HAVING IT BOTH WAYS:
THE ROLE OF THE STATE IN THE CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF GLOBAL POLITICS
Paper prepared for:
International Studies Association Annual Conference
Montreal 16-19 March 2011
British International Studies Association Annual Conference
Manchester 27-29 April 2011
Draft paper: do not cite
Word Count: 8,063 (excluding footnotes and bibliography)
Julian Gruin
DPhil Candidate
Department of Politics and International Relations
University of Oxford
[email protected]
1
Introduction: A Perennial Critical Theoretic Crossroad?
Notwithstanding its partial subsumption within the panoply of actors in the global
politico-economic system, the state remains the most significant point of reference
for both practitioners of global politics and those concerned with theorizing the
dynamics of this system. Yet there exists a significant disjuncture between the
accepted necessity of empirically analyzing the practical role of the state, and the
attention paid to incorporating this role of the state into any post-positivist normative
social theory of global politics. This paper explores the difficulties of accounting, from
a critical theoretical perspective, for the retention of the state as an analytical
concept by ‘rationalist’ scholars and practitioners of global politics. Andrew Linklater
identified, some time ago now, three methodological steps in the practice of critical
international relations theory – the normative-philosophical, sociological, and
praxeological.1 Ten years later Alexander Wendt asked again whether post-positivists
really mean to suggest that students of social life should not ask causal questions or
attempt to test their claims against empirical evidence.2 If these were in some way
responses to Robert Keohane’s comments of 19883—in effect an admonition of the
reflectivist schools of IR theory for seemingly doing little more than throwing stones
at a mainstream industriously getting on with ‘making sense’ of the world—then
what has become of the sociological aspect of the critical theoretical research
agenda? This paper offers one possible route of reflection on the limitations currently
faced by social theorists who seek to generate possibilities for the progressive
development of seemingly immutable structures of global politics by understanding
how those structures came into existence.
In this sense the critical theoretical endeavour requires an understanding of not
merely how the social world ought to be, nor what it is, but how it comes to be. As
such, it involves a desire to comprehend the forces of social evolution and
transformation, and thus being able to provide an account of the mechanisms
1
2
3
Andrew Linklater, "The Question of the Next Stage in International Relations Theory: A
Critical- Theoretical Point of View," Millennium: Journal of International Studies 21, no. 1
(1992).
Alexander Wendt, "On Constitution and Causation in International Relations," Review of
International Studies 24, no. 5 (1998).
Robert Keohane, "International Institutions: Two Approaches," International Studies
Quarterly 32, no. 4 (1988).
2
through which the development of society, and specifically the analytical role of the
state, has diverged from the counterfactually normative preconditions of its
existence. Hence it is apparent that the challenge for critical theory is to develop and
assert its capacity to encompass, and then build upon, the act of dynamic
explanation around which the core of the social scientific endeavour is assembled the “illumination of concrete processes of social life”.4 In taking up this challenge the
critical strain of IR scholarship in the tradition of the Frankfurt School seems to be
lacking a well-defined conception of what it means to engage in the explanatory
analysis of social phenomena.5 From whence does this conundrum derive? An
insistence upon approaching the social world in all its complexity – the
intersubjective multi-variability of interactions between social actors? Or is it rooted
in the difficulties of doing so; of theorizing the state in an adequately sophisticated
and comprehensive manner, so that critical theorists may develop a better grasp of
what alternatives exist?
In this paper I contend that it is both. I argue that the ontological and
epistemological commitments of critical social theorists propel them into a mode of
analysis that renders it difficult to avoid performative contradiction. Developing
frameworks for understanding how the social preconditions of meaningful individual
action form not only the foundations for social structure but also the regenerative
potential for social evolution is a task fraught with complexity. Such difficulties of
describing a complex social world—particularly in theorizing the manner by which
socialized individuals come to form collective social structures—and critical theorists’
failures to overcome these difficulties, have prompted the development of
analytically discrete ontological categories for the purposes of methodological
expediency and versatility. This methodological turn forms the basis not only for
rationalist social theory but has also informed the evolution of practical discourses of
global governance. This places critical theory in a precarious situation: as it seeks to
interrogate the shortcomings of existing discourses it simultaneously encounters the
4
5
Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984), xvii.
Perhaps this is not greatly surprising in circumstances where the methodological coherency
of the mainstream constructivist research agenda amongst leading scholars in the US has
been questioned in recent(ish) years. Vincent Pouliot, ""Sobjectivism": Toward a
Constructivist Methodology," International Studies Quarterly 51 (2007): 359, Emanuel
Adler, "Constructivism in International Relations," in Handbook of International Relations,
ed. Walter Carlsnaes, Thomas Risse, and Beth A Simmons (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2002),
109, Jeffrey Checkel, "Social Constructivisms in Global and European Politics: A Review
Essay," Review of International Studies 30, no. 2 (2004): 239.
3
inevitable need for what might be termed the analytical totalization of social
structures. I speculate that these theoretical difficulties may be insurmountable, and
that more explicitly acknowledging these difficulties and the definable limits of their
endeavours might, ironically, enable theorists to gain greater critical purchase in
their analysis of discourses rooted in the reified structures of contemporary global
society.
To this end the paper has four parts. I turn first to explain briefly the ontological
problem that arises when seeking to transform theoretical concepts into analytical
tools. These ontological issues are fundamentally important in developing the
sociological basis for a critical theory of the role of the state in global politics, as the
nation-state represents the site of analytical convergence between rationalist
accounts of global politics reliant upon a methodological territorialism, and social
theorists who generally take the domestically bounded nation-state to constitute the
analytical frame of reference. I examine how one eminent social theorist in Jürgen
Habermas engages with the problem of the differing ontological levels of social
evolution. In the second part I examine the reasons underlying this tendency to
engage in the analytical totalization of social structure. In the third part I explore the
possible implications of this tendency by taking up the example of how the concept
of power in the global system is analyzed. In the fourth and final part I begin to
sketch out how recognizing and addressing these issues might enable us to better
meet the challenge of understanding how practitioners of real world politics socially
construct the state and its role within global politics. Taking this step may provide us
with a basis for more adequately analyzing difference across states in a way that is
currently not possible, and I thus explore some of the ways in which the socialization
process and the relationships of power and authority as have emerged in China
might be viewed as substantively and significantly distinct from the modes of
thought that have proven to dominate both analytical and theoretical practice in the
West.
