The SAGE Handbook of Political Sociology, 2v

William Outhwaite, Stephen Turner, William Outhwaite, Stephen Turner, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781473919464
• eBook ISBN: 9781526416483
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The SAGE Handbook of Political Sociology offers a comprehensive and contemporary look at this evolving field of study. The focus is on political life itself and the chapters, written by a highly-respected and international team of authors, cover the core themes which need to be understood in order to study political life from a sociological perspective, or simply to understand the political world. 

The two volumes are structured around five key areas:

PART 1: TRADITIONS AND PERSPECTIVES
PART 2: CORE CONCEPTS
PART 03: POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES AND MOVEMENTS
PART 04: TOPICS
PART 05: WORLD REGIONS

This future-oriented and cross-disciplinary handbook is a landmark text for students and scholars interested in the social investigation of politics.

Part I Traditions and Perspectives

1 Classical Approaches: Origins and Development of the Theory of Politics

Bryan S. Turner

Introduction

We might start by simply saying that the intellectual struggle to define power has shaped the history not only of political theory in general but also of political sociology. Politics from a sociological perspective is understood to start with the rise of the state, the creation of parties, the formation of citizenship, and the development of civil society. More specifically, political sociology has been more concerned with the intermediary institutions and social forces that connect individuals and social groups to the state than with formal political institutions as such. Sociology has been more focused unsurprisingly on ‘the social’ rather than ‘the political'. This issue contributed to Hannah Arendt's critical exchange with David Riesman (Baehr, 2010). In The Lonely Crowd, Riesman (2001[1961], p. 217) had asked the question, ‘Is there a ruling class left?’ and had answered that power was not concentrated in a business elite or in the military, but more widely dispersed through society. Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) was arguably the most significant political theorist of her generation and hence her criticisms of sociology were significant. She associated the rise of sociology as a discipline with the arrival of a mass society, and she complained that sociology had failed to understand the rise of totalitarianism despite its pretensions as a science of prediction (Arendt, 1958). More pointedly, she claimed that the ancient world knew nothing of ‘society’ but only of the public world of the polis. There was in her reading of the growth of totalitarianism and anti-Semitism an unholy alliance between the social, sociology, mass society and an alliance between the elite and the mob (Canovan, 1992, p. 18). Perhaps the important outcome of the Arendt–Riesman debate, which started around 1947, was that sociology cannot take the political for granted and that it needs to be aware of its own history and its roots in classical debates about how the social and the political are intrinsically connected. Regrettably, with the increasing fragmentation, bureaucratization and specialization of the disciplines, there is an increasing intellectual gap between political theory, political science and political sociology. Max Weber (1864–1920) is both a sociologist and a political theorist. This simple classification has been challenged in interpretations of Weber's ‘science of man', most notably by Wilhelm Hennis (1988). Was Weber a sociologist or is that classification the result of Weber's introduction into American sociology by Talcott Parsons? Hennis believes that in Weber's work we find an ethical and anthropological investigation of the rationalization of life-orders as manifest in the rise of bureaucracy and officialdom or the rise of Fachmenschen (Stauth & Turner, 1988, pp. 98–122). However one settles these conflicts between political theory and political sociology, the underlying issues are partly about the philosophy of science but more substantively about power.

In this examination of political theory and social theory, one issue emerges, which is that politics typically deals with politics within but also between nation states, whereas social theory tends to deal with issues within nation states. Thus, in political theory from Thucydides to Machiavelli, attention is given not only to how to run states but also equally how to conduct business between states. To put it in the terminology of the ancient world, and following the commentary of Michel Foucault (2005) in The Hermeneutics of the Subject, a wise ruler takes care of the discipline of his citizens (soulcraft) and the management of the state (statecraft), including its external relations in war and peace. A wise and successful ruler attends to both dimensions. While, generally speaking, political theory has this double focus on the internal and external, social theory tends to be focused on the state, the market and civil society. What appears ultimately to bring about an integration of political theory and political sociology is the rise and development of citizenship, which has remained an issue from Aristotle to Talcott Parsons.

That there is ultimately no consensus over what power is should neither surprise nor disturb us. There are clearly a number of competing traditions (Lukes, 1974, 1986). In this chapter, I shall adopt a simple distinction between seeing power as either repressive and constraining and thus more closely associated with force, or power as enabling and thus associated with the idea of empowerment. I recognize that making simple distinctions is never completely satisfactory and, in the case of power, any discussion of it brings into view a cluster of related issues about authority, domination, influence, interest, legitimacy, representation, and rule. Nevertheless this binary contrast has a heuristic value. Thus, the first tradition connects power with violence and conflict, the second with administration, management and authority. The first approach can be defined as realist or indifferent to ethical concerns and to any requirement for justification; the second typically seeks justification for power in democratic processes of legitimation.

