1 Development and Underdevelopment Definitions & conceptualization: Development & Underdevelopment Development notions Since its inception in the 1950s and 1960s, the notion of development has been an equivalent term with “progress” and “modernization.” Nowadays it has become an analogue of “economic growth”. A few catch-words: Economic growth Industrialization and modernization Progress Update, up-to-date Technological advance Modern man, ”capitalist spirit”, forwardlooking “Development” denotes a movement away from something that is considered to be underdeveloped. The US president Truman was among the first who used the word “underdeveloped” in his speech on January 22, 1949 when he took office: “We must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped area.…” Since the word “underdeveloped” was invented in comparison with the development level of the West at the end of World War II, the majority of the world population had suddenly degraded into a status of “underdevelopment.” Development defined All non-Western countries have been more or less in a process to “develop” or to “catch up.” The Petit Robert dictionary contains the following text under the general heading of “development”: “Developing country or region, whose economy has not yet reached the level of North America, Western Europe, etc.” 2 Development measurements economic growth and expansion (GDP*, GNP*) , institutionalized by WB and IMF
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Development andUnderdevelopmentDefinitions & conceptualization:Development & Underdevelopment
Development notionsSince its inception in the 1950s and1960s, the notion of development hasbeen an equivalent term with “progress”and “modernization.” Nowadays it hasbecome an analogue of “economicgrowth”.A few catch-words:Economic growthIndustrialization and modernizationProgressUpdate, up-to-dateTechnological advanceModern man, ”capitalist spirit”, forwardlooking“Development” denotes a movement away fromsomething that is considered to be underdeveloped.The US president Truman was among the first whoused the word “underdeveloped” in his speech onJanuary 22, 1949 when he took office: “We mustembark on a bold new program for making thebenefits of our scientific advances and industrialprogress available for the improvement and growthof underdeveloped area.…”Since the word “underdeveloped” wasinvented in comparison with the developmentlevel of the West at the end of World War II,the majority of the world population hadsuddenly degraded into a status of“underdevelopment.”
Development definedAll non-Western countries have been more orless in a process to “develop” or to “catch up.”The Petit Robert dictionary contains thefollowing text under the general heading of“development”: “Developing country or region,whose economy has not yet reached the level ofNorth America, Western Europe, etc.”2Development measurementseconomic growth and expansion (GDP*,GNP*) , institutionalized by WB and IMFInternational trade (export and import)wealth accumulation (foreign reserve, etc.)mass production and consumption.One is considered as being “developed” if itcan meet these measurements.
Problems of these measures1) The number-based measures fail to give areal picture when using them for acrosscountry
comparisons due to the widedifferences from country to country in termsof exchange rate anomalies, differentials intariff and tax rates, as well as subsidies toconsumption goods2) these data put an emphasis on the market value ofeconomic transaction, that is the rate at whichresources are converted to commodities andconsumptions together with other paid servicesand activities. For example, the expansion ofmilitary budgets, expenditures on prisons, warsand crime including prevention expenditures, aswell as environmental costs (the destroying offorests and the toxic dumpsites) seem to makeGNP and GDP data impressive;3) they do not take account of exchange ofgoods and services that do not enter themarket, for example, self-sufficiency,female contribution to households, eldersunpaid tutoring of youth, care for the sickand elderly, voluntary work of civicsocieties, etc, and other social aspects, suchas family and community coherence,emotional well-being, social stability
New ways of thinking and measure1) basic well-being (e.g., food, shelter,clothing, the goods for self-respect)2) additive well-being (e.g., health, education,identity expression, culture)3) freedom from subtractive and divisivewell-being (e.g. environmental degradation,violence, crime, coercion, deception,genocide, ethnic-cleansing, lynching,slavery, psychological torture, forceddisplacement and migration, rape and abuse)34) multiplicative well-being (e.g., ease ofmobility, degree of comfort, ease andparticipation in creative and public life,spiritual fulfillment, confidence andgrowing self-respect and psychic health)
Three Major Development TheoriesModernization TheoryCritical development theories:Dependency TheoryWorld System Theory
Critical Development TheoriesThe latter two (dependency and world system)developed as critiques of the modernizationschool.Emerged as theory to find answers todevelopment problems, but ended up more asan explanation of underdevelopment in theThird World.
Modernization theoryHistorical origin1. The rise of the US as a superpower and as a
model to follow.2. The birth to many new nation-states in theThird World which were in search ofdevelopment model.3. The US identified the threat of communismin post-war Europe and in the Third Worldbelieving that economic recovery andmodernization and moved them along thepath of the US, and thus they would moveaway from communism. (Marshall, EastAsia)4. The economic recovery of Europestrengthened the ideology and policy ofdeliberate intervention.5. American political scientists sought toidentity the conditions that gave rise todevelopment in the First World andexamine why these were lacking in theThird World.6. With the US support, an interdisciplinarymodernization school was in making inthe 1950s.4Modernization AssumptionsDevelopment is a spontaneous, irreversibleprocess inherent in every single society.Development is regarded as an evolutionaryperspective. Development andunderdevelopment are differences betweenrich and poor nations in terms of observableeconomic, political, social and cultural gaps.Social change is progressive, gradual, andirreversible.Development thus implies the bridging ofthese gaps by means of an imitative processin which less developed countries graduallyassumed the qualities of the industrializednations. It is a phased process. Society beginswith a primitive stage and move to anadvanced stage.Modernization policies (a rationalization andeffectivization of economic and socialstructures) are not only seen as elements of adevelopment strategy, but as universalhistorical forces. It bears a strong resemblanceto the transition from feudalism to capitalismin Western economic history.Development implies structural differentiationand functional specialization.The process of development can be dividedinto distinct stages showing the level ofdevelopment achieved by each society.Development can be stimulated by externalcompetition or military threat and byinternal measures that support modernsectors and modernize traditional sectors.
Development is seen as an universal processas well as a characteristic of humansocieties rather than a concrete historicalprocess taking place in specific societiesduring specific periods.
Some approaches to modernizationFunctional-structural approach to societyand modernizationcultural approach to society andmodernizationThe economics of development5Functional-structural approachto society and modernizationA. Emile Durkheim (19th century). NeilSmelser, Talcott Parsons1. Social evolution is a process of socialdifferentiation as a result of societiesbecoming structurally more complex.2. Social change is seen as a basicallyendogenous process (in-built).Modernization is a universal processcharacteristic of human societies ratherthan a concrete historical process takingplace in specific societies during specificperiods.3. Systems are in complex exchange withtheir environment, which often requiresinternal adjustment. (division of labourand differentiation)4. Social differentiation is defined to be theevolution from a multi-functional rolestructure to a specialized role structure.5. For example, during a society’s transitionfrom family to factory production, thedivision of labour increases and economicactivities based on the family move to thefirm. When a formal education systememerges, education and training functionsprovided by the family and church are nowcatered for by a specialized unit - theschool.6. In political sphere, the political roles in apre-modern society are closely bound upwith kinship roles, which provides the mainintegrative principle in such a society.When a society becomes increasinglycomplex and more specialized structuresemerge: bureaucracies, parties, assembliesand the like.1. Appropriate economic conditions fordevelopment, while necessary, were not ofthemselves sufficient. (economicrationality is not enough)
2. In addition, a capitalist spirit, a set oforientations and values, was required.
Cultural approach to societyand modernization63. Weber argues that there is causal connection existedbetween the spiritual and the temporal, namely theeffect of religion on the development of capitalismreligious spirituality was secularized when thededication to the task of societal regeneration becamelinked to the generalization and multiplication ofcapital and when profit-making was turned into anethos, a moral crusade. This gave birth to a socioeconomicevolution which began to function in amanner independent of religion which wasmarginalized by the economic logic.4. These characteristics are depicted as uniquecultural phenomena of Western civilization and asthe elements behind the emergence of capitalismin Europe:1) rationalization and creativity of economicactivities.2) rational organization of free labour (separation ofproductive activity from the household).3) modern book-keeping system.4) industrial organization.5) organization of political and social life.5. Market economy as an entity that combinesnorms, values, markets, money, and laws is anunanticipated consequence of the Protestantethic because “people create social structuresbut that those structures soon take on a life oftheir own, over which the creators have littleor no control.6. Besides Weber, Hegel and Marx also tookthe culturalist perspectives to explain whyoccidental (Western) societies were able toachieve industrialization earlier than the restof the world, and why the oriental (Asian)societies failed to do so. (ChineseConfucianism vs Protestant ethics)7. They argue that traditional religions, cultures(such as Chinese Confucianism) and socialpatterns in oriental societies were structuralbarriers and were inimical to the developmentof capitalism. This also denotes thatmodernization is preconditioned by culturalcapital and ideological attitude receptive tocapitalism.(the decline of the Chinese empire --- the rise ofEast Asia since 1960s --- the financial crisis in1997 --- the rise of China)8. Weber’s work has generated a tremendousimpact on and strengthened the culturalistapproaches to the studies of Third Worlddevelopment.9. Cultural aspects become one of the mostimportant elements in development studies.
7Cultural Modern Man1. “Modern man” is a central concept. Modernman is adaptable, independent, efficient,oriented to long-term planning, adaptable tochange. Modern man is confident of theability to bring change about and is activelyinterested in and eager to participate inpolitics.3. On the contrary, the “traditional man” isanxious, suspicious, lacking in ambition,oriented towards immediate needs,fatalistic, conservative and clings to wellestablishedprocedures even when theyare no longer appropriate.The economics of developmentUnderdevelopment is a shortage issue:- Physical conditions- Capital (saving rate)- TechnologyW.W. Rostow, The Stages of EconomicGrowth, 1960 (non-communist manifesto)The best known economic contributionwithin the tradition of modernization theoryis that of Walt Rostow, who conceived ofdevelopment as a number of stages linking astate of “tradition” to “maturity”. Thisdevelopment process was believed to be anendogenous process.There were five stages through which all developingsocieties had to pass:1. The traditional societyLimited production, absence of modern science andtechnology; agricultural based, clan-based polity, andfatalistic mentality.2. The pre-take-off society (many traditionalcharacteristics removed; agricultural productivityincreased; effective infrastructure created; newmentality and new class appeared.)3. Take-off (most crucial, economicdevelopment obstacles removed;national income raised; certain sectorsdeveloped faster;)4. The road to maturity (moderntechnology disseminated from theleading sector; the whole economymoves to mass consumption)5. The mass consumption society (today)8Policy implicationsModernization theories are not justacademic theories, they were originallyformulated in response to the new globalleadership role of the United States after
World War II. Therefore they haveimportant policy implications.Modernization theories intend toprovide an implicit justification for theasymmetrical power relationshipbetween "traditional" and "modern"societies. Since the US is modern andadvanced, and the Third World istraditional and backward, the lattershould look to the former for guidance.Modernization theories attempt tolegitimate the US aid and interventionpolicies. If what is needed is moreexposure to modern values and moreproductive investment, the US can helpby sending advisers, by encouragingAmerican business to invest abroad, bymaking loans and other kinds of aid.Structural theories:Dependency and World SystemStructuralist thought (economic structuralism)It has its origin in MarxismA historical perspectiveHolistic perspectiveEconomic and political analysisFocus on the structure of the international capitalistsystem / mode of production
Structuralism (background)Unlike European industrialization, one of thedistinctive features of Third Worldindustrialization is the fact that such a processwas taking place alongside alreadyindustrialized Western countries and wastherefore tied to them by various economicrelationsCritique to the David Recardo’s ComparativeAdvantage: each country is endowed with localresources, material, cultural and geographicalconditions. A country’s economic developmentwould benefit from specialization on thesestrengths connected with international trade.If everyone does the same, a system ofspecialization and trade will work to itsoptimum.9Structuralist theories: some basicassumptions1. It is necessary to understand the globalcontext within which states and other entitiesinteract.2. They stress the importance of historicalanalysis in comprehending the internationalsystem.3. The rise of British (see List’s theory) and
the later-comers (the US, Russia, Germanyand Japan) all favored industrializationbehind protective tariff barriers --industrialization not under globalspecialization, but under protection.4. The global system is not a uniformmarketplace with actors freely makingmutually beneficial contracts, rather, it isdivided into powerful central and relativelyweak peripheral economies with the formerplaying an active role and the latter apassive/reflexive role.5. It is assumed that particular mechanisms ofdomination exist that keep Third World statesfrom developing and that contribute toworldwide uneven development.6. They also assume that economic factors areabsolutely critical in explaining the evolutionand functioning of the world capitalist systemand the relegation of Third World states to asubordinate position.
Dependency TheoryDefinitions of dependencyIn a nutshellHistorical OriginIntellectual OriginExplanations of underdevelopmentSuggestions of solution
Definition of Dependency…a situation in which the economy of acertain group of countries is conditioned bythe development and expansion of anothereconomy, to which their own is subjected.(Dos Santos)(Theotonio Dos Santos, "The Structure of Dependence," in K.T. Fannand Donald C. Hodges, eds., Readings in U.S. Imperialism. Boston:Porter Sargent, 1971, p. 226)
10An explanation of the economicdevelopment of a state in terms of theexternal influences - political, economic,and cultural - on national developmentpolicies. (Osvaldo Sunkel)(Osvaldo Sunkel, "National Development Policy and ExternalDependence in Latin America," The Journal of Development Studies,Vol. 6, no. 1, October 1969, p. 23).
a historical condition which shapes a certainstructure of the world economy such that itfavors some countries to the detriment ofothers and limits the developmentpossibilities of the subordinate economics...
In a nutshell“The underdevelopment of the Third World and thedevelopment of the First World are not isolated anddiscrete phenomena. Rather, they are organically andfunctionally interrelated. Underdevelopment is not aprimal or original condition, to be outgrown byfollowing the industrialized course pioneered byWestern nations. The latter are overdeveloped today tothe same degree the peripheral lands are
underdeveloped. The states of developedness andunderdevelopedness are but two sides of the samecoin.”L.R. Stavrianos, Global RiftKey points:_Dependency is the source ofunderdevelopment_Dependency is the result of the impositionof a set of external conditions on ThirdWorld development
Historical and intellectual originDependency Theory developed in the late1950s under the guidance of the Director ofthe United Nations Economic Commissionfor Latin America (ECLA).Economic growth in the advancedindustrialized countries did not necessarilylead to growth in poorer countries.A group of Latin American intellectuals(especially economists and sociologists), inthe early 1960s, began an overall critique tomodernization theory. ECLA's scholarsstarted a set of theoretical approaches thatwas going to be known generically asDependency Theory.11It is argued that most of the foundations ofthe theoretical categories and developmentpolicies rooted in the modernization schoolhave been exclusively based on the historicalexperience of European and North Americanadvanced capitalist countries. Thus, thesewestern theoretical categories are not suitableto guide our understanding of theunderdevelopment problem of the ThirdWorld.Marxist tradition – combination of severaltraditions, Marxism, Leninism, Neo-Marxism - more sociological in outlookAssociated with Marxist thinking and setsLDCs within wider socio-historical context,arguing that lesser developed nations aredominated economically & politically by,and dependent upon, outside industrialpowers
Fields of investigationmechanisms and processes of domination throughwhich existing structures are maintained regardingboth national and international structures.forms of dependency creating mechanism of selfperpetuationand the possibilities of change.antagonistic and non-antagonistic relations betweensocial classes and groups.
Basic assumptions1) Historical dimensions of relations of dependence arerooted in the internationalization of capitalism.Gunder Frank:“All serious study of the problems of developed and
underdeveloped and all serious intent to formulatepolicy for the elimination of underdevelopment and forthe promotion of development must take in account,nay must begin with, the fundamental historical andstructural cause of underdevelopment in capitalism”2) The international system comprises twosets of states – metropolitan centre vs peripheralsatellites (buffer).3) External forces are of singular importanceto economic activities of dependent states.4) Relations between two sets of states aredynamic because ongoing interactions tendto reinforce and intensify unequal relationsand patterns.5) Attempt to explain underdevelopment byexamining patterns of interactions andargument that inequality and exploitationare intrinsic parts of those interactions.126) Developing countries could not be able tofollow the suit of the Western path becausethey have experienced the history thatwestern countries have not experienced –colonialism7) Third World countries are not “primitive” and“feudal” or “traditional”. It is the colonialismand foreign domination have handicappedtheir development course.8. Poor countries exported primary commodities tothe rich countries who then manufacturedproducts out of those commodities and sold themback to the poorer countries. (even today)9. The "Value Added" by manufacturing a usableproduct always costs more than the primaryproducts used to create those products. (rawmaterial vs finished products; agriculture vsmanufacturing)10. Domestic elite is in an alliance withinternational capital because they share thesame interests.Today, “transnational elite class”
Underdevelopment formulaForeign capital and surplus penetrating inthe national economyLoss of economic control, wealth,distribution to foreign powersUnderdevelopment and economicstagnation
Samir Amin: dual sector1. The centre and the periphery play unequal rolesin the system because of unequal exchange.2. In the periphery the ruling groups are in alliancewith those of the centre create environments inthe former in which peasants lack access to thequantity and quality of land needed to maintaintheir family's livelihood. As a result, the pool oflabour available is large. (labour creation)3. Due to the surplus of labour, the reduction in
wages makes the reduction of prices ofcommodities produced by the peripherypossible.4. The production processes in the centre arearticulated whereas those in the periphery aredis-articulated135. In the centre, demand and supply linkagesconnect the production process throughout theeconomy. Thus expansion of one sector haspositive impacts on other sectors via theselinkages.6. In the periphery, there are few links betweenvarious sectors. The expansion of one sector haslittle impact via demand or supply linkages to therest of the economy. This rules out autonomousdevelopment in the periphery.
