Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory

In this important new book, Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi take a fresh look at the big questions surrounding the peculiar social form known as “capitalism,” upending many of our commonly held assumptions about what capitalism is and how to subject it to critique. They show how, throughout its history, various regimes of capitalism have relied on a series of institutional separations between economy and polity, production and social reproduction, and human and non-human nature, periodically readjusting the boundaries between these domains in response to crises and upheavals. They consider how these “boundary struggles” offer a key to understanding capitalism’s contradictions and the multiple forms of conflict to which it gives rise.

What emerges is a renewed crisis critique of capitalism which puts our present conjuncture into broader perspective, along with sharp diagnoses of the recent resurgence of right-wing populism and what would be required of a viable Left alternative. This major new book by two leading critical theorists will be of great interest to anyone concerned with the nature and future of capitalism and with the key questions of progressive politics today.

• The Old is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born: From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump and Beyond
• Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto
• In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (The Wellek Library Lectures)
• Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis
• Critique of Forms of Life
• Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (Mapping Social Reproduction Theory)
• Alienation (New Directions in Critical Theory Book 4)
• From Alienation to Forms of Life: The Critical Theory of Rahel Jaeggi (Penn State Series in Critical Theory Book 1)
• For a Left Populism
• Redistribution or Recognition?: A Political-Philosophical Exchange