Historical Sociology and World History

Uneven and Combined Development over the Longue Durée

Alexander Anievas, Kamran Matin

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781783486830
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Colonialisme et post-colonialisme

The concept of 'uneven and combined development' was originally coined by Leon Trotsky to theorise Tsarist Russia's distinctive experience of modernity and revolution. But it has re-emerged over the last decade or so as a burgeoning research programme within International Relations (IR) and historical sociology. It has been critically and creatively deployed in two main areas: the provision of a sociological foundation to international theory overcoming the chronic schism between ‘sociological’ and ‘geopolitical’ modes of enquiry; and, relatedly, in superseding prevailing Eurocentric approaches in the social sciences. This volume is the first to provide a sustained reflection on the idea of uneven and combined development as the intellectual basis for a non-Eurocentric social theory of ‘the international’. It does so through a series of empirically rich and theoretically informed analyses of socio-historical change, political transformation, and intersocietal conflict over the longue durée. The volume thereby aims to demonstrate the unique potentials of uneven and combined development in overcoming IR and historical sociology’s shared inability to theorize the interactive and multilinear character of development.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Historical Sociology, World History and the ‘Problematic of the International’

Alexander Anievas and Kamran Matin

The classical sociology tradition has long been criticised for offering a conception of ‘the social’ abstracted from its wider intersocietal context. The ‘methodological internalism’ inherited from this intellectual tradition has in turn lent itself to Eurocentric modes of enquiry in which modernity is conceived as endogenously and autonomously emerging within Europe—or even more narrowly, England—from which it subsequently spread to the rest of the world at varying times and tempos. From such perspectives, we find the flowering of the Renaissance (Burkhardt 1990), the emergence of absolutism and the modern state system (Teschke 2003), the origins of capitalism and the ‘rise of the West’ (Jones 1981; Brenner 1985; Landes 1998) as exclusively European phenomena: immanent properties of the uniqueness of European development itself. Europe is thus not only conceived as auto-generative and self-sustaining, but also as the permanent ‘core’ and ‘prime mover’ of world history. This is a view of European development as autopoietic. As a result, dominant theoretical understandings of world history have been constructed with non-European societies and agents largely absent, even when they are recognised as being empirically important to the stories we tell (cf. Anievas and Nişancioğlu 2015). Missing in these Eurocentric accounts, then, is any theoretical comprehension of ‘the international’ as a thick space of interconnection and co-constitutive societal differentiation: a conception of intersocietal systems as necessarily marked by, and generative of, alterity, hybridity and non-linear forms of development.

Recently in the fields of International Relations (IR) and historical sociology, a thriving new research program has emerged specifically addressing these two intersecting problematics of ‘the international’ and Eurocentrism building upon Leon Trotsky’s notion of uneven and combined development. This volume brings together a number of scholars working within these fields in offering critical reflections on the potential of uneven and combined development as an intellectual basis for a non-Eurocentric social theory of ‘the international’. It does so through a series of theoretically informed and empirically rich analyses of socio-historical change, political transformation and intersocietal conflict in world history over the longue durée.

In what follows, we further flesh out the issues and debates revolving around the twin problematics of ‘the international’ and Eurocentrism. We offer an exposition of the theory of uneven and combined development, while addressing some of the central lines of debate within the contemporary literature. We then move in Section IV to position the various chapters in relation to the above-noted problematics.

It is worth noting here that in putting together this volume we aim to pursue two main goals. The first, more explicit one is that the volume should act as a catalyst for further critical discussion and debate on and theoretical re-articulations of the central role of intersocietal relations—and extra-European societies in particular—in the making of world history. Our second, more implicit goal is to show the intellectual potentials of the idea of uneven and combined development for acting as a bridge between the fields of historical sociology and world history. For although contemporary world historians have also been centrally concerned with intersocietal interactions and differentiation in history there has been little dialogue between world history and historical sociology in IR as distinct but cognate fields. We reflect on the roots of this problem and the ways in which uneven and combined development can contribute to its solution in the concluding chapter.

To these ends, we offer the idea of uneven and combined development as a framework uniquely suited to theoretically and empirically ‘re-orient’ (Frank 1998) extant conceptions of world history and ‘the international’. In particular, we argue that uneven and combined development provides a generative research programme that opens up new theoretical and empirical vistas through which to analyse world history anew.

