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

Rebecca Karl's newest work is a collection of essays written over the course of a decade that explores "conceits—concepts—of history, philosophy, and culture as thought through China in the 1930s and 1990s" (4). These were both crisis decades—the first saw the Great Depression and the War of Resistance against Japan, while the second was dominated by the aftermath of the bloody student challenge to the communist regime at Tiananmen Square and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Both eras inevitably spawned vigorous intellectual debate over how to shore up the state and the economy in order to demonstrate the viability of a Chinese model in a hyper-competitive global environment. Karl's premise of showing the linkage between economic thinking and social life during these two crucial junctures could easily lend itself to a fascinating study.

Karl is an Associate Professor of History at New York University (nyu) with a 20-year track record of writing on feminism, nationalism, Marxism, and culture in twentieth century China. She has been an activist for a variety of causes on and around campus, candidly admitting in her preface that this work was born out of her opposition to recently-retired (or perhaps ousted) nyu President John Sexton. Sexton's tenure saw nyu become even more selective, better endowed, and a leader in "global networking," with the launch of gleaming degree-granting campuses in Abu Dhabi and Shanghai. Nevertheless, Karl rails against Sexton in her preface, calling him an autocrat who pushed a corporate agenda that was indifferent to faculty or student interests. This builds to her explanation that she was motivated to write The Magic of Concepts because she saw parallels between the changes Sexton brought on at nyu and the Chinese intellectuals/economists of the 1930s and 1990s who imported catchall western solutions that were similarly tone deaf to the concerns of real people. Some may find her candour refreshing, but most readers will be perplexed by the connection she has invented between two very different and seemingly unrelated subjects.

The title of this work was borrowed from Wang Yanan, an economic philosopher active in the 1930s and '40s, who coined "magic of concepts" (gainian de moshu) as a pejorative term for the ahistorical, impersonal theorizing of his contemporaries. Wang was highly critical of colleagues inspired by both the Austrian school and Marxism who imported western economic ideas and then tried to make them fit a Chinese model very different from the one that had produced them; Wang believed that by adhering to these imported concepts his colleagues were dealing in abstract terms that minimized or ignored the human element. Flash forward to the 1990s, and a new generation of Chinese economists turned its back on socialism in favour of "capitalist social science" (6), compounding the error of their predecessors. Karl has indicated that she is working on a separate monograph on Wang Yanan that, one hopes, will have more resonance with scholars of Republican China, though this crucial thinker does appear prominently in the third and fourth chapters on the battle between neoliberal and communist economics in the 1930s and 1990s respectively.

The first chapter explores how capitalist thinking has shaped modern world history, with the emergence of modernization and economic growth as the commonly accepted benchmarks for national success. This process has been, in Karl's view, a form of westernization and cultural imperialism even as our conception of the West has expanded beyond Europe to include the United States, Japan, and other fast-rising economic powers. This historical framework typically reduces China's place in the world order to the sum of its economic parts, downplaying its rich and unique cultural heritage to the detriment of those who seek to truly understand the country better. The second chapter delves into the Asiatic mode of production (amp), a Marxist conception of pre-capitalist elite exploitation...