Grasping a deviant capitalism requires abstracting its specific differences, not its general features.

Evidence

There is certainly no simple counterposing of “social” as against “economic” factors here. Rex cannot be accused of neglecting the level of economic relations, as many “culturalists” can. Indeed, it is his concern with the specificity of the forms of economic relations peculiar to the South African case which enables him to grasp some of the fundamental features of a social formation which is both identifiably “capitalist,” and yet different in structure from “the capitalist type” of social development—as the latter has been derived from one reading of the Marxist literature. The attention to the “central labour institutions” of this formation enables him to bring forward what Marx in another context called the “differentia specifica”—the basis, as he put it, of an adequate historically specific abstraction: “just those things which determine their development, i.e., the elements which are not general and common, must be separated out … so that in their unity … their essential difference is not forgotten” (Marx 1973: 85). — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 591

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the methodological principle of the ‘differentia specifica’ — historically specific abstraction selects what is peculiar to a case rather than what it shares with the general type.
• XREF: Connects directly to Hall’s general method of conjunctural, non-reductionist Marxism; echoes calls for ‘articulation’ theory elsewhere in the reader’s collection.
• DEEPTHINKING: The proposition that deviant cases — what a case lacks in common with the general type — rather than typical cases are where explanation must begin is counterintuitive and methodologically fertile beyond this chapter.