Political Sociology for a Globalizing World

Michael Drake

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745638157
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Mondialisation

This accessible book addresses one of the twenty-first century's most important issues: the increasing lack of connection between political institutions and the social reality of our everyday lives. A gulf between popular expectations and formal politics has widened continually since the revolts against authority of 1968, the Eastern European revolutions of 1989 and the growth of new social movements. Today, popular disillusion with politics is ubiquitous. Enormous social transformations on a global scale since the 1970s have produced no fundamental change in what are considered normal political institutions such as the state, or in mainstream political ideologies and parties.

This book provides tools to understand the apparent irrelevance of formal political institutions and practices to social life. In order to enable us to begin to rethink the relations between politics and society, Michael Drake ably synthesises the new theoretical developments that social transformations have produced, including the analysis of power, representation, social identities, social movements, sovereignty, statehood, globalization, revolution, risk and security. Ultimately, the book explores the emergent potentialities and problems of this new politics in a world of continuous transformation, where the parameters of the political are continuously shifting.

1

Political Sociology and Social Transformation

In José Saramago’s novel Seeing (2007), a government is confronted with a city that refuses to participate in the electoral process of sustaining political elites and returns an overwhelming majority of blank ballot papers, though without any apparent conspiratorial organization among its citizens. The novel produces many insights into the contemporary political condition, but this basic premise can be read as an allegory of the relation between modern politics and society, in which a rupture has opened between political institutions and politicians, on the one hand, and the societies they supposedly represent, on the other.

Crouch (2004) tells a similar story of declining political participation in advanced democracies, but provides an analytical explanation for this in the very success of the democratic political system in producing economic prosperity and individualization. This, he argues, undermines the collective political project of democracy, resulting in the decline of mass political parties and other forms of organized representation such as trade unions, a collapsing exercise of the electoral franchise, and disinterest in and even antagonism towards collective provision of services, public institutions and collective rights. This familiar scenario is also addressed by Hay (2007), albeit with a different explanation and conclusion, for Hay acknowledges that social actors do not simply collapse into post-political mass passivity. Rather, they develop different styles of political engagement that bypass political institutions and thus escape the conventional measures used to analyse political activity. Furthermore, even withdrawal into privatized lifestyles produces a politics, as Giddens (1991) explained, though this may not correspond to the conventional conception of what politics and political issues consist in. Furthermore, new political issues and the politicization of social life per se produce new public spheres and new forms of political organization, as has long been analysed by those studying the ‘new social movements’ that emerged in the 1970s (Scott 1990).

The watershed year was 1968, when students rioted on the streets of Paris and major cities across the world, making demands for freedoms that had often not been articulated before. Even in Eastern Europe, 1968 marks the appearance of new thinking and new movements for change that no longer looked either to the Communist Party or to the legacies of pre-communist political organization, but sought to think through new routes for political emancipation which spread silently and invisibly beneath the surface until the revolutions of 1989, when they erupted as if spontaneously. Such movements themselves articulate their relation to society in normative ways, in terms of what should be, but they also generate an analysis of what there is. Though social and political science conventionally distinguish between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’, these two moments of articulation are not separate in political practice. Social movements have thus played a major part in resituating the parameters of the political, by politicizing the social.

Changes in the relation between the political and the social as a result of processes such as globalization and post-industrialization highlight the changing structural determinations of politics, but the effect of the actions of new social movements on society emphasizes agency and contingency. These shifts also, however, confound the assumed distinctions between a political science concerned with actions and a social science concerned with structures. What we mean by the political and the social have both undergone radical transformation, beginning with the rupture of 1968.

Rather than constructing a historical spectacle of ’68, the function of the events of that year here is simply to serve as a well-known marker of much more widespread changes which challenged existing authority across the breadth of society, from the international scale of superpower domination to the micro-social scale of manners in gender and family relations and norms of individual body management, such as the length of men’s hair. The year 1968 serves to indicate processes which have transfigured and continue to transfigure the political and the conditions of politics. To use the contemporary phrase la lutte continue does not mean that the same (now old) struggles go on interminably as a post-’68 traditional political agenda; at least some of the issues of that time have passed into irrelevance, superseded by subsequent events. As the Situationist Viénet (1992) argued in reference to the Paris events of 1968, we need to look to the continually renewing conditions and styles of struggle.