Suggestions of solutionPoorer countries should embark on programs ofimport substitution so that they need not purchasethe manufactured products from the richercountries.The poorer countries would still sell their primaryproducts on the world market, but their foreignexchange reserves would not be used to purchasetheir manufactures from abroad.The only possibility of avoiding dependencyis creating an alternative system ofproduction, a non-capitalist system ofproduction. Here, the majority of dependentistintellectuals were proposing "socialism" asalternative.
Alternative Dependency thinkingsCardoso: Associated-dependecy_It is a critique to the classical dependency school’sassertion that foreign domination/dependencymakes no room for national development._It puts a focus on the new development andparticularity of these activities in order to uncoverthe dynamics.Questions to ask and think:_The historical origin and uniqueness of agiven dependency situation._A particular dependency situation differentfrom previous._Can the existing dependency structuresthemselves generate possibilities oftransformation?_What impact will a change in dependencyhave on the historical development of adeveloping country?14Cardoso’s arguments:1. to some extent, internal prosperity of thedependent countries becomes compatible withmultinational corporations (they have to sellproducts) and they promote development.2. the basic relationship remains the same
because this relationship between thedeveloped and underdeveloped country isbased on the extractive exploitation of theunderdeveloped.3. Cardoso regards the national bourgeoisies ofthe dependent societies as potentially powerfuland capable of shaping development.4. In the case of Brazil, the military regime(bureaucratic-technocratic) state, the MNCsand the local bourgeoisie formed a politicalalliance to promote associated-developmentsince 1964.O’Donnell – bureaucratic-authoritarianstate (vs traditional authoritarianism)1. Dominance of bureaucratsHigh government officials were those whohave successful careers in bureaucraticorganizations such as the arm, the publicbureaucracy and large private firms.2. Political exclusionThe BA states repressed popular sectors (fxlabour unions) through closing channels ofpolitical access and imposing corporatistcontrols.3. Economic exclusionThe BA states reduced or postponesaspirations to economic participation by thepopular sectors.4. DepoliticizationSocial issues were reduced to “technical”ones that can be solved by the rationalplanning of state bureaucrats. (China inthe last two decades, economics-incommand. )5. Capital is oriented towards: stability,predictability, discipline. (rather thandemocracy, human rights)
Post-colonial dependencyIt refers to the status of a country that is nolonger colonized and has regained its politicalindependence (e.g., post-colonial Africa). In thissense, "post-colonialism" will pertain to theprevious set of features (economic, political,social, etc)15Colonial infrastructuresConceptual definitions (democracy, rights)*A legal system (legislation, law-enforcement)A communication system (ports, roads,railways, telegraphs, etc.)An economic system (trade, production,finance, accounting,A social system (health, police, recreation)A cultural system (state and societal)Post-colonial dependency characterizes thestatehood of these countries and the way theynegotiate their colonial heritage – the long
periods of forced dependency have aprofound impact on the social and culturalfabric of these societies (the post-colonialcondition), fx. Africa and Latin America.“African state”
Political and cultural dependencyideological conviction (brain-wash)culture of governanceculture of managementculture of capitalist spirit (Weber)culture of understanding society,economics and politics
World system theory1. Three major historical social systems:a) closed local economiesb) World empires ( a core extracts tribute fromperipheries; such as the Chinese empire and theRoman empire)c) World economies (a single economy withdivision of labour; pattern of specialization andexchange; multiple cultures; no central politicalauthority2. The world systems approach, argues thatthe present inequality and poverty is a directconsequence of the evolution of theinternational political economy into a fairlyrigid division of labor which favored therich and penalized the poor.163. The modern world-system is a capitalist worldeconomy,which means that it is governed bythe drive for the endless accumulation ofcapital, sometimes called the law of value.4. This world-system came into existence in thecourse of the sixteenth century, and its originaldivision of labor included in its bounds much ofEurope (but not the Russian or OttomanEmpires) and parts of the Americas.5. This world-system has been expanding overthe centuries, successively incorporatingother parts of the world into its division oflabor.6. The capitalist world-system is constitutedby a world economy dominated by coreperipheralrelations and a political structureconsisting of sovereign states within theframework of an interstate system.7. The fundamental contradictions of thecapitalist system have been expressed within
the systemic process by a series of cyclicalrhythms, which have served to contain thesecontradictions.8. The cyclical rhythms included hegemoniccycles consisting of the rise and decline ofsuccessive guarantors of global order, eachone with its particular pattern of control.9. The cyclical rhythms resulted in regular slowmovingbut significant geographical shifts inaccumulation and power, without changing thefundamental relations of inequality within thesystem.10. These cycles were never perfectlysymmetrical, but rather each new cycle broughtabout small but significant structural shifts inparticular directions that constituted the seculartrends of the system.11. The modern world-system, like all systems, isfinite in duration, and will come to an end whenits secular trends reach a point* such that thefluctuations of the system become sufficientlywide and erratic that they can no longer ensurethe renewed viability of the system's institutions.When this point is reached, a bifurcation willoccur, and via a period of (chaotic) transition thesystem will come to be replaced by one orseveral other systems.
World-system in historical perspectiveMini-systems (pre-agricultural era)Mini homogeneous societies in cultural andgoverning structuresWorld empires (8000 B.C. – 1500 A.D.)Vast political structure encompassing a widerange of cultural patterns; the extraction oftribute or locally self-sufficient.17Wallerstein: (vis-s-vis culturalist explanations)- The Chinese empireThe Chinese were accomplished astronomers;had invented gunpowder, printing, and paper;and had developed a sophisticated bureaucracyto manage their imperial state. The Great Wallof China is the only clear object that can beseen from the moon. (The long and durablefeudal system)- Turko-Arabic empireThe Arabs had pioneered much of modernmathematics including the use of Arabicnumerals, zero, and algebra (the term itself isderived from Arabic). They were alsoaccomplished chemists, having developeddistillation (alcohol is another term derived fromArabic).World economies (since 1500)Uneven chains of integrated productiondissected by multiply political structures; thebasic logic was accumulation of surplus;wealth was unequally distributed in favour of
those able to achieve monopolies; the capitalistworld economies then expanded to the entireglobe.(European expansion, the fall of other empires)
From British to American EmpireNeil Ferguson (2003)Empire: The Rise and Demise of the BritishWorld Order and the Lessons for Global Power
British empirethe British Empire was the grand provider of fiveinstitutions for the world:1. the triumph of capitalism as the optimal system ofeconomic organization.2. the Anglicization of North America and Australasia3. the internationalization of the English language4. the enduring influence of the Protestant version ofChristianity.5. "the survival of parliamentary institutions.
Neil: American empire?that it is the United States, not Britain, that is"capable of playing an imperial role" in the worldtoday.America's own history - freeing itself from theBritish Empire - has made it wary of "formal ruleover subject peoples"America must face up to its imperial dutiesbecause it is "an empire in denial," an empire "thatdare not speak its name."
18other readingsChalmers Johnson (2000): Blowback: The Cost andConsequences of American Empire.Andrew J. Bacevich (2002) American Empire: TheRealities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy.Harry Turtledove (2003) American Empire: TheVictorious Opposition.
The rise of European dominanceAs the first to develop a national capitalist economy,then expanded to the globe, then translated theeconomic power the into the military andtechnological power necessary to dominate andeventually subjugate its Islamic and Chinese rivals.The maturation of a capitalistic society gave theEuropeans an edge over other powers and offeredthem advantages that resulted in Europeandominance. From these beginnings came Europeanhegemony.
World system, 1800 - World system, 1900 -World system, 2000 ? (China and East Asia) Country differentiationsCompetition in total production output(GNP, GDP)Specialization in particular type ofproduction (technological level)Timing and conditions of state formationRelative successes in warfare and internalpopulation control19
World-system methodologyA Marxist approachThe essence of Marx's analysis of history is thatclass divisions emerge as a result of the mode ofproduction within a society. Slavery, feudalism,,and capitalism all created class divisions, be theymaster/slave, noble/serf, or capitalist/worker.Human history is a history of class strugglesaccording to Marx.Wallerstein expands it to examine the entireglobal economy from a Marxian perspective.Applying the Marxist approach on the globallevel.The globe also could be arranged not on thebasis of geography but on the Marxian basis ofthe mode of production and division of labor.
Global divisionsCore, “developed”Semiperiphery, “semi-developed”Periphery, “developing” or underdeveloped
The coreThe core was the equivalent of the rulingclass in traditional Marxian perspectivewhile the periphery was the equivalent ofthe lower class. The core, or First World,had an economy based upon the importationof raw materials and exportation of finishedgoods.
The peripheryThe periphery, or Third World, in turnprovided the raw materials and a market forthe finished goods made from them.
The semi-peripheryIn between lay the semi-periphery, orSecond World. The economy of the semiperipherywas a mixture of resourceextraction and manufacturing but wasdominated by neither.More recent formulations of the theory haveexpanded the semi-periphery to include thesemi-core20World system discoursesA. It rejects the nation-state as the unit of analysis:- as long as exchange takes place through amarket (sale for profit), even if it is only on aninternational level, it is still capitalism;- wage labor is not the issue here; production forprofit in a market is the issue;- agricultural capitalism began with the rise ofthe Western world (Marx's stages of history)B. A world division of labor in whichproduction is exchanged through a marketand in which the political units are notconterminous with the division of labor is acapitalist world-economy; if political unit is
conterminous with division of labor, it is aworld-empire.(The division of economic and political class;single vs multi-legitimation)C. In a world market, actors and producersattempt to avoid the normal operation of themarket whenever it did not maximize theirprofit. They turn to non-market devices inorder to ensure this--this means to the nationstate.;i.e., mercantilism; note that this canmean protection (usually for those seeking tocatch up) or a more positive hand to capitalists--forcing open markets, maintaining a free traderegimeD. Historically northwest Europe was better situated inthe 16th century to diversify agriculturalspecialization and add certain industries (textiles,shipbuilding, metal wares). It traded these with E.Europe and W. Hemisphere for grain, bullion,wood, cotton, sugar. Strong states developed in thecore because there was more surplus to tax and newproducers wanted protection. They did not developin the periphery because there were no surpluses totax and large agricultural producers did not wantprotection (self-sufficient, self-reliance).E. Once the unequal exchange mechanism isset up, and the differences between strongand weak states are established, thesituation is exacerbated. Strong statesdefend their markets and force open thoseof the periphery.F. Western liberal values (science, progress,rationality, liberty, democracy, rights) which arealleged to have been the basis of imperialism,domination and exploitation are not consideredas a major cause of exploitation and domination.Rather, it was the military and economic powergenerated by capitalism that made Europeancolonialism and hegemony possible. (economicand technological imperatives)21Capitalism vs socialismChristopher Chase-DunnThe historical development of the communist states canbe explained as part of a long-run spiraling interactionbetween expanding capitalism and socialist counterreponsesThe history and developmental trajectory of thecommunist states can be explained that socialistmovements in the semiperiphery that attempted totransform the basic logic of capitalism, but ended upusing socialist ideology to mobilize industrialization forthe purpose of catching up with core capitalismThe spiraling interaction between capitalistdevelopment and socialist movements can be seen inthe history of labor movements, socialist parties andcommunist states over the last 200 years:both capitalism and socialism affect one another'sgrowth and organizational forms. Capitalism spurssocialist responses by exploiting and dominatingpeoples, and socialism spurs capitalism to expand its
scale of production and market integration and torevolutionize technology (resilience of capitalism).Socialists were able to gain state power in certainsemiperipheral states and use this power to createpolitical mechanisms of protection against competitionwith core capital. This was not a wholly newphenomenon because capitalist semiperipheral stateshad done and were doing similar things. But, thecommunist states claimed a fundamentally oppositionalideology in which socialism was allegedly a superiorsystem that would eventually replace capitalism.Therefore, it is both a economic and ideologicalstruggle.In response to socialist movement, capitalismwas driven to further revolutionize technologyor to improve living conditions for workers andpeasants because of the demonstration effect ofpropinquity to a communist state.U.S. support for state-led industrialization ofJapan and Korea (in contrast to U.S. policy inLatin America) was understood as ageopolitical response to the Chinese revolution.
Dependency vs World-systemDependency perspective World-systemperspectiveUnit of analysis The nation-state The world system
Methodology Structural-historical: boomand bust of nation-stateHistorical dynamics of theWorld-system: cyclicalrhythms and secular trendsTheoreticalstructureBimodal: core-periphery Trimodal: coresemiperiphery-peripheryDirection ofdevelopmentDeterministic: dependency isgenerally harmfulPossible upward anddownward mobility in theworld economyResearch focus On the periphery On the periphery as well ason the core, the semipheryand the world economy
World-system key positionNation’s future is shaped solely by itshistorical position in the world system.Strategies for growth and national policyhave limited impact on development22The case of East Asia: yes+noModernizationEast Asia
Critical questionsWhat are the conditions that give rise toEast Asian developmental states?Why did it emerge in East Asia and not inAfrica and Latin America?What are other factors and explanationswhich form the nature of state-market
relations and state-society relations
East Asian: a special case?The role of geopolitics- The Cold War- The role of the US (political, economic andmilitary.The role of the state (political economy)- Authoritarian capitalism, CDS- The role of culture?
American security umbrellaSouth Korea- $13 billion or $600 per capita in the period of1945-79- US aid accounted for five-sixths of Koreanimports_ Taiwan some $5.6 billion and $425 per capita._ Market access, investment and foreign trade
Limits of East Asian modelHistorically specific vs culturally specificA model to be learned, but historically confinedUnique conjunction with the development ofcapitalism (after the Second World War)Globalization vs high-speed export-orientedAfter the Cold War with the fall of Soviet Unioncommunism, US needs “fair competition”The 1997 Asian financial crisis.The East Asian case is the interaction of manymutually-related external and internal factors. Itis the synergy of external factors, such as theUS security umbrella, favorable internationalenvironment, foreign assistance and directinvestment, correlating with internal factors,such as the role of state, cheap labor, export-leddevelopment policy, the role of education andcultural aspects. Ignoring one single factorwould put explanations on a fragile anduncompleted basis.…………………………………………….
