesManu Goswami, Moishe Postone, Andrew Sartori, and William H. Sewell Jr.Manu Goswami, Moishe Postone, Andrew Sartori, and William H. Sewell Jr.PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreWe launch Critical Historical Studies with a sense that critical understandings of politics, culture, economy, and social life need renewal and deepening.1 Over the past few decades, most critical thinking in the humanities and social sciences has utilized the tools of the cultural or linguistic turns as a privileged analytic lens and has broadly focused on questions of identity—that is, on inequities structured by gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity, and postcoloniality. An earlier style of critique, largely grounded in Marxist analysis of class inequities, has dwindled proportionally. We recognize the important analytical, political, and moral gains achieved by the cultural and linguistic turns. Yet it seems increasingly clear that the problems besetting the contemporary world cannot be grasped adequately without renewed attention to questions of political economy. Since the 1970s, during the very period when the humanities and social sciences were caught up in the linguistic and cultural turns, world capitalism has undergone fundamental and irreversible transformations—transformations that pose profound challenges to our understanding of both the past and the present. Critical Historical Studies aims to develop an innovative approach to historical transformations that is adequate to this challenge, an approach strongly influenced by a critical appropriation of Marx but that remains in open and vigorous dialogue with other theoretical currents. The journal encourages systematic exploration of connections between cultural and political change on the one hand and overarching transformations in socioeconomic contexts on the other.The current deep crisis of the world economy has significantly revived the question of capitalism in contemporary scholarly and popular debates, for example, about the legitimacy of neoliberalism, the threat of ecological crises and global climate change, or the causes and consequences of widening economic inequalities. This awareness of contemporary political economic issues has coincided with the emergence of new histories and historical sociologies of capitalism rooted variously in geographical, ecological, or institutional approaches; an advancing wave of ethnographies on the politics of dispossession and debt or on the construction and circulation of abstract financial artifacts; and even a substantial surge of heterodox economics. The multiple economic, ecological, and political crises that beset our present have thus bolstered the fortunes of political economy as a substantive line of inquiry. These cross-disciplinary developments attest to a growing distrust of the formalism of standard economics and a rising challenge to the utopian faith in market rule. In our opinion, these developments underscore why the question of capitalism and attendant large-scale transformations must be reintroduced and recast in intrinsically historical terms across social-scientific and humanistic research. Ever since capitalism emerged as humanity's dominant socioeconomic framework, its peculiar dynamic of creative destruction has imparted a specific rhythm and shape to modern history. The flourishing and decline of disparate cultural forms, social movements, and political struggles are necessarily interwoven with specific eras of capitalism's history. Grasping the influence of capitalism's trends in the present requires a rich sense of historically recurrent processes, constraints, and possibilities. Critical Historical Studies is intended as a forum for nurturing this necessary historical consciousness.We believe that studies of past eras or of ongoing historical transformations should be informed by critical reflection about why such work is worth carrying out in the present. Critique in a Kantian sense implies a philosophical perspective aimed at a reasoned clarification of the meanings and implications of doctrines, judgments, practices, and institutions. Our usage borrows in particular from the critical theory of Marx and the Frankfurt School, which aimed to evaluate institutions, ideas, and practices according to their implications for the possibility of human emancipation. Critical history, therefore, is in the first instance history that is based on a moral and political standpoint in the present, on a reasoned dissatisfaction with life as it is currently lived and an attempt to reflect on that dissatisfaction by means of historical investigation. But if critical history is necessarily based on moral concerns, it is not a moralistic history. It does not set up the historian as a sovereign moral judge of the past and the present. Rather, it analyzes what exists with reference to what is possible and does so while insisting on the necessity of deep historical reflexivity. A critical historical scholar, when wrestling with a historical problem, should always ask herself not only "Why does this problem seem important to me?" but also "How am I and my own moral judgments implicated in the problem I study?" Or "What is it in the current historical situation that makes me capable of seeing this as a problem at all?" Or "What are the political, discursive, social, or cultural conditions in the current phase of social development that pose this as a problem to me but that made it seem nonproblematic or differently problematic to investigators working in a previous period?" Critical historical scholarship, in other words, implies a reflexive historical critique of the conditions of possibility for the inquirer to engage in the inquiry at hand.In our view, what makes a particular work or approach historical is neither its temporal reference—for example, past, present, or future—nor its disciplinary origin. Historical studies entail a reflexive temporalization of the phenomenon in question, a mode of analysis as relevant for parsing ongoing financial dislocations as it is for understanding the dynamics of the French Revolution or nineteenth-century imperialism. The challenge, in either instance, is to explicate the entwinement of social practices within shared spatiotemporal matrices, rendering them intelligible as simultaneously conceptual and empirical problematics. Given that our present is shaped by the institutional and cultural forms of capitalism, critique must among other things take into account the specific forms of domination characteristic of capitalism—from various kinds of direct exploitation to the general commodification of social and cultural life, to the imperatives and constraints that underlie capitalism's temporal dynamics. Capitalism is not, from this vantage point, reducible to the economy or economic phenomena. Our concern rather is with the historical processes by which economic, social, and cultural forms become intrinsically interrelated.If our own perspective cleaves to the tradition of historically reflexive approaches to capitalism, a major goal of Critical Historical Studies is to foster open-ended dialogues with scholars whose perspectives are shaped by other theoretical perspectives. We welcome articles written from the points of view of, for example, critical ecology, feminism, critical race studies, critical realism, postcolonialism, critical geography, science studies, or critical legal studies. We encourage submissions from all disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. We welcome monographic research articles as well as theoretical interventions; critical reflections on current cultural, political, and scholarly issues; and substantial review essays. We are convinced that the full flourishing of critical historical studies requires many-sided arguments backed by sound research, searching theoretical development, and open intellectual engagement. Critical Historical Studies invites its contributors and readers to join this venture. Notes 1The idea of launching Critical Historical Studies arose during a conference held at the University of Chicago in December 2011 to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Social Theory Workshop, a faculty and graduate student forum led from its inception by Moishe Postone and William Sewell. Thomas Dodman, Parker Everett, and Stacie Kent, the three graduate students who conceptualized, planned, and organized the conference, felt that the workshop had, over the years, generated a distinctive yet insufficiently articulated theoretical approach to historical questions, one that needed to be fleshed out in intensive discussion. Critical Historical Studies represents, among other things, an effort to widen and deepen the ever-branching conversations begun at the conference. Next article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Historical Studies Volume 1, Number 1Spring 2014 Sponsored by the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT) Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/675083 Views: 2557Total views on this site Citations: 3Citations are reported from Crossref © 2014 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Jessica Stanier An Introduction to Engaged Phenomenology, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 53, no.33 (Jun 2022): 226–242.https://doi.org/10.1080/00071773.2022.2081533Stephen W. Sawyer Epilogue: Neoliberalism and the Crisis of Democratic Theory, (Jan 2016): 191–213.https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137581266_10Heidi J. S. Tworek, Simone M. Müller Editorial – communicating global capitalism, Journal of Global History 10, no.22 (Jun 2015): 203–211.https://doi.org/10.1017/S1740022815000030