Worlds of Economic Thinking in 20th Century China
This talk will take up three decades of debate when “the economic” as a category of social activity and disciplinary knowledge was heavily contested: the 1930s, in the context of global financial crisis; the 1940s, in the context of total global war; and the 1950s, in the context of China's transition to socialism. By examining how “the economic” is conceptualized flexibly in proximate albeit very differently-situated historical moments, the project engages in a critique of the universal stability of social scientific/economic categories across time and space, while also introducing a set of important Chinese intellectuals whose deep engagement with capitalism, in China and as a global structure, should be more widely known. This project bridges intellectual histories of China, Europe, economics, social science, Marxism, and the mid-twentieth century world.
Rebecca E. Karl is Professor of History at New York University. She is the author, most recently, of China’s Revolutions in the Modern World: A Brief History (Verso, 2020), and The Magic of Concepts: History and the Economic in Twentieth-Century China (Duke University Press, 2017). She is also the author of Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World: A Concise History (Duke University Press, 2010). Karl is co-editor and co-translator (with Lydia Liu and Dorothy Ko) of The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory (Columbia University Press, 2013). She is a Founding Editor of Positions Politics, and of the Critical China Scholars collective.