The Terms of Order

Political Science and the Myth of Leadership

Cedric J. Robinson

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781469628226
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Process
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Do we live in basically orderly societies that occasionally erupt into violent conflict, or do we fail to perceive the constancy of violence and disorder in our societies? In this classic book, originally published in 1980, Cedric J. Robinson contends that our perception of political order is an illusion, maintained in part by Western political and social theorists who depend on the idea of leadership as a basis for describing and prescribing social order. Using a variety of critical approaches in his analysis, Robinson synthesizes elements of psychoanalysis, structuralism, Marxism, classical and neoclassical political philosophy, and cultural anthropology in order to argue that Western thought on leadership is mythological rather than rational. He then presents examples of historically developed "stateless" societies with social organizations that suggest conceptual alternatives to the ways political order has been conceived in the West. Examining Western thought from the vantage point of a people only marginally integrated into Western institutions and intellectual traditions, Robinson's perspective radically critiques fundamental ideas of leadership and order.

Chapter 1: The Order of Politicality

In perceptual terms, the concept of the political has no precise, corporate image. Certainly, there are objective phenomena which we identify with the political because of association, but they are aspects or elements of it rather than its actual nature. Figures and institutions—presidents, congresses, bureaucracies, parties, armies—can be recognized as being of the nexus of the political, but they are by no means identical with it. These are not the substance of the political but its phenomenology: the objects which express the presence and influence of the political.

Yet the political seems to have as a characteristic the quality of arranging the relationship of things and of people within some form of society. It is an ordering principle, distinguishing the lawful or authorized order of things while itself being the origin of the regulation. We associate, then, the political with power, authority, order, law, the state, force, and violence—all of these are phenomena which restrict the outcome, deflect the extraneous, limit the relevant forces. We speak of the political both as an instrument for ordering society and that order itself. It is both a general way of acting on things and the consequences which follows having acted upon things.

But further, as consequence, the political presupposes the possibility of continued action:

In the political context the end is altered from a purpose to an effect, and the vision of power as a process scaled down from the realization of the good to the production of a faithful mechanism of response. As a corollary, the finite tendency of potentiality, in its original sense, to surpass every stage of itself toward its end becomes, in the political context, the tendency of power, bereft of its purpose, toward infinite expansion of itself.¹

The political is always there, it would seem, absorbing and being itself absorbed, penetrating and being penetrated. It is a stratagem of behavior directed toward a certain consequence, an act founded on specific sociological presumptions, a pattern of role-interactions selectively scattering the existence of human beings by some estranged, arbitrary definition of the positivity. It is an active definition of the situation.

Yet there is no doubt that the political is a phenomenon of force and thus of significance. But what exactly is the nature of that force? What forms, what substances do its regularities assume? Where are they to be sought, how are they to be found?

If one were to reach toward the materials of contemporary political science in hopes of identifying that very force, one might withdraw with the secure insight that the force is in essence the phenomenon of governing and that political science was the record of the art, science, and/or failure of governing. Governing justly, unjustly, singly or by elite, “democratically” or dictatorially, momentarily or for imperial durations, consensually or by force,² wisely or wrongly, but nevertheless, governing.

But there could be seen, too, a more particular preoccupation evidenced by the science. One could come to the understanding that governing is realized through elements consisting of boundaries, rulers, administrations, decision-making apparatus, formal and informal parties, patterned negotiations, interest conflicts, executing, legitimating institutions, all mitigated by crises, creeds, ideologies, public opinion, conditioned and modeled responses, primary and idiosyncratic as well as quite literally the enigmatic and the extraordinary. Yet governing still. And governing, in turn, could be defined as the rule of some specified community by some form of authority. At a not much higher level of abstraction and distillation, our ambitious nominalist might subsequently decide that what he was discovering in the political was the habits, forms, histories, and characters of authority.

