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Socio-Economic Review Advance Access published online on April 15, 2008
Socio-Economic Review, doi:10.1093/ser/mwn007
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press and the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

The temporalities of capitalism{dagger}

William H. Sewell, Jr

Department of Political Science, University of Chicago, 5828 S. University Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Correspondence: wsewell{at}uchicago.edu

The temporalities of capitalism are in certain respects unique. The temporalities of social life in general are ‘eventful’, i.e. irreversible, contingent, uneven, discontinuous and transformational. Although capitalist social processes are in certain respects super-eventful, the extreme abstraction that is a signature of capitalist development enables core processes of capitalism to escape from the irreversibility of time and to sustain a recurrent logic at their core. This means that the temporality of capitalism is composite and contradictory, simultaneously still and hyper-eventful. Recognizing this contradiction at the core of capitalism poses important conceptual and methodological challenges for those who study it.

Key Words: capitalist systems • economic change • economic history

{dagger} This paper will be part of the SYMPOSIUM: How History Matters.


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