The Difficult Ontology of Social Evolution
The challenge of developing adequate theoretical frameworks to account for the
construction of the nation-state as a foundational entity in global politics, and its
4
simultaneous analytical reification across the theoretical spectrum of global politics,
first requires revisiting a variant of the structure and agency question that has
concerned social theorists for a not insignificant length of time. At first blush one
possible though misconceived reaction is to reason that agency always informs
structure; if social structure is constructed by socialized individuals, then agency is
logically prior to and determinative of structure. As Watkins argued, it is an
ontological truism that “all social phenomena are, directly or indirectly, human
creations.”6 Hindess has argued that the term ‘agent’ must be applied in the same
sense to collectivities that act as corporate units in social life—political parties, firms,
families, states, clubs, or trade unions—as it is applied to individuals.7 This misses
the mark; whilst the exercise of agency is always conditional upon the presence of
intersubjective relations, this collective aspect does not permit the agglomeration of
agency into a further and coherent social unit of analysis. Social structures do not
possess internal logics of their own – such forms of structural inertia or momentum
are merely reflective of the alterations that emerge in the intersubjective relations
between actors. The ontological slip that occurs here is that the patterns of these
intersubjective alterations may come to be regarded as structurally immutable in
themselves; praxis—in the form of institutional evolution—is limited by an inability to
accurately depict the relationship between changes in the worldview of the
intersubjectively mediated subject, and the state of the thoroughly intersubjective
social totality that is nonetheless structurally institutionalized as the sum total of
each subject’s worldviews.
Stated bluntly, the notion that clear causal mechanisms can be discerned within this
relationship is troublesome,8 for a necessary implication of a dialectical conception of
social action is that it becomes logically impossible to isolate the causal relationship
between any two social facts or phenomena. It is thus no longer a matter of claiming
that agency involves being “capable of exerting some degree of control over the
6
7
8
John Watkins, "Ideal Types and Historical Explanation," The British Journal for the
Philosophy of Science 3 (1952). This has been described by Jon Elster as a “trivially true”
truism. See Jon Elster, Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989), 66.
Barry Hindess, "Actors and Social Relations," in Social Theory in Transition, ed. Mark
Wordell and Stephen Turner (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986).
Sewell’s observation—that the most fundamental problem with structuralist arguments is
that they tend to assume far too rigid a causal determinism in social life—highlights the
difficulties in assuming the structural totality of social institutions. See William Sewell, "A
Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation," The American Journal of
Sociology 98, no. 1 (1992).
5
social relations in which one is enmeshed”,9 nor that any “structure of intersubjective
public beliefs”10 is to preclude the possibilities for meaningful individual action. It is
only by explicating the fluid dialectics of a constantly re-iterating relationship
between two social facts that we can hope to provide a plausibly accurate illustration
of how such social facts interact. Such a view is counter-posed against a theory that
invests totalizing concepts with explanatory significance when forming the analytic
link between the sociological conditions of individual identity-based action, and their
manifestation within social institutions. Bertell Ollman has argued that Marx’s
conceptual slipperiness is due largely to his commitment to a specifically, and
distinctively, dialectical ontology.11 As Sayer observes,
Marx did not conceive social reality atomistically, as made up of clearly bounded,
separate, interacting entities: the kind of analytic particulars which can be
grasped in clear, consistent and exclusive definitions. He saw the world, rather,
as a complex network of internal relations, within which any single element is
what it is only by virtue of its relationship to others.12
In other words, Marx’s social world is thoroughly intersubjective. Despite Marx
remaining rooted in a philosophy of consciousness, with unfortunate implications for
the subject’s point of vantage upon the unfolding evolution of society, this external
social reality defied the erection of the ontological divisions necessary for causal
explanation. Marx’s historical materialism has long been discarded within the
Frankfurt School, but the animating spirit of his critical method now provokes the
question of whether those identifiable characteristics of the subject is capable of
providing the analytic, rather than merely the theoretic tools to comprehend the
mutually iterative process of the formation of social institutions.
The importance of this challenge is apparent in examining how the issues
surrounding subjectivity have not only generated significant difficulties for the
philosophical foundations of social theory, but have manifested in the practice of
world politics through discourses of social control and regulation based on totalizing
conceptions of society as it relates to the individual. I examine these issues by
9
Ibid.: 21.
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, "Rethinking Weber: Towards a Non-Individualist Sociology of
World Politics," International Review of Sociology 12, no. 3 (2002).
11
Bertell Ollman, Alienation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).
12
Derek Sayer, The Violence of Abstraction: The Analytic Foundations of Historical
Materialism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 19.
10
6
focusing on Habermas’ account of social change and evolution as grounded in the
theoretical framework of universal pragmatics. The manner by which the dialectic of
functionalist and communicative rationality undergirds processes of social evolution is
linked to Habermas’ development of universal pragmatics as the presuppositions of
competent communication. It is Habermas’ contention that the same presuppositions
of an individual’s competent communication have informed the macro-development
of society.13 Accordingly, by reconstructing through universal pragmatics the process
by which social actors develop the capability to engage in communication, it is made
possible to elucidate processes by which society as a whole evolves. For Marx, the
evolutionary dynamic of all social development was to be found in the conflicting
relationship between the forces of production (science and technology) and relations
of production (social classes formed by the way the ownership of the means of
production is distributed). However such a restriction renders Marxist historical
materialism incapable of explaining the development of our intersubjective
capacities.14 Thus Habermas seeks to reconstruct historical materialism as a theory
of social (ie. communicative) evolution. Since social evolution has been construed as
a process of social learning, Habermas suggests that a model for a reconstructed
historical materialism already exists in studies of the learning capacities of individual
human beings. Ontogenesis (the development of the individual) thus becomes the
model for phylogenesis (the development of the species).
