Daniel Steinmetz- Jenkins: You state the following about defining capitalism: “Although it is still quite hard to define, it remains quite easy to see.” What do you mean by this? MS: Marx’s hostility to the idea of equality was based on the initial idea that laws or rules work like markets and prices, because they apply generally to everyone irrespective of their real differences. Markets, as the saying goes, are impersonal, because the things that make markets possible, like quantities and prices, are measurable. But people have personalities, and some aspects of personality are incommensurable. Marx’s hostility towards equality was connected to a set of distinctions between singularity and universality, particularity and generality, irrationality and rationality—or, to put it more directly, between whatever is involved in making me different from you, although we are both human beings and, in this respect, are subject to the same sort of causal processes that are built into natural and human life. We live, in short, in a causally determined world, and the propensity to subordinate individuality to generality is an effect of how the idea of causation presupposes something fairly general that can be applied to something fairly particular. Deferral, then. A starting point for thinking about the intellectual debts that the new history of capitalism might owe to poststructural theories of language. I’ve only crudely drawn this parallelism, but I hope it is at least suggestive. And to it I would add one more link, for which I would redirect you to the first of Levy’s definitions of capital I cited above: “a particular kind of pecuniary process of valuation, associated with investment, in which capital may (or may not) become a factor of production” (485).

For these royalists, commercial and political society represented two competing spheres of human activity, kept separate in any properly constituted society. But as counterrevolutionary writers like Alphonse de Beauchamp, the Comte d’Allonville and the Marquis de Villeneuve observed, the ascent of money and the monied had corrupted this arrangement and had brought on the reign of commerce through the influence of its fruits – capital – over politics. Under the guise of a new society founded upon legal equality and the rights of man, the agents of this transformation – who we now call the bourgeoisie – had done nothing but inaugurate the reign of private self-interest over the common and public good.The book is divided into two parts, “Problems” and “Solutions.” The first describes the development of the idea of capitalism and relates it to other political concepts. Sonenscher distinguishes between capitalism on the one hand and commercial society and the division of labor on the other. His analysis is political, and he regards these institutions as problematic because they lead to inequality. Capitalism is a system of property ownership, and arrangements other than private ownership of capital are readily conceivable. Commercial society, on the other hand, arises from humans’ propensity to exchange, and it is hard to imagine a world without that and its concomitant, the division of labor. The potential for commercial society or capitalism to act as economic engines producing growth is not discussed. 1 That’s totally all right! I was just confused as to whether I should be speaking on my own behalf or trying to consider your questions from the point of view of Levy’s essay. It is possible that I am forcing a connection to poststructuralism here, but I don’t think so. Levy’s refusal of the materialist capital concept is also a refusal of what Derrida called a “metaphysics of presence” in which presence is philosophically privileged over non-presence. To quote the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy again: “Western philosophy has consistently privileged that which is, or that which appears, and has forgotten to pay any attention to the condition for that appearance. In other words, presence itself is privileged, rather than that which allows presence to be possible at all.” This seems to me to be very close to the way Levy articulates his reasons for abandoning the materialist capital concept: physically embodied factors of production are privileged over the monetary and financial operations which make their construction, maintenance, etc. possible, but there is no logically consistent reason why that should be. The distinction between the “real” economy and mere financial activity is a hollow or illusory one.

This question structures the second half of Sonenscher’s book, which functions not only as an analysis of a series of proposals to mitigate the worst effects of the division of labour, but also as a characteristically original account of the works of Marx, Smith, Hegel, Ricardo, and Lorenz von Stein. Walk on parts for Rousseau, Sieyès, Kant, and a host of more minor thinkers form an admirable supporting intellectual cast and help link this book to Sonenscher’s earlier writings which have focused on the French Revolution and the intellectual history of the 18 th century. I spoke with Sonenscher on the implications of this older understanding of capitalism, on why the division of labor is now considered an essential aspect of capitalism, and on whether any solutions to it can be found today.One of the most interesting but relatively understated elements of Levy’s argument is his handling of what he critiques as the “materialist capital concept,” the definition of capital (as explained above) as physically embodied factors of production. Levy identifies this definition with an invidious division of economic activity into two metaphysically unequal kinds—it “treats monetary and financial dynamics as extrinsic to both capital and the ‘real economy’ in general” (486). Levy is suspicious of this distinction, and he argues that recent work in the new history of capitalism has for the most part insisted on transcending or ignoring it. “In recent years, many historians (and also economists) have almost instinctively broken away from the materialist capital concept… They have revived interest in issues of money, credit, and finance, phenomena no less and no more economically ‘real’ than physical production” (488).