From Socialism to Hedge Fund: The Human Element and the New History of Capitalism

David Huyssen

doi:10.5195/jwsr.2015.9

Abstract

Alfred Winslow Jones was a socialist who founded the first hedge fund in 1949. He had been U.S. Vice Consul in Berlin from 1931 to 1932, Soviet sympathizer and anti-Nazi spy with dissident German communists, humanitarian observer during the Spanish Civil War, acclaimed sociologist of class, and an editor for Fortune magazine. At every stage of his life, Jones occupied positions of advantage, and his invention of the modern hedge fund has had an outsized impact on global capitalism’s contemporary round of financialization. On its face, then, his life would appear to offer ideal material for a “great-man” biography. Yet this “great man” also wrestled with the continual recognition that structural forces were undermining his fondest hopes for social change. Following Georgi Derluguian, Giovanni Arrighi, and Marc Bloch, this article proposes a world-system biography of Jones as a method better suited for mapping the internal dialectics of twentieth-century capitalism, using Jones as a human connection between cyclical and structural transformations of capitalism, and across changes of phase from financial to material expansion—and back again. On another level, it suggests a theoretical reorientation—toward what Bloch called “the human element”—for studies of capitalism’s cultural and material history. It argues that such a reorientation would hold rewards for the “new history of capitalism” field, which until now has pursued its quarry primarily by tracing the movements of commodities, capital, institutions, and ideas.

Highlights

This journal is published by the University Library System, University of Pittsburgh as part of its D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program and is cosponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Press
He had been a purser on a tramp steamer, U.S Vice Consul in Berlin from 1931 to 1932, Soviet sympathizer and anti-Nazi spy with German socialists, humanitarian observer during the Spanish Civil War, acclaimed sociologist of class, and an editor for Fortune magazine
His invention of the modern hedge fund grew out of this striving, and it made an important contribution to the shape of global capitalism (Knorr-Cetina and Preda 2004; Geithner 2004; Stultz 2007; Pike and Pollard 2010; Lysandrou 2012)

Summary

Epochal Shifts and Radical Nostalgia

There is a plausible (if unduly narrow) case for ascribing Jones’s turn away from the radical left solely to his romantic life. Carter had grown up on a Virginia tobacco plantation and had moved to New York originally planning to do work with children, but had taken the job at Columbia when the opportunity presented itself through Southern connections She was progressive, and hardly in a conventional bourgeois way—she would remain politically active and engaged in social justice causes for the rest of her life, joining the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, advising New York mayors on desegregating public education, and leading the Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side. Jones’s account of their decision to go to Spain reflects the disappointed ambivalence of active leftists and self-identifying socialists toward the manner of capitalism’s apparent disintegration He indicts the American, French, and British governments for abiding by the non-intervention agreement in the face of Hitler and Mussolini’s flagrant violations of it, while offering an implicit defense of Stalin’s decision to limit Soviet aid (for fear of sparking “general war”). We ought to go” (Weiner and Jones 1993)

From Naïve Sympathy to Deliberate Economism

Findings

Conclusion