Rethinking market society: Delineating the historical specificity of capitalism

Under the influence of what is referred to as “liberal materialist” tendencies in the social theory and historiography of early modernity, it is argued, our understanding of the novelty and historical specificity of capitalism has been greatly compromised. In both liberal and Marxist accounts, capitalism has tended to be defined in terms of the unfolding of autonomous, natural, linear and/or essentially technical processes, making it appear to be nothing but a further stage in the development of a continuous logic stretching back millennia. Now more than ever, with recent theoretical and political challenges to the validity of the concept of capitalism and, by implication, of historical materialism, it is imperative to engage in some clarification as to the historical specificity of capitalism and of the concept “mode of production”. This discussion attempts to provide such clarification: first, by examining the operation of “liberal materialist” assumptions regarding the origins and nature of capitalism in the work of two seminal non-Marxist theorists, Karl Polanyi and Max Weber; second, by making use of the insights of the “agrarian capitalist” theory of the origins of capitalism, most closely associated with the work of historian Robert Brenner, in an attempt to develop an alternative, yet still historical materialist, understanding of origins and specificity of capitalism; and finally, on the basis of a “renewed” historical materialism, by subjecting two of the main theoretical and political discourses associated with what might be called the conceptual disappearance of capitalism—postmodernism and “market socialism”—to critical examination. The study concludes that the capitalism's historical novelty and specificity, and the secret of its unique pattern of economic and social development, resides in the market-based regulation of social production.