Politics and Social Theory

Peter Lassman, Peter Lassman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136658976
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria politica

First published in 1989, this Routledge Revival is a major collection of essays on the competing traditions of social and political theory. The contributions, by international scholars, reflect the re-examination of the boundaries between the 'political' and the 'social', the 'public' and 'private', and 'state' and 'society'. The reissue will be of great value to students in both sociology and political science.

Bringing new arguments to bear on the debate about the place of political theory in social science, the contributors discuss such issues as the different languages used by sociologists to describe the state; Marxist and socialist theory; class analysis; the welfare state; feminist political theory; and the impact of post-modernity on contemporary social thought.

Chapter one

Introduction: Politics and Social Theory

Peter Lassman

The title page of the first edition of Durkheim’s The Division of Labour in Society contains the following quotation from Aristotle’s Politics: ‘A state (polis) is not made up of only so many men, but of different kinds of men, for similars do not constitute a state’ (Aristotle 1984:2001).

It is an interesting fact in itself that Durkheim chose to quote this text for in doing so several things are indicated. Firstly, and obviously, that he was a student of the classical literature of political philosophy and saw its relevance for his own project of creating a social science. He also recognized the centrality for social theory of the problem of recon ciling plurality and order within a complex society. In making this obser vation it is important to note that all of the ‘founders’ of modern social theory were conscious of the reversal that they were effecting in the classical understanding of politics. It is a mark of their success in effect ing what was an almost total transformation in thought that it is so little remarked upon. Translated into modern terms a central topic for social theory has always been the problem of the relationship between the ‘state’ and ‘society’. There is, at the heart of modern social theory, an attempt to supplant the language of classical political philosophy in favour of a new language, conceived in various forms, of science. The predica ment of contemporary social theory constructed in the scientific mode follows from the fact that, although this is far from being universally recognized, the confidence that a ‘science of the social’ could ever be constructed has been systematically undermined. Without going into the way in which the development of modern philosophy has contributed to this state of affairs it is important to recognize that the idea of a social science in the form presented by the mainstream tradition of modern sociology from Comte to Parsons, and, probably, Habermas too, has been open to fundamental criticism in its claim to present an objective account of the social realm.

The claim to present a picture of society that aspires to the status of a scientific theory must mean that no area of social life is immune from its explanatory claims. Clearly, on this account, the realm of politics and of the political must be as amenable to social scientific explanation as is any other area of human affairs. The assumption that is being made here is that the ‘political’ simply is a constituent part, or in modern terms, a subsystem, of something called ‘society’. This is the fundamental assumption of practically all modern social science and this includes much of what is called ‘political science’ too. There is a fundamental conflict of interpretation here between the language of political philosophy, the language of the polis, and the language of ‘society’ conceived as an order that encompasses the political sphere.

What is at issue here is the very concept of ‘the political’ that is being taken for granted in the discourse of modern social theory. The typical approach of the contemporary social scientist appears to be an assertion that all that is required to keep up with the times is to pay more attention to the question of the ‘role of the state’ and to the problem of power. However, from the standpoint of a more classical attitude this line of argument is still imprisoned within a way of thinking that has distinct limitations. Thus, in a manner that is typical of the modern form of social science, when Durkheim quotes Aristotle he ignores or perhaps ‘creatively misreads’ him. It is in this way that all those questions raised by the classical notion of politics are sublimated into a new form of discourse. In the classical view ‘politics’ does not refer simply to the institutions of government and of domination but is regarded as being an essential part of all the important aspects of the shared life of a com munity (Sartori 1973; Wolin 1985). In the modern social scientific view ‘the political’ is a separate department of ‘society’ and it is such that its operation is subsumable by those general laws or processes that are presumed to operate throughout its structure.

Even more remote from most of modern social science is that other aspect of the Aristotelian science of politics which is the idea of ‘the political’ as that science which is concerned with the ‘good for man’. There has always been a tension here in the work of modern social scien tists. On the one hand, they are, in differing ways, committed to the idea of creating an objective as possible scientific account while, on the other hand, their motivation for constructing such a science in the first place is irreducibly ‘value laden’ and, hence, ultimately political in character. It has long been a commonplace in the interpretation of the history of the emergence of modern social science to point out that it was from its origins a ‘crisis science’, a reflection of its own times. For all its rhetorical use of claims to scientificity the discourse of the social sciences cannot escape from the fact that it itself exists within the political realm and, hence, cannot escape from the fate of being a political discourse. Even when its subject matter is not political in content its explanatory concepts rely upon notions of human nature and of ‘what is good for man’ and these concepts are themselves of an essentially contestable character (Taylor 1967). Such explanatory structures are far from possessing any of the characteristics that are normally assumed to be those of a genuine science. They are, in fact, derived from political philosophies in the traditional sense. Indeed it has been argued convinc ingly that given the collapse of the ‘positivist’ notion of scientific explanation and the recognition of the importance of the idea that all theories are underdetermined with regard to fact, it follows that in the social sciences

the proposal of a social theory is more like the arguing of a political case than like a natural-science explanation. It should seek for and respect the facts when these are to be had, but it cannot await a possibly unattainable total explanation. It must appeal explicitly to value judgements and may properly use per suasive rhetoric. (Hesse 1978)

If we accept this argument then we are clearly back in the traditional territory of political justification and of political judgement.

