Behemoth

Main Currents in the History and Theory of Political Sociology

Irving Horowitz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351289740
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The title, Behemoth, derives from the Hebrew word Behemah-a beast, an enormous creature, monstrously huge and vast. It is an apt description of the State on the eve of the twenty-first century. Loved by few, vilified by many from all perspectives, it nonetheless continues to grow; by turns rivaling and co-opting that more pleasant-sounding word: Society. Political sociology aims to define and understand the interrelationship between these two huge terms: State and Society.

Continuing in a path begun by Horowitz in the 1950s in The Idea of War and Peace in Contemporary Social and Philosophical Thought, expanded upon in the 1970s with Foundations of Political Sociology, this summing up in the late 1990s is an effort to extract and evolve the canon of political sociology. Starting with Montesquieu, Horowitz proceeds through the European experience of Rousseau, Tocqueville, Hegel, Marx, Durkheim, Sorel, and Weber. He then takes the field on its tangled migration to America with the Frankfurt School in exile, followed by searching chapters on Schumpeter, Mills, Arendt, and Huntington, among others.

The result is a stunning revaluation of the intellectual sources of the present day divisions between statists and socialists, welfarists and individualists, advocates of dictatorship and of democracy, mandated rules and voluntary association, hard realists and soft utopians, a world without states and a world with a single state. Horowitz does not offer the usual evolutionary notion of doctrines, but a canon embedded in and embattled with the societies they aim to serve or overthrow in the present as in the past. The result is a major recasting of the theory and practice of social science and normative frameworks.

The final chapter offers Horowitz's own prognosis of what we can expect in the recasting of the Welfare State to include the Welfare Society, and its growing nemesis the global economy which threatens to engulf State and Society alike in a return to civilizational concerns. This is an essential text for policy-makers and social scientists interested in macroscopic changes in the political order.

1

Between Anarch and Behemoth: The Spirit of Montesquieu

“There is one way in this country in which all men are created equal–there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court.… I’m no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and in the jury system–that is no ideal to me, it is a living, working reality. Gentlemen, a court is no better than each man of you sitting before me on this jury. A court is only as sound as the men who make it up.”

–Harper Lee (Atticus’s Summation from To Kill a Mockingbird)¹

This work is an effort to understand, if not entirely solve a vexing problem: what is the relationship between state and society in Western classical and modern theory? What is it that makes these two gigantic entities function at loggerheads, in much of the past at least, when addressing the problem of social welfare and political order? Indeed, to even speak in terms of welfare and order conjures up images of the good society satisfying mass wants on one hand, and the evil state keeping everyone in line on the other. That certainly was a solid nineteenth-century vision of the situation.

To be sure, most reasonable people understand the need for both ingredients. And yet uneasy hangs the relationship of state and society within capitalist theory, socialist theory, social welfare theory, and a welter of approaches that owe their allegiance to feudalism no less than to post-modernism. In approaching matters in this way, I seek to take seriously the late Karl Popper’s belief, expressed in his 1963 Harvard lecture, that science neither begins nor ends with the collection of data and observation; rather, as he put matters (and as Durkheim, Simmel, Weber and others did before him), the issue of such a linkage starts and ends “with the sensitive selection of a promising problem.”² The problem of the actual and ideal relation of state to society strikes me as at the core of the matter.

There is a sense in which we are concerned with a phenomenon–the state–as intrinsically a dual element: an instrument for the oppression of people and an agency for their survival, if not salvation, through order. Of the former, we know much: ranging from the Nazi state apparatus that murdered millions and its counterpart, the Stalinist state that likewise dealt in development through death–as if they were organically and inseparably linked. These very regimes cause us to think of anarchism in pleasantly romantic terms, of a freewheeling disdain for authority. But as the twentieth century rolls on, this romanticism produced one series of nightmares after another: the Khmer Rouge murders of innocent peasants, bands of Ugandan warlords kidnapping and enslaving hundreds of children and making them part of an army of nomads, the paramilitary troops of the Shining Path movement wreaking havoc on ordinary Peruvian peasants. One of the more prominent nightmares produced by this romanticism is a civil war of all against all in the former Yugoslavia in which crosscutting bands of Moslems and Christians, and Bosnians and Serbians slaughter one another. One can go on at length in this hand-wringing fashion. What it comes down to is the absence of shared authority, of law, of a sense of common destiny, in short the breakdown or absence of the state itself.

