The central core of the work of Adam Smith is identified here, with particular reference to his own words. His argumentation is full of surprises and paradoxes, and it offers key insights for sociology, especially as it allows us to better understand key features of the modern world.

This paper argues that the alleged demise of liberation theology is the product of an oversimplification of the movement’s development,—one that depends on a church-focused understanding of the process of secularization. Yet, a different interpretation of this process may allow us to see secularization as a process capable of eliciting new forms of sacralization. My contention is that liberation theology has remained active in civil society, especially through faith-based organizations not supported by the Catholic Church. I argue that these civil-society organizations have become new sacred spaces that address the needs of the most vulnerable. To warrant these claims, I present a comparative study of the parallel development of liberation theology and Pentecostalism in Latin America, particularly in the case of Peru. Since both movements focus on the most disenfranchised and thus may compete for the same public, attention to the success or failure of their strategies will help to elucidate the current status of liberation theology.

This article weighs the meaning, potential, and pitfalls of the concept of “racial capitalism” for studying the nexus of racial division and the economy. The concept has spread like wildfire in Anglophone social science since its≠ introduction in Cedric Robinson’s revisionist account of the rise of capitalism as racializing, but it remains epistemically inchoate and analytically problematic. The critique of leading uses and common corollaries of the term shows that it stipulates that which needs to be explicated, namely, the “articulation” of capitalism “through race,” which is not a structural invariant but ranges from coevalness and synergy to parasitism and disconnection. The notion cannot accommodate the varied bases of race as a naturalizing and hierarchizing principle of vision and division as well as the historical peculiarity of the economic variant of slavery in the Atlantic world. Advocates of “racial capitalism” need to put in the hard work of epistemological elucidation, logical clarification, and historical elaboration needed if they are to make the label more than a “conceptual speculative bubble.”

This article examines the issue of prices from a sociological standpoint. We show that, contrary to popular belief, price setting is always the result of social practices. We identify two main perspectives in the relevant literature. The first deals with the central notion of quality: price setting is a matter of judgement, arbitration and equipment. The second focuses on measurement practices, such as valuation and pricing, which occur before or during the transaction. These two complementary perspectives reveal a variety of processes that both determine prices and can be used to construct a typology based on two criteria: the moment of price setting, and the level of competition. Four different types of pricing mechanisms are distinguished: self-regulated, administered, composed, and bargained. We use examples to describe these different pricing types, and to show how such an approach contributes to our understanding of the economy.

Loïc Wacquant’s essay, “The Trap of ‘Racial Capitalism’”, asks whether the term is “a conceptual solution or a conceptual problem”. His answer is forthright. He argues that racial capitalism has no place in a properly defined and understood social science. In this contribution, we set out the limitations, as we perceive them, of Wacquant’s own analysis and, at the same time, discuss other difficulties of the idea of racial capitalism. These, we suggest, are associated with an absence common to Wacquant and the major proponents of racial capitalism alike; namely, a failure to reckon systematically with the ways in which modern capitalism arises and develops within the global structures of European colonialism.

The economic discipline plays a performative role in constructing the moral order of market society. Yet, little attention has been paid to what economists explicitly regard as moral or how they conceive of morality. This article reflects a recent attempt to put morals into economics, that is, to introduce morality as a research topic in behavioural and experimental economics. It maps three research programs that theorize the moral economy. The programs emphasize the moral foundations of market society, the moral limits of market expansion, and the moral consequences of market trading and, thus, appear irreconcilable with classifications of economists as market enthusiasts or moral agnostics. At the same time, however, the literature centres on an “economized” form of morality that is corrective to market inefficiencies, attributed to the responsibility of the individual, and expressed in rational terms. In doing so, this literature contributes to redefining moral problems in economic terms.

The brief essay is a response to an article by the French sociologist Loïc Wacquant which critiques the concept of “racial capitalism” that has gained much prominence and currency in recent times. It offers a historical analysis of the emergence of “race” as a concept in the Euro-Atlantic sphere and points to the complexities in extending it beyond that space, into the Indian Ocean world for example. As a consequence, the ambitious claims made by some theorists of “racial capitalism” appear difficult to sustain.

This study introduces the concept of micro-segregation as an alternative to ghettoization in order to understand residential patterns in historical Jewish communities. The process of ghetto formation is associated with the spatial separation of a minority group as a result of racial stigma and poverty. It operates at a large scale and posits that ghetto boundaries will be rigidly policed. By contrast, the process of micro-segregation is associated with the separation of a minority group as a result of marginalized legal status. It operates at a smaller scale and posits that the boundaries of ethnic communities are porous, offering sites of economic value. To assess the conceptual utility of micro-segregation, we apply it to four Jewish communities in the German states before the 20th century. Spatial analysis suggests that the communities varied in their degree of micro-segregation, but consistently offered economic opportunity at the boundaries of Christian and Jewish worlds.

Until the 19th century, the UK state stayed out of education. Only in 1833 would Parliament first pass an act that subsidized education for the poor. By 1914, 160 education acts had been passed, consolidating into the state schooling system we recognize today. This paper seeks to explain this remarkable progression. I argue that the emergence of social-knowledge institutions across the West was a powerful force of cultural construction. What I term social scientization, this process was multidimensional and translocal, entailing the elaboration, reification, and diffusion of functionalist theories of the nation-state that centered national education as means to greater cultural rationalization. Longitudinal analyses on comprehensive population data comprising over 10,100 UK parliamentary acts support the core historical insight of this piece: increasingly routine and aggressive forms of state intervention in education were the progressive instantiation of the 19th-century nation-state model, which was fundamentally epistemic in character and inextricably linked to the expansive cultural content of the ascendant social sciences.