Center for European StudiesWorking Paper Series 129Unbalanced Growth: Why Is Economic SociologyStronger in Theory Than in Policies?*by
Carlo TrigiliaProfessor of Economic SociologyFaculty of Political SciencesUniversity of FlorenceVia Delle Pandette, 2150127 Firenze, ItalyE-mail: [email protected]
The aim of this article is to discuss the relationship between economic sociology and economicpolicies. In the last decades, economic sociology has made significant achievements in terms oftheory and research, but that its influence on policies has remained weak. While this was inevitablein earlier decades, when scholars had to concentrate most of their effort on defining the roleand contribution of economic sociology, it has since become a constraint for the institutionalizationand recognition of the discipline. The return to economic sociology, since the 1980s, hasbrought about important theoretical achievements, especially in the analysis of economic organizationat the micro level in terms of social and cultural embeddedness. The role of social relationsin contemporary economy has clearly emerged, but its implications for policies to promote economicdevelopment have remained more latent so far. Although a weaker institutionalizationand a poorer connection to policy-making certainly affect the political influence of economic sociologyin comparison to economics, the paper focuses on the research perspective. A shift of theresearch focus from the statics to the dynamics of economic organization could be useful. In thisframework, particular attention is drawn to the study of local development and innovationthrough a closer relationship of economic sociology with comparative political economy. A separationbetween these two approaches does not favor a full exploitation of the potential contributionof economic sociology to policies.*Paper prepared for the International Review of Sociology. A first version was presented at the InternationalConference on “Economic Sociology: Problems and Prospects,” University of Crete, Rethimno, Crete,September 8-10 2004. 2The aim of this article is to discuss the relationship between economic sociologyand economic policies. I would like to show that in the last decades economic sociologyhas made significant achievements in terms of theory and research, but that its influenceon policies has remained weak. While this was inevitable in earlier decades, when scholarshad to concentrate most of their effort on defining the role and contribution of economicsociology, it has since become a constraint for the institutionalization and recognitionof the discipline.Of course, one could ask why we should care about influencing policy. It couldbe argued that the main goal of the discipline should be to improve knowledge of economicactivities and processes from a sociological point of view. My answer is that a socialscience should care about its contribution to a reflexive reconstruction of society. AsJames Coleman wrote, "social science is not only a search for knowledge for the aestheticpleasure of discovery or for the sake of knowing, but a search for knowledge for the reconstructionof society" (Coleman 1990, 651).I will begin by recalling that the classics, the founding fathers of economic sociology,viewed their approach as clearly oriented towards finding solutions for the reconstructionof a society increasingly destabilized by liberal capitalism. Analytical intentionsand political implications were strictly related. However, after the Second World
War, a process of disciplinary specialization took place. There was a decline of the classicaltradition and a loss of interest in economic policies. The latter were mainly discussedin the framework provided by mainstream economics. In the ensuing part of thepaper, I will try to show that a revival of economic sociology, since the 1980s, hasbrought about important theoretical achievements, especially in the analysis of economicorganization at the micro level in terms of social and cultural embeddedness. The role ofsocial relations in contemporary economy has clearly emerged, but its implications forpolicies to promote economic development have remained more latent so far. In the finalsection, I discuss some factors that affected this outcome and point to possible remediesto strengthen the contribution of economic sociology to policy proposals. I am awarethat a weaker institutionalization and a poorer connection to policy-making certainlyaffect the political influence of economic sociology in comparison to economics. However,this paper concentrates on the role of the research orientation. It suggests that ashift of the research focus from the statics to the dynamics of economic organizationcould strengthen the policy impact of economic sociology. From this perspective, particularattention is drawn to the study of local development and innovation through acloser relationship with comparative political economy. The separation between thesetwo approaches prevents a full exploitation of the potential contribution of economicsociology to policies.1. The classics of economic sociology and the political reform of capitalismThe founders of economic sociology did not oppose the market, but were convincedthat it should be properly regulated. It was mainly in Germany, with Max Weberand Werner Sombart, that economic sociology grew as an autonomous discipline. Bothof them respected neoclassical economics. They took Menger's side in the methodologicaldebate (Methodenstreit), where he opposed the historicists. They believed that analyticaleconomic theory had a legitimate right to exist, but did not assume its empirical va 3lidity. Weber repeatedly stated that economic behavior was actually influenced onlyvery rarely by the motivations that neo-classical economics attributed to self-interested,atomistic actors. This is why he wanted to begin a theoretical study of the economy in itssocio-cultural context. He aimed to develop a micro-foundation of economic behaviorable not only to improve the understanding of capitalist development, but also to providemore sophisticated and effective policy tools than the laissez-faire kit of neo-classicaleconomics.The worries about liberal capitalism expressed by Weber and Sombart wereshared by other classics, such as Durkheim and Polanyi. For all of them the marketworks better when problems of fairness and trust are successfully dealt with, and thisdistinguishes the sociological view from neo-classical economics.Economic sociology is more interested in the problems of fairness in real markets,while economics focuses on problems of efficiency, taking it for granted that a fullycompetitive market will also resolve any problems of equity. If labor relations are particularly
unbalanced, conflicts may emerge in bargaining relations, which risk endangeringproductive activities; or alternatively, workers may become less committed totheir tasks, lowering productivity. In these cases, the institutions representing the collectiveinterest of workers and introducing political regulation into the labor market, becomeimportant. Moreover, state intervention to regulate working conditions and to reducesocial inequalities brought about by the market are also necessary precisely to havemore efficient markets.In addition, the real operation of the economy is highly dependent on trust. Individualsare not normally well-informed or fully capable of rational calculation, and noteveryone can be considered equally trustworthy. The lack of perfect information, togetherwith the risk of moral hazard, makes market exchanges problematic, even wherethey have been legitimized. In addition, markets are not always fully competitive. In realsocieties, therefore, the market works better insofar as there are institutions that generateand reproduce trust through personal interactions (for example, those tied to families,kinship relations, local communities, etc.) or in an impersonal way, through formal institutions(such as legal sanctions applied to people who violate contracts). Therefore,what Durkheim called “non-contractual conditions of the contract” are crucial for thetradition of economic sociology.These analytical intentions of economic sociology are well known, but it is worthnoticing that they were strictly related to clear political implications. The classics wereconvinced that social and political regulation of the market was necessary; and this convictionwas strengthened by the economic and social turmoil brought about by the GreatDepression and the crisis of liberal capitalism, as is very clear in Polanyi's Great Transformation.However, after the Second World War, this tradition of economic sociology asmacro-sociology of capitalism, oriented towards its political reform, declined. The legacyof the classics became fragmented and economic sociology moved towards greater thematicand disciplinary specialization. New fields emerged, such as industrial and laborsociology, organizational studies and industrial relations. The original political orientationstowards the reform of liberal capitalism dissolved as well.4Many factors contributed to the process of fragmentation and disciplinary specialization,but there are two reasons particularly worth mentioning. The first concernsthe consequences of intense economic growth and social and political stabilization. Inother words, many of the worries about the difficult relationship between the economyand society in liberal capitalism – on which the founders of economic sociology had focusedtheir attention – seemed less important as a consequence of the “great transformation”of capitalism. This occurred particularly in the more developed countries,where Keynesian policies and “Fordist” forms of industrial organization became widespread.The second reason involves the contemporary redefinition of the boundaries
between economics and sociology. On the one hand, with the “Keynesian revolution”,economics offered new and effective instruments to interpret and guide this new andintense phase of economic growth. On the other hand, the institutionalization of sociologypushed scholars towards fields that were less studied by economists, and encourageda greater disciplinary specialization. The work of Talcott Parsons played a crucialrole in the redefinition of the boundaries between economics and sociology.Parsons (1937) criticized the atomistic individualism of neo-classical economicsbecause of its assumption that individuals define their ends independently of their mutualinteraction. However, he proposed a definition of the boundaries between the twodisciplines based on what he called “the analytical factor view". Economics must be conceivedas the analytical theory of a factor of action based on the rational pursuit of individualinterest, while sociology should be understood as an abstract analytical theory ofanother factor of action, one linked to “ultimate values”. While an important effect ofthis influential view was to favor the academic institutionalization of sociology in newfields not presided over by economics, at the same time it also meant that the interests ofthe sociological community shifted away from economic sociology and towards otherthemes. Policy implications were loose and indirect, but basically they implied interventionsthat could favor the social acceptance of market economy, even through redistributivepolicies (as is clear in Parsons and Smelser 1956). Economic organizationwas seen as essentially shaped by market incentives, and thus left to mainstream economics.Summing up, we could say that when the era of the classics came to a close, theircommitment to a political reform of capitalism had been taken over by Keynesian economicsand Fordist re-organization, until the late 1960s. Sociology was oriented towardsthe problem of social integration, and distanced itself from the analysis of the economyand from economic policies (Granovetter 1990).2. The revival of economic sociology: theoretical achievements distant from policiesAs is known, since the 1980s there has been a return to economic sociology withthe "new economic sociology", focusing mainly on the micro level. Two main factorshave influenced this trend. First, there was a theoretical reaction to new economic neoinstitutionalist'sattempts to analyze the growing variety of productive organization. Inaddition to market and hierarchy, a number of new hybrid forms were developing,based on the more or less formalized collaboration between firms (joint ventures, alli5ances, co-operation agreements, etc.). Although transaction-costs theory tried to redefinethe traditional economic theory of action by taking into account aspects such as"bounded rationality" and "opportunism" (Williamson 1975,1985), this approach still explainsorganizational choices in terms of the rational search for efficiency. Thus, it hasnot been able to provide a satisfactory explanation for economic action under conditionsof insufficient information and uncertainty.In sociology, the development of neo-institutional economic theories triggered, inturn, new explanations of organizational variety that underlined the autonomous roles
of social networks, cultural factors and power relations. This led to the second factordriving new economic sociology. In the 1970s and early 1980s, there was a growing dissatisfactionin sociology with Talcott Parsons’ theory of action, and the new economicsociology was particularly influenced by the criticisms developed by ethnomethodologyand phenomenology (DiMaggio 1994). Thus, it shares a theory of actionthat is more constructivist, more contingent and more open to direct social interactions.Different approaches converge in the new economic sociology. It may be worthmentioning some differences and similarities between the structuralist and the neoinstitutionalapproach. In the structuralist approach, the actor’s location in the structureof social relations is crucial for understanding his actions (Granovetter 1985). It defines apeculiar “social capital” that can be used in economic transactions to provide informationand trust (Coleman 1990). Important applications of the structural approach can befound in the study of labor markets, business groups and inter-firm relations, productdifferentiation and market competition, new high-tech activities, the stock market.In contrast, sociological neo-institutionalists take a different position, emphasizingthe autonomous role played by cultural factors in motivating actors and shaping organizationchoice. A good example of the analytical consequences resulting from theneo-institutionalist approach is the work on “isomorphism” by Powell and Di Maggio(1991). In empirical research, this approach has stimulated numerous contributions, especiallyin sectors that are not affected by market competition, such as non-profit andcultural organizations, as well as financial institutions and large accounting firms. Fligstein’swork (1990) on the productive diversification of large American firms providedan interesting application.Despite these differences, both the structural approach and sociological neoinstitutionalismprovide a view of the market as embedded in social structures, and tryto explain the real action of economic actors in concrete markets. Both also share an explanationof organizational diversity than cannot be reduced to the mere search for efficiencyby atomistic actors (individuals or firms). Under the same conditions of "assetspecificity" - to use Williamson's language – different actors could rely to different degreeson the market, hierarchy or relational contracting, thus providing variable organizationalchoices. In fact their choice is influenced by their social relations (or socialcapital as intended by Coleman) and by their cognitive and normative attitudes. In thisway the new economic sociology reacted to the "imperialism" of economic analysis byproviding alternative explanations for the variety of economic organization. AsGranovetter (1990) pointed out, this is an important difference from the "old" economicsociology, which did not trespass on the traditional boundaries between economic andsociology.6On the whole, this has been a significant theoretical achievement, which was favored
by interesting research, and is in turn orienting new research on economic organization.However, there is in an important potential for policy-making in the new economicsociology that has not been fully exploited so far. While the shortcomings ofmainstream economics, particularly in the micro-foundation of economic behavior, havebeen clearly shown, standard economic thought continues to greatly influence policiesto promote economic development. The new economic sociology appears distant frompolicy debates. Engaged in reacting to the “economic imperialism” at the analyticallevel, it remains extremely weak in challenging the dominance of mainstream economicsand economic neo-institutionalism over policies. Why is it so?3. How to strengthen the influence of economic sociology on policiesCurrent economic policies may take the form of either laissez-faire measures orstate-centered intervention. Both orientations, however, share the same attitude towardseconomic behavior. Economic action is about self-interested and socially isolated actors.Laissez-faire policies assume that in order to improve economic development, economicactors have to be freed from social bonds and political constraints. This is still the sameold worry, since Adam Smith, that social relations and networks among economic actorswould bring about collusion, and could result in the loss of efficiency. In contrast, sincethe “Keynesian revolution”, state-centered measures recognize that uncertainty, lack ofinformation and trust may hinder economic activity. However, they usually providepolicy solutions that are based on two main instruments: financial incentives to compensatethe risks and costs coming from the backwardness of local settings, or public investmentsto improve infrastructure or human capital. In any case the role of social relationsand social networks is not considered as a possible target for policies. On the contrary,it is often perceived as a factor that could hinder the efficient operation of markets.The reasons for the hegemony of mainstream economics over economic policiesare complex. Certainly, economics provides important tools for the macro-managementof contemporary economies, and this adds to a long-lasting tradition of institutionalization.and reputation. Economic research centers - both within the university system andin public or non-governmental structures - are well entrenched and tightly connected togovernmental decision-making. They have a long experience in translating economicideas into policy proposals. It is obvious that the degree of institutionalization of economicsociology and its capacity to influence policy proposals are much weaker.In addition, one should take into account that the policies shaped by mainstreameconomics tend to be more easily understood by politicians and representative of interestgroups, although this does not mean that they are always accepted. As a matter offact, they are usually formulated in terms of attempts at influencing the behavior of single
actors, through financial incentives or regulatory measures. Policies inspired by economicsociology would be more complex because they would try to shape the relationalaspects of economic activities, or the building up of social capital as a way of fosteringeconomic development. The benefits of such policies tend to be more diffuse, rather thanconcentrated on specific groups, and their effective implementation usually requires alonger time than standard economic measures.7Therefore, there are various reasons that hinder a stronger influence of economicsociology over policies. However, in the following remarks I will concentrate on someaspects that mainly concern the research topics and the analytical perspective of the discipline.Although these factors do not directly affect the important issues of institutionalizationand connection to the decision-making, my contention is that a shift of the researchfocus to the problem of local development and innovation, and to the relevantpolicies, could improve the contribution of economic sociology to more effective policies.This, in turn, would require a more intense collaboration with comparative politicaleconomy.So far the “new economic sociology” - especially in the United States - has grownmainly dealing with static problems. Basically, it has tried to provide an alternative explanationfor the varieties of economic organization at the micro level. Research interestshave been strongly concentrated on the attempt to show that efficiency reasons are notsufficient and can be misleading. Both the structural approach based on networks andthe study of isomorphism undertaken by sociological neo-institutionalism reacted toeconomic explanations of economic organization. While this research focus was able toshow the role of social and cultural factors in the operation of the economy, it was lessfavorable to exploiting the analytical potential of economic sociology in terms of policies.A shift of focus towards dynamic problems – such as local development and innovation– could foster a more active contribution to policies New research might involvedynamic cities, backward areas that experience new growth, or local innovation systemssuch as new high tech districts. A systematic assessment of comparable cases of successand failure would allow a better understanding of the influence of social and culturalembeddedness on economic performance.What are the policy implications of the social and cultural embeddedness ofeconomic organization? We could hypothesize that the local availability of a rich networkof social relations would favor economic activity and development. It might helpto tackle the problems of co-operation that are due to lack of information and trust; andit might also help to develop favorable relations among the leaders of collective actors,thus improving the provision of collective goods. If these hypotheses were reasonablyconfirmed, we would have important elements for new policies that go beyond the olddichotomy between state and market, by promoting cooperation among individual actors(firms, workers and firms) and collective actors (local governments and organized
interests) as a way to support economic development and social quality. This could entailboth technical assistance and financial incentives to cooperative projects aimed atstrengthening external economies and collective goods.To make progress in this direction would require more collaboration with comparativepolitical economy in focusing on the role of politics and policies. The themes oflocal development and innovation have been more extensively investigated within thecomparative political economy tradition, especially in the literature related to industrialdistricts and local innovation systems (Trigilia 2002), but also in work on the “varietiesof capitalism” (Hall and Soskice 2002). However, the social dimension is often the missinglink. A closer relationship with the theoretical framework and research tools of economicsociology could improve the analysis of local development and innovation by focusingon the specific role of social networks and on their relationship with governance,and could also help to propose new and more effective policies.8From this perspective, I would like to draw attention to two problems. The firsthas to do with the specific role of social networks, which is not sufficiently clear in thepolitical economy literature. They may favor development, or may hinder the growth ofeconomic activities. They may lead to collusion, or to closure with regard to externalstimuli (new knowledge of technology or market trends). So we must ask under whatconditions social networks favor local economic development and innovation. The secondproblem concerns the origins of “good” networks conducive to local developmentand innovation. It is important to clarify whether good social capital is just rooted in thehistory of a particular region or city, or can be fostered through appropriate politicalmeasures. The possibility of improving policies for local development and innovationstrongly relies on adequate evidence and convincing comparative accounts. But beforedealing with these problems (in the final section), it is worth pointing to the increasedimportance of social relations in contemporary economic organization.4. Why social relations become more important for economic developmentComparative political economy implicitly suggests that social networks are moreimportant for economic development, in the post-Fordist era: the economy tend to becomemore “relational” (Veltz 2000, DiMaggio 2002). Fordist organization made socialnetworks less important than in liberal capitalism. Large vertically-integrated firms weremore autonomous from their environment. The non-economic factors that most influenceddevelopment were mainly of two types: the organizational capacity of the firm –the “visible hand” of the organization at the micro-level - and the Keynesian policies atthe macro-level. Policies to attract large external firms by means of incentives and infrastructureswere also important for backward areas. Stability was the key word for theold model, which guided the “golden age” of post-war development. In the last decadesit has been increasingly substituted by two other catch-words, especially for firms in advancedcountries: flexibility and quality. Flexible specialization changed the landscapeand tended to give social networks a growing role. The search for flexibility and quality