In this sense the problem-solving capacity of the society will therefore be directly
related to the problem-solving capacities of its members. Habermas admittedly
cautions against the drawing from ontogenesis over-hasty conclusions about the
developmental levels of societies, acknowledging that it is the personality system
that is the bearer of the ontogenetic learning proess, and thus in a certain way, only
social subjects can learn.15 However in nonetheless undertaking this bold move
Habermas seeks to address what has been described as “the most fundamental and
most important problem of the social sciences: that of the relation between
13
14
15
Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2: Lifeworld and System: A
Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge: Polity, 1987), 15355.
Alan How, Critical Theory (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), 134-35, Jonathan Nitzan
and Shimshon Bichler, Capital as Power: A Study of Order and Creorder (Oxford:
Routledge, 2009), 280.
Jürgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy
(Oxford: Polity, 1991).
7
individual and society.”16 Two processes of socialization are crucial to Habermas’
ability to trace the social evolution of the human species in this manner. Jean Piaget
identified three stages of the cognitive development of the ego. In the symbiotic
stage a child has not yet differentiated itself from its environment. In the egocentric
stage, this differentiation has occurred, but there is as yet no distinction within the
environment between the physical and the social. Further, the child cannot yet view
the world from any perspective but its own. In the third, socio-centric objectivistic
stage, the child not only comes to master the physical/social distinction, but also the
possibility of imagining this environment from another being’s perspective. In the
final, universalistic stage, the child is capable of hypothetical thought, and thus of
questioning behavioural norms and rules and seeking rational justification for them.17
Secondly, Kohlberg’s examination of the development of moral competence includes
the preconventional, conventional and post-conventional stages of development of
normative reflection. The pre-conventional involves the adherence to norms for
reasons rooted in a logic of consequences. The conventional stage involves the
habitualized identification with the expectations of a given social order, whilst the
post-conventional individual seeks now to identify a basis for validity or justification
separate from either the authority of the persons or groups holding such principles,
or one’s own identification with them.18 These two processes—forming the basis of
the universal pragmatics of communication—whilst not mechanically mapping onto
social progress, are traceable through the social evolution of the human species. This
theoretical framework of analyzing social evolution can thus allegedly be used to
trace the development of society through to late capitalism from the perspective of
both the lifeworld and the system.
The diachronic reconstruction of social action undertaken by Habermas is thus to be
understood as a theory of evolution presenting the historical evolution of the
universal structures uncovered by universal pragmatics. Yet this is perhaps too neat
a transition from a theory of individual socialization to a theory of social evolution.
Habermas’ method of rational reconstruction here takes on a task of significant
proportions; one that takes the model of analysis capable of rationally reconstructing
structural rules that are not only valid for individuals but which also have collective
16
17
18
Lars Udehn, Methodological Individualism: Background, History and Meaning (London:
Routledge, 2001), 1.
Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society, 100-01.
Ibid., 77-82.
8
validity, and applies it not only to forces of production and institutional frameworks,
but also world views, which by contrast are highly complex formations determined by
cognitive, linguistic, and moral practical forms of consciousness for which structural
composition and interplay is not fixed once and for all.19 Thus, as Habermas
observes,
it is indeed possible to model the history of technology on the ontogenetically
analyzed stages of cognitive development, so that the logic of the
development of productive forces becomes visible. But the historical sequence
of modes of production can be analyzed in terms of abstract principles of
social organization only if we can specify which structures of world views
correspond to individual forms of social integration and how these structures
limit the development of secular knowledge.20
What are the limits of this endeavour? Habermas does not explicitly specify the
point, if any exists, at which the analyst rather than the theorist, must take
‘structural composition and interplay’ as fixed in order to derive clear and incisive
insights into the specificities of a historically particular social context. Habermas
himself provides a tentative answer. In The Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere (hereafter Structural Transformation) Habermas traced the emergence of the
public sphere of bourgeois Europe. As Anderson makes clear in his description, this
account embodies a paradox by virtue of being
antithetical in method and argument. It proceeds, not by dramatic—and
dramatically
arbitrary—discursive
projection,
but
by
careful
historical
reconstruction, based on controllable empirical materials. … Habermas traces
the rise of [the public] sphere through its successive institutional circuits: the
conjugal family, the world of letters, the coffee-house and salon, the weekly
and the novel, the circulating library and the newspaper, culminating in the
codification of civil law that ushered in the bourgeois-constitutional state.
Habermas furnishes a warm and vivid phenomenology of this whole process,
as an impressive triumph of reason in its time.21
Structural Transformation sought to describe a process of structural change through
historical narrative, rather than an abstract account of how the “systematic gradation
19
20
21
Ibid., 168.
Ibid., 169.
Perry Anderson, Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (London: Verso,
2005), 114.
9
of problem-solving capacities [entailed in human evolution] is possible when the
achievements . . . [of particular modes of cultural life] are measured by [such]
universal claims to validity (here by propositional truth and normative rightness)."22
What is absent from Habermas’ account of social evolution along these latter lines is
an adequate appreciation of the historically contingent, practically located nature of
human discursive action and its effects upon the process of cognitive moral
development. The conceptual clarification by way of historical contextualization
necessary for the analytical deployment of Habermas’ social evolutionary framework
fails to materialize.23 Structural Transformation, taken on its own terms derived its
convincingness on the basis of its ability to generate what might be termed
‘analytical agency’ – conceptualized categories of social force whose actions and thus
influences could be traced. As Held noted, perhaps rather tritely, by 1980 and later
works such as Communication and the Evolution of Society, and Legitimation Crisis,
Habermas’ “critique is addressed to mankind as such, and not to any particular class
or group”.24 Habermas unfortunately does not appear to provide a satisfying answer
to the question of whether the nature and occurrence of these paths of social
evolution are entirely conditional upon and necessarily implicated by the agency
generated by universal pragmatics, or if historical contingency itself can play a
constitutive role in enabling the transformational potential of social agency.