I respond to the reactions of Gurminder Bhambra, John Holmwood, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam to my dissection of the concept of “racial capitalism.” I reiterate my critique of the latter on grounds of semantics, logics, and heuristics. I warn that racial capitalism erases historical variations, interludes, and contingencies to replace them with monolithic depiction and mechanical necessity. We cannot assume that racial division, colonial or metropolitan, is functional to capitalism across all lands and epochs. We need to recognize and theorize the varieties of regimes of racial domination, anchored by the ideal-typical distinction between “genuine race-divided societies” and “societies with race,” much as comparative political economists have taught us to dig into the varieties of capitalism. Combining these two dimensions serves us well to decouple capitalism and race analytically so that their historical conjunction may be studied empirically.

In 1963, a young French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, together with two assistants—Luc Boltanski and Jean-Claude Chamboredon—conducted the first sociological study of the credit practices of a major French bank, entitled “The Bank and Its Customers”. This article discusses the context, the findings and the legacy of this study. First, the article sketches the landscape of the emerging mass credit market in France in the early 1960s. Then, the paper summarizes and analyses the report itself. We also demonstrate how bank-customer interactions and credit continued to be a subject of interest for Bourdieu throughout his subsequent career. Finally, the paper seeks to contribute to comparative research on the varieties of national configurations of private indebtedness in relation to the level of development of the welfare state.

States require money to function and therefore every government has to continuously raise new funds. On the financial markets, governments cannot be sure that auctions of their debt will be sufficiently attractive to financial investors, which is why they usually enter into cooperative agreements with selected banks. The best known and most widespread form of cooperation is the primary dealer system. A primary dealer is a bank that commits to purchasing a certain percentage of government debt at each auction and to intervene as a formalized market maker in the debt market if necessary. Most of the primary dealer systems involve the banks being financially neither remunerated nor compensated for their activities, and if there is some kind of financial compensation, it is on a low level. The article analyses European primary dealer systems and asks why banks are willing to participate in these systems. I will show that both domestic and foreign banks use their status as primary dealers to build long-term relationships with one or more European governments and to gain an advantage on the global stage. In Bourdieu’s terms, primary dealer banks use their financial capital to accumulate social and symbolic capital.

This article provides the conclusions of a study of wars which are relatively well-documented through the ages and across the continents of human settlement. The evidence on which these conclusions are based is to be found in my book On Wars published by Yale University Press in July 2023. There are two main conclusions. First, the initial decisions to make either war or peace have almost always been made by a small handful of rulers and their advisors, regardless of whether they inhabit autocratic or representative political systems. They are to blame for war, not the peoples. Second, wars are rarely rational in either means or ends. They are rarely carefully calculated and they rarely bring the the desired ends, with the exceptions of where big powers aggress against small ones, “sharks swallowing minnows”, and of wars fought in self-defense where there is a reasonable chance of success. This is because in addition to the element of rational calculation so stressed by Realist theory, rulers and their advisors are substantially driven by combinations of emotions and ideologies.

There are many reasons you may want to make your contributions to public debates anonymously, and there are many reasons you may want to act in solidarity with others. Why might people engaged in social movements want to do both at the same time? “Anonymous solidarity”—symbolized by a great many protestors wearing one and the same iconic Guy Fawkes mask—signifies not only solidarity (“we are as one”) but also multiplicity (“we are many”) and interchangeability of each for the other (“for every one of us who falls, ten more will take our place”). The latter two features make a movement more likely to succeed, the former by rendering it stronger and the latter by rendering it more robust. A raft of evidence shows that people are more likely to participate in collective action that is more likely to succeed, even if their own participation is in no way essential for its success.

This article considers the political implications of temporal orientations, building on Reinhart Koselleck’s conceptual histories of “progress” and “utopia”. A computational analysis of survey data from the 2016 US election provides a snapshot of the breakdown of the American Dream for some respondents, and its continued relevance for others. Rather than progress from past to future, data shows negative perceptions of the past or present associated with negative expectations for the future, a link especially pronounced among white respondents and those who subscribe to “America first” beliefs. At the same time, to the extent that racial privilege is inversely related to expectations of future progress, the findings suggest that utopian narratives of progress can help smooth over injustice or inequality with view to a better future. Expectations of progress are thus tightly woven into perceptions of injustice or marginalization.

This paper adds to a vital international tradition of discussing the history of sociological theory by empirically investigating its structure, dynamics, and relationships. Our primary contribution to this tradition is to bring to the conversation a greater level of comparative and historical scope, a more systematic quantitative methodology, and a degree of reflexivity and synthesis. To do so, we examine some 670 editions of sociological-theory books geared toward students, published in English, German, and French between 1950 and 2020. Our empirical analysis highlights patterns, trends, and relationships among the theorists featured in these books, the narratives and approaches that define their visions of sociological theory, and the characteristics of the authors who wrote them. Our findings reveal some key intellectual as well as sociological factors associated with the changing composition of the canon.