[2] Sombart's texts and lectures helped to make "capitalism" a household word in Europe, as the name of a socio-economic system with a specific structure and dynamic, a history, a mentality, a dominant morality and a culture.
[3] The use of the term "late capitalism" to describe the nature of the modern epoch existed for four decades in continental Europe, before it began to be used by academics and journalists in the English-speaking world - via English translations of German-language Critical Theory texts, and especially via Ernest Mandel's 1972 book Late Capitalism published in English in 1975.
The Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin famously declared in 1920, that there are no "absolutely hopeless situations" for capitalism; short of an anti-capitalist political revolution overthrowing the rule of the bourgeoisie, the system could always recover sooner or later.
According to Google Books Ngram Viewer, the frequency of mentions per year of the term "late capitalism" in publications has increased steadily since the 1960s.
[9] In contemporary academic or journalistic usage, late capitalism often refers to a new mix of high-tech advances, the concentration of (speculative) financial capital, post-Fordism (transition of mass production in huge factories, as pioneered by Henry Ford, towards specialized markets based on networks of small flexible manufacturing units),[10] and growing income inequality.
I hope that this term will be favourably received; I am aware, of course, of how much aversion there is, particularly among [academic] colleagues, to accepting unfamiliar new terminology – as Max Weber once put it: 'as if it were a question of using someone else's toothbrush.'
[17] Only since the late 1980s[18] and 1990s[19] did significant scholarly interest in Sombart's intellectual legacy begin to revive, with new appraisals and studies of particular aspects of his oeuvre.
Ever since the famous theoretical controversy between orthodox Marxists and revisionists in the 1890s, socialists have been discussing the decline, breakdown and collapse of bourgeois society.
In the post-World War I reconstruction era, many of the wartime regulations in Europe continued, and the state played the leading role in repairing, rebuilding and reorganizing society.
[24] At the time, this was not an especially radical turn of phrase, because many people of different political persuasions really believed that the existing social order was doomed, or was at least ripe for renewal and transformation.
In their book Capitalism since World War II, Philip Armstrong, Andrew Glyn and John Harrison comment that: "Paul Samuelson, who later wrote the bestselling economics textbook published in the postwar years, raised in 1943 the probability of a 'nightmarish combination of the worst features of inflation and deflation', fearing that 'there would be ushered in the greatest period of unemployment and industrial dislocation which any economy has ever faced' (Samuelson, 1943, p. 51).
[…] Joseph Schumpeter, an eminent economist, summed up the mood of alarm of the early forties: 'The all but general opinion seems to be that capitalist methods will be unequal to the task of reconstruction.'
Indeed, the virulence and imperialist aggressivity of capitalism were said to result precisely from desparate attempts to avert this crisis by provoking tension, conflict, and war.
[35] In 1971, Leo Kofler published a book called Technologische Rationalität im Spätkapitalismus (Technological Rationality in Late Capitalism).
[39] In 1979, Volker Ronge published Bankpolitik im Spätkapitalismus: politische Selbstverwaltung des Kapitals?, a study of banking in late capitalism.
[40] In 1981, Winfried Wolf and Michel Capron extended Mandel's analysis of the long recession in Spätkapitalismus in den achtziger Jahren.
[46] According Ernest Mandel, late capitalism involves the commodification and industrialisation of more and more parts of the economy and society, where human services are turned into commercial products.
[47] Mandel believed that "[f]ar from representing a 'post-industrial society', late capitalism [...] constitutes generalized universal industrialization for the first time in history".
[55] In part, Mandel's analysis was a critique of Henryk Grossmann's breakdown theory, according to which capitalism would collapse after a series of business cycles because of insufficient surplus value production.
[56] But Mandel also criticized the methodological approach of Rudolf Hilferding, Rosa Luxemburg, Nikolai Bukharin, Otto Bauer, Michal Kalecki, and Charles Bettelheim.
Intermediate between the periodization of business cycles and the postulated ultimate collapse of capitalism, Mandel argued, there were epochs of faster and slower economic growth.
[61] In the tradition of the orthodox Marxists, Mandel tried to characterize the nature of the modern epoch as a whole, with reference to the main long-run laws of motion of capitalism specified by Marx.
[64] Fredric Jameson borrowed Mandel's vision as a basis for his widely cited Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
[65] Jameson's postmodernity involves a new mode of cultural production (developments in literature, film, fine art, video, social theory, etc.)
From the second half of the 20th century, however, modernism was gradually eclipsed by postmodernism, which is skeptical about social engineering and features a lack of consensus about the meaning of progress.
[citation needed] Jameson argues that "every position on postmodernism today—whether apologia or stigmatization—is also...necessarily an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today".
Jameson regards the late capitalist stage as a new and previously unparalleled development with a global reach—whether defined as a multinational or informational capitalism.