So before we simply adopt the position that all state authority is evil, or the high road to serfdom itself, it might be worthwhile to step back and take a look at a universe in which the state functions to prevent the sort of mayhem that is all too commonplace the world over.³ It might be pleasant to contemplate a world in which all surrender of personal authority to an impersonal state is somehow an unmitigated evil, a collapse of the individualism that made the ancients self-reliant. But in the name of realism, unpleasant as that name might be, we need to structure a world that takes seriously the existence of the state, not as a curse upon the poor or a blessing upon them for that matter, but simply as that agency which has come to dominate our age. And despite the socialist calls to “smash state power,” and the social democratic assurances that social welfare would accomplish precisely such ends, nothing of the kind has happened. Indeed, it is evident that in all sorts of societies–democratic or totalitarian–the state, far from diminishing, is expanding. It is my contention that society itself has come to be defined by the state. The welfare societies of past decades and the warfare states of past ages have merged to become one–the welfare state. Indeed, the very concept has by now become a commonplace. Serious critics no longer speak in big terms about smashing state power; they are content to consider ways in which state power can be contained.

The state is, in short, a wondrous instrument. This medieval invention aimed at organizing and rationalizing the secular society has survived, thrived and expanded despite all sorts of vicissitudes and predictions of its imminent demise. It is almost as if the state is a realm apart–able to overcome the intrigues of religious agencies, able to withstand the blandishments of “withering away” predicted by a host of revolutionists, and above all, able to master the craft of survival in the face of inventions and discoveries of otherwise earth-shattering proportions. But before we proceed too much further along this path, it is appropriate to admit that this is not a work of social history. J.C.N. Raadschelders has beautifully accomplished the task of delineating and defining the history of the state.⁴ In showing the medieval origins of the state in the areas of general government and finance, public order and safety, health and societal care, education, trade and traffic, and finally public works in general, he has given us a descriptive narrative not soon or easily to be replaced. However, missing from that sort of study is whether the state must always be in charge of such tasks and programs, or does so by default. Unless one is prepared to believe in the myth of the “social contract,” in which individuals actually contract out large chunks of their world to a thing called the state, it becomes evident that just how the institutional formations between state and society evolve is a problem, not a given.

The reader will also notice that the analysis of this problematic starts with theorists of the Enlightenment, rather than with ancients like Plato the Greek, and post-Renaissance figures like Machiavelli the Italian and Hobbes the Englishman. This is in no way to slight their contributions to the study of the sate. Without their powerful intellects, the field of political studies would be barren. Rather, this is not aimed as pure academic exercise or intellectual history, but the study of the sate as something apart from rulers, from dynastic heads. And it is this distinction between the study of, or advice to sovereigns and the study of sovereignty as such–that is the state as an institution apart from the manipulation of the levers of power–that one finds absent in the three major figures (Plato, Machiavelli and Hobbes) who rightfully might be claimed as the source of classical theories of those who rule. The great Catholic theorist, Jacques Maritain, places these classical figures in the history of political philosophy, a sapiential knowledge directed to the ends of human conduct; whereas political sociology is concerned with the details of phenomena.⁵ While I would like to think that this volume crosses the bridge of politics and ethics, the fact remains that the sorts of special concerns of Machiavelli on the moral virtues belong to an earlier epoch, one that precedes the empirical study of the relation of state and society.