The Theoretical and Practical Implications of Social Individualization
In this section I propose that the difficulties encountered by Habermas in developing
a theory of social evolution that not only captures the thoroughly universal and
intersubjective dynamics of human discursive action, but which is capable of
operating in historically specific and particular contexts, are the social-theoretic
manifestation of a process of the development of human subjectivity in which the
rise of modern reason became concomitant with a mode of social analysis that seeks
analytically distinct individual components, be it in the form either of methodological
individualism or nationalism. The process of individual socialization in Western
22
23
24
Jürgen Habermas, "History and Evolution," Telos 41 (1979).
See G Skirbekk, "Rasjonalitet–Universell Og Pluralistisk?," in Undringa, ed. G Skirbekk
(Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2002), 231, cited in Jørgen Pedersen, "Habermas' Method:
Rational Reconstruction," Philosophy of the Social Sciences 38, no. 4 (2008): 481.
David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1980), 375.
10
society—the progressive development of the subject’s ability to parse out a number
of objects and view the hypothetical world from their perspective—has enabled the
social construction of the state as a discrete actor autonomous from society. As
Giddens claims, nation-states are often treated as ‘actors’—as ‘agents’ rather than
‘structures’—and there is a definite justification for this. Modern states are reflexively
monitored systems that, even if they do not ‘act’ in the strict sense of the term,
follow coordinated policies and plans on a geopolitical scale. As such, they are simply
a prime example of a more general feature of modernity, the rise of the
organization.25 It is here that the distinctions in approach adopted by Habermas
between an analysis such as that of Structural Transformation and that later taken
up in Communication and the Evolution of Society, and The Theory of
Communicative Action are perhaps made clearer. It is only by attaching particular
agency to social organizations that it becomes possible to attain clarity and focus in
the analysis of actually occurring social phenomena. Crucially, the evolution of social
theory in this respect mirrors ‘worldly’ historical evolution; the cognitive psychological
foundations for theorizing the social world are identical to those necessary for its
construction. Thus it can be seen that this tendency emerges not only in the
conceptual imaginaries of social theorists but in the practical world-views of those
engaged in the active construction of socio-political discourse.
The theoretical lineages of such a perspective in Western liberal thought stretch back
to the initial conception of social contractarian theory by Hobbes and Locke. Hobbes’
conceived of an extremely individualistic theory based on the notion of human selfinterest and the rationality to coordinate it, in the sense that it commences with
natural, or pre-socialized individuals, and explains the institution of society and/or
the state solely in terms of the human nature of these individuals.26 This is a
necessary basis of neoliberal thought – the assumption that the individual is as a
result of this socialization process a naturally autonomous and self-determining
agent, and that in an ideal situation, the individual is able to perform best without
the constraints of social institutions.27 On this basis it is only a short step before the
state comes to be perceived as an entity, mutually constituted by society, but of
25
26
27
Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 15-16.
Allesandro Pizzorno, "On the Individualistic Theory of Social Order," in Social Theory for a
Changing Society, ed. Pierre Bourdieu and James Coleman (Boulder: Westview Press,
1991).
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
11
which social and political demands can be made and with which instrumental
relationships are to be formed. Individuals accordingly no longer necessarily feel a
connection with the state; in a sense it becomes detached from the public sphere,
and democratic government itself becomes one side of a largely instrumental
transaction. This particular relationship between the individual and the state has
fostered the disembedding of the state from society. It is this mode of thought that
has enabled the assumption, for instance, of economic irrationality being governable
through the exercise of political rationality. It can be grasped in terms of the need
for individuals to construct or develop simplifying modes of thought to be
counterposed against the counterfactual complexity of human interaction. In essence
this becomes a justification for recognizing the importance of—and ultimately
reifying—social systems such as the state.
This process can be conceived of as a distinctly modern form of social evolution,
which has resulted in two distinctive features of the relationship between the
individual and the structures of society. The first is that which Giddens has referred
to as detraditionalization,28 or which Beck refers to disembedment.29 This involves
the detachment of individuals from external social constraints including cultural
traditions in general, as well as encompassing social categories such as kinship,
community and social class. This is not to undermine the role that these categories
play, but to highlight the shifting nature of this role, from a social tradition to be
preserved through individual effort, to a social resource capable of deployment in
order to aid the individual. As Beck and Beck-Gernsheim state
Neoliberal economics rests upon an image of the autarkic human self. It
assumes that individuals alone can master the whole of their lives, that they
derive and renew their capacity for action from within themselves. Talk of the
‘self-entrepreneur’ makes this clear. Yet this ideology blatantly conflicts with
everyday experience in (and sociological studies of) the worlds of work, family
and local community, which show that the individual is not a monad but is self-
insufficient and increasingly tied to others, including at the level of world-wide
networks and institutions. The ideological notion of the self-sufficient individual
28
29
Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age.
Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism
and Its Social and Political Consequence (London & Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2002).
12
ultimately implies the disappearance of any sense of mutual obligation – which
is why neoliberalism inevitably threatens the welfare state.30
The second feature is that identified by Bauman as “compulsory and obligatory selfdetermination”:31 the compelling of individuals to become proactive in taking
responsibility for their own problems. This is achieved through the development of
new social institutions, such as the education system, labour market and state
regulations. Although these institutions play a social role, they are instrumental in
nature, and necessary for the purposes purely of producing material security.32 The
state itself comes to play a limited role in moral and emotional support, the individual
being forced to rely upon the resources of other social structures for this purpose.33
Bauman likens the ontological detachment of atomistic individuals in modern society
to the pattern of a camping site:
The place is open to everyone who has his or her own caravan and money to
pay the rent. Guests come and go, none taking much interest in how the site is
run, providing that they have been allocated a plot big enough to park the
caravan, that the electric sockets and water taps are in good order and that the
passengers in nearby caravans do not make too much noise and turn down
their portable hi-fi and TV speakers after 10 pm. Drivers bring their own homes
attached to their cars, equipped with all the appliances they need for the short
stay. Each driver has his or her own plans and own schedule, and wants from
the site managers nothing more than to be left alone and not to be interfered
with, promising in exchange not to break the site rules and to pay the rent.
