Uppsala domkyrkoförs., Suecia
Today, we’ve been hearing about all sorts of ways to capture the contemporary moment, and by the “contemporary moment,” cer- tainly in my case, I am referring not just to the last couple of years, but the last few decades. The way I have chosen is “rentier capi- talism,” so I would like to begin by explaining what I mean by it, and what I hope to achieve by using it. The first thing to say is that for me it was and still is something very simple, a way of grasping a set of empirical realities over the recent decades. Yet in searching for a way to do that, I failed to find an existing conceptual archi- tecture. By trying to do something very empirical, I came to rely on the concept of “rentier capitalism.”