In his brilliant, if at times eccentric, reading of Plato, Machiavelli and Hobbes, Sheldon Wolin, in Politics and Vision, places the distinction between the medieval and the modern squarely: a failure to grasp the interconnection between social and political factors.⁶ Modernity saw the emergence of the so-called popular classes as a critical pivot in all social analysis. For Plato, the idea of democracy was a violation of any serious study of both orderliness and goodness in human affairs. For Machiavelli, the popular masses could be a dangerous beast, the anarch itself, and a phenomenon that the sovereign had to manipulate and bridle–for the good of these self-same inchoate masses.⁷ Nonetheless, Machiavelli fully understood that “the masses are more knowing and more constant than the Prince.” This sense of tension between ruled and rulers preserves Machiavelli from converting national interest into a defense of reaction. For Hobbes, with a far deeper sense of political philosophy than political economy, the problem of rule was how to establish a theory of sate power in the absence of a theology that could sanction absolute obedience and mission.⁸

Ernest Cassirer, in his finely distilled observations on Machiavelli, pointed out that, “The State is entirely independent; but at the same time it is completely isolated.” And he goes on to prophetically note: “The political world has lost its connection not only with religion or metaphysics but also with all other forms of man’s ethical and cultural life. It [the State] stands alone–in an empty space.”⁹ Cassirer strikes an utterly modern note here. He does so with advice to rulers about the arts of war or connivance of diplomacy, but seeing the state as an object in itself, for itself, apart from specific rulers, becoming the essence of the modern political world. It is that world that confronts the other large-scale claimant to the attentions of the moderns, the society or the social system. It is this dialectic that my work seeks to address, rather than perhaps the most conventional political psychology that preceded in time and in depth modern political sociology.

In all candor my decision to commence the study of political sociology with Montesquieu rather than with Machiavelli does not receive universal approval. Perhaps the most serious challenge launched is that of Talcott Parsons and his colleagues who in their superb anthology on Foundations of Modern Sociological Theory, start with an extract from The History of Florence. Clearly, if Machiavelli is considered the staring point of sociology, my claim that he is the quintessential political theorist, without much concern for social considerations, is seriously weakened.¹⁰ Indeed, other than Machiavelli’s presumed attention to normative considerations from what Parsons calls “the actor’s point of view,” I fail to detect any rationale for assigning such a pivotal place to Machiavelli. It is fair enough to speak of him as one of the great political historians of all time, as well as a peerless analyst of political power. But I remain firm in viewing Montesquieu as the true starting point of modern political sociology. Indeed, Parsons would have been on firmer ground had he referenced the Discourses rather than The History of Florence.

Probably the most convincing reason for excluding Machiavelli from the canon of political sociology is provided by Harvey Mansfield, who in his outstanding translation of The Prince, points out that for Machiavelli, “politics is thought to be carried on for its own sake, unlimited to anything above it.”¹¹ Mansfield goes on to point out that for Machiavelli politics is carried on for its own sake, with its own rules. In large measure, Machiavelli was concerned with the costs and benefits of winning and losing. In this, he was a shrewd advisor to rulers, not a servant to rulers as a special class of people. The need to come to grips with and resolve the placement of Machiavelli in the history of political sociology was an early wake-up call in the problem of selecting a proper starting point. It also alerted me to the difficulty of developing a canonical work, to know where to start as well as what to include. This was reinforced in the need to ask the identical question of the great Thomas Hobbes.

In this brief survey of the pre-history of political sociology an essential stopping point is the work of Thomas Hobbes and, in particular, his famed Leviathan. In this extraordinary work we are presented with a sense of the political as the dominant motif in all human existence. And whether this is viewed as a one-sided reading of society or a pure reflection of the realities of power, its essential vortex is not the relation between state and society, but the requirements and restraints of “office.” The psychology behind the Hobbesian ruler is quite similar to the position taken by Machiavelli in The Prince: the acquisition of power is central and, in turn, appetites require a struggle for the acquisitions of still more power. There is no pure endpoint; or rather that endpoint of the terrorist state had not yet been reached in those earlier centuries. What did exist was desire mediated and tempered by a sense of duty. Indeed it has always been the aristocratic foil that their natural right of rule is underwritten by this sense of devotion to the whole and the duty to making that whole tranquil.

