The Separation of the Economic and the Political in Social Thought and Historical Reality

Jonah Stuart Brundage, University of Michigan

Sociologists and social theorists often treat the "political" and the "economic" as distinct and separate (though interacting) forms of power. In this paper, I argue that rather than an ontological commitment, as is typical, the distinctness of political and economic powers is a historical question, and I suggest historical conditions under which it obtains: the centralization and abstraction of public authority (as in modern states) and the relegation of major appropriation and accumulation processes to a private sphere (as in capitalist market economies). Although it provides a plausible representation of much modern life, then, treating the political and the economic as ontologically distinct may impede historical explanations of the emergence of modern states and capitalism ("transitions to modernity"), and it may blind contemporary analyses to moments and ways that politics and economics become re-fused ("transitions out of modernity"?). I thus propose a framework that accommodates the separation of the economic and the political as a historically specific reality while opening a field of investigation into its historical conditions of possibility.

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 Presented in Session 143. Power and Normativity in Society and History II: Historicism Conceptually Reconfigured