 capitalism.
That shared project, however, can accommodate a variety of contradictory impulses. The sharpest example of this divergence comes in the work of two authors whose paychecks issue from the same university. Although both Johnson and Beckert share Marxist sympathies, that is where their intellectual similarities end. For Johnson, the essence of what he labels “slave racial capitalism” appears when typologies are put aside and a particular market is investigated “concretely and specifically.” In part for this reason, Johnson has distanced himself from what he refers to as “the end-of-historiography enthusiasm for the ‘new’ history of capitalism.” According to Johnson, tracing the path of a single bale of cotton reveals more about the antebellum economy’s workings than any number of theories targeting “the grand abstraction” of capitalism....
Economic growth has real benefits—right now, in Europe and the United States, especially for the rich, but also for anyone who depends on a sound basis for the welfare state. But the increase of per capita productivity and population captured by the gross domestic product is just one way of measuring prosperity, and a deceptive one at that. Though economic growth’s limitations were easier to see before its canonization in the middle of the twentieth century, they are again coming into sight.
Prophets of an end to economic growth, or of its triumphant resurrection, beg to be made into fools by an unpredictable future. Indictments of contemporary policy, however, don’t hang on forecasts of what is to come. That fact was clear to the hundreds of thousands of people who marched against climate change in September, and to anyone who felt a twinge of recognition after seeing the protesters in Zuccotti Park—or to the 58 percent of Americans who reported in a recent New York Times/CBS News poll that protecting the environment should take precedence over economic growth....
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