Such would surely be the mean result of a behavioral analysis of the field of contemporary American political science. With respectful consideration given to the antiquity and sociology of Aristotelian thought, our researcher would find that this science would present to him a “paradigm” quite clearly the consummation of Aristotle’s declarations on political philosophy and artifact. Man is thus intended by nature to be a part of a political whole, and there is, therefore, an immanent impulse in all men toward an association of this order. “But the man who first constructed such an association was none the less the greatest of benefactors.”³

But be certain, the question here of the meaning of the political is not one of antiquity or parentage, but one of relevance. It is not so much a question as to whether the foundations of modern political science can be discovered in the work of Aristotle as it is a question of whether modern political science consciously addresses the political. Sheldon Wolin’s assessment appears appropriate:

A wide variety of theories exists for the political scientist to choose among. To call them political theories is, in the language of philosophy, to commit something like a category mistake. Systems theories, communication theories, and structural-functional theories are unpolitical theories shaped by the desire to explain certain forms of non-political phenomena. They offer no significant choice or critical analysis of the quality, direction, or fate of public life.⁴

And so one would be led, finally, to the conclusion that one cannot resolve the question of the nature of the political by the process of distilling it from a science of politics. For, at some point, one would have to confront the science of politics in its epistemological, metaphysical, and methodological terms. That is, those terms themselves which would suggest that the first order of inquiry would be some close explication of the philosophy of science, since it is there that the relationship between epistemology, metaphysics, and methodology is assigned.

Two major contemporary voices in the fields of the history and philosophy of science are those of Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn.⁵ Regardless of their attempts to argue otherwise,⁶ it appears certain that what each describes as the true nature and essential processes of knowledge growth in the sciences are at odds, representing fundamentally different and opposing schema.

Popper’s thesis is closer to the folklore of science, postulating a systematic, deliberate, and conscious process for the development of larger inventories of knowledge proceeding through the construction of falsifiable hypotheses and their confrontation with empirical reality: “We invent our myths and our theories and we try them out.”⁷ Popperian science is then most clearly identifiable with speculative philosophy—conjecture and refutation:

I do admit that at any moment we are prisoners caught in the framework of our theories; our expectations; our past experiences; our language. But we are prisoners in a Pickwickian sense: if we try, we can break out of our framework at any time. Admittedly, we shall find ourselves again in a framework, but it will be a better and roomier one; and we can at any moment break out of it again.⁸

Popper thus argues for the rational man who imposes procedurally his ethic of rationality onto the very character of discovery in the larger adventure of making human experience rational. And “rational” presupposes, imposes in fact, a self-consistency, an internal coherence.⁹

Kuhn, on the other hand, has read the history of science quite differently and proposes that in the sequence of creative thought, Popper’s perception is that of only a single episode in the sequence. He argues that science proceeds in its development of fundamental insight through the replacement of one paradigm by another, for example, Ptolemaic astronomy being replaced by Copernican astronomy. Paradigms are discarded for several reasons: awkwardness (the computational correction of Ptolemaic theory had proliferated by necessity into unmanageability); impatience (Copernicus presented to his colleagues a system which could explain little, if any, more than its predecessor, yet it was simpler, and the other had been given a fair amount of time to prove itself); anomalies (in a different episode, an experimenter unexpectedly released a gas which would later be known as oxygen—to a follower of the phlogiston theory, the gas was an unacceptable result); and multiplicity of competitive theories.

It is during periods of crises, in the transitional periods—and more specifically when competitors have been severely reduced in number, most importantly to one—that “extraordinary science” (Kuhn’s phrase) occurs. “Extraordinary science” is a testing, challenging procedure which is identical in its significant aspects to Popper’s version and generalization. Once the crisis is resolved by the selection of the new paradigm, Popperian, extraordinary science ends and “normal science” (again Kuhn) or “puzzle-solving” begins. The creative moment is over and scientists now get down to the proliferation of games, techniques, and instrument-designs which will be used to confirm their paradigm-induced presumptions.

“Normal science” is thus in large measure the actualization of tautology. Full sequences of inquiry and responses have been proscribed while other sequences have become prescribed. One knows what to ask of one’s data and how to produce that data because one knows “instinctively” the boundaries and the range of correct and acceptable answers.

