For decades, Charles Lemert has been the leading voice in social theory. In Capitalism and its Uncertain Future he teams up with one of the most creative emerging social theorists, Kristin Plys, to examine how social theory imagines capitalism. This engaging and innovative book provides new perspectives on well known theorists from Adam Smith, and Frantz Fanon, to Gilles Deleuze, while also introducing readers to lesser known theorists such as Lucia Sanchez Saornil, Mohammad Ali El Hammi, and many more. The book examines theories of capitalism from four perspectives: macro-historical theories of the origins of capitalism; postcolonial theories of capitalism that situate capitalism as seen from the Global South; theories of capitalism from the perspective of labor; and prospective theories of capitalism’s uncertain future. This provocative and ambitious, yet accessible, perspective on theories of capitalism will be of interest to anyone who wants to explore where we’ve been and where we’re headed.
Author Biography:
Kristin Plys’s research sits at the intersection of political economy, postcolonial theory, labor and labor movements, historical sociology, and global area studies. The greater part of her intellectual work analyzes the historical trajectory of global capitalism as seen from working class and anti-colonial movements in the Global South. This research program has led her to take a particular interest in Marxist political economy, social protest against authoritarianism in the 1970s Global South, avant-garde visual art as left politics in the Global South, labor history and histories of café culture, and historical method. She works in multiple languages including Hindi, Urdu, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Punjabi.
Kristin’s first book, Brewing Resistance: Indian Coffee House and the Emergency in Postcolonial India (2020) uncovered histories of the resistance movement that was launched from New Delhi’s café culture during India’s brief period of dictatorship (1975–1977). Her current research in-progress investigates how visual artists, writers, poets, Communists, and Maoists fomented opposition against Pakistan’s 1977 military coup through a "cultural front" that innovated new forms of anti-authoritarian writing, painting, and poetry rooted in Lahore’s vibrant café culture.
Kristin is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Toronto, Mississauga and an affiliate of the Centre for South Asian Civilizations and Culinaria. She completed her PhD in sociology at Yale University and has held visiting positions at the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Lahore, Pakistan, the Georg-August-Universität-Göttingen in Göttingen, Germany, the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India, and at the Centre for Development Studies in Thiruvanathapuram, India. Before beginning her PhD, she was a researcher in Development Economics at Princeton University. Her undergraduate degree is in Cross-national Sociology and International Development from the Johns Hopkins University.
Charles Lemert is University Professor and Andrus Professor of Social Theory Emeritus at Wesleyan University. Among his books are The Structural Lie: Small Clues to Global Things (2011), Why Niebuhr Matters (2011), Uncertain Worlds: World-Systems Analysis in Changing Times (2013, with Immanuel Wallerstein and Carlos Aguirre Rojas), and Globalization: Introduction to the End of the Known World (2015), and the seventh edition of Social Theory: The Classical, Global, and Multicultural Readings (2021). He is at work on, among other books, Uncertainties of Time: The Past and Future TimeSpace (with Immanuel Wallerstein, posthumously).
