Overview

The capitalist system has often been described by its critics as a heartless economic structure corroding social bonds and symbolic values. Its defenders and analysts likewise use narratives that position emotions as central to the economy. This book enquires into the history of these framings. To explore the role of emotions in economic practices and imaginaries, the volume presents case studies including original rereadings of well-known texts such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, as well as forays into little-known histories such as representations of capitalists in post-war Turkey, and how art dealers strategically used emotions for navigating the market in interwar Germany. Rather than simply reproducing the image of “cold capitalism”, however, it offers nuanced investigations into the ambivalent images evoked by living and working within economic structures. In late-socialist Poland, capitalism felt “warm” and “fuzzy”, while pop culture of the seventies found it not destructive but cool, hip, and edgy. This book is aimed at students and scholars of social, economic, and cultural history. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylor francis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution- Non- Commercial- No Derivatives (CC- BY- NC- ND) 4.0 license.

Full Product Details

Author:   Agnes Arndt (Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarianism Studies, TU Dresden, Germany) ,  Kerstin Maria Pahl (Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Germany)
Publisher:   Taylor & Francis Ltd
Imprint:   Routledge
Weight:   0.480kg
ISBN:  

9781032399126

ISBN 10:   1032399120
Pages:   238
Publication Date:   24 January 2025
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

Introduction: Capitalist Cold: Feeling Economic Structures from the Nineteenth to the Twentieth Century Part 1: A ‘Cold’ System? 1. The Cold Bourgeoisie: Affect and Colonial Property 2. Cold Pop: How West German Pop Culture Began to Embrace the Modern World Part 2: Cold Capitalists? 3. Cold Melancholy: Tempers of Financial Pathology in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol 4. Citizen-Subjects of Capitalism: Comparing the Autobiographies of John Kenneth Galbraith and Milton and Rose Friedman 5. Hope, Indignation, Nostalgia: The Emotional Navigation of Urban Modernity in Postwar Istanbul Part 3: Cold Markets? 6. “Small Group, Big Business”: Imagining Capitalism and Capitalists in Late-Socialist Poland 7. “Closed Doors, Sealed Lips”: Emotional Practices on Legal and Illegal Art Markets in Early Twentieth-Century Germany

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Author Information

Agnes Arndt is a senior researcher at the Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarianism Studies and has worked extensively on Modern European History and the Cultural History of Economics. She is the author of Intellektuelle in der Oppostion (2007) and Rote Bürger (2013) and the co-author of Feeling Political (2022). agnes.arndt@mailbox.tu-dresden.de Kerstin Maria Pahl is a post-doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development specializing in the cultural history of the Anglophone world. Her publications include Revisiting the History of Emotions (ed. 2023) and The Visual Worlds of Life Writing. Portraits and Biographies in England, 1680-1750 (2024). Pahl@mpib-berlin.mpg.de

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