led not only to restructuring to increase the autonomy of the firms’ internal organization,but even more to a greater need for external co-operation, especially in sectorswhere the technological trajectory is uncertain or the demand is very unstable (as inbiotechnologies, or in the media industry or in some parts of ICT).Networks of firms (or districts) and large networked-firms become the protagonistsof contemporary economy. But they are more dependent than their predecessor ofthe past – the vertically-integrated large firm - on the willingness of the workers andother firms to cooperate effectively to obtain flexibility and quality. This increased thepotential transaction costs and therefore the value of social capital – of the networks ofsocial relations rooted in a certain territory – in the productive process and for innovation.However, one could object that increasing globalization of economic activities, andthe improvement in communications, foster a decentralization of manufacturing towardsthe newly developing countries with lower costs. Thus, the role of localized socialnetworks tends to become less important in a global market where contractual relationsare continuously growing.As a matter of fact, individual firms – above all the multinationals, but also thesmaller firms – can search, more easily now than in the past, for more advantageous9conditions by moving from one country to another and by combining in their productiveprocess inputs from firms and local partners in different areas, through complex organizedstructures. The improvement of communications and information technologies helpthis process. All this tends to rapidly alter the localized benefits of a particular territory.Nevertheless, the empirical evidence suggests that the result is not a simple tendencytowards the “de-territorialization” of productive processes, but rather a greater competitionbetween regions in which the resource of “good” social networks between individualand collective actors is crucial. Productive growth and localization of external investmentstend in fact to concentrate where the external economies and productive specializationare stronger. This affects both the newly developing countries as well as themore advanced ones.The decentralization of manufacturing to areas with lower costs is not even. It ismuch stronger in areas where external economies and collective goods are more widespread.The availability of “good” social networks among individual firms, and amongemployers and workers influence the potential for economic development. No less importantis the role of collective social capital: cooperative and effective relations amongprivate and public actors which help to increase the production of collective goods (infrastructure,services, training) for the local economy (Evans 1996). Even within the “developmentalstates”, in the Third World, there are strong regional differences in theability to attract foreign investments and to sustain local initiatives.In the developed countries, globalization is fueling an overall reshuffling of economicorganization. While manufacturing tends to shrink, there is a shift toward thenew knowledge economy. These countries are forced to pursue a “high road” based oninnovation in high-tech activities more dependent on scientific advances. But this trend
is producing a new “re-territorialization” of the economy around specialized areas andcities, both in Europe (Crouch et al. 2001, 2004) and in the US (Florida 2002,2005). Innovationis now more closely tied to processes of co-operation among firms in differentsectors, which imply the sharing of a language, the development of “conversations”among different actors (Lester and Piore 2004); some forms of tacit knowledge that allowthe better exploitation of standard technologies and codified knowledge to find out newsolutions and new products. Paradoxically enough, in many innovative sectors such usbio-technologies, software activities or the media industry, the growth of new informationand communication technologies increases the diffusion of codified information,but at the same time opens up a greater role for tacit knowledge and understanding,embedded in social networks, as a competitive resource. Again, it is not only the networkof relations between individuals, but that between organizations, or collective actors,which is also important. A good network of relations between interest organizations,financial institutions, universities, and local governments can favor the improvementof infrastructural facilities and the efficient provision of economic and social services,as well as the influx of capital and investments of both local and external firms,and the establishment of effective cooperation among economic actors and research andtraining institutions.Therefore, it can be said that globalization has contradictory consequences for localdevelopment. It may weaken some areas not only as a result of higher costs, but alsobecause these do not manage to keep up with the provision of external economies andcollective goods that are necessary to increase productivity. It may however favor other10areas that exploit their social capital to attract external firms and to take advantage of thegreater opportunities in terms of a growing market for exports that open up, as in thedeveloping countries; or to exploit the new possibilities dependent on knowledge-basedeconomy for developing more innovative activities, as in advanced countries.On the whole, it is to be stressed that the importance of social network seems toincrease, in comparison to the past. This trend enhances the possibilities of local actors toaffect the development of their region. This process does not necessarily depend onlower costs, although they remain important as competitive resource, especially in thedeveloping countries. Both in the backward and in the advanced countries, the capacityto use social capital to develop a certain amount of knowledge and of specialization is akey resource for development.5. Social networks, local development and policiesWhile the political economy literature suggests that social networks may play animportant role in local development, it is not sufficiently clear how they actually work,under what conditions they may favor economic development, and when they insteadlead to collusion or closure to external knowledge. Another crucial problem concerns the
possibility of promoting cooperative social networks that are conducive to economic developmentand innovation through intentional actions. A research investment by economicsociology in these issues, and a closer cooperation with comparative politicaleconomy, could improve the understanding of these processes and could help developnew policies more fine-tuned to the relational features of contemporary economy.Some examples can help to clarify these problems. Let us consider first the problemof collusion with particular reference to the backward areas. The role of traditionalsocial structures (e.g. family, kinship, community, religious, ethnic subcultures), as resourcesfor development in backward countries has been widely discussed, reversingone of the classic assumptions of the theory of modernization. In fact, however, their relationshipwith economic development is more complex. While traditional resources assource of social networks are widespread, their activation as resources for developmentis quite uneven, as is shown, for instance, by a comparison between Latin-American andAsian countries. What makes the difference seems the combination of networks basedon traditional institutions and a modernized politics, autonomous from civil society. It isthe “embedded autonomy” (Evans 1995) – the autonomy of political action that is at thesame time socially embedded at the local level – which can contribute in an innovativeway to local development. In Latin America politics seems to have hindered the productiveuse of social capital linked to traditional structures, because of its lack of autonomyfrom social interests and the weakness of state structures. On the contrary, theAsian experiences show a polity that not only provided more strategic capabilities (developmentalstates), but also oriented social networks towards the economic rather thanthe political market.Following this perspective, one can propose the hypothesis that the compositionof social capital (strong ties vs. weak ties) matters. It seems likely that an appropriatemix of the two types would favor economic growth. But an important condition has todo with the role of politics. Political settings that are more autonomous from particular11istic pressure seem more able to avoid the collusive use of social networks, more orientedto the political rather then to the economic market. In addition, this kind of polityseems more equipped to avoid the closure of local networks to external stimuli, andtherefore more able to prevent the emergence of lock-ins. More systematic comparativestudies could throw light on this crucial issue, which is obviously important for policies.Another example that shows the importance of clarifying the role of social networksconcerns the sites of innovation in the most advanced countries. There is a clearlink between the production of innovation in the knowledge-based economy and thecities. Richard Florida (2005) pointed out that the process is mainly influenced by somesocial groups with high human capital. They choose to live in cities with high degree oftolerance, and cultural and social amenities. This, in turn, attracts – or contributes to thecreation of – innovative firms. This explanation raises many questions about the causaldirection. However, it is certainly true that not all the large and well-equipped cities areable to trigger a virtuous circle between people and innovative activities, including the
crucial contribution of university and research institutions. There is a different “absorptive”capacity of potential for innovation related to universities and research facilities, interms of economic, cultural and social infrastructure. The comparison between SiliconValley and route 128 in Boston (Saxenian 1994) suggests that there is an important socialfactor in the explanation of why certain regions or cities succeed and others do not.Again, a closer attention in comparative terms to the role of social networks and to theirrelations to governance could help to better understand local development, and couldcontribute to work out more effective policies beyond the traditional opposition betweenmarket and state-centered policies.Let us come to a second problem. It is not yet clear whether the role of socialnetworks is merely dependent on the history of local contexts - on the way history hasshaped culture and social relations of actors - or if it may also be socially and politicallyconstructed through reflexive action. In the first case, if path-dependency prevails, thereis little space for policies. Local development could be predicted but hardly promotedthrough purposive policies in local contexts which lack certain requisites. In the othercase, we could learn important lessons for new policies that work by promoting the appropriatesocial capital through financial incentives and technical assistance. These kindof policies that try to foster economic development by promoting social capital aregrowing, especially in Europe, where they are pursued by the EU, and in the developingcountries through programs of international organization such as the World Bank orUNIDO, and others. Therefore, it would be crucial to select and investigate cases of localdevelopment that are based on planned interventions to improve cooperation amongindividual actors, as well as collective actors. These might include cases of strategicplanning for cities, territorial pacts for backward areas, or projects for the growth of hightech systems. Such an analysis might encourage the creation of a new repertoire of policiesfor economic development that build social bridges between state and market, andtake more into account the relational bases of contemporary economic organization.These examples show that there could be an important role for economic sociologyin the analysis of local development and innovation. This, in turn, could strengthenthe contribution of this approach to more effective policies. But this also requires thateconomic sociologists start to pay more attention to political processes and the role ofpublic policies than the new economic sociology has so far. As Fligstein (2002) has12pointed out, this would be important because it would not only contribute to a more integratedsociology of markets, but would also help to link micro-economic sociologywith macro-comparative political economy (see also Block and Evans 2005).Actually, in the main accounts of more recent achievements, economic sociologyhas been mainly identified with the "new economic sociology" developed in the US. Thistrend does not favor a closer relationship with comparative political economy. A widerconception of economic sociology that includes comparative political economy would be
consistent with the classical tradition of economic sociology, which paid particular attentionto the influence of the state on economic activities (Trigilia 2002). It also wouldhelp to develop the policy implications of theoretical and empirical achievements. In thisway economic sociology could integrate its theoretical framework with the kind of "pluralisticapplied research" that Coleman was demanding, for a richer contribution to thereflexive reconstruction of society.13ReferencesBlock, F. and Evans, P. 2005. “The State and the Economy”, Pp.505-526 in The Handbook of EconomicSociology, edited by N.Smelser and R.Swedberg, 2nd ed.. Princeton: Princeton UniversityPressColeman, J. 1990. Foundations of Social Theory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Crouch, C., Le Galès, P., Trigilia, C., and Voelzkow H., 2001. Local production Systems in Europe:Rise or demise? Oxford: Oxford University Press.- 2004. Changing Governance of Local Economies: Responses of European Local production Systems.Oxford: Oxford University Press.DiMaggio, P.1994. “Culture and the Economy.” Pp. 27-57 in The Handbook of Economic Sociology,edited by N.Smelser and R.Swedberg. Princeton: Princeton University Press.- 2001, ed., The Twenty-First-Century Firm: Changing Organization in International Perspective,Princeton: Princeton University Press.Evans, P. 1995. Embedded Autonomy. States and Industrial Transformation. Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press.- 1996. “Government Action, Social Capital and Development : Reviewing the evidence onSynergy.” World Development 24(6): 1033-37.Florida, R. 2002, The Rise of the Creative Class, New York: Basic Books- 2005, Cities and the Creative Class, New York: Routledge.Fligstein, N. 1990. The Transformation of Corporate Control. Cambridge, MA: CambridgeUniversity Press.- 2001. The Architecture of Markets. An Economic Sociology of Twenty-First-Century Capitalist Societies,Princeton: Princeton University Press.Granovetter, M. 1985. “Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness.”American Journal of Sociology 91: 481-510.- 1990. "The Old and New Economic Sociology: A History and an Agenda." Pp. 89-112 in Beyondthe Marketplace. Rethinking Economy and Society, edited by R. Friedland and A.F. Robertson.New York: Aldine de Gruyter.Hall, P. and Soskice, D. 2002. Varieties of Capitalism. The Institutional Foundations of Comparative
Advantage, Oxford: Oxford University Press.Lester, R, and Piore, M. 2004. Innovation: The Missing Dimension, Cambridge Mass.. HarvardUniversity Press.Parsons, T. [1937] 1968. The Structure of Social Action. 2 vols. New York: Free Press.Parsons, T. and Smelser, N. 1956. Economy and Society: A Study in the Integration of Economic andSocial Theory. Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press.Powell, W. 1996. "Interorganizational Collaboration in the Biotechnology Industry." Journal ofInstitutional & Theoretical Economics, 12:197-215.Powell,W. and DiMaggio, P. 1991. ”Introduction.” Pp.1-38 in The New Institutionalism inOrganizational Analysis, edited by W. Powell and P. DiMaggio. Chicago: University ofChicago Press.Saxenian, A. 1994. Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128,Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press.Trigilia, C. 2002. Economic Sociology: State, Market and Society in Modern Capitalism, Oxford:Blackwell.Veltz, P. 2002. Le noveau monde industriel, Paris: Gallimard.
Beyond the 'problem of order': Elias, habit and modern sociology(1) or
Hobbes was rightROBERT VAN KRIEKEN
University of Sydney
....social interaction is not simply the substructure of the "crystallisations" which make up Simmel's society, or an order detached from the social order made up of Goffman's 'solid buildings' in whose
cracks 'the individual self resides'. It is what endows those entities with the only kind of existence they have. Social interaction turns out to be not only where 'most of the world's work gets done', but
where 'the solid buildings of the social world' are in fact constructed. (Burns 1992: 380)
Norbert Elias is rarely regarded as a significant sociological theorist, partly because he was hardly ever concerned to comment on, let alone outline or reconstruct other theorists' ideas. When he was being critical of other sociological approaches, he usually preferred to keep his critique implicit, so that only a careful 'reading between the lines' reveals the positions he was distancing himself from. Elias developed and elaborated his theoretical position primarily through his empirical studies, especially those on the significance of 'court society' (1983) and one particular long-term social process around which he felt others tended to be organized: the civilizing process (1994). Elias refrained from making the claim that he was developing a theoretical 'system' because he wanted to avoid fetishising theory, theorists and theoretical perspectives; his theory was embedded within his sociological practice rather than being self-consciously presented as such.
This can give the impression that his primary strength as a sociologist lies in his empirical studies in historical sociology, not his theoretical framework. It may have been Lewis Coser's (1980) particularly bad-tempered review of the first of Elias's two explicitly theoretical books, What is Sociology? (1978)(2) which established this assessment of Elias's sociological theory. Coser insisted on his admiration for The Civilizing Process (1939) and The Court Society (1983), but proclaimed What is Sociology? a 'failure' (p. 193) , the work of 'an outsider battling what he perceives to be the establishment of sociology' (p. 192). Elias, we were told, 'tends to ram in open doors', and Coser dismissed Elias's concept of 'figuration' as adding nothing, because it covers 'a subject matter that has been the birthright of sociology since the days of Comte or Cooley' (p. 193).
A central purpose of this paper is to correct this cantankerous misunderstanding, both of Elias himself and of sociological theory more generally. Rather than assume a continuity in sociological thinking from the days of Comte and Cooley to today, almost every assessment of Talcott Parsons's The Structure of Social Action (Alexander 1988; Camic 1989; Gould 1991; Levine 1989; Shils 1961: 1406), including by Coser (1977: 562) himself, has indicated Parsons's significance in having effected a powerful transformation of sociological thought, one which established a clear break with pre-Structure theory in the very process of claiming to draw out the essential features of (some) classical social theorists. Edward Shils once remarked that Structure 'precipitated the sociological outlook' and 'began the slow process of bringing into the open the latent dispositions which had underlain the growth of sociological curiosity' (1961: 1406), and no later commentator has formulation a convincing argument against this assessment.
The paper will begin by identifying two persistent obsessions in sociological theory introduced by Structure - the captivation with dualisms of various types, and the fascination with the so-called 'Hobbesian problem of order' as the fulcrum of all sociology - and establishing the underlying connection between the two, using Bruno Latour's (1993) conception of the 'Constitution' of modern
scientific thought to explain this connection. Then I will outline Elias's sociological theory and 'way of seeing', indicating the ways in which it moves around sociology's 'Constitution' in a very particular and, I will argue, more useful way, concluding with some observations about what we might do with our theoretical 'Constitution' from this point onwards.
THE DOCTRINE OF 'THE TWO SOCIOLOGIES' AND THE 'PROBLEM OF ORDER'
We can begin with two observations, and then see how they are linked. First, all sociologists are by now familiar with the mode of reasoning which proceeds as follows: hitherto everyone has divided both the world itself and the way we think about it into two categories; many have tried to bridge, link, integrate or synthesise these categories, but all have failed. However, we now have a new way of thinking which truly achieves the bridging, linking, integration or synthesis, and I, dear reader, am the bearer of this delightful new theory. This is the doctrine of 'the two sociologies'. It was probably Talcott Parsons who first developed this rhetorical style in The Structure of Social Action (1937), the book which Jeffrey Alexander argues established the 'base line vocabulary for modern sociology', the modern sociologist's 'frame of reference' even as she argues against it (1988: 97). Before that, sociologists saw both themselves and all previous social and political thought as rather loose collections of competing perspectives, not as organised around any dualism or polarity in need of linkage (Shils 1961; Camic 1989).
The bridging exercise never actually abolishes the oppositional dualism, indeed it preserves it. As Parsons wrote concerning his particular bridging endeavour between positivist and idealist theories of action, he wanted to 'make the best of both worlds' (Parsons 1937: 486) rather than construct a third. We need only think of what bridges do - they keep things apart as much as they provide a means of moving from one to the other. The bridge ceases to exist unless the polarity/opposition/dualism remains in place, the bridge needs the dualism, if we can use such a functionalist term. The same applies to 'links', and even integration and synthesis are less interesting once they have been completed and there is nothing left to integrate or synthesise.
The net result is that every new generation of theorists can repeat the argument, organise their research, their journal articles, their monographs and their textbooks around the dualism(s) of their choice, although they may choose to rename the dualism a duality - conflict/consensus, action/structure, micro/macro, homo economicus/homo sociologicus, individualism/holism, and so on - and set about busily linking them (Holmwood & Stewart 1991; Sztompka 1994: 269-70). It gives us all something to do, these two things which need to be integrated, synthesised, bridged or linked, and something to organise our thoughts around.(3) But apparent attempts to transcend or bridge the agency/structure dualism merely reproduce it and pose it in a different form because of the continued conceptual opposition of 'action' to 'structure'. As Richard Kilminster has observed in relation to structuration theory, 'the ghost of the old dualism haunts the theory because his point of departure is action theory, which carries the dualism at its core' (1991: 98), and this is why Collins remarks that 'the result looks curiously like the Parsonian scheme that Giddens criticizes' (Collins 1992: 89).
