ABSTRACT
Long ago, in the 1960s, the radical Catholics of the Slant group wrote that for much of its existence their Church had danced a slow jive with capitalism (Cunningham et al., 1966). Anachronistic though it is, the metaphor is an attractive one; it suggests a partnership-inmovement whose terms are always changing, yet in which the partners share a kind of responsive relationship, that patterns, reciprocally, their movements. Jiving is a promiscuous kind of metaphor that can work just as well if the Catholic Church is replaced as partner by some other entity or practice, such as the nation state or warfare. It also works, up to a point, to illuminate the history of a discourse, such as the subject of this collection, creativity, whose birth and rapid development coincide with capitalism’s, and which learned to dance, as it were, in the spaces opened up by its more powerful partner.
