Abstract
Long-established narratives of the emergence of capitalist societies tend to describe it in teleological terms, taking ongoing processes of rationalization and de-socialization as central phenomena. However, scholars have in recent decades increasingly recognized such narratives as Weber’s “disenchantment” thesis as myths. Bruno Latour (1993), for instance, asserted as much with the title of his book We Have Never Been Modern, and, indeed, the most recent episode of economic distress caused by the 2007−2008 global financial crisis was interpreted by many as proof of the fallibility of calculative rationality. But if the development of capitalist societies cannot be understood as an ongoing process of rationalization, then how should we understand it? This is the question that has been central in attempts to provide alternative explanations for how capitalist societies develop, e.g. Boltanski and Chiapello’s (2005) suggestion to see capitalist dynamics as a dialectic movement driven by critique and the emergence of new modes of justification. In his contribution, Jens Beckert takes not rationality but the capacity to imagine as the crucial characteristic of capitalist subjects. What we have, he argues, is not rational disenchantment but secular enchantment.
Taking the future to be fundamentally incalculable, Imagined Futures puts forward the daring argument that economic agents construct expectations of the future that have, for their lack of correspondence to reality, a fictional character. As Beckert warns us, this should not be understood as a complete dismissal of economic expectations as illusory, but rather as a plea for the importance of what might be called “present futures” – that is, images of the future that are real because they shape present action, but fictional (though plausibly “realistic”) because they portray a future that need not come about. This argument is developed in three parts, which neatly fit together to provide a theory of the role of imagined futures in capitalist dynamics.
The first part provides the conceptual tools for analyzing the role of “fictional expectations” in capitalist dynamics. While Chapter 2 presents a compelling genealogy of capitalism’s temporal order, Chapter 3 reviews the role of expectations in economic and sociological literature, providing few new insights for those familiar with economic sociology, not least of which Beckert’s earlier work. The crucial role of fictional expectations in capitalist dynamics, he argues, is constituted by the notion of the future as an open-ended process, characterized by a potentially productive uncertainty; to act in the face of such a future, agents need to create fictions that can guide their own actions and those of others. Chapter 4 cuts to the chase and presents us with a refreshing interpretation of economic expectations as fictional, drawing out both similarities and differences with literary fictions. While both literary fictions and economic expectations need to be credible to be accepted as “truthful” narratives, Beckert argues, they differ in the sense that economic agents tend to obfuscate the fictional character of the narratives they disseminate to attain strategic gains.
The second part of the book uses the conceptual toolkit developed in the first part to examine the role of expectations in what Beckert calls the four “building blocks of capitalism”: money and credit (Chapter 5), investment (Chapter 6), innovation (Chapter 7), and consumption (Chapter 8). It is the production of fictional expectations, he asserts, that drives the dynamics of each of these processes. For instance, expectations about creditworthiness and the stability of a currency’s value are crucial for sustaining the system of money and credit. Establishing shared expectations of the future also facilitates the coordination of present action thereby allowing investments to be made and innovation processes organized around shared imagined futures to take off. As fictional expectations become widely shared, they enable and constrain specific patterns of action, which, as has been argued in the sociology of expectations in relation to innovation, provides a point of entry for the analysis of the politics of capitalist dynamics.
The third part presents an account of how such fictional expectations are shaped, respectively focusing on the use of forecasting techniques (Chapter 9) and economic theory (Chapter 10) as instruments. Observing a caveat in the correspondence between theories and forecasts on the one hand, and actual economic realities on the other, Beckert argues that their usage can nonetheless be explained by their usefulness in the organization of action (for instance, by delegating responsibility to the artefact, or by stimulating imagination). What matters for their uptake is whether they appear credible – that is, when they are coherent, conceivable, plausible, and persuasive. To understand capitalist dynamics, Beckert argues, it is therefore necessary to understand the dynamics of credibility with respect to such instruments as theory and forecasting. Though the budding argument developed in this part does well to point at the importance of credibility and usefulness of imagined futures, it does less to explore how dominant narratives are not only discursively established, but also become embedded in the material organization of markets.
The book’s major contribution is to develop an account of capitalist dynamics that allows for their contingent nature, offering a convincing alternative to dominant teleological narratives. On a practical note, Beckert provides useful suggestions for further research in the social sciences at large, including economic sociology, anthropology, political economy and economics. These suggestions range from studies on instruments of shaping expectations other than forecasting and economic theories, such as “business plans, accounting, strategies, and marketing” (p.278), to more macrohistorical studies that map the changes in “the dominant imaginaries” (p.279). As such, Beckert cuts across the traditional division of labour between economics and other social sciences, and provides a positive contribution to a theoretical and empirical research agenda to which scholars from both disciplinary backgrounds can aspire.
In conclusion, Imagined Futures offers an impressive account of the secular enchantment of contemporary capitalist societies that synthetizes a large volume of somewhat fragmented literature in economic sociology (and beyond) of the past decades into a single theoretical framework from which new research may arise. While elsewhere scholars (including Beckert himself) have sought to re-imagine economic sociology (Aspers and Dodd, 2015), Imagined Futures paves the way for an economic sociology of imagination.