One of the most frequently heard complaints about historians’ recent rediscovery of the concept of capitalism is that they are so reluctant to engage with questions of definition and historiography. The complex genealogy of the concept of capitalism indeed poses a problem for its users. Any attempt to ground oneself more explicitly in this historiography forces the historian on decidedly unfavorable terrain. There seems to be little room between either coming out as a full-blown supporter of one of the many theoretical (sub-)currents that shaped this field, each of which has been subject to decades of the most vehement criticism, or the daunting task of coming up with some new synthesis. The dilemma is not new. After all, even Braudel felt compelled to banish the definitional and methodological concerns raised by his three-volume Civilisation materielle et capitalism to a separate text, appropriately published in English under the title Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism. Perhaps it is a sign of the severe hits taken by more structuralist, system-oriented and social-theory informed approaches to history since the 1980s, that in the new history of capitalism such concerns frequently do not even arise as afterthoughts. As Lenger notes in the opening essay of Globalen Kapitalismus denken, this minimalist approach to theory stretches from many of capitalism's new critics to the pro-capitalist editors of the 2014 two-volume Cambridge History of Capitalism.

One way to help the field overcome its self-chosen conceptual naïveté is to combine the intellectual agenda of the new histories of capitalism, in particular their attention to global origins and the role of the state, politics, and coercion, with the writing of rigorous intellectual histories of the study of capitalism as a topic that is itself worthy of (transnational) analysis. Friedrich Lenger is, of course, not the first to try to do so. To give but one example, Jürgen Kocka's Geschichte des Kapitalismus, which I reviewed earlier for this journal, opens with an insightful examination of the history of the usage of the term capitalism. Lenger himself is aware that renewing the intellectual history of theories of capitalism is a collective effort that must be perceived of in close interaction with renewing the way in which the global history of capitalism is written. His Globalen Kapitalismus denken therefore appears as the first volume of a series of Studies on the History and Theory of Capitalism (Studien zur Geschichte und Theorie des Kapitalismus) edited by Lenger.

Rather than forming a coherent monograph, Globalen Kapitalismus denken contains three loosely connected essays that are of completely different size and scope. The first is a forty-page review essay on the New History of Capitalism, which situates it in various post-war attempts to explain the global dimensions of the history of capitalism. Published in 2016 in Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, it provides a thorough but also quite wooden contextualization of recent trends in the literature. Its running commentary on the strengths and shortcomings of a number of now no longer brand new books, especially the previously mentioned Cambridge History of Capitalism, clearly mark this essay as intended for a journal, and one could question the usefulness of republishing it in a book like this. A similar comment can be made about the barely ten-page essay that follows it on Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. Although this text was originally written for this book, it was pre-published in Mittelweg 36. Zeitschrift des Hamburger Instituts für Sozialforschung. The essay contains interesting observations on the “non-problem” of the apparent contradiction between compassion and self-interest in Smith's economic theory and moral philosophy, but Lenger does not integrate these into an overarching argument across the three texts and, again, one wonders whether a journal was perhaps a more suitable outlet for it.

However, these criticisms on the editorial choice of including the first two essays in this volume, which, by the way, do not invalidate their individual contents, are more than compensated for by the topical relevance and quality of the over 100-page-long third essay, “Anfang und Ende einer spezifisch deutschsprachigen Sozialwissenschaft. Umrisse einer Geschichte des Archivs für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik”. This essay, first published here, might as well have been presented as a monograph in its own right. It spans the entire history of the famous journal, founded in 1888 by Heinrich Braun as the Archiv für soziale Gesetzgebung und Statistik. It attained its greatest influence after 1904 when it was renamed, and came under the helm of Edgar Jaffé, Werner Sombart, and Max Weber. Published until 1933 and bridging many disciplines in the social sciences, Archiv could count among its editors and contributors (apart from the three mentioned above) such foundational figures of twentieth-century thought as Joseph Schumpeter, Karl Polyani, Alfred Weber, Robert Michels, Ernst Troeltsch, Carl Schmitt, and Karl Mannheim. Among its occasional contributors were luminaries such as Walter Benjamin, Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz, Karl August Wittfogel, Eduard Bernstein, and Michail Tugan-Baranowsky. Like its most famous editors, the journal provided a wide-ranging engagement with the problem of capitalism, understood not merely as an economic system, but rather at the cross-section of economics, politics, and culture. Many of the famous contributors were (reform-oriented) socialists, but, equally, many were not, and some contributors even moved uncomfortably close to fascism and the broader authoritarian right. Lenger summarizes the key phases in the development of the journal, both from the side of the main intellectual contributions and contemporary scientific and political concerns of its contributors, and the often strained relationship between its editors. Of special interest is the way in which Lenger manages to bring out the interaction between Archiv and its close neighbours, including influential social-democratic party journals such as the Neue Zeit, Carl Grünberg's Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung (the progenitor of the Frankfurter Schule), and the increasing number of specialist journals in the social sciences. Tracing this history convincingly shows how, for four and a half decades, Archiv more than any other single journal left its imprint on the study of capitalism.

Some readers might find Lenger's essay too genealogical, not only in its aims, but also in its meticulous tracing of the often diverging argumentative threads that ran through Archiv's pages. However, some of the most challenging questions in the historiography of capitalism-study indeed have to do with hybrid origins and cross pollination. Even in the intellectual milieu of German social-democracy, so fundamental for the first-generation diffusion of the term capitalism, the mental leap from challenging capital to positing the global presence of a closed social system called capitalism owed as much to Marx as it did to Rodbertus, and in his footsteps Sombart and his fellow contributors in Archiv. Rich traditions of social analysis and empirical study of the history of capitalism that are often assumed to be mutually exclusive frequently share common roots, leading to unsuspected affinities and biases shared across conflicting approaches. Lenger provides an admirable reconstruction of these intersecting strands of analysis through an intellectual history of the journal that formed one of the most influential locations for their intersection. The essay alone makes the book a highly worthwhile statement of the ambitions of the series that it launches, and a showcase for what a rigorous engagement with intellectual history can add to the current historiographical turn in the study of capitalism.