This notebook contains some of the ideas, ambitions, hopes, anxieties, interrogations, and fears that randomly or expectingly came to punctuate the writing of the previous chapters.

The introduction initially approaches the topic of money and American literature via key passages from the work of Thomas Pynchon, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Toni Morrison. It then traces three key threads running through the following chapters. Firstly, it considers the close interrelationship between money and ideas of American nationhood: how the unity of the “United States” has been fostered, and unsettled, through monetary initiatives, schemes, and experiments. Next, it addresses the interplay between materiality and immateriality – “real” and “imaginary” forms of value – that has been a persistent topic of debate in American monetary history, as well as the closely related question of money’s deep affinity with writing as a different but connected form of value-bearing inscription. A pivotal, money-themed chapter of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) serves as a case study. The introduction’s final section foregrounds the fundamental question of money’s relation to power and identity: its constitutive role in structures of inequality, exploitation, and marginalization and, in particular, its inextricability – as society’s dominant measure of value – from conceptions of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Examples from F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nella Larsen serve to illustrate these ideas.

This chapter argues that antebellum sensationalism, broadly defined, offers a key archive for understanding the emotional life of capitalism. The first half of the chapter examines the period’s two best-selling novels, George Lippard’s The Quaker City (1845) and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), and argues that sensationalism adopts and makes use of the affective excesses of melodrama. The chapter shows how, repeatedly, these and other sensational texts stage characters whose postures of emotional distress reflect a desire for spiritual meaning and social connection that transcends the modern, rational world of capitalism – that which Max Weber famously describes in terms of “disenchantment.” The second half of the chapter turns to urban sensationalism. Here, the chapter contends that most of these popular texts revolve around a sentimental logic whereby the tears of the financially distressed act as the markers of middle-class sensibility. Affect thus becomes an alternate currency. The chapter concludes with the most canonical example of urban sensation fiction: Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853). The argument here is that “Bartleby” turns the emotional registers of sensationalism inside out. For though Bartleby is the melodramatic and sentimental victim of capitalism and disenchantment, he also rejects the emotional gestures of these genres.

Just as we would be remiss to skip past a discussion of the role of entrepreneurs in innovation, we would be remiss to skip over the role of the state. In this chapter, we move through three starkly different visions of what role government ought to play in bringing about innovation in the economy. The first paper discussed, by Acemoglu & Robinson, suggests that the state actually plays a key role in creating the institutions that make innovation worthwhile. The second reading, a set of chapters from a book by Mazzucato, argues that this institution-oriented view is too limited, provides evidence of how ‘entrepreneurial states’ can also work to develop innovations, and suggests that this implies a state that is much more active in investing in and directing innovation. The third reading turns up this argument further, arguing that the urgency of the global climate crisis and the vast economic reorganization that it demands means that the state should not just be more active in investing and directing: the crisis, it argues, can only be solved by a complete socialization of the economy, by the state actively managing innovation and production.

In this chapter, we lay out the basic frame for studying innovation management. To do so, we are going to try to understand why innovation is important for society, for companies, and for individuals, and to do that we take our point of departure in the “urtext” of innovation research, namely Schumpeter’s work on Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy and especially the notion of Creative Destruction. To follow that up, we are going to untangle how innovation management fits within a broader context of capitalism as an economic system, within a particular ideology, and within the operations of the modern corporation.

This chapter charts a chronology of British literary realism in relation to nineteenth-century capitalism. It considers formal innovations in Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, George Gissing, Thomas Hardy, and Joseph Conrad, situating those techniques in conjunction with processes such as enclosure, financialization, urbanization, and imperialism. Throughout, it argues for the dialectical faculties of novel forms (counterbalancing interior and exterior, individual and society, event and context, exceptional and exemplary, concrete and abstract, cartography and utopia) to mediate capitalist contradiction, transformation, and totality.

The introduction outlines four major tasks of this study: (1) to present evidence of disability-based intergroup economic disparity in the United States; (2) to engage the lived experiences of individuals and communities experiencing multiple simultaneous axes of oppression, including disability-based oppression; (3) to contribute to emerging understandings of the importance of intersectionality to economic research and policy; and (4) to contribute to stratification economics in applied terms through direct engagement with policy proposals for a federal jobs guarantee and federal “baby bonds” program. It provides an overview of disability and the US economy, disability and economic research methods, common models of disability, and the challenge of race/disability analogies.

