The history of political economy is tormented by beasts. The most famous is the Leviathan, the giant serpentine monster that figures in Hobbes’s masterpiece of modern political theory. Robert Fredona and Sophus Reinert spotlight another sea monster, the Kraken, that giant octopus or squid with a particular morphology (i.e., its tentacles) that so fittingly describes the grip of multinational corporations, stateless financial capital, social media, and tech giants today. But there are still other monsters in the bestiary of political economy. In this essay, I highlight the Behemoth, a land monster that captures another critical dimension of political economy: the willful and intentional deployment of chaos and disorder as a way of governing. Franz Neumann, political and legal theorist and lawyer, Columbia University professor, and member of the Frankfurt School in exile, placed the Behemoth at the heart—and in the title—of his analysis of Germany’s political economy under the Nazi regime. Alongside the Leviathan surveillance state and the many tentacular grips of multinational, social media, and tech Krakens, the Behemoth remains a key model to better understand current forms of capitalism.

Decarbonization is a momentous challenge for capitalism and makes one ask which changes in its morphology may be necessary to achieve that objective. The contribution by the French economist Albert Aftalion (1874–1956), with its emphasis on intermediate levels of aggregation (the “meso“ approach), the differentiated time profiles of economic actoivities, and their differential speeds of reaction to dynamic impulses, provides an invaluable heuristic for conceptualizing the structural transformations required by transition to a low energy regime. Aftalion’s analysis of industrial capitalism emphasizes that structural changes occur along multiple co-existing time horizons. This provides tools to analyze the time constraints on the sequencing of structural changes for different sectors on a decarbonization trajectory without neglecting the strict time requirements for implementing effective climate change mitigation. This interplay of time horizons is central to decarbonization, and it will require a new balance between the invisible hand of markets and the visible hand of states and other public bodies. Moreover, Aftalion’s emphasis on material constraints offers a novel approach to conceptualizing the importance of intermediate levels of aggregation in economic theory, thereby offering a new basis for sectoral policymaking and a fundamental challenge to institutionalist accounts of the morphology of capitalism.

Although it has a durable institutional shape, the operation of capitalism takes different forms across space and time with varying distributive effects. This article contributes to a growing literature considering the successive forms taken by capitalism in the developed democracies since World War II. It develops a distinctive conception of these forms as “growth regimes” that are mutually constituted by the core practices of firms and reinforcing public policies specific to each historical era. The movement of firm practices and government policies is then examined with a view to identifying the growth regimes of three postwar eras of modernization, liberalization, and knowledge-based growth.

Quinn Slobodian has established himself as a leading historian of neoliberalism. Crack-Up Capitalism continues where his Globalists left off, but shifts focus from visions of global ordering to the fragmentation of the world into special economic zones (SEZs). In Slobodian’s provocative analysis, SEZs become a late neoliberal solution to the entrenched problem of democracy at the nation-state level. We follow Slobodian into the zone, thinking with him about the spatial dimensions of contemporary political economy. Although we problematize the disjuncture between Crack-Up Capitalism’s group biography of market radicals and its analysis of zones as a global economic reality, our intent is not to critique Slobodian, but to use his new book as a jumping off point to foreground other possible frames for understanding the zone: a longue durée historical outlook that can help de-exceptionalize the zone as a phenomenon of late neoliberalism, a focus on the internal diversity and political possibility of the zone form, and an emphasis on the causal link between the recent proliferation of zones and the ascendance of export-oriented industrialization as a global development paradigm.

Capitalism has taken many forms over the last 500 years. This short essay asks whether rediscovering the idea that corporations have a moral duty to contribute to the social good might help create a form of capitalism capable of addressing the massive problems that we face. I argue that the property view of the corporation, or the idea that the sole goal of the corporation should be to maximize investor returns, might once have been appropriate, but is currently causing enormous damage. I suggest that the entity view of the corporation, or the view that the primary purpose of the corporation is to serve the common good, has a long history, and is currently remerging in ways that have the potential to help reform capitalism in powerful ways.

Corporate capitalism changed dramatically in the early 2000s. The 1980s mantra that “greed is good” gave way to corporate vows to prioritize social and environmental values alongside profit. The rise of the “new corporation” purported to answer a question first raised in the nineteenth century: How do we ensure corporations are legally and morally accountable to those their actions impact? By the late nineteenth century, capitalism had become corporate, and the corporation had become capitalist. This created a moral lack in capitalism that inspired the “new capitalism” in the 1920s, the New Deal administrative state, and today's “new corporation.” Understanding its historical antecedents reveals the “new” corporation's limitations and dangers.