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Presidential Address
The official theme of the 2012 Social Science History conference is "Capitalism and Its Histories." I want to set a good example by reflecting publicly about capitalism as a historical problem. It is only over the last decade or so that I have been wrestling with the problem of capitalism in a serious way. During most of my intellectual career I have studied the history of revolutions--especially the French revolutions of 1789, 1830, and 1848 (Sewell 1980, 1994). Working on such highly contingent and fateful events as revolutions has led me to be critical of deterministic and structural explanations--of revolutions and of history in general. In fact, outside the small circle of French historians, I am probably best known for my efforts to introduce a historians' sense of temporality into social theory. Social temporality, I have insisted in my writings, is contingent, fateful, complex, eventful, and heterogeneous--and definitely not teleological (Sewell 2005).
But capitalism, as an object of historical study, poses serious challenges to my own previous arguments. Capitalism actually is characterized by certain forms of temporality that I ruled out of court in my previous work. Capitalism, that is, has long-term temporal dynamics that possess a powerful directionality. These complex dynamics, which have been going on in capitalism for at least three centuries, are manifested as sustained economic growth, consistent geographical expansion, and relentless commodification of social relations. Capitalism also is marked by a rather weird repetitive temporal rhythm known as the business cycle.1In short, capitalism seems to be a major exception to what I once rashly declared to be the "global contingency" of social temporality (Sewell 2005: 120). This, of course, is what makes capitalism obsessively fascinating to me as an object of study.
In the end, I continue to believe in the global contingency of social temporality and social forms. Capitalism, as I see it, has highly constraining long-term temporal dynamics, but it is certainly not the product of some transhistorical teleological law of social development. Rather, capitalism is a contingent--and also a temporary--product of history. It arose in a particular corner of the world in a particular historical circumstance--in northwestern Europe in a period when Europeans had recently established dominance, both commercial and military, of the high...