Publication Type
Journal Article
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
4-2016
Abstract
This article engages with the question of how to construct modern economic relations as an object of political theorizing by placing Hannah Arendt's and Karl Marx's writings in critical conversation. I contend that the political aspect of capitalism comes into sharpest relief less in relations of economic exploitation than in moments of expropriation that produce and reproduce the conditions of capitalist accumulation. To develop a theoretical handle on expropriation and thereby on the politics of capitalism, I syncretically draw on Marxian and Arendtian concepts by first examining expropriation through the Marxian analytic of "primitive accumulation of capital" and second delineating the political agency behind primitive accumulation through the Arendtian notion of "power." I substantiate these connections around colonial histories of primitive accumulation wherein expropriation emerges as a terrain of political contestation. From this perspective I conclude that such putatively "economic" questions as dispossession, exploitation, and accumulation appear as irreducibly political questions.
Discipline
Political Economy | Political Science
Research Areas
Political Science
Publication
Journal of Politics
Volume
78
Issue
2
First Page
411
Last Page
426
ISSN
0022-3816
Identifier
10.1086/684596
Publisher
University of Chicago Press
Citation
INCE, Onur Ulas.(2016). Bringing the Economy Back In: Hannah Arendt, Karl Marx, and the Politics of Capitalism. Journal of Politics, 78(2), 411-426.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/1986
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1086/684596