The Magic of Concepts: History and the Economic in Twentieth-Century China by Rebecca E. Karl (review)

Karl's The Magic of Concepts is primarily a conceptual intervention in the historiography of modern China. Karl seeks to reframe scholarly understandings of capitalism and globalization in the twentieth-century Chinese context. She focuses in particular on two important periods that in her view witnessed repetitions of similar thematic debates about economic concepts and practices—the 1930s and the 1980s to 1990s. The guiding spirit in this study is the translator and theorist Wang Yanan (1901–1969), from whose work Karl derives the concept of a problematic "magical" approach to economics in China (and, indeed, around the world)—an approach that decontextualizes and dehistoricizes economic ideas and practices in the periods both before and after the "socialist moment" of the first thirty years of the People's Republic of China (5–6).¹

Karl's research design is intensively interdisciplinary. She draws substantially from critical theory, sociology, anthropology, film studies, literary criticism, and heterodox economics in order to describe and critique the "magical thinking" surrounding economic ideas, especially as regards so-called "market fetishism" (160). This book can be seen as a work of historiography or, rather, of "think[ing] about larger historical problematics" not narrowly confined to "the disciplinarity of history" (164). Karl writes, "[T]he 'magic of concepts' is at one and the same time a condemnation of a lack of historical-conceptual reflexivity as well as a potentially generative call for an engagement with the conceptual complexity of history as lived global and local experience and social practice" (12). Her overarching aim is to urge scholars to reintegrate their study of economic and philosophical ideas into everyday life in China, rather than detaching these concepts from the human and material contexts in which Karl sees them to have operated.

The book's introduction, "Repetition and Magic," presents Karl's case: "The economic" in China must be understood as "embedded within and produced through the broad historical conditions informing and forcing appropriative activity," especially as pertains to "the production of the everyday and its conceptualization as an uneven yet simultaneous form of modern global social life within the abstracting processes of capitalist expansion and reproduction in different local parts of the globe simultaneously" (11). Five thematically interrelated chapters follow: "The Economic, China, World History: A Critique of Pure Ideology"; "The Economic and the State: The Asiatic Mode of Production"; "The Economic and Transhistory: Temporality, the Market, and the Austrian School"; "The Economic as Lived Experience: Semicolonialism and China"; and "The Economic as Culture and the Culture of the Economic: Filming Shanghai."

The book concludes with an afterword that warns about what Karl contends are the dangers of "the growth over the past decades of a pervasive naturalized (purportedly apolitical) culturalism in politics, history, and social life" as a feature of the post–Cold War world (163). The book's notes and index are both more than serviceable, and its bibliography provides a wide-ranging syllabus that further underscores Karl's interdisciplinary approach while reflecting the contributions of the other scholarly works with which Karl engages.²

This book will be primarily of interest to graduate students and scholars of modern Chinese history; Karl's investigations do not make for easy reading. Even so, her contribution with this book is to present a flexible theorization of China's historical entanglement with economic globalization that will remain relevant because, as she writes in reference to Wang Yanan's views, "Global capitalism could not be understood without China; China could not be understood without global capitalism" (15).