Beijing's successful bid to host the 2008 Summer Olympics has drawn the world's attention to the unprecedented pace and scale of transformation in the People's Republic of China and rekindled debates about what the public sphere, human rights, and democracy might mean under “market socialism.” Readers of Public Culture of course find themselves particularly well-placed to analyze the cross-cultural contacts and conflicts on display this summer, thanks to a wealth of previously published essays examining forms of cultural, economic, and ideological hybridity in the “New China.”

In the midst of a global financial crisis, many have begun to question what went wrong: did certain mechanisms for manipulating capital actually fail, or were they merely implemented to their logical extremes? What, exactly, does capitalism mean anymore, and what relation does the “free market” bear to the democracies which now seek to regulate it? Public Culture has featured a range of articles on the speculative and risk-laden nature of late capitalism, as well as the dynamics of circulation that drive globalization and have fundamentally altered the ways in which we understand culture, finance, and economics. In the articles below, our authors consider the conditions, possibilities, limitations, and circuitries of capitalism in the present, drawing on history, philosophy, ethnography, and economics to understand where we are—and where we may be going.