How are History of Sci/Med/Tech and History of Capitalism Teaching One Another?
Continuing our ruminations on the history of capitalism and its relationship to the history of science/med/tech or to STS (here) (here) (and here), I think we might find some useful categories of analysis in Jeffrey Sklansky's recent historiographical essay from Modern Intellectual History (Vol. 9, no. 1, 2012). Sklansky's piece, "The Elusive Sovereign: New Intellectual and Social Histories of Capitalism," (requires subscription) does what great historiographical works should do: it covers and categorizes a wide literature using analytical categories that shed new light on the assembled works; it reads recent scholarly trends perceptively; and it points the way toward fruitful new avenues of research and analysis. I'll summarize Sklansky's approach to each of these aspects, but for our purposes, I will note this first: Sklansky's analysis suggests to me that the history of capitalism as currently practiced already shares deep affinities with our own domin…