The explicit distinction between ‘state’ and ‘society’ is a product of a fairly recent intellectual development. It seems that it was Hegel who first systematically developed the distinction between ‘civil society’ and the ‘state’. In Hegel’s account the two spheres are interdependent but it is the state that is the highest form of human association. The relevant point here is that Hegel still takes the state to be logically more fundamental than society and it is on this very point that there is a funda mental difference of opinion between the mainstream of the tradition of western political philosophy and that of the modern form of social science. The fundamental assumption of the social scientific outlook is that ‘society’ is the foundation for the ‘state’ and that the ‘social’ existence of human beings is more fundamental than is their political existence. It is on this point that, for example, both Marx and Durkheim agree. Here, despite all the differences between them in terms of method, the nature of industrial society or of the function of the state, they operate with the common assumption that man is essentially a ‘social’, rather than a ‘political’ being. It is instructive to note that they both dismiss Aristotle in similar terms. In Durkheim‘s view Aristotle is simply pre scientific; his ‘classification of societies tells us nothing about their nature’ (Durkheim 1960:9). Similarly, Marx from his earliest writings is con cerned to reverse the traditional view of the relationship between the ‘state’ and ‘society’. This aspect of Marx’s thought is well known but it is worth stressing the fact that he never changed his opinion on this point and that it is of fundamental importance for his whole outlook. In Capital he asserts that ‘man is, if not as Aristotle contends, a political, at all events a social animal’ (Marx 1961:326). Durkheim would not have disagreed.

Among the ‘classical’ theorists Max Weber, as one would expect, is a much more complex thinker to categorize in these terms. Neverthe less, any attempt to consider his fundamental ‘thema’ in terms of its derivation from political philosophy must still face the difficulty of recon ciling those elements in his thought that are consistent with that inter pretation with those that are not (Hennis 1983). Among these latter features there is, most obviously, his denial of the relevance of the classics for an understanding of the modern world and his redefinition of the sphere of politics in terms of the apparatus of the modern state, which, in turn, is identified with the struggle for power and nothing else. Of course, the seeds of this view were sown from within the political philosophical tradition itself but it is still true to assert that it is here that there exists a fundamental difference of outlook between the two opposing languages of the state and of the nature of politics (Wolin 1960). When Marx made this idea central to his own thought he made it impossible for any marxist to produce an enlightening theory of politics without so seriously revising the views of the master that in doing so all that is distinctive of marxism as a theory is removed. All attempts to appeal to a supposedly more ‘sociological’ or more ‘realistic’ Marx who can contribute to the creation of a theory of the modern state that would be plausible for contemporary social scientists cannot overcome this barrier. Such revisions can only appeal either to some rather scat tered remarks in his more marginal writings, or to meaningless notions such as those of the state’s supposed possession of ‘relative autonomy’.

The consolidation of the ‘social science paradigm’ coincided with a period in which the traditional activity of political philosophy appeared to have exhausted itself. There was a general mood in which it was assumed that the traditional problems were for the most part meaningless and that empirically minded social sciences were the rightful successors to these now discredited disciplines. Today, we live in a different world. The confidence in the ability of the social sciences to explain and to understand has been seriously eroded while there has been a considerable revival in the fortunes of political philosophy. It is no longer considered to be a marginal activity and although much recent writing in political philosophy does draw upon work done in the social sciences and especially in economics and political science it is nevertheless recog nized as being a legitimate and autonomous province of enquiry. Meanwhile, as mentioned above, the centrality and unavoidability of questions of value within all of the social sciences can no longer be denied with conviction.