They pay and they demand. They tend to be quite adamant in claiming their
rights to go their own ways and to demand that the promised services are on
offer.34
On one hand, the process of individualization represents the disintegration of
previously existing and now-fragile social forms such as class and social status,
gender roles, family etc. On the other, new modes of life are coming into being to
30
31
32
33
34
Ibid.
Zygmunt Bauman, The Individualized Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 32.
Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age.
Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The
Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), David
Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1989 [1961]).
Bauman, The Individualized Society, 100. (Emphasis added)
13
replace them in modern society. Through the job market, the welfare state and
public institutions, people are tied into a network of regulations, conditions, and
provisos.35 Individualization neither implies necessarily ontological or methodological
individualism—an “unfettered logic of action, juggling in a virtually empty space”—
nor mere ‘subjectivity’, an attitude blinded to the highly efficient, densely woven
institutional nature of society.36 The density of regulations informing modern society
comprises a “work of art of labyrinthine complexity, which accompanies us literally
from the cradle to the grave.”37 The emergence of the autonomous individual that
represents one of the defining features of ‘high modernity’ is only possible by virtue
of the counterposing of social structures tied together through the—sometimes
diffuse, sometimes monolithic, but always conceptually and analytically cohesive—
nation-state. This observation serves not only to underscore the fragility of ultimately
untenable neoliberal theoretical commitments, but to enable a recognition that for all
of the necessity of its presence for the ongoing viability of modernity, the state
simultaneously
provides
the
‘constitutive
counterfactual’
for
identifying
the
autonomous individual.
Comprehending the Intersubjectivities of Power
What are the implications of this parallel development of the intimately connected
theoretical orientation and historical trajectory of modern western society? One
example of how this dilemma manifests in the study of global politics might be found
in how international relations scholars approach the analysis of power. In this section
I thus begin to take some tentative steps towards a reconceptualization of the role of
the state in global politics. The developments outlined above capture—both in
theoretic and practical terms—a process through which the power exercised by the
state over the individual comes to be derived from very different sources across
different cultural contexts; western social theory is tied to a particular view of the
socialization process. This same socialization process has resulted not only in a
35
36
37
Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, "Individualization and 'Precarious Freedoms':
Perspectives and Controversies of a Subject-Oriented Sociology," in Detraditionalization,
ed. Paul Heelas, Scott Lash, and Paul Morris (Oxford: Blackwells, 1996), 25.
Ulrich Beck, "The Debate on the 'Individualization Theory' in Today's Sociology in
Germany," in Sociology in Germany - Development, Institutionalization, Theoretical
Disputes, ed. Bernard Schäfers (Opladen: Leske Verlag, 1994).
Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, "Individualization and 'Precarious Freedoms': Perspectives and
Controversies of a Subject-Oriented Sociology," 25.
14
particular form of how individuals relate to the state, but also to how the social
sciences have come to understand the role of the state. The agent in Western social
thought cannot connect the individual subject to the collective object in ways that
avoid erecting social structures that are ontologically opposed to the agent in a
relationship of reciprocal exchange. It is this relationship that I postulate underpins
state-individual relationships in western societies, and which enables us to
understand why nation-states (or for that matter any other particular territorial
configuration of power and authority) remain the analytical focal point for analyses
of global politics.
In its most basic sense, power is the production of causal effects.38 Weber classically
analysed power as existing within the structures of authority and administration in
pre-modern and modern states. On this view power manifests in the chances that an
actor’s will can be imposed on the other participants in a social relations, even
against their resistance.39 This view was formally modeled by Lasswell and Kaplan,40
and forms the basis for an individualistic view of social action, emphasizing the
autonomy and rationality of agents as they choose from among alternative courses
of action on the basis of a calculus of the power that they posses in order to pursue
their given interests. Watkin’s trivial truism of ontological individualism thus becomes
transformed into methodological individualism.41 As Ordeshook and Riker stated in
the first comprehensive use of game theory in political science,
what we insist upon … is that collectivities, regularities about people in them,
and the common goals and values of collectivities can be understood only by
understanding the individual persons who make up the collectivities. And in
this sense our method is individualistic.42
38
39
40
41
42
John Scott, Power (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 1, Steven Lukes, "Power and
Authority," in A History of Sociological Analysis, ed. T Bottomore and R Nisbet (London:
Heinemann, 1978).
Max Weber, "The Economy and the Arena of Normative and De Facto Powers " in Economy
and Society, ed. Günther Roth and Claus Wittich (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968
[1914]), 942.
Harold Lasswell and Abraham Kaplan, Power and Society (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1950).
See further, Harold Kinkaid, Individualism and the Unity of Science: Essays on Reduction,
Explanation, and the Special Sciences (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997).
William Riker and Peter Ordeshook, An Introduction to Positive Political Theory (Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973), 37.