Parsons may have been the first to practice the argument of 'the two sociologies' in 1937, but it was Pamela Nixon who appears to have first named it as such sometime in the late 1960s,(4) to be disseminated in Alan Dawe's (1970) article of that title. As Dawe put it, 'there are...two sociologies: a sociology of social system and a sociology of social action' (p. 214). The first 'asserts the paramount necessity, for societal and individual well-being, of external constraint,' whereas the
second revolves around the concept of 'autonomous man, able to realize his full potential and to create a truly human social order only when freed from external constraint' (p. 214).(5)
At this point you may be protesting that there are many dualisms in sociology - individual-society, micro-macro, etc. - and that it has become accepted practice to insist that they are not all the same. Erving Goffman, for instance, is more properly understood as a 'micro structuralist', rather than seeing him as emphasising the creativity of human action simply because of his micro focus (Burns 1992; Collins 1992: 80). 'Action' is, in principle, not supposed to be bound up with the concept of 'the individual', agency can be attributed to collective actors such as organisations. However, in practice we usually find this insistence dissolving back into something which looks remarkably like the same old individual/society dichotomy; we often begin by talking about micro-macro or agency-structure, but it rarely takes very long before we are actually talking about individuals and their relationships to social constraints (Alexander et al 1987). We seem to be unable to resist the temptation, despite all our best intentions, to mobilize our dualisms as if they were concerned with the opposition between individual and society, between free will and determinism. To the extent, then, that any dualism tends to revert back to the individual/society opposition, I will treat all of them as essentially the same, grouping individuals, agency/action and the micro-level on one side, and society, structure/social system and the macro-level on the other, gathering them together under the heading of 'the doctrine of the two sociologies'.
The second observation is that sociological thought is organised around an equally persistent misinterpretation of Hobbes, the 'Hobbesian problem of order', another central feature of Parsons's The Structure of Social Action. Before explaining why it is a misinterpretation, we need to look briefly at how the problem and its centrality to sociology has been defined. The standard sociological interpretation(6) of Hobbes is the attribution to him of the view that 'in the absence of external constraint, the pursuit of private interests and desires leads inevitably to both social and individual disintegration' (Dawe 1970). Without any constraint imposed on the random pursuit of ends, wrote Parsons, 'the relations of individuals then would tend to be resolved into a struggle for power - for the means of each to realize his own ends. This would, in the absence of constraining factors, lead to a war of all against all - Hobbes's state of nature' (1982: 87). It is 'clear enough,' asserted Nisbet, that 'Hobbes is concerned with what he believes to be the natural character of the individual - his precultural, presocial, and prepolitical character' (Nisbet 1974: 138-9). Since then, we have been told with consistency and regularity that 'the thesis that sociology is centrally concerned with the problem of social order has become one of the discipline's few orthodoxies' (Dawe 1970: 207). The 'Hobbesian problem of order' is seen as central to sociology because the question of 'how is social order possible' slides over to the quite different one of 'how is society possible'. Alexander puts it in precisely this way: 'What Parsons called the Hobbesian problem can be understood in the following way: What holds society together?' (1988: 97). Parsons told us that Hobbes felt that only the coercive force of sovereign authority could in fact hold society/social order together, when in fact it was the internalisation of values which achieved this effect - the normative solution to the problem of order which retained a voluntaristic element to social action.
The standard sociological interpretation of Hobbes is simply wrong, for two reasons, concerning both the problem of order itself and its solutions. First, this is not how Hobbes understood the 'state of nature' and it is not his 'problem of order'. Essentially the standard sociological intepretation rests on a very simplistic, and incorrect, reading of what Hobbes meant by the 'state of nature', revolving around a projection of its own concern to see 'nature' as opposed to society onto Hobbes's much more specific concern with explaining and preventing civil war. C.B. Macpherson remarked as early as 1962 that Hobbes's state of nature concerns the conduct of entirely socialized individuals in the
absence of a central authority. 'To get to the state of nature,' wrote Macpherson, 'Hobbes has set aside law, but not the socially acquired behaviour and desires of men' (1962: 22). Hobbes's state of nature 'is a deduction from the appetites and faculties not of man as such but of civilized men' (1962: 29).
Hobbes did not regard human beings as psychological egoists who could only be constrained to act in a civil manner by some external authority. Like any contemporary sociologist, Hobbes took it for granted that humans are made - by discipline, education or as we would all it today, socialization - rather than born (Gert 1967; 1996). The threat to social order - the threat of civil war - came not from some presocial, egoistic human nature, which Hobbes felt never existed,(7) but from the effects of passionately held beliefs and opinions with no central authority to decide between them. Rather than not having a sense of normative order, as Parsons accuses him (1937: [89]), Hobbes's whole point was that it was precisely unregulated values and beliefs which would drive humans to civil war (Loyd 1992). We are in a state of nature, argued Hobbes, so long as 'private appetite is the measure of good and evil' (1962: 167) - in other words, as long as society is not normatively integrated, something which he felt can only be achieved via a socially-founded (not externally imposed: Lloyd 1992: 317; Shapin & Schafer 1985: 152-3) sovereign state. In Bernard Gert's words, 'all the premises about human nature....which he uses in arguing for the necessity of an unlimited sovereign, are in fact statements about the rationally required desires, and not, as most commentators have taken them, statements about the passions' (1996: 164; c.f. also Ryan 1996: 217-8 and Kraynak 1983: 93-4).
Second, the 'normative' solution to the problem of order which almost everyone from Parsons onwards has suggested is specific to sociology, having eluded Hobbes, (Levine 1980: x) is actually present in Hobbes himself. Brian Barry (1970), Charles Camic (1979) and Donald Levine (1980) have made this point abundantly clear for the utilitarians generally. Barry observes that 'the victory over the 'utilitarian' schema is an empty one, because Parsons's 'utilitarians' are men of straw' (1970: 77), and Camic comments that,
The ultimate irony of Parsons's discussion of the utilitarians is that they would reject the egoistic, rationalistic image of humans ...which Parsons suggests was their image for two centuries. They would in fact reject it in a more general fashion than Parsons himself does in Structure, where the Hobbesian problem of order remains central (1979: 523).
Levine also remarks that 'none of the writers associated with developing the principle of utility in moral philosophy held a view of human action as determined solely by the pursuit of selfish interests through instrumentally rational means. Much of the animus of their work precisely refutes such a conception' (1980: xiii).
Levine felt that Hobbes and Mandeville might be the only remaining European social philosophers who did 'reduce the elements of action to narrowly defined gratificational interests', but noted that even here there were arguments (1980: xix), and in fact all of Barry's and Camic's arguments concerning the utilitarians apply with equal force to Hobbes. Barry had pointed out that 'Hobbes held that men might be motivated by a quite refined moral code', but simply felt that this was insufficient in itself to prevent violence and civil warfare, making the state's monopolization of violence 'a necessary (though not sufficient) condition of social peace' (1970: 77). Bernard Gert had pointed out that Hobbes appealed to morality as much as he appealed to self-interest and self-preservation. Indeed, continued Gert, 'it would be exceedingly odd for Hobbes, holding that mistaken views about rights and duties were one of the causes of civil war, to come up with a theory
of human nature in which men never act because of their beliefs in the moral rightness or wrongness of an action (1967: 517-8). This is why, writes Lloyd, Hobbes solution actually has less to do with 'force' and more to do with 'authority' and its moral effects, so that his solution to his 'problem of order' is 'to reproduce perpetually a proper, stability-reinforcing conception of people's transcendent religious interests by a process of education that continually generates consensus. It is education, and not might, that makes for social order in Hobbes's system' (1992: 2).(8)
Occasionally there are leading sociologists who see this difficulty in the interpretation of Hobbes, and the fate of this perception is instructive. For example, in 1972 Giddens was very clear that the 'Hobbesian problem of order' as Parsons had formulated it was not in fact a problem in Hobbes himself, nor in Durkheim, nor in any classical theorist. Giddens had read Macpherson, and agreed that the static dichotomy between 'man in nature' and 'man in society' was 'foreign to Hobbes's own thinking, which is much more historically oriented' (1972: 359). However, by 1979 this emphatic rejection of the sense of talking about a problem of order in Parsons's sense had started to weaken, beginning to be replaced by the different concern that Parsons's 'social actors are not capable, knowledgeable agents' (1979: 254). By the time we get to the official unveiling of structuration theory, in The Constitution of Society, Giddens had moved even further along this road; the problem or order was reinstated as a real one, and when Giddens mentioned it, his only complaint was that 'little, if any, conceptual room is left for what I emphasize as the knowledgeability of social actors, as constitutive in part of social practices' (1984: xxxvii).
Dennis Wrong also has, at times, a very clear and precise understanding of Hobbes's position, pointing out very correctly that Hobbes saw the 'war of all against all' as 'a hypothetical construct' and that 'he fundamentally conceived of both the state of nature and the social contract as theoretical "models" or Weberian "ideal types"; at most, the war of all against all represented a limiting condition towards which all societies tended in times of weakened political authority and internal conflict' (1994: 16-17). Yet, on the very next page, Wrong reverts back to the standard interpretation: 'Hobbes's state of nature is the negative mirror image of social order. It is intended to represent disorder as the opposite of order...Hobbes's state of nature is the contrary of social order' (1994: 18-9), and later speaks of 'the Hobbesian problem of how asocial, self-preserving human beings manage to create and maintain cooperative and rule-governed social relations at all' (p. 28). Flying right in the face of all the textual evidence, then, the very best exponents of sociological thought seem determined to cast Hobbes as a negative reference point for sociology as a particular mode of perception and analysis.(9)
The connection between my two observations is this: the significance of the misconceptions is not simply the scholastic one that Hobbes has been maligned, it is that the definitional construction of our understanding of the specifically sociological imagination as pitted against a fictional 'Hobbesian' individual/society opposition which is 'the exact inverse of the sociological outlook formed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries' (Wrong 1994: 16) actually has the effect, perversely, of lodging that very opposition between nature/individual and society, or agency and structure, at the heart of sociological theory itself. As Giddens put it,
the 'Hobbesian problem of order'...was defined by Parsons as concerned with how society can exist, with some degree of stability over time, in the face of the struggle of individual wills, the war of all against all. The effect of adopting this point of departure has been to tie Parsons's own theories, in a deep-rooted way, to a position in which interests are grasped primarily in terms of an individual/society opposition. The moral consensus which makes
possible the unity of the social whole incorporates values 'internalised' as need-dispositions in personality, thus ensuring a fit between individual and society (1979: 101-2).
If we accept that the (false) "Hobbesian problem of order" is a problem at all both attributes (wrongly) the assumption that social orderliness is external to human individuals to Hobbes (and, for Parsons, the utilitarians generally) and condemns us to that assumption ourselves, leaving only an argument about the correct solution to the problem - coercive, exchange, or normative, Hobbes, Locke or Durkheim (Ellis 1971) -, about how that external constraint should be conceptualized, in terms of brute force or norms and socialization, which takes us back to the individual/society dualism (Elias 1969: 141).
Instead of having moved beyond the individual/society opposition ever since Cooley, as Coser (1980) asserted, Margaret Archer can still see it in 1995 as ontologically founded, announcing that 'the problem of the relationship between individual and society was the central sociological problem from the beginning. The vexatious task of understanding the linkage between "structure and agency" will always retain this centrality because it derives from what society intrinsically is' (Archer 1995: 1). Dualisms like individual/society, or agency/structure and the 'Hobbesian problem of order' are thus integrally linked, bound to each other like Siamese twins. Accept the latter, and we are condemned to the former.
How can we make sense of this seemingly perverse fascination with dualisms like agency/structure at the very same time that we think we are moving beyond them? Why is it that astute theorists like Giddens and Wrong can both reject the individual/society dichotomy and yet remain captured by it? What exactly is this spider's web we are entangled in? Perhaps Bruno Latour can be of assistance.
LATOUR AND THE MODERN CONSTITUTION.
In We Have Never Been Modern (1993), building on Shapin and Schaffer's (1985) discussion of Hobbes and Boyle, Latour sets out an argument concerning the way we have conceived the relationship between the human and non-human worlds, between the world of nature and things, and the world of human beings and society. It is a complex set of arguments, and I will only be able to refer to the ones I want to utilize here. He opens the book with observations about how in practice we actually mix politics, science, culture, human beings, things, religion, economics, society regularly and routinely, and yet we conceptualize them as distinct entities. In particular, we divide science and the knowledge of nature and things from politics, society and the realm of human beings. The first set of practices, Latour calls 'the work of translation' or 'mediation', the creation of hybrids, networks, and 'collectives', and the second he calls 'the work of purification', the establishment and maintenance of the dichotomy between non-humans and nature on the one hand, and humans, culture, society and politics on the other. Each set of practices depends on the other: without translation, hybridification and mediation, ' the practices of purification would be fruitless or pointless'. Without purification, 'the work of translation would be slowed down, limited or even ruled out' (p. 11). He represents his argument diagrammatically as follows:
Figure 1. Source: Latour 1993: 11.
Being 'modern', suggests Latour, consists of seeing the work of purification and the work of translation as entirely distinct, and never allowing the two to be seen together. So, what he calls the 'Constitution' of modern knowledge consists of three 'guarantees':
1. Even though we construct Nature, Nature is as if we did not construct it. 2. Even though we did not construct society, Society is as if we did construct it. 3. Nature and Society must remain absolutely distinct: the work of purification must remain absolutely distinct from the work of mediation. (p. 32)
'Nature' and 'Society' can thus alternate at will between being 'hard' or 'soft', one determining the other, or the reverse, to suit our needs at the time and place. Diagrammatically:
Figure 2. Source: Latour 1993: 52
This Constitution, writes Latour has 'made the moderns invincible' (p. 37), because they can move from one position to the (contradictory) other to suit the unrestricted proliferation of hybrids, collectives and networks. By denying the existence of hybrids and collectives and maintaining that only the upper half of the Constitution exists, the work of translation can proceed unimpeded without having to take account of its effects. 'Native Americans,' writes Latour, 'were not mistaken when they accused the Whites of having forked tongues. By separating the relations of political power from the relations of scientific reasoning while continuing to shore up power with reason amd reason with power, the moderns have always had two irons in the fire' (p. 38). With this Constitution, moderns 'hold all the sources of power, all the critical possibilities, but they displace
them from case to case with such rapidity that they can never be caught redhanded' (p. 39). If we conceptualize purification and hybridization together, 'we immediately stop being wholly modern, and our future begins to change' (p. 11).
The dualism with which Latour is concerned is nature/society, but the argument actually works for any dualism, including individual/society and agency/structure.(10) Using Latour's diagram, sociology's Constitution would look like this:
The guarantees would be:
1. Even though Structure determines Action, Action is as if Structure did not determine it. 2. Even though we did not construct Structure, Structure is as if we did construct it. 3. Action and Structure must remain absolutely distinct: the work of purification must remain absolutely distinct from the work of mediation.
And the dual determinisms would look like this:
Figure 4. Source: Adapted from Latour 1993: 52
This concept of sociological theory as bound by this constitution makes sense of why the various dualisms are so difficult to overcome, because they are crucial to the whole project of modern, post-
Parsonian sociology, and why we constantly alternate between defending the dualisms and trying to bridge, integrate or synthesise them, between dissolving them in practice and continuing to work within them in theory. The work of translation and hybridization - sociological analysis which makes no distinction between structure and agency, individual and society, micro and macro - went on and goes on all the time, in the work of the classical theorists, the Chicago School, Goffman, Bourdieu, Bellah, etc., indeed in Parsons himself, perhaps in every sociologist, but operates more powerfully precisely because it is never observed together with the top half of the Constitution, with the debates concerning the dualisms and how they are to be bridged, linked, synthesised, and so on, so that conceptual and empirical sociological hybrids can proliferate unhindered. Look at the two halves of the constitution together, and you get a different type of sociological theory and practice, one not organised around the 'problem of order', as we shall in in the work of Elias.
FROM ACTION AND STRUCTURE TO HABITUS AND SOCIAL PROCESSES
Elias moves around this Constitution in a very particular way, one which allows us to perceive its operation more clearly, for two reasons: his rejection of the centrality of a theory of 'action', and his insistence on a temporal dimension to sociological theory. When he met Parsons in 1970 at the ISA conference in Varna, Elias praised his integrity, sincerity and his power of theoretical synthesis, but added: 'I cannot persuade myself that this gift has been used in the right cause' (Elias 1972: 277). Elias made essentially two points about Parsons and, through them, sociology more broadly.
