Page 8 - Culture Society and Economy

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Introduction

This book seeks to make seven main points. My first argument concerns
the role that cultural studies have played in sidelining interest in eco-
nomic questions in modern social sciences. The form in which this has
been expressed is in ritual rejections of ‘economism’. The examples of
this discussed are the works of Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy. While
economism is certainly to be deplored, this term has been so loosely used
that it has almost lost all meaning. The rejection of ‘economism’ has led
to a decline in economic knowledge in cultural and sociological theory
and a consequent weakening in the ability to develop convincing eco-
nomic alternatives to capitalism and globalization. Above all, therefore,
this book is an appeal for a return to the serious study of economics
which sociology and anthropology once displayed in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries.
My second point is that the most important empirical and theoretical
reality for ordinary people and the social sciences to grasp today is the
significance of the emergence of corporate (monopoly) capital since the
beginning of the twentieth century. This process has had a number of
consequences which have been and continue to be fundamental for
world social, economic and political development. First of all, it repre-
sents the passing of a model of liberal bourgeois society which provided
(and still provides) the social, economic and political basis for traditional
Anglo-Saxon notions of the individual and of liberal democracy. This is
the Hobbes–Locke civil society tradition which was, of course, itself not
uniform. 1
This supersession of an economy based on medium-sized enterprises
of approximately equal size competing non-monopolistically in the mar-
ket (the model of Adam Smith) is a far cry from the Behemoths which
today dominate national and world economies, as scholars such as Franz
2
Neumann long ago argued. Indeed, as many have pointed out, today’s