Anti-Capital: Human, Social and Cultural

Book excerpt: The notion of capital has enjoyed a rich career in the social sciences, its use across a range of subjects and in diverse academic and professional contexts having served to establish its conceptual status as 'given'. With particular attention to human and social capital - including cultural capital - this book traces the roots of this theoretical and conceptual trend to economics, revealing the proliferation of various forms of capital to be based upon an encroachment of the conceptual apparatus of economics into other social sciences. Offering an in-depth, critical analysis of the concepts of human and social capital, as well as their surrounding theories, Anti-Capital: Human, Social and Cultural proposes an alternative theoretical framework, whilst better explaining the realities that they mask in economic terms. A rigorous exploration of the most popular forms of 'capital' in the contemporary social sciences, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of sociology, political and social theory, demography and economics.