THE LEGACY AND LACUNA OF THE CLASSICAL SOCIOLOGY TRADITION

Over the past four decades or so, scholars of historical sociology have provided a wealth of new and exciting works analysing world history. From multi-volume studies, such as those provided by Perry Anderson (1974a; 1974b), Michael Mann (1986; 1993; 2012; 2013), Immanuel Wallerstein (1974; 1980; 1989; 2011), W. G. Runcimen (1983; 1989; 1997) and Kees van der Pijl (2007; 2010; 2014), to the many works of Jack Goldstone (1991; 2002; 2008), Theda Skocpol (1979; 1994), John M. Hobson (1997; 2004; 2012) and Charles Tilly (1984; 1993; 2004), historical sociological approaches have offered a number of important insights and novel analytical frameworks for examining world history over the longue durée. Particularly significant here is the persistent question of the theoretical standing of intersocietal relations—or ‘the international’—that many of these historical sociological works have sought to address and the zones of engagement and cross-fertilisation this has inspired with the field of IR.1

Engagements with the ‘problematic of the international’ have time and again taken centre stage in historical sociology and IR as they have sought to overcome the problems bequeathed by classical sociology’s singular notion of ‘society’ conceived in abstraction from the conditions of societal multiplicity and interactivity (see, among others, Nisbet 1969; Berki 1971; Skocpol 1973; Barker 1978; Giddens 1985; Mann 1986; Halliday 1987; Bertram 1990; Linklater 1990; Hobson 1998; Hall 1999; Teschke 2005; Rosenberg 2006; van der Pijl 2007; Davenport 2013). As far back as 1965, Gianfranco Poggi noted how modern sociology had primarily taken shape around the ‘study of the inner structure and dynamics of social units’. It was therefore marked by a ‘learned incapacity’ to theoretically incorporate the distinct causal dynamics and behavioural patterns emergent from the interactive co-existence of multiple societies and states (Poggi 1965, 284). For the guiding methodological assumption of the classical sociology tradition was that the growth and change of society ‘should be explained with reference to its internal constitution’ (Tenbruck 1994, 74). While the interactions between societies may not be viewed as entirely ‘inconsequential’, they are ‘in principle insignificant for sociology, since its effects on the essential process [are] seen as negligible’. It was this ‘conception of the internal history of societies that underlies the rise of sociology’ (Tenbruck 1994, 74, emphasis added). Similarly, surveying the vast field of classical sociologists from Karl Marx and Ferdinand Tönnies to Émile Durkheim and Talcott Parsons, Richard Bendix (1967, 306–7) concluded that ‘[f]or all their diversity’ the classical sociology tradition has tended to ‘treat societies as “natural systems”’ whereby ‘social change consists of a process that is internal to the society changing’. This absence of any intellectual tradition of international theory is replicated in Classical Political Philosophy, rousing Martin Wight’s (1966) oft-cited question: ‘Why is there no international theory?’

The problem of how to theorise international relations inherited from the classical sociology tradition has led a number of contemporary historical sociologists and IR scholars to abandon any unitary notion of society. They have instead invited us to revisualise processes of long-term social change and transformation in terms of intersecting ‘webs’ and ‘flows’ operating across, and irreducible to, individual societies, or contextualising social development within wider ‘intersocietal systems’ (see, for example, Giddens 1985; Mann 1986; Runciman 1989; Shaw 2000). While marking definite advances in approaching macro-historical analysis, such moves towards assigning a more central status to intersocietal relations and dynamics have all too often involved either an ‘extra-social’ or reductionist conception of ‘the international’. In other words, existing historical sociological approaches have oscillated between realist2 reifications of ‘the international’ as a timeless supra-social sphere or reductive theorisations of its distinct causal properties through some form of ‘domestic analogy’: a visualisation of ‘the international’ as a reimagining of domestic society writ large (Bull 1966). Consequently, the theoretical divide between ‘sociological’ and ‘geopolitical’ modes of explanation persists as neither perspective theoretically transcends classical sociology’s original conception of society in the ontologically singular (cf. Rosenberg 2006). This methodological dichotomy and the myriad problems it has generated have been at the heart of recent debates within the field of IR, where historical sociology has secured a vocal, albeit still marginal, place (see, inter alia, Hobson 1998; Buzan and Little 2000; Halliday 2002; Rosenberg 2006; Bigo and Walker 2007; Matin 2007; van der Pijl 2007; Chernilo 2010; Bhambra 2010; Hobson, Lawson and Rosenberg 2010; Teschke 2014; Anievas and Nişancioğlu 2015; Bieler, Bruff and Morton 2015; Buzan and Lawson 2015).