The first was the organization of sociological thought around the concept of 'action'. 'Why put 'actions' in the centre of a theory of society,' said Elias, 'and not the people who act? If anything, societies are networks of human beings in the round, not a medley of disembodied actions' (Elias 1972: 277). The division of sociological thought into'the two sociologies' emerges from interaction between a continued attachment to individualist, liberal ideals of autonomy and freedom and the organization of sociology around theories of 'action'. Attempts to oppose the determinism of structuralist approaches with action theories merely approach the dualism from a different angle, proposing that social order can emerge from autonomous individuals emancipated from external constraint. As Elias put it, 'one of the strongest motive forces of people who insist on starting their theoretical reflections about societies from "individuals per se" or from "individual acts" seems to be the wish to assert that "basically" an individual is "free"' (Elias & Scotson 1965: 172).(11)
To the extent that Parsons's understanding of human action as organised around the linking of means and ends has been followed within sociology, with the only argument being about how the ends are determined, sociologists have forgotten an essential feature of the classical sociologists' understanding of human behaviour which Elias retained, namely, their emphasis on the importance of particular psychological formations of individuals in explaining social life. Charles Camic points out that an important concept which the early sociologists organised much of their work around was 'habit', 'habitus', 'habitude', a concept which Parsons 'wrote out of the whole history of modern social theory' (Camic 1986: 1074), and which few writers have written back into it.(12) The exceptions have included Wilhelm Reich, the Frankfurt School theorists - Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and the early Fromm - and more recently, Elias, Camic, Pierre Bourdieu and, to a lesser extent, Randall Collins. However, as R.W. Connell points out, 'There have been no effective successors to this generation of theorists. Historical depth psychology remains a gleam in the theoretical eye rather than an established branch of knowledge' (Connell 1983: 158).
The concept of habit or habitus refers to 'the durable and generalized disposition that suffuses a person's action throughout an entire domain of life or, in the extreme instance, throughout all of life
- in which case the term comes to mean the whole manner, turn, cast, or mold of the personality' (Camic 1986: 1046). Elias called it 'second nature'. As Durkheim wrote, anticipating Freud, 'it is not enough to direct our attention to the superficial portion of our consciousness; for the sentiments, the ideas which come to the surface are not, by far, those which have the most influence on our conduct. What must be reached are the habits....these are the real forces which govern us' (Camic 1986: 1052). Weber's work on the 'spirit of capitalism' showed a similar concern with habit, not just in relation to traditional action, but also modern instrumentally rational action, which Weber felt also rested on a foundation of habit. His concept of the 'capitalist spirit' referred to 'the development of [a] particular habitus', and he saw ascetic Protestantism as producing 'a psychological vehicle that tended to create a typical conduct' (Weber 1978: 1113). Weber's analysis was of the emergence of a particular type of Lebensführung or 'conduct of life', and his focus was on 'the aspect most difficult to grasp and 'prove', relating to the inner habitus' (in Hennis 1983: 146). The concept 'socialization' has emerged in its place, but it never properly dealt with the problem, because it left the door open for a continued re-emergence of arguments against the 'determinism' built into the concept of socialization.
This was why Elias frequently remarked on the continuing individual/society dichotomy, to the frustration of many of his critics. Sociologists generally agree that individuals do not exist outside society, and that subjectivity is socially constructed. But the continued adherence to a theory of action, uninformed by psychology, smuggles the concept of an 'autonomous individual' opposing an 'autonomous society' back in via another route, re-embedding it within sociological thought at the very same time that a contrary theoretical position is taken up when the question is addressed overtly. Parsons read and utilized Freud later, but by then the damage had been done. Sociology had become organized around a dismissal of psychology, producing a schism in its understanding of human social life which Parsons' appropriation of psychoanalysis could only approach from the other side. The rejection of the concept of habit, remarks Camic, has 'left permanent effects on the inner conceptual structure of sociological thought' (Camic 1986: 1077). In other words, sociologists may explicitly agree that individuals are social beings, and thus become puzzled when Elias suggests they do not, but the latent structure of sociological theory continues to embody a continuing opposition between 'the individual' and 'society'. To put it as simply as possible, the huge and vital difference between Elias and Parsons was that Elias wrote Freud into his theory from the outset, whereas for Parsons psychoanalysis was a late addition to an already-formulated sociological theory.
Second, Elias argued that the assumption that societies are normally well-integrated systems makes little sense, and that both social and system integration is emergent and contested. At first this looks like an echo of the standard criticisms of Parsons from a conflict-theoretical position. But Elias's critique was aimed equally at Parsons' opponents, to the extent that they also neglected the historical interweaving of conflict and stability. For Elias it was important precisely to make the long-term processes of social integration and disintegration themselves the object of sociological study, rather than assuming a condition of either integration or conflict. It was the neglect of 'long-term processes of integration and disintegration as a theoretical and empirical topic of sociological enquiry' (Elias 1972: 278) which, Elias argued, had produced the opposition between conflict and consensus perspectives which dominated sociological debate in the 1960s and 1970s. Parsons had essentially rejected history via his rejection of evolutionism.(13) Sociologists generally joined Parsons in his disdain for evolutionary theory, from a variety of perspectives. Liberals would reject it because of its determinist implications, Marxists because of the neglect of class struggle and denial of the possibility of revolutionary transformations. Whatever the merits of a rejection of teleological evolutionary theory, in the process sociologists also forget about history altogether, and it is only in the last few decades that the historical dimensions of sociological analysis have become taken more
seriously. This relates back to the question of human action, because it is only over time that one can trace the workings of habitus, and its re-formation over a number of generations. Elias observes that habitus and culture are very slow to change, making it impossible to understand social life except over longer spans of time. A temporal dimension, in other words, is crucial to understanding the workings of human social life.(14)
The theoretical position which Elias felt avoided these two mistakes - organizing sociology around a theory of 'action' and rejecting history - included the following basic elements:
1. an understanding of social life as the unplanned and unintended outcome of the interweaving of intentional human actions;
2. an approach to human beings as interdependent, forming figurations or networks with each other which connect the psychological with the social, or habitus with social relations;
3. a relational orientation;
4. a related concern with dynamic processes of development and change, rather than static structures.
UNPLANNED 'ORDER'AND THE QUESTION OF AGENCY
Elias also saw sociology as fundamentally concerned with a 'problem of order' but a very different one. He did not see the very existence of 'social order' itself as problematic, saying that he understood the concept 'in the same sense that one talks of a natural order, in which decay and destruction as structured processes have their place alongside growth and synthesis, death and disintegration alongside birth and integration' (Elias 1978: 76). He directed his attention to another question, namely, the apparent independence of social order from intentional human action. Whereas Parsons puzzled over how human beings formulated their ends and related them to their means, Elias went on to examine the relationship between the pursuit of those ends and the actual outcome of that pursuit in social life. For Elias, the question was: 'How does it happen at all that formations arise in the human world that no single human being has intended, and which yet are anything but cloud formations without stability or structure?' (Elias 1994a: 443-4). It was the slowly dawning awareness from about the French Revolution onwards that, just as social life was not determined by God or supernatural forces, it was also not determined by the intentions of human beings, which Elias felt contributed to the emergence of sociology as a discipline:
If one does not ask merely for a definition of society, but rather for the experiences which cradled a science of society, this was one of them: the experience that although people form societies and keep society moving by their actions and plans, at the same time society seems often to go its own way and, while being driven by those who form them, at the same time, seems to drive them (Elias 1984a: 43).
The thinkers who first contributed to this developing awareness included, suggested Elias, Adam Smith, Hegel, the Physiocrats, Malthus, Marx and Comte. Hegel's concept of the 'cunning of reason' was one of the first attempts to capture this 'ordered autonomy' of social life from the individuals who make it up:
Again and again...people stand before the outcome of their own actions like the apprentice magician before the spirits he has conjured up and which, once at large, are no longer in his power. They look with astonishment at the convolutions and formations of the historical flow which they themselves constitute but do not control (Elias 1991: 62).
Elias thus recasts the 'problem of order' as not being about the possibility of social order (Parsons), which actually needs no explanation, but about the relationship between social order and human intentionality, the actions of the human beings making it up. More precisely, the most acute problem for Elias was the apparent lack of relationship, the seemingly alien character of the social world to the individuals making it up.
Elias saw 'society' as consisting of the structured interweaving of the activity of interdependent human agents, all pursuing their own interests and goals, producing distinct social forms such as what we call 'Christianity', 'feudalism', 'patriarchy', 'capitalism', or whatever culture and nation we happen to be part of, which cannot be said to have been planned or intended by any individual or group. Weber's analysis of the roots of the spirit of rational capitalist accumulation in ascetic Protestantism provides a good example of the kind of 'blind' process Elias was talking about. Although human beings possess and conduct themselves with 'agency', then, this does not mean that they are the 'agents' or 'creators' of social life, which has a 'hidden order, not directly perceptible to the senses' (Elias 1991: 13).
It is only in a limited sense, then, that people 'make their own history'. Elias formulated it as follows:
It is simple enough: plans and actions, the emotional and rational impulses of individual people, constantly interweave in a friendly or hostile way. This basic tissue resulting from many single plans and actions of men can give rise to changes and patterns that no individual person has planned or created. From this interdependence of people arises an order sui generis, an order more compelling and stronger than the will and reason of the individual people composing it. It is this order of interweaving human impulses and strivings, this social order, which determines the course of historical change; it underlies the civilizing process (Elias 1994a: 444).
This conception has much in common with the notion of 'spontaneous order' usually attributed to Adam Ferguson and the Scottish Enlightenment theorists, although an earlier, theological version appeared in 1681, in the work of Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1976). There has been some discussion of the notion of the 'unintended consequences of human action', indeed Robert Merton published a short paper on the topic at the same time that Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation was being completed (Merton 1936; see also Boudon 1986). We all know that Friedrich von Hayek explored the concept of 'spontaneous order' and also argued against the utility of planned intervention into economic and social processes (von Hayek 1967; 1989). However, Elias worked through the implications of the concept of 'unplanned order' far more systematically, and in relation to particular empirical examples. Instead of seeing unintentional outcomes merely as 'perverse' and mysterious effects of human action, he emphasised that 'unplanned development...is structured and correspondingly explainable' (Elias 1997a). Rather than engaging in a polemical argument against communism and socialism, as von Hayek did, he analysed the relationship between intentional attempts to control and transform the social world and the long-term unplanned processes of development within which they take place.
Elias wrote in The Civilizing Process that the 'more general problem' which he was addressing 'has also been posed for a long time by American sociology', (1994a: 543) mentioning Sumner's Folkways. He cited Sumner's remarks about the necessity of examining exactly what any given culture's morals, norms and values were and how they arose, adding that it was also important to apply the analysis to 'our own society and its history'. Elsie Parsons' (1914) book also drew Elias's attention to Franz Boas's work and William James's conception of 'habit' as 'the enormous flywheel of society' (James 1892: 143; cited in Elias 1994a: 543). Elias had come across the notion of the 'unintended consequences of human action' in Hegel's 'cunning of reason', and in Marx, both of whom had read Adam Smith. But it was Sumner's Folkways (1906) which seems to have provided the most thought-through linkage of Elias's concerns with culture and behaviour with the concept's original formulation in Adam Ferguson and the other Scottish Enlightenment theorists.
Bogardus's (1933) collection on the concept of social process also drew Elias's attention to the work of Albion Small, Charles Ellwood, George Herbert Mead, Howard Becker, Charles Cooley, as well as Florian Znaniecki, Pitirim Sorokin and Robert MacIver. So enamoured were this generation of American sociologists with the concept 'social process', that Read Bain felt obliged to sound a note of warning that it was being used too loosely and too broadly, emptying it of its explanatory value and becoming another example of 'pseudo-scientific jargon' (Bain 1933: 110). There would have been much about this book that Elias would have found confused and inadequate, but approaching social life in terms of processes at all was important for Elias, and most of these writers had an interest in trying to analyse long-term processes of social change without lapsing into normative and teleological conceptions of evolution and progress. Robert MacIver, for example, maintained that it was important to look for the formative processes which lie behind any given social pattern:
Beyond the fabric there is not only the loom and the weaver but also the weaving. Beyond the social pattern there is the play of forces emanating from the endless interaction of group and environment. By studying the fabric alone we could never understand the process of weaving, and we will never come to grips with the problem of social causation by studying its contemporary resultant patterns. (MacIver 1933: 145)
MacIver argued, in terms which were to be echoed in the 1970s and 1980s, that 'the time-dimension is seriously lacking in our sociological studies today, and our presentation of social change is apt to be merely a series of successive pictures as lacking in the dynamic of real life as those we see upon the screen' (1933: 146), although today we may disagree about the realism of the screen!
Like Freud's demonstration that 'the ego is not master in its own house' (Freud ??), Elias's argument inflicts a narcissistic wound on modern sensibilities, because it emphasises the extent to which the human world is resistant to direct control. 'It is dreadful to think that people form functional interconnections in which what they do is to a large extent blind, aimless and helpless. It is much more reassuring to think that history - which is, of course, always the history of particular human societies - has a meaning and a destination, perhaps even a purpose' (Elias 1978: 58).
In analysing the relationship between intentional human action and unplanned surrounding social preconditions and outcomes, Elias emphasized, on the one hand, the dependence of any given individual, no matter how central a position they held, on the surrounding network of social, economic and political relations. 'No individual person, no matter how great his stature, how powerful his will, how penetrating his intelligence, can breach the autonomous laws of the human network from which his actions arise and into which the are directed' (Elias 1991: 50). He indicated a very clear preference for understanding social transformations in terms of changes in social
conditions, or in the structuring of social relationships, rather than attributing very much causal significance to the decisions and actions of particular, supposedly powerful individuals or groups (Elias 1994a: 266).
On the other hand, although within the broad sweep of history it is apparent how much individuals are buffeted by forces beyond their control, 'the person acting within the flow may have a better chance to see how much can depend on individual people in individual situations, despite the general direction' (Elias 1991: 48). It is equally unrealistic to believe 'that people are interchangeable, the individual being no more than the passive vehicle of a social machine' (Elias 1991: 54). Elias saw social life as both 'firm' and 'elastic': 'Crossroads appear at which people must choose, and on their choices, depending on their social position, may depend either their immediate personal fate or that of a whole family, or, in certain circumstances, of entire nations or groups within them' (Elias 1991: 49). Agency thus consisted of the strategic seizure of opportunities which arise for individuals and groups, but not in the actual creation of those opportunities, which 'are prescribed and limited by the specific structure of his society and the nature of the functions the people exercise within it' (Elias 1991: 49). Moreover, once an opportunity is taken, human action 'becomes interwoven with those of others; it unleashes further chains of actions', the effects of which are based not on individual or group actors, but 'on the distribution of power and the structure of tensions within this whole mobile human network' (Elias 1991: 49-50).
One of the primary focuses of sociological analysis is, then, the relationships between intentional, goal-directed human activities and the unplanned or unconscious process of interweaving with other such activities, past and present, and their consequences. Often Elias emphasized the unplanned character of social life, largely because he was concerned to counter the notion that there can ever be a direct and straightforward relationship between human action and its outcomes. However, all his observations taken together indicate a more complex understanding, for he always believed that improved human control of social life was the ultimate objective of sociological analysis. In his words, 'people can only hope to master and make sense out of these purposeless, meaningless functional interconnections if they can recognize them as relatively autonomous, distinctive functional interconnections, and investigate them systematically' (Elias 1978: 58). Elias saw an understanding of long-term unplanned changes as serving both 'an improved orientation' towards social processes which lie beyond human planning, and an improved understanding of those areas of social life which can be said to correspond to the goals and intentions of human action (Elias 1997a: [14]). In relation to technological change, he commented: 'From the viewpoint of a process theory what is interesting is the interweaving of an unplanned process and human planning' (Elias 1995: 26).
INTERDEPENDENCE - FIGURATIONS - HABITUS
For Elias, the structure and dynamics of social life could only be understood if human beings were conceptualized as interdependent rather than autonomous, comprising what he called figurations rather than social systems or structures, and as characterized by socially and historically specific forms of habitus, or personality-structure. He emphasised seeing human beings in the plural rather than the singular, as part of collectivities, of groups and networks, and stressed that their very identity as unique individuals only existed within and through those networks or figurations.
The civilizing process itself, argued Elias, had produced a capsule or wall around individual experience dividing an inner world from the external world, individuals from society, and this had come to be reproduced within sociological theory itself. Rather than seeing individuals as ever
having any autonomous, pre-social existence, Elias emphasised human beings' interdependence with each other, the fact that one can only become an individual human being within a web of social relationships and within a network of interdependencies with ones family, school, church, community, ethnic group, class, gender, work organisation, and so on. The essential 'relatedness' of human beings, said Elias, began with being born as a helpless infant, over which we have no control: 'Underlying all intended interactions of human beings is their unintended interdependence' (Elias 1969: 143).