15
The conceptualization of power as causal power is fundamental to the notion of
human agency.43 Social power is a form of causation that has its effects in and
through social relations.44 Power in this sense only manifests in the particular state of
the relationship between two agents at any particular point in time. Yet this notion of
power also contains an inherent element of intersubjectivity. For example, Guzzini
has observed—equating money with power—that money is not basically different
from power: its fungibility is an effect of social conventions, not of some inherent or
objective criteria.45 An understanding of the intersubjective socialization process
would open up the possibilities for an understanding of power as intersubjectively
constituted. Tendencies towards this are evident by conceiving of power
relationships as endowed with meaning only through the comprehension of the
other. As Offe states, any such relationship only diagnosed by a critical observer, but
never experienced as a surmountable form of oppression by its presumed victims,
ceases to be of analytic interest even to the social-scientific observer.46
Yet this notion of intersubjectivity nonetheless involves a containerization of social
relations; the power structure with which an individual is confronted remains
monolithic and one from which the individual—or for that matter any other actor—is
largely excluded. Just as Habermas felt compelled in Structural Transformation to
trace the rise of the public sphere in bourgeois Europe through a structural
framework of individuals increasingly sophisticated in their cognitive capabilities but
which were destined to deploy their emancipatory agency in the context of a power
struggle against the opposed forces of the existing aristocracy, contemporary
attempts to locate the dimension of power as a force of social change are compelled
to attach it to something. In other words, we are driven to imagining power as filling
analytical containers imbued with the status of social agents. It is only thus that Held
is able to describe the state as “a legally circumscribed structure of power with
supreme jurisdiction over a territory”.47
43
44
45
46
47
Anthony Giddens, New Rules of the Sociological Method (London: Hutchinson, 1976), 110,
———, "Action, Structure, Power," in Profiles and Critiques in Social Theory, ed. Anthony
Giddens (London: MacMillan, 1982).
Jeffrey Isaac, "Beyond the Three Faces of Power," in Rethinking Power, ed. Thomas
Wartenberg (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992).
Stefano Guzzini, "The Use and Misue of Power Analysis in International Theory," in Global
Political Economy: Contemporary Theories, ed. Ronen Palan (London: Routledge, 2000).
Claus Offe, "The Problem of Social Power in Franz Neumann's Thought," Constellations 10,
no. 2 (2003): 214.
David Held, Political Theory and the Modern State (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), 11.
16
Critical theorists have either neglected or been unable to take the next step in the
theorization of the shared social foundations of social structures—whether they are
states or markets—which involves attempting to understand how the intersubjective
socialization process is imbued with particular forms of the exercise of power, or in
other words, to infuse this analytical progression from the individual to society as a
whole with the dimension of power. Such a failure has limited the ability of critical
theorists, and social constructivists more generally, to “understand how global
outcomes are produced”.48 Again the choice thus confronted by critical IR theorists is
to either develop a conception of power that enables the notion of instrumental
power taken up by rationalists to be subsumed within a social constructivist theory,
or to accept that there are forms of power that do heed a methodologically
individualist logic of transmission.
This difficulty of overcoming the tendency towards analysis at the level of social
totality, in the context of power analysis, has thus led critical theorists to largely
leave its analysis to rationalists prepared to attach it to various entities within an
objectively defined social world and thus analyze it in material, rather than purely
ideational terms. As Barnett and Duvall observe, ever since Carr,49 IR theorists have
tended to treat power as the exclusive province of realism.50 The only way for
rationalists to handle the concept of power is to attach it to social entities, such as
the state, private economic actors, international organizations etc. They are thus
content to perceive economic power as being wielded by private actors in opposition
to the political power of the state. As Hurrell has noted, because of the tendency to
tie global governance to institutionalized cooperation, coordination of convergent
interests, and the production of collective goods, many scholars diminish or overlook
the role of power.51 This has enabled them to retain some sense of comprehension
of what Barnett and Duvall term ‘compulsory power’,52 corresponding to Dahl’s
classical conception of power as purely interactional – the ability of A to intentionally
48
49
50
51
52
Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall, "Power in International Politics," International
Organization 59 (2005): 41.
Edward Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919-1939: An Introduction to the Study of
International Relations (London: MacMillan, 1939).
Barnett and Duvall, "Power in International Politics," 40.
Andrew Hurrell, "Power, Institutions and the Production of Inequality," in Power and Global
Governance, ed. Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2005).
Barnett and Duvall, "Power in International Politics."
17
make B do something that B wouldn’t otherwise have done.53 On this view,
rationalist scholars of politics retain the analytic category of the nation-state because
of a need to endow political power with an ontological locus, in an attempt to avoid
the ‘anonymity of power’.54
In rejecting this view and seeking to no longer theorize the state and market as
entities ontologically discrete from society, critical theorists have come to undertheorize the dimension of socio-economic power through a retreat from the politicoeconomic critique that lay at the heart of Marxian social analysis. An example of this
tendency can be found in Franz Neumann’s taking up of the question of the nature
of power in modern capitalist systems. For Neumann, the intersubjective nature of
power relations means that they cannot be grasped quantitatively, as can relations in
external nature: “the variations of the power relationships are numberless. One may
classify and describe them, but one cannot quantify them.”55 According to Neumann,
the notion of economic liberty that rests at the core of the market capitalist system
has three dimensions. First, it constitutes the liberty to enter the market, and
secondly, it involves the “choice between opportunities” on the market. Both of these
functions are power over objects, instrumental relationships made possible by the
liberty to engage capital in particular ways in relation to particular objects. The third
function, on the other hand, involves power over people, or the liberty to limit
liberty. The model he envisages is that of the individual possessor of economic
resources who deploys opportunities available on the market so as to effectively limit
the range of opportunities available to other market participants, limiting their
freedom, perhaps to the point of reducing them to a relationship of dependency.56 In
the realm of political theory, Neumann further conceived of the power of the state as
opposed in a perpetual ‘field of tension’ to the freedom of the wider society.57 These
conceptions of socio-economic and political power lead one to reduce the
intersubjective dimensions of power relationships to instrumental modes of
interaction.
53
54
55
56
57
Robert Dahl, "The Concept of Power," Behavioural Science 2, no. 3 (1957): 202-03.
Claus Offe, Modernity and the State: East and West (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996).
Franz Neumann, "Approaches to the Study of Political Power," Political Science Quarterly
65, no. 2 (1950): 4.
———, "On the Preconditions and the Legal Concept of an Economic Constitution," in Social
Democracy and the Rule of Law, ed. Keith Tribe (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987 [1931]),
47.
Hubert Buchstein, "A Heroic Reconciliation of Freedom and Power: On the Tension
between Democratic and Social Theory in the Late Work of Franz L. Neumann,"
Constellations 10, no. 2 (2003): 233.
