Abstract

I examine the reasons for the impressively consistent disinterest in African economics that runs through all the schools of comparative political economy that Economy and Society has published over the last three decades. These theoretical movements can be helpfully arranged in reverse chronological order: Callon's economization, Soskice and Hall's varieties of capitalism (VoC), Boyer and Jessop's regulationism and Foucault's governmentality. Each of them shows an intriguing indifference to the question of whether African evidence matters for their arguments. What makes this interesting was that in its first decade, between 1971 and 1981, Economy and Society was obsessed with the problem of the comparative theorizing of the African economy and its transformation. Indeed, it is not too strong to say, as I show, that theorizing African capitalism was the journal’s raison d’etre. What happened to kill off that curiosity? Reconstructing debates within the journal, the paper explores the shifts, in comparative political economy and in African studies, between 1970 and 1990 that account for the collapse of comparative interest in the features of capitalism on the continent.

摘要

我研究了过去三十年来，在《比较经济》和《社会》发表的所有比较政治经济学流派中，人们一直对非洲经济学产生无比持续的兴趣的原因。这些理论运动可以按时间倒序排列：卡隆的节约，索斯基斯和霍尔的资本主义变体（VoC），博耶和耶索普的规制主义以及福柯的政府性。他们每个人都对非洲证据是否对他们的论点很重要的问题漠不关心。有趣的是，在1971年至1981年的第一个十年中，经济与社会痴迷于非洲经济的比较理论及其转型问题。的确，正如我所表明的，说非洲资本主义理论化是该杂志的存在理由并不过分。发生了什么事才能消除这种好奇心？该论文重建了期刊内部的辩论，探讨了比较政治经济学和非洲研究在1970年至1990年之间的转变，这说明了对非洲大陆资本主义特征的比较兴趣的崩溃。