It was not just the French reformers who were suspicious of the state. The same could be said for the English liberal philosophers who came long after Montesquieu, Rousseau, and the Enlightenment tradition as a whole. But they did so in a somewhat more naive manner, what might be called the tradition of philosophical liberalism rather than legal liberalism. And since we will be concentrating on the continental founders of political sociology, it might be of some value to pause and consider the contributions of the British political philosophers of first rank. John Stuart Mill posed the human conscience in opposition to state power. The fabled essays On Liberty and Utilitarianism¹² both aim to show that the limits of the state reside in the individual and that any tendency to abrogate civil society is a threat imposed from the state. Mill was hardly consistent on this point, invoking the role of the state in the formation of British domestic and overseas policies alike, but he did set a tone of liberal discontent. The liberalism was predicated on the belief that the state was a necessary evil, and hence should be kept as small as possible.

Then came Herbert Spencer, who tried to replicate in politics what Adam Smith thought was the case for economics: the tendency toward equilibrium of a society if left undisturbed by bureaucratic authority. Spencer’s theme articulated in The Man Versus the State is that, “there is in society that beautiful self-adjusting principle which will keep all its elements in equilibrium. The attempt to regulate all the actions of a community by legislation will entail little else but misery and compulsion.”¹³ Just as the struggle in nature arrives at some sort of equilibrium based on adaptation, so too Spencer, and much of nineteenth-century organic theory, presumes a similar process is at work in society. In this type of scenario, the state becomes an impediment to the normal relationships of people to one another. This sort of extrapolation was feasible only as long as analogical reasoning was permitted, and as long as individualistic doctrines of superiority and inferiority were held to be natural and part of the social order of things.

The twentieth century broke through such Spencerian myths, and did so on two fronts: the near universal acceptance of equity as a goal, if not a fact of society and the extraordinary breakthrough of technology that gave evidence that abundance was a possibility. The engineering of nature led to the notion of the engineering of the soul. And it is this huge leap that gave the state a regulatory role undreamed of even by its opponents in the past. Far from “withering away” on the left or “human self-adjustment” on the right, the state became the political equivalent of engineering and technology. The new century has witnessed the emergence of the assembly line, transistors, copiers, faxes, and memory chips. Technology has changed how we live, providing radio, television, air travel, household appliances, air conditioning, plastics, films, and compact discs. We have invented new forms of mass combat, from the nuclear weapon to rocketry and new forms of mass health, from antibiotics and birth control pills to body imaging. Rather than become the source of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Between Anarch and Behemoth: The Spirit of Montesquieu
• 2. Secularizing Society: Helvétius, Rousseau, and Comte
• 3. Romancing the Organic State: Hegel
• 4. The Liberal Compromise with State Power: Alexis de Tocqueville
• 5. Utopianism as Scientific Sociology: Marx
• 6. Social Order without State Power: Durkheim
• 7. State Power without Social Order: Sorel Ø
• 8. Legitimizing the Bureaucratic State: Weber I
• 9. Defining the Boundaries of Law and Order: Weber II
• 10. The Unhappy Alliance of Democracy and Dictatorship: Horkheimer, Benjamin, and Neumann
• 11. Modern Capitalism as a Social Phenomenon: Schumpeter
• 12. State, Military, Business: The Trinity of Power: Mills
• 13. Totalitarian Visions of the Good Society: Arendt
• 14. Beyond the State: Civilization and Community: Etzioni and Huntington
• 15. Between Politics and Economics: Welfare State vs. Global Economy
• Index