In The Magic of Concepts Rebecca E. Karl interrogates "the economic" as concept and practice as it was construed historically in China in the 1930s and again in the 1980s and 1990s. Separated by the Chinese Revolution and Mao's socialist experiments, each era witnessed urgent discussions about how to think about economic concepts derived from capitalism in modern China. Both eras were highly cosmopolitan and each faced its own global crisis in economic and historical philosophy: in the 1930s, capitalism's failures suggested that socialism offered a plausible solution, while the abandonment of socialism five decades later provoked a rethinking of the relationship between history and the economic as social practice. Interweaving a critical historiography of modern China with the work of the Marxist-trained economist Wang Yanan, Karl shows how "magical concepts" based on dehistoricized Eurocentric and capitalist conceptions of historical activity that purport to exist outside lived experiences have erased much of the critical import of China's twentieth-century history. In this volume, Karl retrieves the economic to argue for a more nuanced and critical account of twentieth-century Chinese and global historical practice.

Preface and Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction. Repetition and Magic  1
1. The Economic, China, World History: A Critique of Pure Ideology  19
2. The Economic and the State: The Asiatic Mode of Production  40
3. The Economic as Transhistory: Temporality, the Market, and the Austrian School  73
4. The Economic as Lived Experience: Semicolonialism and China  113
5. The Economic as Culture and the Culture of the Economic: Filming Shanghai  141
Afterword  160
Notes  167
Bibliography  199
Index 213