He developed this point in part through his critique of what he called the homo clausus, or 'closed personality' image of humans. Elias argued for a replacement of this homo clausus conception with its emphasis on autonomy, freedom and independent agency with:
....the image of man as an "open personality" who possesses a greater or lesser degree of relative (but never absolute and total) autonomy vis-a-vis other people and who is, in fact, fundamentally oriented toward and dependent on other people throughout his life. The network of interdependencies among human beings is what binds them together. Such interdependencies are the nexus of what is here called the figuration, a structure of mutually oriented and dependent people. Since people are more or less dependent on each other first by nature and then through social learning, through education, socialization, and socially generated reciprocal needs, they exist, one might venture to say, only as pluralities, only in figurations (Elias 1994a: 213-4).
Elias introduced the concept of 'figuration' in the 1960s because it 'puts the problem of human interdependencies into the very heart of sociological theory' (Elias 1978: 134) and he hoped it would 'eliminate the antithesis....immanent today in the use of the words "individual" and "society"' (Elias 1994a: 214).
Before he started using the word 'configuration' in 1965 and then 'figuration' from 1969 onwards, the German concept he used was Verflechtungsmechanismus, or 'mechanism of interweaving'. Elias felt it expressed 'what we call "society" more clearly and unambiguously than the existing conceptual tools of sociology, as neither an abstraction of attributes of individuals existing without a society, nor a "system" or "totality" beyond individuals, but the network of interdependencies formed by individuals' (Elias 1994a: 214). Elias regarded societies as basically 'the processes and structures of interweaving, the figurations formed by the actions of interdependent people' (Elias 1978: 103). He also believed that it made it easier to overcome the tendency to apparently deny human agency and individuality with the use of concepts like 'society' or 'social system'. Indeed, 'it sharpens and deepens our understanding of individuality if people are seen as forming figurations with other people' (Elias 1983: 213).
Unlike 'system', it also did not convey the suggestion of harmony or integration characterizing the organic or machine analogy; it referred to 'harmonious, peaceful and friendly relationships between people, as well as to hostile and tense relationships' (Elias 1983: 141). This means that figurations are always organised around the dynamic operation of power:
At the core of changing figurations - indeed the very hub of the figuration process - is a fluctuating, tensile equilibrium, a balance of power moving to and fro, inclining first to the one side and then to the other. This kind of fluctuating balance of power is a structural characteristic of the flow of every figuration (Elias 1978: 131).
It was 'a generic concept for the pattern which interdependent human beings, as groups or as individuals, form with each other' (Elias 1987: 85), and Elias saw the analysis of the formation of dynamic figurations as 'one of the central questions, perhaps even the central question, of sociology' (Elias 1983: 208). Indeed, 'it is this network of the functions which people have for each other, it and nothing else, what we call "society". It represents a special kind of sphere. Its structures are what we call "social structures". And if we talk of "social laws" or "social regularities", we are referring to nothing other than this: the autonomous laws of relations between people' (Elias 1991: 16).
He used the analogy of dance to illustrate the concept figuration, saying that 'the image of the mobile figurations of interdependent people on a dance floor perhaps makes it easier to imagine state, cities, families, and also capitalist, communist, and feudal systems as figurations' (Elias 1994a: 214). Although we might speak of 'dance in general', 'no one will imagine a dance as a structure outside the individual'. Dances can be danced by different people, 'but without a plurality of reciprocally oriented and dependent individuals, there is no dance'. Figurations, like dances, are thus 'relatively independent of the specific individuals forming it here and now, but not of individuals as such' (Elias 1994a: 214). In other words, although it is true that figurations 'have the peculiarity that, with few exceptions, they can continue to exist even when all the individuals who formed them at a certain time have died and been replaced by others' (Elias 1983: 142), they only exist in and through the activity of their participants. When that activity stops, the figuration stops, and the continued existence of the figuration is dependent on the continued participation of its constituent members, as the East European communist countries discovered in 1989. Figurations 'have a relative independence of particular individuals, but not of individuals as such' (Elias 1983: 27).
The dynamics of figurations are also dependent on the formation of a shared social habitus or personality make-up which constitutes the collective basis of individual human conduct. In his words:
This make-up, the social habitus of individuals forms, as it were, the soil from which grow the personal characteristics through which an individual differs from other members of his society. In this way something grows out of the common language which the individual shares with others and which is certainly a component of his social habitus - a more or less individual style, what might be called an unmistakable individual handwriting that grows out of the social script (Elias 1991: 182).
Elias gave the example of the concept of 'national character', which he called 'a habitus problem par excellence' (Elias 1991: 182). He also referred to is as 'second nature', or 'an automatic, blindly functioning apparatus of self-control' (Elias 1994a: 113, 446). The organisation of psychological make-up into a habitus was also, for Elias, a continuous process which began at birth and continued throughout a person's childhood and youth. It is, he wrote,
....the web of social relations in which the individual lives during his more impressionable phase, during childhood and youth, which imprints itself upon his unfolding personality where it has its counterpart in the relationship between his controlling agencies, super-ego and ego, and his libidinal impulses. The resulting balance between controlling agencies and drives on a variety of levels determines how an individual person steers himself in his relations with others; it determines that which we call, according to taste, habits, complexes or personality structure (Elias 1994a: 454-5).
Moreover, the development of habitus continued through a person's life, 'for although the self-steering of a person, malleable during childhood, solidifies and hardens as he grows up, it never ceases entirely to be affected by his changing relations with others throughout his life' (Elias 1994a: 455).
Finally, the ways in which the formation of habitus changed over time, what Elias called psychogenesis, could also only be properly understood in connection with changes in the surrounding social relations, or sociogenesis. He argued against the disciplinary separation of psychology, sociology and history as follows:
The structures of the human psyche, the structures of human society and the structures of human history are indissolubly complementary, and can only be studied in conjunction with each other. They do not exist and move in reality with the degree of isolation assumed by current research. They form, with other structures, the subject matter of the single human science (Elias 1991: 36).
In his critique of Lloyd de Mause's psychogenetic theory of the history of childhood, Elias said that 'psychogenetic studies alone, without the closest connection with sociogenetic studies, are hardly suitable for revealing the structures of social processes. This is only possible with a theory of civilization which links psychogenetic and sociogenetic aspects to each other' (Elias 1997b: [8]). The formation of habitus is a function of social interdependencies, which vary as the structure of a society varies. 'To the variation in this structure,' wrote Elias, 'correspond the differences in personality structure than can be observed in history' (Elias 1994a:249) . While he used the notion of 'correspondence' between habitus and social structure in The Civilizing Process (Elias 1994a: 156), later he modified his position to accommodate the possibility that social habitus might change more slowly than the surrounding social relations (Elias 1991: 211). Our 'whole outlook on life' said Elias, 'continues to be psychologically tied to yesterday's social reality, although today's and tomorrow's reality already differs greatly from yesterday's' (Elias 1995: 35; see also 1991: 211, 214, 217).
RELATIONISM
Elias consistently maintained that it was necessary for sociologists avoid seeing social life in terms of states, objects or things, what Georgy Lukács called the reificiation of what are in fact dynamic social relationships. His attempt to transcend reification in sociological theory consisted of a double movement: the first was towards a consistent emphasis on social life as relational, and the second was an insistence on its processual character. We will look at the first in this section and the second in the following section. It is important to emphasise both sides of this double movement away from reification, because many sociologists undertake one or the other (Berger & Luckmann 1971), but very few pursue both. All of the rest of his theory flowed in one way or another from this starting point.
The principle is simple enough, that it is necessary in sociology 'to give up thinking in terms of single, isolated substances and to start thinking in terms of relationships and functions' (Elias 1991: 19). A 'person' or 'individual' is thus not a self-contained entity or unit, she or he does not exist 'in themselves', they only exist as elements of sets of relations with other individuals. The same applies to families, communities, organizations, nations, economic systems, in fact to any aspect of the world, human or natural, for the concept arose from Einstein's physics. Relations between people, the ties binding them to each other are, for Elias, the primary object of sociological study, the very stuff of historical change:
What changes is the way in which people are bonded to each other. This is why their behaviour changes, and why their consciousness and their drive-economy, and, in fact, their personality structure as a whole, change. The "circumstances" which change are not something which comes upon men from "outside": they are the relationships between people themselves (Elias 1994a: 480).
The explanation of any sociological question thus has to focus on the social relations composing the object of study, rather than any of its elements in isolation. This applies even to understanding individual experience; as Elias put it: 'Even the nature and form of his solitude, even what he feels to be his "inner life", is stamped by the history of his relationships - by the structure of the human network in which, as one of its nodal points, he develops and lives as an individual' (Elias 1991: 33). We have to start, Elias said, 'from the structure of the relations between individuals in order to understand the "psyche" of the individual person' (Elias 1991: 37).(15)
What Elias found most important about relationships between people was the way in which they were constituted as power relations, so that he develops this argument in most detail with reference to 'the relational character of power' (Elias 1978: 75). He felt that there was a particularly strong tendency to reify power, to treat it as an object which was possessed to a greater or lesser extent. 'The whole sociological and political discussion on power', he wrote, 'is marred by the fact that the dialogue is not consistently focused on power balances and power ratios, that is, on aspects of relationships, but rather on power as if it were a thing' (Elias 1984b: 251). If we see it more as a relation, it also becomes possible to recognize that questions of power are quite distinct from questions of 'freedom' and 'domination', and that all human relationships are relations of power.
Building on both Hegel's famous discussion of the master-slave relation and Georg Simmel's reflections on power and domination, Elias wrote:
The master has power over his slave, but the slave also has power over his master, in proportion to his function for the master - his master's dependence on him....In this respect, simply to use the word 'power' is likely to mislead. We say that a person possesses great power, as if power were a thing he carried about in his pocket. This use of the word is a relic of magico-mythical ideas. Power is not an amulet possessed by one person and not by another; it is a structural characteristic of human relationships - of all human relationships (Elias 1978: 74).
He went on to consistently refer to power in terms of power-ratios or 'shifting balances of tensions' (Elias 1983: 145), and regarded these concepts as the best successors to debates about freedom and determinism. Referring to Sartre's conception of existential freedom, he said that the recognition that all human beings possess some degree of freedom or autonomy 'is sometimes romantically idealized as proving the metaphysical freedom of man', its popularity arising primarily from its emotional appeal (Elias 1983: 144). However, he argued that it was important to go beyond thinking in terms of a fictional antithesis between 'freedom' and 'determinism' - fictional because of human beings' essential interdependence - and move to thinking in terms of power-balances.
He stressed the reciprocal workings of power, so that within the network of relations binding the more and less powerful to each other, apparently less powerful groups also exercise a 'boomerang effect' back on those with greater power-chances. As he put it, 'in one form or another the constraints that more powerful groups exert on less powerful ones recoil on the former as constraints of the less powerful on the more powerful and also as compulsions to self-constraint' (Elias 1983:
265). This was, he felt, a problem with concepts like 'rule' or 'authority', since they 'usually make visible only the pressures exerted from above to below, but not those from below to above' (Elias 1983: 265). He gave the example of the relation between parents and children: parents clearly have greater power-chances than their children, but because children fulfil particular functions and needs for their parents, they also have power over their parents, such as calling them to their aid by crying, requiring them to reorganize their lives (Elias 1997b: [5]).
To say that the less powerful also exercise power over the more powerful within a power relation, however, only applies to the internal dynamics of that relationship, but not to any capacity to transform it. For example, when one of his assistants, Angela Rijnen, suggested to him that slaves in ancient Rome could have acted on their masters' dependence on them, refused to cooperate on a collective basis, and thus escaped their enslavement. Elias became furious: 'How dare you say something like that?...You must know that the figuration was not of a type that slaves could resist it?' (Rijnen 1993: 92-3). Unlike Foucault, then, Elias did not conceptualize power relations in terms of an opposition between power and resistance, but as consisting of more or less even 'balances' or 'ratios'.
It is true that ethnomethodologists, phenomenologists and symbolic interactionists (Becker 1970; Mead 1934; Blumer 1969; Goffman 1959; Strauss 1979; Laing 1962) also emphasis the dynamic, emergent character of social life, and argue against seeing social reality as independent from human practices (Layder 1986; see also Haferkamp 1987: 548). They had also read Simmel, and in Goffman's case, Elias. Similar relational approaches can be found in a wide variety of other writers and schools of thought, including R.D. Laing, Gestalt psychology, field theory, Jean Piaget and Rom Harré. However, the comparison should be approached with caution, since Elias was never satisfied with the concept of 'social interaction'. He argued that, at best, it only 'scratches the surface of the relatedness of human beings' (Elias 1969: 143), to the extent that it fails to move beyond the homo clausus model of human beings as possessing some basic identity prior to their interactions with others. Social interaction creates 'the impression of something arising solely from the initiative of two originally independent individuals - an ego and an alter, an 'I' and an'other' - or from the meeting of a number of originally independent individuals' (Elias 1983: 143). He felt that without an adequate understanding of the essential interdependence of human beings within a wide network of relationships, even theories of interaction would posit a pre-social individual who only became social when they engaged in social interaction (Elias 1969: 143).
Elias's critique of the concept 'interaction' is basically the same as that of the 'transactionalism' of John Dewey and Arthur Bentley (1949). They distinguished between 'interaction' - where independent elements are seen as engaging in a relation with each other, so that the elements are primary and the relation secondary - and 'transaction' - where the elements in a social process emerge from the relations between them, so that the relation is primary, and the elements secondary (Dewey & Bentley 1949: 108; Meacham 1977: 264). Indeed, Arthur Bentley, who had been taught by Dilthey and Simmel, suggested that human activities should be regarded as 'interlaced':
That, however, is a bad manner of expression. For the interlacing itself is the activity. We have one great moving process to study, and of this great moving process it is impossible to state any part except as valued in terms of the other parts (1908: 178, italics added).
Bentley thus came to much the same position as Elias, stressing both the 'interlacing' (interweaving) of human activity and its dynamic, processual character. One could also draw parallels with the ideas of network theorists, who focus on the 'pattern of ties' and networks of relations linking the
members of a social system (Granovetter 1973; Powell 1991). For network analysis, 'the organization of social relations [is] a central concept in analysing the structural properties of the networks within which individual actors are embedded, and for detecting emergent social phenomena that have no existence at the level of the individual actor' (Knoke & Kuklinski 1991: 173), an approach which bears a strong resemblance to Elias's use of the concept of figurations.
AGAINST PROCESS-REDUCTION
The second step Elias took away from the reification of social life was to see it as having an inherently processual character, and this needs to be seen in combination with his emphasis on relationism. Figurations of interdependent individuals and groups can only be properly understood as existing over time, in a constant process of dynamic flux and greater or lesser transformation. The analysis of the interrelationships between intentional action and unplanned social processes had to be undertaken over periods of time, for as Johan Goudsblom has put it, 'yesterday's unintended social consequences are today's unintended social conditions of 'intentional human actions' (Elias 1977: 149). Elias spoke of the 'the transformational impetus (Wandlungsimpetus) of every human society', and regarded 'the immanent impetus towards change as an integral moment of every social structure and their temporary stability as the expression of an impediment to social change (Elias 1997a: [14]).
A historical approach to sociological analysis was, in fact, self-evident to most sociologists up to World War II. In The Civilizing Process itself the main disciplinary argument was with psychology, which was why like-minded writers such as Mannheim always spoke of the need for a 'historical psychology' (Mannheim 1940: 16); there was no need to argue for a 'historical sociology'. However, Elias pointed out that in the course of the twentieth century a momentum had been building up against theories of 'progress' and 'evolution', especially their normative and teleological dimensions, their assumption that all social change was essentially 'progressive' and that the current form of society was the apex of human development. In the process, social scientists lost interest in development of any sort. Rather than merely rejecting the normative and teleological elements of evolutionary theories, the whole idea of examining long-term processes of change became unfashionable, and most sociologists stopped concerning themselves with a historical approach to their discipline altogether. In Elias's words:
...it is not simply the ideological elements in the nineteenth century sociological concept that have been called into question, but the concept of development itself, the very consideration of problems of long-term social development, of sociogenesis and psychogenesis. In a word, the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater (Elias 1994a: 200).
The notion that 'present social conditions represent an instant of a continuous process which, coming from the past, moves on through present times towards a future as yet unknown, appears to have vanished' (Elias 1987: xvi). In 1970 Elias pointed out that where the concept 'development' was used, it was restricted to non-Western, 'underdeveloped' or 'developing' countries, implying that Western, highly-industrialised nations were not in a developing state (Elias 1972: 274-84).
The expression Elias used to identify the tendency in sociological thought which he was arguing against was Zustandsreduktion - literally, 'reduction to states', although in English he preferred 'process-reduction', i.e. the 'reduction of processes to static conditions' (Elias 1978: 112). A manifestation of process-reduction was sociologists' turning-away from historical analysis, the emphasis by both functionalists and structuralists on synchronic rather than diachronic analysis, and
the assumption that stability was the normal condition of social life, and change a 'disruption' of a normal state of equilibrium. By 'long-term' Elias meant periods of not less than three generations (Elias 1986c: 234).