To help understand how the relation between sociology and political studies has changed as a result of this reconfiguration of the relations between the social and the political, we can look at a snapshot taken at the very moment in which these assumptions began to unravel. In 1967, meetings of the American Political Science Association convened to discuss the relation between political science, then considered to be in crisis, and other disciplines, such as sociology, seen at the time as in dynamic growth, with its relevance firmly established – a situation which is often seen as reversed today. The discussion appears to have become extended over the ensuing year, when the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset edited a collection of papers from the meetings (Lipset 1969). It is perhaps significant that the essays published in the book give no indication of the radical challenges to legitimacy and authority that broke into open rebellion around the world in that intervening year and which now, in retrospect, appear as the singular significant event of the time. However, despite the subsequent construction of ‘the events of ’68’, it is not the events themselves that are sociologically important, but the wider processes that they merely indicate and mark.

I will concentrate on two essays which enter into direct correspondence with one another: Lipset’s ‘Introduction’ and a paper by the political scientist Giovanni Sartori, ‘From the Sociology of Politics to Political Sociology’ (Lipset 1969: vii–xxii, 65–100). Both authors argue that political sociology properly understood is in fact closer to political theory than to political science. They write against the background of a social developmental paradigm typical of modernization theory, in which what Adorno (2001) critically termed ‘the totally administered society’ had become the objective of all progressive development, characterized by the planned welfare state as the vehicle for society to integrate functionally hitherto distinct spheres of life. Sociology and political science are usually distinguished as the study, respectively, of social structure and of political-governmental institutions, but Sartori and Lipset both argue that political sociology can be more than the application of sociology to politics. Sartori contrasts both the conventional study of social variables in politics (the sociology of politics) and the science of political institutions in society with a political sociology which would look at political as well as sociological reasons for action, and at how political institutions such as parties are a function of social factors but also affect those factors. In Sartori and Lipset’s political sociology the distinction between cause and effect breaks down, as social factors are revealed as effects of political action and political action is revealed as a function of social factors.

Although this may help us to grasp what political sociology can be in relation to sociology and political science, the definition remains abstract. It is significant to note that the authors’ concrete examples reveal how the year of rebellion in between the conference and the publication of the papers had begun to undermine the terms of the discussion even before it was in print. For instance, as examples of political action, Lipset and Sartori refer to political parties, the very institutional form that was bypassed by the rebellions of ’68, thus enabling the actors of those revolts to reinvigorate politics, finding new ways around the sclerotic paths of the administered society by contentiously politicizing hitherto uncritically accepted aspects of social life. To follow these developments, sociological theorists have taken seriously many of the new approaches in political theory that have emerged from the subsequent pluralization of the political.

Situating political sociology

We can thus begin from the understanding that the separation of the study of the social and the political has a history. The distinction derives from the different ways that the academic study of politics and of society has developed in the modern world, and, if political sociology is basically the study of the relation between politics and society, it has to take account of how both these elements, and the way in which we analyse them, undergo change.

Politics and society were not always considered separately. In early modern Europe, the kind of thinking and writing that we would today call political theory concerned both political and social life. At that time, the dominance of religious ideas about how people should live was being eroded by secular thought, which developed non-religious criteria for evaluating the organization of collective human life, such as productivity, security and stability, as well as ideals that had taken on religious sanction in the Middle Ages, such as justice and universality. Some of those criteria were practical and others were ideal, but most political theory, even that of such notorious ‘realists’ as Niccolò Machiavelli, ultimately tried to unite the ideal, or normative, and the practical, or objective, dimensions into one unitary project. The ultimate objective was a society that would be both just and efficient, so modern political ideas fused traces of mainly Christian theology with notions of the materialist interests of a community.

Max Weber (1978) argues that all salvation religions, such as Christianity, are the outcome of a compromise between an evangelical tendency, which aims only at the salvation of the soul – what Max Weber has called an ‘other-worldly’ orientation – and a pastoral tendency, which aims at the development and reproduction of a community of believers that produces a more this-worldly orientation. From the pastoral point of view, evangelical excesses such as giving all of one’s possessions to the poor and dedicating one’s life to prayer represent a threat to community, while from the evangelical perspective the institution of a church invested in earthly community is a sacrilege. The tensions between these polarities were managed through the institutions of monasticism and church hierarchy, which together formed a system of social order for medieval Europe that functioned alongside the political order provided by such secular authorities as princes and communes.

