Capitalism and inequality. Structural characteristics or different implications of different socioeconomic conceptions? A historiographical approach

Abstract

In this article, we aim, on the one hand, to describe and interpret the evolution of the ways in which the relationship between common sense and ideology, humanities, social sciences and science-based technologies also derived from them has been structured. On the other hand, we intend to observe the consequences arising from the application of each of the epistemological paradigms in question — modern, neomodern and postmodern — to the analysis of the problem of inequalities in societies organized based on the capitalist mode of production (local/regional, national, subcontinental and global scales).

We then attempt to propose a synthetic characterization, in a logic of present-day history, of the evolution of inequalities in capitalist economies (in developed, intermediately developed and underdeveloped countries) since the end of the Cold War. To this end, we adopt the perspective of the new historiography — neomodern and resulting from the fusion of critical idealism, critical Marxism and structuralist historiography — and outline comparisons with the 18th and 19th centuries, with the post-First World War and with the post-Second World War periods.