Just as individuals, families, communities, and so on, should be conceived as embedded within a network of relations, rather than being seen as isolated objects, Elias argued that they should also be seen as dynamic, in a state of flux and change, as processes. Individuals, for example, rather than having a fixed identity,
are born as infants, have to be fed and protected for many years by their parents or other adults, who slowly grow up, who then provide for themselves in this or that social position, who may marry and have children of their own, and who finally die. So an individual may justifiably be seen as a self-transforming person who, as it is sometimes put, goes through a process (Elias 1978: 118).
Indeed, suggested Elias, although it is not how we are used to thinking about ourselves, 'it would be more appropriate to say that a person is constantly in movement; he not only goes through a process, he is a process' (Elias 1978: 118). We can only understand and explain any given sociological problem if it is seen as the outcome of some long-term process of development, if we trace its sociogenesis.
Instead of speaking of static 'states' or phenomena such as capitalism, rationality, bureaucracy, modernity, postmodernity, Elias would always wish to identify their processual character, so that he would think in terms of rationalization, modernization, bureaucratization, and so on. Often it is difficult to come up with the appropriate concept. For example, 'capitalism' is difficult to render in this way - but the point is to attempt a conceptualization along these lines, to identity the process underlying what one was studying. If, for example, one observes what appear to be a large number of single parents in Western societies, a productive approach for Elias would be to look for the long-term trends in marriage and fertility, to see how this current phenomenon fits in with other processes of social development, in order to possibly explain its occurrence. This example also illustrates Elias's emphasis on the existence of a plurality of processes, all which interweave with each other, with no causal primacy being given to any one of them. Transformations in social relationships are thus intertwined with a variety of other process of change: economic, political, psychological, geographical, and so on. The main long-term trends Elias concentrated on included increasing social differentiation, industrialization, urbanization, political centralization, integration from smaller to larger social units, state formation and nation building, functional democratization, psychologization and rationalization - these will be discussed in the next chapter.
Social processes had no particular beginning; he said: 'Wherever we start, there is movement, something that went before' (Elias 1994a: 48). They also have no end, Elias always assumed that we find ourselves in the middle of any given process, and that the point of looking to where it came from was to provide some sense of its future development. He said a number of things about the question of directionality: often he seemed to insist that the overall direction of a long-term trend was all that mattered, and that any divergences from this direction would only be temporary interruptions to the broader tendency. For example in a letter to Gerhard Schmied in 1982, he said of the Roman Empire that it 'was in turn again only the apex of an integrative movement' and that 'All in all, there is only one single developmental process. One should demonstrate it in all states in the world' (Schmied 1988: 213). It is this type of argument which leads some critics to regard Elias as a unilinear evolutionist. However, he also said that 'two main directions in the structural changes of
societies may be distinguished: those tending toward increased differentiation and integration, and those tending toward decreasing differentiation and integration' (Elias 1994a: 182), leading commentators such as Peter Burke to describe his theory as multilinear (1992: 149). Any given trend 'is always linked to counter-trends. A trend might remain dominant for a long time; then a counter-trend can again completely or partially gain the upper hand' (Elias 1997a: ??). This perspective was developed in more detail in his work on twentieth century German history, and the notion of decivilizing processes which underlay particular historical events like the Holocaust. These arguments will also be examined in the next chapter.
A major difference between Elias's approach to long-term social processes and earlier theories of evolutionary change was that he did not think it possible to identify the course of development which had to take place. His explanatory concern was primarily retrospective, focusing on how:
...a figuration had to arise out of a certain figuration or even out of a particular type of sequential series of figurations, but [it] does not assert that the earlier figurations had necessarily to change into the later ones (Elias 1978: 161).
One could not say that figuration C necessarily had to emerge from figurations A and B, only that C was made possible by the emergence of A and B, that A and B were the necessary preconditions for C. Figuration C was thus only one of the possible successors to A and B, and there is never a necessity or teleology to the social development.
Although Elias did distance himself from theories of social progress which simply assumed that all social change was progressive, he did feel that, overall, humanity was in fact progressing. It is important to bear his fundamentally ambiguous attitude to progress in mind, because it helps explain why so many of his critics accuse him of reverting to the ninteenth century evolutionary perspectives. For example, in 1977 he wrote:
...the twentieth century is an epoch of the greatest experiments and innovations.... Much of what people in earlier times only dreamed of has become 'do-able'. Human knowledge - not only about interconnections in the non-human, natural world, but also about people themselves, on the individual as well as social level - is far more extensive than in the past. The conscious, planned concern with improvement of the social order and human living conditions - as inadequate as it is - has never been greater than it is today (Elias 1997a: [3]).
He was also confident that human beings have gradually developed more control over the natural world, and that this increased control could easily be put in the category of 'progress'. When challenged about his attitude to the control of the natural world by a Dutch interviewer, he said: 'We can't go back to nature, that's a dreadful idea, nature is wild, blind, angry, sometimes beautiful....The most important thing we have is what we make out of nature, not nature itself' (Elias 1984c: 10). Despite the barbarism which Western 'civilized' people were capable of, for Elias this meant merely that 'we have not learnt to control ourselves and nature enough', for he was insistent that the contemporary world was considerably less brutal and violent than it had been in the Ancient or Medieval world. He felt that relations between classes, men and women, superordinates and subordinates, adults and children, were gradually becoming increasingly equal and democratic, and that the point of identifying those instances where this was not the case was to further the process of 'functional democratization', not to suggest its impossibility.
On the other hand, he did also argue that processes of integration could at any time be accompanied by those of disintegration, civilizing processes by decivilizing processes (Elias 1986c: 235), and he placed more emphasis on these in his later work, such as The Germans (1996). Elias should be read both ways, as optimistic about the progress of humanity, and as acutely aware of how easily we can descend to cruelty barbaric cruelty. The death of his mother in Auschwitz was a permanent reminder of that, so he can not be accused of being unaware of the dark side of Western civilization.
CONCLUSION
Future sociological inquiry, taking preliminary cues from such areas as the sociology of emotion and feeling, the philosophical theory of action, and the psychoanalytic theory of action and affect, must move beyond the present means-ends framework and the problem of order, if it seriously seeks to illuminate the nature of social action, rather than fragments of it. (Camic 1979: 545)
The question of whether sociologists continue to see 'the individual' and 'society' as separate entities seems to have been settled long ago, and the transcendence of the dichotomy seems to be simply part of sociology's inheritance. If we can read it in Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Simmel, why repeat the argument? However, in reality the dualistic forms of perception, apparently vanquished in explicit arguments and in the relevant sections of the textbooks, simply reappear in another form, built into the structure of sociological thought with different labels attached. The problem, as Charles Camic (1986) has shown, is that the early sociologists can be read in a variety of ways, and the effect of both Parsons's construction of the sociological 'tradition' and the criticisms of it has been, until only quite recently, to perceive human conduct in a way which reproduces the individual/society dichotomy. Concepts and modes of perception have a habit of rising, phoenix-like, from the ashes. Elias's arguments about problems in sociological thought need to be addressed at the level of its deep, underlying structure rather than merely its surface arguments, and from that perspective they retain much of their force. If they did not, we would not still be puzzling over the supposed distinctions between agency and structure, social and system integration, or micro and macro approaches to sociology (Knorr-Cetina & Cicourel; Alexander et al 1987; Mouzelis 1993).
This can also be seen in the criticisms of Elias. Bauman, for example, commented that 'Elias encourages his followers to close their eyes to the active, creative role of the individual or collective subject of knowledge' (Bauman 1979: 120), and Dennis Smith suggested that 'his approach leaves unresolved an important contradiction concerning the human capacity for choice and evaluation' (Smith 1984: 370). What distinguished Elias from writers such as Marcuse, Habermas and Moore, said Smith, was 'his 'bleaching out' of the evaluating, choosing side of humanity' (Smith 1984: 373). Hans Haferkamp also felt uneasy about the emphasis which Elias placed on the unplanned and 'blind' character of social development: 'Elias does not give much weight to the success of intentions and plans in this framework. Nor does he check to see when the planning of associations of actions has been successful....there have been many situations where micro- or macro-social actors have succeeded in their intentions and plans' (Haferkamp 1987: 556).
To the extent that 'agency' is conceived as somehow 'oppositional' to, or 'autonomous' from, social determination, such criticism merely reinforces Elias's assertion that the individual/society dichotomy is still a problem in sociological thought. He would have regarded claims like: 'The residuum of human autonomy and creativity must be reclaimed for social theory otherwise the full implications of human agency will be totally eclipsed' (Layder 1994: 118) as reflecting a continuing romanticism about individual 'freedom', and as a misinterpretation of the reality of human social
existence. Elias never questioned the idea that human beings act creatively, with conscious intent, and that their actions cannot be simply read off in a deterministic fashion from their surrounding social context. This is different, however, from attributed effectivity to their action, and it is the effects of human action which have to be regarded as determined by the way a combination of actions interweave with each other, frequently in conflict and competition with each other. The process by which the actions of various human agents, individual and collective, combine and interpenetrate with each other, by definition lies beyond the control of any of the participating 'actors'. Rather than 'bleaching' out' human choice and evaluation, Elias's position concerning agency is simply one about the 'logic of collective action', about the real effects those choices and evaluations actually have once they enter social life, especially while human groups continue to compete with each other. It is the dynamics of competition, conflict and interweaving which constitutes the 'blindness' of social development and restricts the effectivity of human agency.
The potential contained in both Elias' overall theoretical approach and his empirical studies is that their basic elements can be mobilized in relation to a wide range of topics in empirical social research, with great promise of generating powerful lines of inquiry, explanation and debate. Equally significant, however, is the possible contribution that Elias can make to a reorientation of sociological theory. All the features of Elias's approach - the emphasis on social relations, long-term processes, the interweaving of planned action and unplanned development, the importance of seeing humans as interdependent, the centrality of power in social relations, and the significance of the concept 'habitus' in understanding human conduct - have considerable potential for taking sociological theory beyond dualisms and dichotomies, which seem to have rather outlived their usefulness. As I have argued, many of the supposed problems of current sociological theory can be traced back to its organization around the fictional 'Hobbesian problem of order'. But there no 'problem of order' as Parsons formulated it, no 'two sociologies' and no problem of 'structure and action' requiring solution with a 'theory of structuration' (Giddens 1984). Hobbes was right.
There are only, as the pre-Parsonian sociologists understood, changing formations of habitus within ongoing processes of historical development, of continual adjustment of human conduct to particular social conditions. Although we may be critical of many of its features, an engagement with Elias's sociology can help us develop a theoretical space within which we can recover those 'hybridized' elements of sociological thought which the Parsonian establishment of sociology's 'modern' constitution rendered invisible, theoretical elements for which Elias used a set of concepts including habitus, figuration, social relations, unplanned processes, power and power-ratios and interdependency.
In a very important recent line of argument, Piotr Sztompka has indicated in a related way his own dissatisfaction with 'the almost obsessive theme of paradoxes, ironies, dualisms, or dualities' (1994: 269) in sociological thought. He suggests that we should regard both individual existence and society as only existing in a virtual sense (p. 273). 'Social wholes and human individuals,' writes Sztompka, ' have only virtual existence, their separation and mutual opposition is the product of false, distorted imagination: common-sense illusions, and theoretical as well as meta-theoretical fallacies' (pp. 273-4). He argues for a 'third sociology as opposed to both the sociology of action and sociology of structures, or better as merging both of them in the synthetic, more adequate approach to social reality' (p. 277). If we interpret this sort of argument for rejecting the oppositions and dualisms altogether, for a 'third way', in terms of Latour's 'Constitution', it constitutes proposing that we work only with the bottom half of the constitution, with the hybrids, networks and mediations, and simply abolish the top half, the work of purification.
I would like to end with this issue as a question. Do we want a 'third sociology' (Sztompka) which dumps the modern constitution altogether? Latour's own position is that this is not the best way forward, because 'purification', and its associated concern with dualism, does actually have useful and productive effects. From Latour's perspective, the oppositions between individual and society, agency and structure, and so on, are not simply 'false' or 'distortions', contrary to Sztompka's interpretation - they provide important conceptual and practical resources.(16) The Latourian argument applied here would be that we need to retain the productivity of the modern constitution laid down for sociology by Parsons in Structure, but also to 'restrain' it with an awareness of the bottom half of the constitution, the realm sociological thinking comprised of non-dualistic hybrids and mediations. Rather than seeing Elias's theoretical position as a 'third sociology' which simply opposes the post-Parsonian sociology of action, then, it may ultimately be more useful to see it as complementary. Its primary contribution may be to make it easier to see sociologies of networks, interdependence, relations, habitus and emotions - the bottom, hybridified half of sociology's modern constitution - as well as, rather than instead of, the sociologies of action and structure and the various attempts to bridge, link and synthesise them.(17)
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1. This paper draws on, develops and argues against parts of my Norbert Elias New York: Routledge, 1997. An earlier version was also given at the 1996 conference of The Australian Sociological Association in Hobart, Tasmania, 4- 7th December 1996.
2. The second was The Society of Individuals (1991)
3. There is then also, of course, endless scope for the correction of the misinterpretations of the earlier attempts, as we see in the flourishing industries of commentary on Weber, Parsons, Giddens, and so on.
4. Dawe (1970) first mentions it in print, but then later (1978: 383) acknowledges, rather apologetically, that he got the idea from an unpublished paper by Pamela Nixon.
5. Later, Dawe was to suggest that the opposition was not simply a feature of sociological thought, but mirrored the reality of human experience itself; as he put it, 'the contradiction between the two sociologies articulates the contradiction which is at the heart of the dominant modern experience and which permeates our lives as a constant existential tension of our time and place' (p. 368). However, he also began to point to an instability in the whole argument by indicating that both positions are in fact theories of action. The opposition is that the social system perspective has a pessimistic view of human beings and their action - left to our own devices, we will bring about chaos - whereas the action perspective more optimistically regards human beings as 'self- and socially creative' (Dawe 1978: 380).
6. I am following here Lloyd's (1992) identification of the 'standard philosophical interpretation' of Hobbes: 'Listen in on most any undergraduate philosophy course in which Leviathan is discussed and you will hear a familiar story. Hobbes the individualist. Hobbes the theorist of power, advocate of the view that sheer might makes order. Hobbes the pessimist, defender of the view that the only alternative to anarchy is absolute subjection, that an overriding fear of death drives men to embrace an apparent but necessary tyranny' (p. 6).
7. For example, Hobbes wrote that 'a son cannot be understood to be at any time in the state of nature, as being under the power and command of them to whom he owes his protection as soon as ever he is born, namely, either his father's or his mother's, or his that nourished him' (Hobbes 1972: 117). Elsewhere he referred to the idea of the state of nature as considering 'men as if but even now sprung out of the earth, and suddenly, like mushrooms, come to full maturity, without all kind of engagement to each other' (1972: 205). Hobbes was hardly so dim as to think that we did in fact spring from the earth like mushrooms, which is what the view of him as a psychological egoist implies.
8. See also Wagner's (1991) remarks on this question in relation to religion.
9. In 1967 Gert could hardly contain his frustration, and not much has changed since: 'it seems to me incredible that anyone with an understanding of human nature that Hobbes displays...could be found
guilty of the traditional charge of holding as crude a theory as psychological egoism. An unbiased look at the evidence, textual, philosophical, and historical shows beyond any reasonable doubt that the traditional charge has not only not been proven, but that the evidence in its favor is overwhelmingly outweighed by the evidence against it' (1967: 520).
10. Perhaps any dualism or opposition: micro/macro, real/non-real, male/female, state/society - the possibilities are endless.
11. Collins argues similarly in this regard, that the 'longing for agency' is a retreat to 'a subjective world constructed so as to offer the fantasy of subjective power' (1992: 77).
12. Recent work in the sociology of emotions is rectifying this; see, for example Jack Barbalet's (1997) "The Jamesian theory of action."
13. The famous opening line of Structure was a quotation from Harvard historian Crane Brinton, 'Who now reads Spencer?' (Parsons 1937: 3).
14. Edward Shils has put this well: 'A society is a "trans-temporal" phenomenon. It is not constituted by its existence at a single moment in time. It exists only through time.....It has a temporal integration as well as spatial integration' (1981: 327).
15. Recently the significance of this has been underlined by Pierre Bourdieu, who defines this form of perception as thinking in terms of fields, a mode of thought which 'requires a conversion of one's entire usual vision of the social world, a vision which is interested only in those things which are visible' (1990: 192). Referring to Elias, he points out that thinking non-relationally also has the effect of treating social units as if they were themselves human actors, and mentions the possible 'endless list of mistakes, mystifications or mystiques created by the fact that the words designating institutions or groups, State, bourgeoisie, Employers, Church, Family and School, can be constituted...as historical subjects capable of posing and realizing their own aims' (1990: 192).
16. Hence the continued attachment to them - for example, Mouzelis (1995) - and the inclination to bridge, link or synthesise rather than abolish (Alexander et al 1987; Ritzer 1990).
17. I have here left out of consideration another implication of Latour's analysis, which is that we may need to think about the history of sociology very differently, recognizing no clear dividing line between premodern social and political thought and modern sociology. Both this question, and whether Latour's analysis means rethinking Elias's own conception of history and social process, I will have to leave to another paper.