Kuhn’s paradigms thus represent several levels of actualization. They are metaphysical: sets of beliefs; sociological: universally recognized scientific achievement; and artifacts: tools, instruments and analogies.¹⁰ They thus relate closely to Polanyi’s “justification of personal knowledge” (which are the commitments and responsibility for making certain choices and assertions the foundation of meaning and understanding), and Louch’s “warrant” and “entitlement” in his refutation of the predilection for generalization as explanation and his assertion of the truer authority of ad hoc explanation.¹¹

Kuhn thus rests to some extent in the tradition of Wittgensteinian and Cartesian linguistics while Popper is more identifiable with some “objectivists” who posit a Kantian philosophical development. It is of less significance for the purposes of this essay that Kuhn would now prefer to refer to his sociological paradigms as “disciplinary matrices” and his metaphysical and artifactual paradigms as “exemplars” than that his insistent declaration is that he is attempting to describe the critical force of values in the choice of theory, explanation, meaning, and logic in science:

What I am denying is neither the existence of good reasons nor that these reasons are of the sort usually described. I am, however, insisting that such reasons constitute values to be used in making choices rather than rules of choice. Scientists who share them may nevertheless make different choices in the same concrete situation. Two factors are deeply involved. First, in many concrete situations, different values, though all constitutive of good reasons, dictate different conclusions, different choices…. More important, though scientists share these values and must continue to do so if science is to survive, they do not all apply them in the same way.¹²

Additionally, Kuhn’s use of revolution as a metaphor of the change of paradigms signals the assumption of the panoply of constructs with which most political analysts are quite familiar: conservative-radical factions, alienation, resistance, violence, waste, and a certain sequence of the dynamic of change (e.g., from disequilibrium to equilibrium). It represents, too, a “proof” of his thesis that scientific explanation is often profoundly affected by historical phenomena presumed external to it, for certainly the imagery of revolution has displaced evolution as the dominant impression of change in Western experience. To the contrary, the Popperian interpretation is fundamentally that of an evolutionist.¹³ Again, according to Kuhn, we would anticipate evolution being the character of the mode of analysis to which Kuhn’s work is negation. The analyses of Kuhn and Popper are thus related dialectically and historically.

That both Popper and Kuhn continue to assert that the criteria of change in the scientist’s construction of rationality are accuracy, simplicity, scope, and fruitfulness seems more to demonstrate the irony of the formal convergence of paradox than to be a display of the former “truism” that “all roads lead to Rome.” However, if Kuhn’s reconstruction is to be chosen over Popper’s, there first needs to be the declaration of a formal qualification that perhaps the choice signifies that Kuhn is an apostle of this time, with its biases, bold impressions, and hysterias in its attempt to make change recognizable.

Yet within the confines of a consideration of political science, other reasons for the choice also seem powerfully convincing. These reasons can be articulated through a simple demonstration. This demonstration has to do with the role played by the concept “power” in political science. If we assume for the moment Popper’s prescriptive history of science, for the science of politics, do we find—as we would be led to anticipate by Popper—theories of power which take the form of falsifiability (e.g., the presumption of an organizing principle within human groups alternative to power which would obviate the puzzle-solving business of political scientists)? We, of course, do not discover the latter, but find instead that power as a conceptual tool corresponds most closely to the “background knowledge” of the “methodological falsificationists” (see note 6), and remains an “unquestionable” basic statement among political scientists.

Even given power as a natural phenomenon of human society, is the “conjecture” that it is a causative of order posed so that it might be refuted or is the presumed concomitance between order and power so thorough in the investigations of political analysts that it functions as an identity and consequently might be suspended from critical consideration? Once more, there is no refutation possible since we are told again and again that order in human society cannot be obtained without the presence and subsequent use of power.¹⁴ But perhaps we should draw Popper’s attention to a more concrete problem in American political science. How is it that in the celebration of democracy as the institutionalization of Just power that Western political science seems to have become, is there never the slightest suggestion of the absurdity of identifying this construct with the reality of mass societies as they exist in North America, Western Europe, and elsewhere? Let us pursue this example in some detail.

Democracy and the Political Paradigm

Robert Dahl’s work is an interesting instance of the metaphysical paradigm of power’s inevitable relation to order. In an historical essay, he argues that the American civil war is of interest to “students of politics” because it is a dramatization of the nature, failure, and success of the American political system:

Failure, because there can be no more convincing evidence of the breakdown of a political system than reversion to the barbarism of internal war, particularly among people of the same origins and language, already become a nation after living under the same government for nearly three quarters of a century, or if we count the Colonial period, for two centuries.¹⁵

One paragraph later, he appears to identify political systems with the nature of civilization, “because some problems have recurred ever since civilized men have tried to live together, ever...