In this conversation, intellectual historian Barnaby Raine joins me in a wide-ranging, encyclopedic, and wonderful conversation about capitalism and the self.

Barnaby is working on his PhD at Colombia, where he studies the end of capitalism in social & political thought since Marx, with a focus on ‘the problem of transition’: the challenge of seeking to move beyond a system upon which our lives still depend.

Barnaby is also a teacher at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, where he taught a course on “Capitalism and the Self”, which I took and loved, the content of which is the topic of our conversation today.

Our basic question is this: how has capitalism, throughout its history, produced not only goods and services, but our subjective experience, our sense of what the self is and how we relate to other people?

Barnaby walks us through the intellectual history of this question, from Rousseau, to Dukheim, Lukács, Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Foucault, and finally, into the present.

This is a long (3 hrs) conversation. It’s wonderful in its entirety, but if you’d prefer to jump to specific topics, there is a detailed time map below that can point you to specific segments.

Enjoy!