IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-0-230-60708-8_8.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Conclusion: Toward a Cultural Economy of Popular and Global Finance

In: Performing Capital

Author

Listed:
  • Rob Aitken

Abstract

Writing in 1866, at a moment when the lexicon of a distinctively American language of political economy was being worked out, Amasa Walker crafted his influential The Science of Wealth: A Manual of Political Economy. What is striking about The Science of Wealth is the way in which it figures its central protagonist—capital—in a vocabulary that relies, in seemingly equal measure, on both clarity and anxiety. On the one hand, by mobilizing a common metaphor (see Introduction), capital is conceived as an element of nature and as something as deeply inbuilt in the world as its natural topography. Capital exists as something natural and given in the landscape—the basic structure upon which the rest of the economic world is shaped. On the other hand, however, Walker’s discussion also reveals a kind of anxiety about capital and its basic force. The attempts to classify categories even as resolutely natural as capital are subject, Walker admits, to irksome ambiguities. In Walker’s words, the “general intelligibility” of capital is self-evident.

Suggested Citation

  • Rob Aitken, 2007. "Conclusion: Toward a Cultural Economy of Popular and Global Finance," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Performing Capital, pages 195-212, Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-60708-8_8
    DOI: 10.1057/9780230607088_8
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-60708-8_8. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.