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Once upon a time sociologists knew that modern society is capitalist society: that capitalism is not one thing - a particular kind of economy - and modern society another. The crisis of 2008, which is still unfolding, should have reminded us of how deeply intertwined economy and society are under capitalism. Two implications stand out: that the capitalist economy is too important to be left to economists to study; and that contemporary society cannot really be understood by a sociology that makes no reference to its capitalist economy.
To study contemporary capitalism, I argue, sociology must go back before the disciplinary division of labor with economics negotiated on its behalf by its twentieth century founding figure, Talcott Parsons (Camic 1991). For this it will be helpful to rediscover the sociology in classical economists from Smith to Pareto, Marshall, Keynes and Schumpeter, and the economics in classical sociologists like Weber, Sombart, Mauss and Veblen, to name only a few. Particular interest might usefully be paid to the institutional economics of the Historische Schule and to Marx the social theorist, as opposed to the deterministic economist. The lesson to be learned from all of them is that capitalism denotes both an economy and a society, and that studying it requires a conceptual framework that does not separate the one from the other.
How to study contemporary capitalism, then? My first answer is: not as an economy but as a society - as a system of social action and a set of social institutions falling in the domain of sociological rather than today's standard economic theory.2 This is in fact the tradition of political economy in the nineteenth century. Political-economic theory was to identify the actors and interests underlying, or hiding behind, the "laws of movement" of "the economy", translating economic relations into social relations and showing the former to be a special case of the latter. Treating the economy as a society, or as socially and politically constructed or "constituted" (Beckert and Streeck 2008), is the obverse of treating the society as an economy, which is the approach of "rational choice" economic imperialism. Indeed ultimately the approach I suggest amounts to a sort of imperialism as well, only in...