While historical sociologists have provided new vistas from which to revisualise grand-scale social change and development over the longue durée, the intellectual lacuna of ‘the international’ persists as few scholars have offered any systematic theoretical apparatus capable of incorporating the co-existence and interaction of multiple societies as a distinct sphere of developmental dynamics and social causality (but see van der Pijl 2007). As such, intersocietal relations remain theoretically undigested since it is not clear what is ‘the international’ rendered in substantive historical and sociological terms. That is to say, we have yet to see the formulation of a genuinely international historical sociology (Rosenberg 2006 and chapter in this volume).

MISSING: A NON-EUROCENTRIC SOCIAL THEORY OF ‘THE INTERNATIONAL’

The residual methodological internalism of historical sociological approaches entailed in this continuing absence of ‘the international’ in theory intersects with a second key line of debate within the contemporary social sciences: the problem of Eurocentrism.3 Indeed, one can arguably view the latter as a consequence of the former in the sense that the conception of social change and transformation as an immanent property of societies has led to interpretations and theoretical analyses of the predominant sites and driving forces of such historical processes as an exclusively European affair. Relatedly, through the comparative method, we find the distinct forms and paths of European development posited as ideal-type abstractions and/or normative benchmarks with which all other examples are contrasted and ultimately judged a ‘deviation’. Consequently, the particularities of European development are projected in one form or another on to the ‘extra-European’ world, thereby elevating the European experience into a universal stage of development through which all societies must pass, albeit at different times, places and velocities. The false sense of universality generated by such Eurocentric modes of enquiry has been the bane of social theory since its inception (cf. Anievas and Nişancioğlu 2015).

So what then constitutes Eurocentrism as such? At the core of Eurocentrism lies the claim that modern development across the world consists of a series of discrete re-enactments of modernity’s endogenous development in Europe. This is a view of modern world history as a play with one stage and one actor. As noted, this claim is rooted in classical sociology’s foundational assumption that the character of a society’s development is determined by its internal structures and agents. The self-contained conception of autopoietic development—the autonomous emergence and reproduction of particular social orders—embedded in the ‘pernicious postulate’ (Tilly 1984) of this singular abstraction of ‘the social’ simultaneously entails both an internalisation and globalisation of modern capitalist development in Europe (Amin 1989). This is effectuated by the subordination of space to time through a double-movement.4 Different geopolitical spaces are conceptually decoupled from the particularities of their internal developmental processes, while being simultaneously enclosed and homogenised within an abstract universal history derived from the concrete internal history of one such geopolitical space: Europe. The constitutive and causal significance of political multiplicity is thereby dissolved into a European temporality refashioned as ‘the universal’. In this respect, Eurocentrism combines ‘internalism’ (Tenbruck 1994) and ‘historicism’ (Chakrabarty 2008) producing what can be termed ‘monadic sociology’ (Matin 2007)—a mode of analysis that arguably remains hegemonic within the social sciences, operating across a wider variety of different theoretical traditions despite its many critics.

Two critical alternative approaches to Eurocentrism that have become particularly influential include ‘multiple modernities’ (Eisenstadt 2000) and ‘late postcolonialism’ (Bhaba 1994; Spivak 1994). Both approaches reject European development as the epitome of modernity, whilst emphasising the fundamentally plural nature of the modern experience. These are two crucial components to the formulation of a non-Eurocentric perspective which resonates with the framework of uneven and combined development offered in this volume. However, the ‘multiple modernities’ and ‘late postcolonialism’ perspective each face real difficulties in fully transcending Eurocentrism. The Weberian sociological framework of the multiple modernities approach retains the static comparative methodology fitted with ideal-type abstractions that renders ‘the international’ a contingent externality to its theoretical premises. This in turn attenuates the constitutive role of (geo)politics and intersocietal relations attendant to the globalisation of modern world history. The approach therefore lends itself to a culturalist/relativist mode of inquiry that is preoccupied with questions pertaining to the specificity of each instance of modernity leaving Eurocentrism’s internalist method largely intact (Eisenstadt 2000, 2; Masud and Salvatore 2009, 45).5 By contrast, late postcolonialism interrogates the interactive construction of ‘colonial modernity’ through an explicitly internationalist method (Dabashi 2006, xi–xii). Yet, its poststructuralist h...