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This article discusses the recent resurgence of interest in capitalism in social sciences and humanities fields. Scholars are reexamining capitalism and its relationship to uneven development and social difference. The article brings together papers from various disciplines, including geography, sociology, anthropology, and global political economy, to explore how these concepts intersect. The papers highlight the importance of understanding capitalism as an overdetermined whole and emphasize the role of spatial and social difference in its development. The authors also emphasize the importance of struggle and concrete social interventions in shaping the geographies and temporalities of uneven development. [Extracted from the article]

This article draws on theories of uneven development to deconstruct a set of universalising assumptions in the critique of American capitalism. While these theories have called for more relational understandings of capitalism, there is a tendency to naturalise the United States as an instance of universal capitalist relations. Engaging such diverse thinkers as Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, Michel Aglietta, and Cedric Robinson, the article identifies three recurrent universals, including: (1) abstraction from the US as the most "advanced" capitalist formation; (2) assumption of American capitalism as developing in a particularly "pure" state; and (3) subsumption of the dynamics of American capitalism under universal logics. Reading these against the methodological principles of Uneven and Combined Development, the article argues for provincialising the capitalist formation that appears the most "complete". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the growing literature on the relationship between local governments and financial markets by demystifying the municipal bond rating process. Since the Great Recession, the dynamics of municipal debt have moved to the forefront of American urban politics and the pursuit of high bond ratings has become a key mechanism constraining local policy autonomy. However, we know little about the actual practices of the rating agencies. Drawing on interviews conducted within these organizations, the article examines the criteria, processes and organizational practices that produce ratings. In conversation with calls for bridging the divide between political economy and techno-cultural approaches to markets, the paper shows how bond rating is structured by an ever-present tension between the need to understand localized investment risk in all its place-specific complexity while striving to fit that risk within the standardized grid of the rating scale. Further, the analysis highlights the imperative of budget flexibility through which indebted local governments are pushed into self-disciplining of their finances. As such, the article unpacks a particularly opaque area of local politics and furthers ongoing conversations between financial geography and urban political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]