There is a highly persuasive thesis that argues that the transition to a distinctively social form of theory is a mark of the decline of the sense of the ‘political’ in western thought. This thesis has, above all, been associated with the work of writers such as Arendt and Wolin who, in different ways, have attempted to reconstruct the history of social and political thought (Wolin 1960; Arendt 1958). However, it must be remarked that there is a history of scepticism concerning the self-interpretation of the social sciences that has existed for as long as they have. Even if the true history of this development is much more untidy than it is often presented (and it is probably impossible to be precise about any presumed transition from one discourse to another simply because several competing discourses have coexisted) it still remains true to say that there has been a profound shift in our conceptual vocabulary (Collini, Winch and Burrow 1983). The real question here is one of the status of politics and of the political in our understanding of the modern world. Wolin has stated the problem in a succinct manner:

When modern social science asserts that political phenomena are to be explained by resolving them into sociological, psychological, or economic components, it is saying that there are no distinctively political phenomena and hence no special set of problems. (Wolin 1960:288)

The essays collected in this book are all in their various ways a reflec tion of the predicament of contemporary social and political analysis. Although they are written from different intellectual, disciplinary and political perspectives they all address themselves to the problem of how the ‘political’ is to be understood within a context in which the old certainties of the social sciences are not only felt to be inadequate for an understanding of the contemporary world but, more fundamentally, it is now being asserted more openly than ever before that the entire modern project for the construction of a social science was fatally flawed from the start. The interpretation of industrialism, once thought to be its greatest claim on our attention, is now shown to be historically naive. Further, there are good epistemological reasons for believing that such theories could never be as adequate as they were originally assumed to be. As one recent survey of the entire field gloomily concludes,

[the] history of the twentieth century is one in which passions and interests have remained defiantly particular, and in so far as they are public, have remained so in good part for political rather than social reasons, it is scarcely surprising that as the theories they were intended to be these theories have failed us, have come in many cases to cease to connect to us at all. (Hawthorn 1987:275)

The problem here is that a boundary of the ‘social’ has always been pro vided by ‘polities’. It is an unavoidable fact that the attempt to do ‘social science’ must imply a denial of the centrality of the political domain. This, of course, is an impossibility. We live in a political world. Hence, despite all denials and attempts to be ‘value free’ and to avoid discus sion of the political implications of social science political ideas and political judgements creep in through the back door. In a world that is itself politically constituted the denial of politics is itself a political phenomenon. When modern social scientists argue for the recognition of the growth of the activities of the state and of the ‘politicization’ of social relations then they must also recognize that they are exchanging the certainties of science for the unpredictability of politics (Sartori 1969:214).

In the first essay Berki examines the coexistence of three languages or vocabularies of the state. There are in existence three autonomous languages: the philosophical, the literary and the social scientific. That the philosophical and the social scientific languages continue as rival accounts of the field is an interesting feature of the intellectual landscape. The rise of scientific enquiry does not and can never eliminate philosophy, least of all in the field of political and social enquiry. Berki proposes that the only way to make sense of this is to regard these languages as being complementary and mutually reinforcing. But what is important for the social scientist to note is that no amount of investigation or even of ‘progress’ in these fields will eliminate the necessity for the philosophical vocabulary. There is an endless process of argument and counterargument in which none of the three languages can either dis appear or have the last word.

The transition to the modern concept of ‘society’ is an essential part of Marx’s intellectual achievement. However, as often appears to be the case, such advances are made at a price. The price that marxism has paid since its foundation has been its weak sense of politics and of the state. In asserting the primacy of ‘civil society’ Marx was unable to see the reality of the state and of the political as being anything other than an aspect of human self-alienation. The problem that is the focus of Pier-son’s essay is the problem faced by all attempts to create a political theory of the modern state whether it be ‘capitalist’ or ‘socialist’. As he notes, there is a ‘pervasive characteristic’ of marxist thought to see all politics as class politics. Clearly, in the modern world of ‘new social movements’ and of major political struggles that have no significant class basis this is an inadequate standpoint to maintain. Most worrying for contemporary marxian theorizing is the existence of ‘actually existing socialism’ in which the state shows no sign of either ‘withering away’ or of being transcended and from which politics can never be completely removed. The interesting and new development here is the way in which there has been a recognition on the left that many of the criticisms of marxism that were formerly characterized as products of the ‘cold war’, such as those of Popper and Talmon, ought not to be so easily dismissed (Popper 1945; Talmon 1960). In other words, the central problem that emerges here is the traditional one of reconciling socialism with freedom. Can there be a democratic socialism? If there is to be a return to a recog nition of the ‘necessity of politics’ in a ‘pluralist socialism’ then this is clearly a return to a central topic of traditional political theory which Marx himself and most ‘orthodox’ marxists thought of as belonging to an ‘ideological’ and pre-marxist past.

The social analysis of politics has rested, for most theoretical schools, upon ideas of social class. In an essay of radical ‘deconstruction’ Hindess seeks to show that this is a major defect of modern social and political thought rather than being, as it is usually assumed to be, a strength. Hindess’ claim is to go beyond the necessity of avoiding reductionism in showing that the very idea of social classes as being ‘social forces’ is itself incoherent. The fundamental difficulty here is the assumption that social classes can be conceived as ‘collective actors’ in any useful sense and that as collective entities they possess objectively given col lec...