The Magic of Concepts : History and the Economic in Twentieth-Century China
Rebecca E. Karl is Associate Professor of History at New York University. She is the author of Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World: A Concise History and Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, and co-translator (with Xueping Zhong) of Cai Xiang's Revolution andIts Narratives: China’s Socialist Literary and Cultural Imaginaries, 1949-1966, all also published by Duke University Press. She co-translated and coedited (with Lydia H. Liu and Dorothy Ko) The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory.
The Economic as Transhistory: Temporality, the Market, and the Austrian School
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Published:February 2017
This essay introduces a Chinese critique of the Austrian School of economics through a consideration of 1930s economist Wang Yanan’s philosophical essays on the economic concepts and social scientific norms of his day. The return of marginal utility and market fundamentalism through the rediscovery in 1990s China and the world of Friedrich Hayek is counterposed to this original 1930s moment. Intended as a discovery of a long-lost non-Communist Marxist voice in the Chinese sphere as well as an interrogation of the culturalist propensities of Austrian economics more generally, this essay retrieves and critiques the ways in which economics and culture...
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