Eleven Hypotheses on the Conceptual History of Social Capital

A response to James Farr , “Social Capital: A Conceptual History,” Political Theory 32 (2004): 6-33, drafted entirely before seeing his response, “In Search of Social Capital”—appearing in this issue—other than to comment now that it seems to add nothing to contradict the hypothesis that “social capital” has a conceptual history essentially equivalent to that of the “ploughman's lunch”. For supporting evidence from my own work for the propositions on social capital offered here, see Ben Fine, “The Developmental State Is Dead—Long Live Social Capital?” Development and Change 30 (1999): 1-19; Ben Fine, Social Capital versus Social Theory: Political Economy and Social Science at the Turn of the Millennium(London: Routledge, 2001); Ben Fine, “It Ain't Social, It Ain't Capital and It Ain't Africa,” Studia Africana 13 (2001): 18-33; Ben Fine, “They F**k You Up Those Social Capitalists,” Antipode34 (2002): 796-99; Ben Fine, “Social Capital: The World Bank's Fungible Friend,” Journal of Agrarian Change3 (2003): 586-603; Ben Fine, “If Social Capital Is the Answer, We Have the Wrong Question,” in Social Capital, Civil Renewal and Ethnic Diversity: Proceedings of a Runnymede Conference (London: Runnymede Trust, 2005), 75-81; Ben Fine, “Social Capital,” mimeo, submitted to Development in Practice for special issue on buzzwords; and Ben Fine, “Social Capital in Wonderland: The World Bank behind the Looking Glass,” in draft, available from the author.

Farr, “Social Capital.”

Stephen Smith and Jessica Kulynych , “It May Be Social, but Why Is It Capital? The Social Construction of Social Capital and the Politics of Language,” Politics and Society 30 (2002): 149-186.

For a full account, bringing out debate, exceptions, and the intellectual process involved, see Ben Fine and Dimitri Milonakis , From Political Economy to Freakonomics: Method, the Social and the Historical in the Evolution of Economic Theory (London: Routledge, forthcoming).

For an account, see Gregor McLellan ,“ Fin de Sociologie? The Dilemmas of Multidimensional Social Theory,” New Left Review 230 (1998): 58-90.

Gary S. Becker , Accounting for Tastes (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).

On “identity,” for example, see George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton , “Economics and Identity,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 115 (2000): 715-753; and, for a critique, Ben Fine, “Identity Matters: What Contribution Can Economics Make?” in draft, available from the author.

A simple search in one library catalogue offered, as examples for the historical record, Yves Dubé , J. E. Howes , and D. L. McQueen , Housing and Social Capital (Hull, Québec: Royal Commission on Canada's Economic Prospects, 1957); and John Healey, The Development of Social Overhead Capital in India, 1950-60 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965).

James O'Connor , The Fiscal Crisis of the State (New York: St Martin's, 1973).

For an insiders' account, see Anthony Bebbington , Scott Guggenheim , Elizabeth Olson , and Michael Woolcock , “Grounding Discourse in Practice: Exploring Social Capital Debates at the World Bank,” Journal of Development Studies 40 (2004): 33-64. See Fine, “Social Capital in Wonderland,” for a critique.

See K. S. Jomo and Ben Fine , The New Development Economics: After the Washington Consensus (Delhi and London: Tulika and Zed, 2006).

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels , “The German Ideology,” cited in Takahisa Oishi, The Unknown Marx: Reconstructing a Unified Perspective (London: Pluto, 2001), 23-23.

See Ben Fine , “Examining the Idea of Globalisation and Development Critically: What Role for Political Economy?” New Political Economy 9 (2004): 213-231.