This chapter examines the theoretical roots of discrimination against women in liberal states. It starts with a general discussion of feminism and liberalism and the tensions between their main variants, with an emphasis on the public–private distinction. It then introduces a detailed feminist critique of political liberalism, pointing to its flaws, and in particular to the distinction between the public and the private and between the political and nonpolitical on which Rawls’ theory is based. The chapter claims that these flaws have allowed patriarchal religions and other illiberal ideologies to strengthen their power in liberal societies and deepen the oppression of women. This chapter also introduces the role of capitalism in the oppression of Women in western liberal states, its connection to patriarchal religion, and its dependence on the public–private distinction and its corollary distinction between love and justice. The chapter closes with a discussion of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, compares it to the Race Convention, and claims that despite its shortcomings, it is a better model for protecting women’s rights than the liberal model.

The chapter resituates the ideas of empire and nation in relation to the category of space. It delineates the centrality of the concept of space for understanding the imperial and contemporary world-system and the development of colonial capitalist modernity. Drawing on theorists that include but are not limited to Karl Marx, Frantz Fanon, Henri Lefebvre, Nikos Poulantzas, Raymond Williams, and Edward Said, the chapter seeks to understand how their works engage with space as a critical concept, and how their theorizations deploy the category of space to illuminate the production of new kinds – and conceptions – of space in colonial capitalist modernity: the metropole and the colony; notions of the core, periphery, and the semiperiphery; and the modern world-system as a concatenation of spaces – that is, a set of contiguous and nominally equal nation-states separated out from each other through the novel spatial form of the border. The chapter also examines theorizations of the nation to underline it as an ideology of space.

This chapter focuses on “imaginary space” – literary spaces without a real-world referent. The question of how detached fantasy worlds like C. S. Lewis’ Narnia came to be thinkable in the twentieth century frames the chapter, which argues for fantasy space as a strategic response to the alienations produced by twentieth-century capitalism. Weaving together a history of exploration with a history of different types of imaginary space, the chapter traces the emergence of works like Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia out of earlier forms of imaginary space. Types of space reviewed include the settings of the traveler’s tale (e.g., Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Wu Cheng’en’s Journey to the West), Thomas More’s Utopia, and the Romantic atopias of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and William Wordsworth’s Prelude. The chapter draws on the theories of Yi-Fu Tuan, Fredric Jameson, Henri LeFebvre, and Michel Foucault to explain the distinctions between different formations of imaginary space. It concludes with a reading of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi as a text reflecting the changing value of fantasy space in the twenty-first century.

This chapter takes plantation as a rubric under which theorizations of race and space in Marxism and Black and Indigenous critical theory might be usefully coordinated for the sake not only of intersectional practicality but intellectual purchase for literary scholars in particular. Historically associated with the racializing regimes of both settler colonialism and enslavement that made what historian James Belich has called “the Anglo-world,” plantation comes into view as a key means through which capitalist social relations originating in late medieval southeastern England have been planted across the planet to the massive detriment of human and nonhuman life. Understood as sites at which the compulsion to expand set in motion by capital in the metropole confronts noncapital in its most resistant difference, white settler colonies in North America and Oceania are treated as experimental spaces for the satisfaction of that compulsion – that is, as not only spatial but phenomenological frontiers of real subsumption. This chapter focuses on one such experiment: the settler/master’s assumption of the role of the God of Genesis, specifically the power to bring worlds out of and into being through acts of signification, the whole-cloth fiction of race foremost among them.

This chapter begins from the premise that vocabularies matter in international law and organisation, as ideologies that can reify and make seem necessary and neutral contested and structurally biased means of governance, and in international relations, as disciplinary mechanisms of control. It advances a critical political economy approach to the language of resilience in global governance. By asking the critical political economy questions of ‘who gets what’ from resilience talk and just ‘whose resilience’ are we talking about, the chapter explores resilience as an ideology of new constitutionalism governance. Resilience talk is deconstructed as the language of capitalism, neoliberalism, and the individualisation of responsibility for crisis management. This language obscures the deep class, gender, racial, and intersectional implications of global governance initiatives. The chapter makes the case for destabilising and disrupting this discourse and practice as a necessary move in humanising important institutions of global governance.

This chapter lays out one way through the argument of Capital Volume 1, with the intention of showing that we have now fully entered the realm of the actualization of philosophy. Marx does not impose any preordained dialectical schema or procedure, but shows in detail how the exploitation of workers that commodity production under capitalism requires leads to the expropriation of the expropriators, and thereby to communism. In doing so, he performs the critique of political economy, not as the critique of some field of study, but through the concrete demonstration of how things function, and thereby how they are to function.