18
The argument to this point can be summarized thus: the difficulties encountered by
Habermas in theorizing the dynamic interplay of varying ontological levels of social
action, reflect historically traceable processes of the development of both Western
theory and praxis that construct the state as both an ontologically and analytically
discrete entity, counterposed instrumentally against the socialized individual in
various relationships of power and authority. In the final section, I begin to explore
potentially distinctive modes of socialization and identity-formation that might be
found in divergent socio-cultural contexts, and whether such modes of social
evolution hold significant implications for how power relations evolve and manifest
between the individuals constituting society and the structures of state they
generate.
Preliminary Speculations: Conceptions of Power and the State in an
Individualizing China
The concept of person is what defines an individual as a more or less isolated,
independent entity of society. An individual bearing a civic identity and a conscience
is the foundation of the dominant Western concept of person.58 In contrast, Hsu
argued that five core elements of Chinese culture constitute the Chinese individual:
the central importance of the father-son relationship; the estrangement between the
two sexes; the ideal of the large family; an education system that teaches children
as if they were adults; and parental authority and power.59 This reflected general
perceptions of Chinese culture both within and outside China – that group interests
are prioritized over those of the individual and that the individual belongs and
remains secondary to the group or collective. As Yan states, “at least at the
ideological level, the group (be it the family or the state) does not exist to support
the individual; it is the other way round – the individual exists to continue the
group.”60 In this section I broadly overview how particular conceptions of power are
evident in Chinese society and culture, how such conceptions are traceable and
resultative of micro-level processes of socialization, and their implications for the
study of social phenomena.
58
59
60
Michael Carrithers, Steven Collins, and Steven Lukes, eds., The Category of the Person:
Anthropology, Philosophy, History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 23.
Francis Hsu, Under the Ancestors' Shadow: Chinese Culture and Personality (New York:
Columbia University Pressw, 1948).
Yunxiang Yan, The Individualization of Chinese Society (Oxford: Berg, 2009), 278.
19
The political manifestation of the Chinese conception of power regarded ritual or
status as an end value, not to be debased for utilitarian purposes. This derived from
the ultimate values of Chinese government being stability, continuity and harmonious
relations amongst all members. Since the goals of action were stylized acts
performed in support of the collective well-being and not to promote specific policies,
there was little sense that more efficient application of power would be desirable or
even possible. In China the Confucian legacy upheld the ideal that authority could
be, indeed should be, an end in itself. “Power was used simply to set an example of
moral rectitude so that the conduct of all individuals would be exemplary.”61 The
explicit prototype of government is the family and accordingly Chinese public life
became analogous to family life, and piety became the basis for public relations.62
Pye has described this relationship as follows:
Confucianism, based upon the ideal of paternalistic authority, held that the ideal
government would be rule by superior men who were guided by the wisdom of
the classics and organized as a hierarchy of bureaucratic authority. Ruling
entailed the persuasive influence of moral example and the expectation that
lesser people, like children, would be shamed into emulating the ways of their
superiors. Thus the purpose of governmental power was more to uphold respect
of status than to implement innovative concepts or policies. The ideal ruler did
not impose his preferences on others, but rather inspired everyone to seek his or
her own moral perfection; yet all as done within the terms of a hierarchy in which
superiors lorded it over the subordinates. The test of Confucian political power
was the number of acts of obedience that superiors could extract from
subordinates.63
Of all the East Asian countries, only China succeeded in realizing the Confucian ideal
of bureaucratic power.64 Thus it appears that political attitudes of the Chinese are
not geared to the benefits of mere compound interest; their political rhetoric is tied
to a faith in the almost ‘magical’ powers they expect to find in authority.65 The
Chinese conception of tianxia (under heaven) equated China with the world. At the
turn of the twentieth century, with the expansion of the cultural horizon, there were
61
62
63
64
65
Lucian Pye, Asian Power and Politics: The Cultural Dimension of Authority (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press, 1985), 56.
Benjamin Schwartz, In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 38-39.
Pye, Asian Power and Politics: The Cultural Dimension of Authority.
Ibid., 81.
Ibid., 183.
20
attempts to redefine China’s status in the world. Modernists began not only to
repudiate the earlier perception that only China had a human way of life, but also
urged Chinese scholars to refrain from conceiving of China as a tianxia and to think
of it instead as a unit in the world – a guojia (a state).66 Crucially though, the
Chinese world-view nonetheless depended upon a totally different line of thought
from that underpinning the socio-political development of the West. The harmonious
co-operation of all beings arose, not from the orders of a superior authority external
to themselves, but from the fact that they were all parts in a hierarchy of wholes
forming a cosmic pattern, and what they obeyed were the internal dictates of their
own natures.67
This conception of the relationship between the individual and the state finds its
roots in the distinctive Chinese socialization process. During this process the
unrelenting emphasis upon filial piety prevents the Chinese in early life from
expressing aggression against the natural targets of authority; instead they must
learn to separate their feelings form their actions, suppressing the former and
controlling the latter by strict rules of etiquette.68 Unique East Asian child-rearing
practices play an important role in shaping the ‘Chinese mentality’ that is responsible
for authoritarian rule in Chinese societies.69 The relationship between the individual
and the state is thus hierarchical, rather than as “a reciprocal one in which the
obligations of obedience and respect were contingent upon the model behaviour of
those with power.”70 Chinese scholars have argued that traditional Chinese culture
might be one based on ‘ethical political principles’, although not one of a culture of
humanistic spirit but one primarily regulated by patriarchal consanguineous
principles.71 Thus no form of expectation that favourable responses by government
66
67
68
69
70
71
He Ping, China's Search for Modernity: Cultural Discourse in the Late 20th Century
(Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002), 78.
Joseph Needham, "Human Laws and Laws of Nature in China and the West (II): Chinese
Civilization and the Laws of Nature," Journal of the History of Ideas XII (1951): 230.
Pye, Asian Power and Politics: The Cultural Dimension of Authority, 186.
Richard Solomon, "From Commitment to Can't; the Evolving Functions of Ideology in the
Revolutionary Process," in Ideology and Politics in the Contemporary Press, ed. Chalmers
Johnson (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973).