Modern political thought developed through this tension, not least through the contention of both church and princely authority in the Reformation, most clearly exemplified in the development of the doctrine of resistance by French Huguenot theorists, driven by the Protestant emphasis on conscience. Conscience-based resistance thus translated the evangelical tendency in religion into secular political terms, producing a very different basis for revolt against authority from that of the millenarian ideas that had justified most previous revolts. Interestingly, this historical moment also marked off a break between the modern and medieval worlds with the introduction of the notion of feudalism to characterize the integrity of secular and religious authority of the earlier era (Skinner 1978).

Max Weber, in his distinction between the modern political orientations of an ethics of conviction and an ethics of responsibility (Weber 1946), observed how the tension between other- and this-worldly religious perspectives carried over into modern politics. The major ideologies of the modern political world contained these tensions and provided frameworks through which they could be related to one another, if not exactly reconciled. However, it is perhaps characteristic of politics in the early twenty-first century that these two poles are no longer expected to correspond. Today, instead, they represent twin tracks for political rhetoric, as the rhetoric of hope (or redemption) has become a performative prerequisite for establishing authority to undertake the practical, technical performance of (pastoral) government, as was explicit in the 2008 US presidential election campaign of Barack Obama.

Political science and political studies are concerned with these formal, explicitly political functions, analysing political rhetoric (usually as some kind of discourse analysis), studying institutions such as governments and parliaments and formal political processes such as elections, legislation and policy-making, focusing on formal political agents such as sovereign nation-states and political parties, all within the framework of a structure of clearly defined political ideas – primarily ideologies. As such, political studies tend to neglect social context and the social origins of political issues and movements. At best, these are often reduced to economic conditions or cultural identities (e.g. ethnicity, nationality) that are accepted as they present themselves, rather than questioned. Political science is relatively unconcerned with the social forces behind political action, or with how political action effects social forms. Operating on the plane of political institutions and formalized processes, political science often proceeds as though ‘politics’ takes place in a stratospheric, rarefied realm high above, abstracted from society.

This analytical separation of politics from society for the purpose of study mirrors conventional modern divisions of knowledge and also reflects the way that modern political liberties were defined as separate from social life, as observed by the young Karl Marx. Marx developed a critique of the enshrinement of the Rights of Man in the French constitution, where he pointedly argued that the constitution created the illusion that political identities and relations were distinct from social identities and relations, that all citizens are free and equal when in reality inequality persists, and most people’s lives are actually ruled not by the constitution but by economic necessity. Marx argued forcefully that the new political ideology had displaced religion as the supposed universal truth but had actually replicated the structure of religious doctrine, setting up the political sphere as equivalent to heaven – an ideal, illusory condition. Since the French Revolution at least presented itself as the overthrow of religion, his critique represented a new, secular equivalent to blasphemy (Marx [1844] 1992). Marx argued that, in the absence of real emancipation from economic servitude, the proclamation of ideals such as the Rights of Man merely reproduced in the concept of citizenship the religious idea that each human being was imbued with a sacred soul, setting up the political domain as separate from actual life, just as in religion the idea of heaven is separate from earth.

By the twentieth century, that political sphere had become more filled out. Rather than just the constitution and the formal political identities it defined, a complexity of institutions, relations and forms had emerged, linking politics to society in ways that Marx had not foreseen. Emile Durkheim, for instance, pointed out how the ideal of the individual, the subject of the Rights of Man, provided a common value for complex, socially diverse modern societies in which solidarity no longer arose mechanically from the sense of sameness that had characterized earlier, less complex societies. Social solidarity in the modern world had to be represented in a symbolic form that reflected the social structure of the complex division of labour in society. The notion of the individual, he argued, provided a modern equivalent to the primitive totem, in which society represented itself to itself and thereby generated social solidarity and ontological security for all of its members as a sense of being part of something greater than themselves (Durkheim [1898] 1969).