The first tradition is associated conventionally with Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, Max Weber and Carl Schmitt. Weber (1978, p. 53) famously defined ‘Power (Macht) as the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance, regardless of the basis on which this probability rests', and in the same passage he defined domination or Herrschaft as ‘the probability that a command with a given specific content will be obeyed by a given group of persons'. For Weber, all social relationships are shot through with issues involving the inevitability of power and hence of struggle, competition, domination and force (Lassman, 2000, pp. 84–85). Weber's view of power cannot be divorced from his theory of the nation state. In this regard, Weber's political sociology was as much concerned with foreign relations as with domestic politics (Fitzi, 2004, pp. 176–202). In Economy and Society (1978, p. 398), Weber noted that the concept of power refers ‘to a specific kind of pathos which is linked to the idea of a powerful political community of people who share a common language, or religion, or common customs, or political memories such that the state may already exist or it may be desired'. In evaluating notions of power, we should consider to what extent they embrace the idea of a state and its struggle with other states in a competitive and potentially conflictual relationship. In general, sociological accounts of power have a tendency to treat only the internal or domestic character of politics within rather than between states. Consequently, international relations theory has generally taken place outside the sociology discipline. One major exception is the work of Michael Mann such as The Social Sources of Power (1986) and The Dark Side of Democracy (2013). As we will see, Greek political thought was a response to both domestic political issues and to external conflict with competitors, typically cities or empires.

The second tradition has been more characteristic of American political science and is philosophically associated with pragmatism. The origins of this tradition lie with Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859), who is often claimed exclusively as a political theorist, but he is just as likely to be seen as the father of political sociology. Tocqueville often appears in textbooks on the history of sociology as depicted by Raymond Aron (1967) and Gianfranco Poggi (1972). Tocqueville is, however, absent from Talcott Parsons's The Structure of Social Action (1937) and yet in Parsons's American Society: A Theory of the Societal Community (2007), the idea of ‘societal community’ is compatible with Tocqueville's ideas about mores (or ‘habits of the heart') and ‘civil society'. Parsons clearly interprets power in terms of capacities to bring things about. He characteristically defines power as ‘having to do with the capacity of persons or collectivities “to get things done” effectively, in particular when goals are obstructed by some kind of resistance or opposition’ (Parsons, 1963, p. 232). A similar approach was taken by Robert A. Dahl in Modern Political Analysis (1970), who defined power as influence. Both Parsons and Dahl tend to see power as distributed widely through society. Thus, in Who Governs? (1974), Dahl, in a study of New Haven, CT, was interested in h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on the Editors and Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Traditions and Perspectives
• 1 Classical Approaches: Origins and Development of the Theory of Politics
• 2 Historical Political Sociology
• 3a Marxism up to the Second World War
• 3b Marxism Since 1945
• 4 Elite Theory and ‘Democratic Elitism'
• 5 Class and Politics
• 6 Foucault and Political Sociology
• 7 Gender and Political Sociology
• 8 Postcolonial Theory
• 9 International Relations and Political Sociology
• 10 Political Anthropology
• 11 Law and Political Sociology1
• 12 International Political Economy
• 13 Rational Choice
• 14 Political Sociology and Political Theory
• Part II Core Concepts
• 15 Power
• 16 Governmentality
• 17 Institutions
• 18 The Political Sociology and Political Geography of Borders
• 19 Globalization
• 20 The State
• 21 Weak States
• 22 Civil Society
• 23 Citizenship: T.H. Marshall and Beyond
• 24 Political Culture
• 25 The Concept of Empire
• 26 Empires as a Political Form
• Part III Political Ideologies and Movements
• 27 Ideology
• 28 Neoliberalism and the Study of ‘Isms'1
• 29 European Social Democracy, Communism and the Erfurtian Model
• 30 Fascism
• 31 Populism
• 32 Nationalism
• 33 Federalism
• 34 Democracy and Democratization: Theory and Research
• 35 Causal Models of Democratization
• 36 Asian Model of Democracy
• 37 Islamism, Political Islam
• Part IV Topics
• 38 Revolutions
• 39 State Power and Crime
• 40 War
• 41 Genocide
• 42 Clientelism
• 43 Experts and Science and Politics
• 44 Social Media and Politics
• 45 Political Socialization and Child Development
• 46 Resistance
• 47 Social Movements
• 48 Migration
• 49 Race
• 50 Terrorism
• 51 Transitional Justice
• 52 Post-Communism
• 53 Public Policy Formation and Implementation
• 54 Welfare State
• 55 Religion and Politics
• 56 Paradoxes of Diversity
• 57 Corporate Power in the Twenty-First Century
• 58 Political Violence in Historical Perspective
• 59 Military Sociology
• 60 The Politics of Memory
• Part V World Regions
• 61 The World-System(s)
• 62 European Integration
• 63 Politics in African States
• 64 Minority Rights and Democracy in India
• 65 China: Ancien Régime, Revolution and After
• 66 The ‘Middle East'1
• 67 Europe in the World: From Regional Integration to a Global Power
• Index