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

In this short but dense collection of related essays, Rebecca Karl argues that scholars of the social history of China have been pursuing their craft on unsound foundations. Simultaneously a theoretical meditation and a timely broadside against the dominant historiographical trends of the last thirty years, Karl's book takes aim at the "categories of historical inquiry . . . [that] always were and have become ever more inadequate to the complexity and abstraction of lives lived differentially and unevenly within the structures of global capital" (162).

Karl's point of entry into this agenda are the writings of Wang Yanan, a Marxist theorist active from the 1930s to the 1950s, who is a reference point in each of the essays. Wang wrote widely on the history of economic thought, as well as producing translations of many of the classic European texts of political economy and, with Guo Dali, the first complete translation of Marx's Capital into Chinese. Karl, however, focuses on a different thread in Wang's thinking: his wide-ranging critique of the contemporaneous analysis of Chinese society during the 1930s and 1940s.

Wang saw the intellectual landscape of his day as broadly divided between empiricist and metaphysical epistemologies. On the one hand, empiricists employed the conceptual framework of the social sciences, emphasizing a universal structure arising from individuals' quotidian desires, as in economists' understanding of commercial exchange as a straightforward consequence of human nature. On the other hand, culturalists interpreted the present as arising from an enduring collective essence transcending the trivialities of everyday life and marked by the particularity of specific nations or civilizations. For instance, one of the writers that Wang critiqued, Zhu Qianzhi, characterized Chinese civilization as "philosophical" in nature and contrasted that with India's "religious" civilization and the West's "industrial" civilization.

Wang insisted that, although these two positions appeared as polar opposites, in fact they were two sides of the same coin. Both sets of interpretation arise from the same ground: the forms of decontextualizing abstraction that appear within capitalist society and obscure the real dynamics of that society. Here Karl invokes the concept of reification that Lukács (1971 [1923]) developed in his reading of Marx, which she describes as similar to Wang Yanan's approach. In capitalism, unlike in previous societies, a single abstract and impersonal social form—the commodity—mediates human relations and molds both social structure and consciousness. The defining social relations of capitalist society are objectified in the commodity's dual existence as both value and the product of labor. This, in turn, systematically obscures the real forms of interdependence and domination that produce and reproduce those social relations.

For this reason, the impersonal regularities of "the economy," though historically novel with the advent of capitalism, appear akin to laws of nature that hold across time and space. The sources of cultural life—in reality a product of the intrinsic geographic, social, and temporal unevenness of capitalist accumulation and the varying patterns of social reproduction that accompany it—are likewise concealed from awareness. Because they are abstracted from the real social substance that produces them, both culture and the economy are regularly apprehended as the cause rather than the outcome of social life.

In separate essays focusing in turn on the field of world history, the concept of the Asiatic mode of production, the reception of the Austrian School of economics in China, the idea of semicolonialism, and the portrayal on film of everyday life in Shanghai, Karl analyzes how reified concepts of economic and cultural life repeatedly appear in new guises and different configurations. She gives particular attention to the return to prominence in the 1990s of conceptual dichotomies strikingly similar to those that Wang critiqued.

For example, Karl sees a broad dichotomy of interpretation at work in the recent historiography of China and levies a critique of both sides because of...