Lucian Pye, The Spirit of Chinese Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992),
17.
Hongliang Quo, "Fujian Shekeyuan Xueshu Shalong Taolun Zhongguo Chuantong Wenhua
Wenti (the Discussion of Traditional Chinese Culture: A Review of the Seminar of the
Fujian Academy of Social Sciences," Lilun Xinxibao (New Theories) (1986), Ping, China's
Search for Modernity: Cultural Discourse in the Late 20th Century, 101.
21
should necessarily be forthcoming was ever conferred upon the general population.72
The ideal of social control in Chinese culture rests upon self-discipline, in contrast to
the West.73 This leads to a tendency to cooperate, even when it is not in the
individual’s best interest to do so.74
As China comes into increasingly greater contact with the social, political and
economy imaginaries of the West, it is also undergoing a transformation in the
nature of the relationship between the individual and the state. As Chinese society
becomes increasingly modern and connected to the rest of the world, it faces the
challenge of reconciling its conceptions of authority and power with those that have
generated the existing Western order. The process of changing the concept of power
from being a function of status to being a useful thing for achieving goals is
profoundly difficult; it is filled with tensions because the psychological foundations of
people’s views about power are deeply embedded in their personalities.75 An
example of the ambiguous and contested nature of this individualization process can
be found in the fact that prior to the introduction of personal identity cards Chinese
individuals continued to possess an identity based upon the family or household –
either a conventional type of household or an institutionally created entity called a
‘collective household’. In the cities each household possessed a card detailing the
personal information of each member; thus only one household member could travel
at any one time. Unmarried people not residing with their parents were attached to
their work units, whilst rural Chinese were entitled to no freedom of movement due
to their identity being recorded at the village office.76 The situation began to change
in 1985 when the National People’s Congress mandated that all Chinese citizens be
issued an identity card. Paradoxically, whilst in the West such a move connotes a
form of oppressive state intervention, in China it represented important progress in
the liberation of the individual from the constraints of the family, community, work
place and ultimately the state. This liberation however, occurs purely at what might
be termed the level of instrumental emancipation; a politics of recognition concerned
more with the raising of living standards and social status, rather than the search for
the self. Thus the individual has gained an opportunity for mobility to physically leave
72
73
74
75
76
Pye, The Spirit of Chinese Politics, 17.
Ibid., 97.
Bruce Dickson, "What Explains Chinese Political Behaviour: A Debate over Structure and
Culture," Comparative Politics 25 (1992).
Pye, Asian Power and Politics: The Cultural Dimension of Authority, 53.
Yan, The Individualization of Chinese Society.
22
the family, yet simultaneously, the family remains the most important reference
point for the individual’s self-identity.
The party-state in China manages the process of individualization at three levels.
Firstly, it has promoted socio-economic individualization, but has sought to prevent
individualistic claims of political rights. Secondly, the individualization process is not
universal; certain social groups are granted greater opportunities for self-expression
and development, and thirdly, isolated individual actions of the pursuit of selfinterest and the assertion of rights are tolerated to a greater extent than the
collective action of organized individuals. In so doing, the party-state has managed
to control the development of an independent civil society whereby individuals may
simultaneously re-embed themselves and maintain an autonomous identity.77 Thus it
becomes apparent that the historical development of the individual and its
relationship to the state in China does not evince the definitive separation of the
individual from social structures that characterized the emergence of a public sphere
of autonomous political activity comprised of individuals capable of fully detaching
their own subjectivity from the perspective of a hypothetically objectified external
social reality.
What are the implications of this mode of relating to the state for how the analytical
category of the state is constructed and perceived by theorists and practitioners of
international relations? If the ongoing embeddedness within society of the Chinese
state could be expected to result in a devaluation of the state as an analytical and
practical category, then it emerges as a paradox that in global politics China is
perceived generally to retain an emphasis upon sovereignty that significantly exceeds
that of western states. This paradox must be evaluated in light of the historical
temporality of China’s coalescence with western modes of thought and analytical
frameworks. The ease with which China has embraced many of the fundamental
conceptual underpinnings of the western social imaginary must be counter-posed
against the long historical lineage of Chinese civilization. It is too early to tell
whether or not Chinese notions of how the relationships of power between the state
and individual emerge and evolve will be significant in forging different dimensions of
social structure. Present historical junctures would seem to indicate however that the
nature of a modernity that is on one hand becoming truly global in nature, and on
the other which will also be increasingly moulded by the attitudes and perspectives
77
Ibid., 290.
23
of the Chinese civilization, may as a result be capable of engendering greater levels
of transcultural, and more importantly, transnational solidarity and understanding as
global power structures continue to both emerge and evolve.
Conclusion
This paper has undertaken a sweeping and as yet rather shallow assessment78 of
how particular socio-cultural lineages and their divergent processes of socialization
have given rise to different methods of conceiving the relationship between the
individual agent and social structures. How this relationship can not only be
theorized, but made to work convincingly and analytically, is a problem that has
confronted social theorists for some time and which is reflective of a western
modernity whose individualizing trajectory of social evolution is not only discernible,
but telling in its emphasis upon the construction of the state as a an actor whose
discrete and autonomous status has been largely reified. The implications of this
process are significant for both the praxis and theory of international relations, as
the nation-state is revealed thus to have constituted not only a historically viable and
practically successful locus of power, but an analytically necessary one too. Whether
alternative and feasible conceptions of the state/individual relationship are liable to
derive from a divergent socio-cultural lineage such as China’s is a task that remains
to be explored in far greater empirical and historical depth.
78
I am mindful of three main things: firstly, the as yet relatively undeveloped nature of the
argument as it currently stands, secondly, the absence of clear justification for my choice
of theorists and analytical examples, and thirdly the fact that ironically, an essay devoted
to the problem of the abstractness of much social theory deals with very little historically
or empirically grounded insight or material. These are all issues to be addressed over the
coming months.
24
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