From the late nineteenth century onwards, alongside such ideological forms as individualism and citizenship, parties, classes and nation-states provided focal points for the development of political sociology as the study of links between the political and the social, rather than simply the study of political institutions and forms themselves. In this framework, political sociology developed through two main strands, Marxism and elite theory, which we can cover briefly.

Marxist political sociology begins from the fundamental understanding that politics is ultimately determined by the economic structure of capitalism, so that the structural antagonism between the interests of capital and labour underlies all political struggles. Secondly, Marxist political sociology takes a functional view of the state as the ‘executive committee of the ruling class’ (though it is a major problem for Marxism to show empirically the link it draws in theory between dominant economic interests and the political direction of the state). Thirdly, Marxism has developed a theory of ideology in the sense of the world-view of a particular class which provides a coherent explanation of society, its problems and its possibilities. Thus, for Marxism, ideals and even social knowledge articulate class interests as universal truths.

Marxism is often accused of being economistic, in that all social and political conflict is ultimately traced back to the struggle between labour and capital. The main rival to Marxism in the development of political sociology simply stripped out the economic element, arguing that society is largely politically passive and so is always ruled by politically active elites. Elite theory developed in the early twentieth century as the main rival to Marxism in political sociology, in the works of Pareto, Mosca and Michels, but was already implicit in Machiavelli’s Renaissance analyses of the form of a republic.

The conceptual structure of elite theory is that society is ruled over by a minority which changes over time, either in internal factional struggles between interest groups, through recruitment from wider society, or as the replacement of one elite by another. The theory of the ‘circulation of elites’ explains regime change as revolution or coup d’état, but it can also be applied to the analysis of modern democracies, where the struggle between elites is mediated by an electoral process that remains always limited to a choice between competing factions. Mass parties simply reproduce the same structure of elite domination and circulation internally, but can also function as a mechanism through which elites reproduce themselves, recruiting and elevating the more ambitious, able and politically active members from the wider passive society. Like the Marxist model of class-divided society, elite theory does not claim to analyse any particular political form, but generalizes from its basic premise of a distinction between elite and society to develop law-like propositions for universal application – just as Marxism sees all capitalist political systems as simply different forms of the domination of society by the capitalist class.

Resituating political sociology

Contextualizing and historicizing the development of political sociology enables us to see that these approaches were developed as tools to analyse a political field that consisted of classes and parties in the framework of internally socially stratified national states. Both elite theory and Marxism share that assumption about the field of politics, which since the 1960s has been multiply disrupted by manifold changes. Globalization ruptures the frame, postmodernization changes actors and actions, while securitization displaces the objectives.

For instance, the serial events around the G-nations’ summits, and indeed the summits themselves, from Seattle to Genoa to Edinburgh and beyond, are inexplicable in terms of nineteenth- and twentieth-century modern political sociology. These summits did not involve classes or parties as significant actors in the discussions, the press releases and media representation of the formal events, or in the equally significant ‘informal’ events on the streets around them. Rather, formal participants, protesters and even the police authorities providing security aspired to operate as global rather than national actors, on a stage provided by the media. Similarly, the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers in New York, the 2004–5 public transport suicide bombings in London and Madrid, and the 2008 gun attacks in Mumbai were conducted by transnational terror networks in global cities with casualties of multiple nationalities, on targets selected for their national significance only in so far as those nations operated as global actors. These attacks were thus quite distinct in scope, aim and significance from operations of war between sovereign states, and from the earlier bombing campaigns of nationally oriented movements such as the Provisional IRA or ETA.

The erosion of the significance of the national frame can be read also in more mundane political events. International treaties have radically transformed the relations of national states not only with each other but also with their own citizens, most notably in the EU. Elections are often fought without rhetorical reference to the old political ideologies of communism, socialism, liberalism and conservatism, which contested the national distribution of resources (where these remain as labels, they often designate something very different to the content of the ideology, both in democracies – as with New Labour in the UK – and in other forms of regime – such as the People’s Communist Party of China).

Though many new approaches have been developed to engage sociologically with particular aspects of these political developments, the term ‘political sociology’ adheres to the old field of politics, often more as a ‘sociology of politics’ than in ...