Response to Lisa Wedeen's review of Capitalism and Christianity, American Style

Extract

My (outlandish) hope in Capitalism and Christianity, American Style is to help push capitalism closer to the center of political theory and political science. On my reading, a capitalist “axiomatic” binds together labor, capital, growth imperatives, and commodities. But these defining elements are also insufficient. A specific capitalist assemblage simultaneously depends upon, affects, and folds to varying degrees into its institutions other relatively autonomous force fields, including climate change, religious intensities, mutating diseases, scientific research, new political movements, novel financial instruments, compensatory hopes poured into investment and consumption, wars, and security anxieties. Such intersections combine with the intrinsic instability of markets to produce the volatility of capitalism. It, too, is an open system in a world of open systems that invade, energize, and threaten it.