By good fortune (for the case might easily have been otherwise) the history of our species, looked at as a comprehensive whole, does exhibit a determinate course, a certain order of development: though history alone cannot prove this to be a necessary law, as distinguished from a temporary accident. Here, therefore, begins the office of Biology (or, as we should say, of Psychology) in the social science.
John Stuart MillFootnote 1
John Stuart Mill’s exposition on Auguste Comte’s philosophy of science provides a vignette of some tropes that resonate in the ‘social turn’ in International Relations (IR). In unwinding the discipline from the intermittently firm though always tenuous grasp of rationalist methodological precepts, constructivists reached for philosophical resources. They sought broader, more inclusive theoretical designs to enable a lateralisation of the range of variables (actors, operations, meanings, and practices) admissible to analyses of world political events.Footnote 2 They examined both momentous shifts, like the end of the Cold War or the emergence of ‘new norms’, and ostensibly significant continuities, such as the ‘democratic peace’. Shifting attention to concerns with ontology afforded constructivists the opportunity to bring conceptual and methodological inventories to bear into a field they perceived to be limited significantly in either its dominant rationalist instantiations or the contributions of the latters’ critical discontents. A middle way was deemed possible, charted on the basis of an integration of elements from critical realist philosophy,Footnote 3 and sociological structuration theory.Footnote 4 Constructivists since have, in the more programmatic and less applied writings, extolled the virtues of this approach.Footnote 5 The constructivist approach, on this account, offers the possibility of admitting and accommodating a plurality of theoretical and methodological predispositions. Based on the meta-theoretically effected widening of permissible variables, as well as the continued commitment to IR as a science, the social turn in mainstream constructivism engendered a shift to Sociological perspectives and decidedly away from the questions raised – and the issues confronted – by Political Theory and Political Philosophy.
However, with this shift comes baggage. In this article, I want to show that the intellectual project of mainstream IR constructivism is much more firmly rooted in very specific premises, the historical legacy of which link back to the inception of the emergence and then study of society as a distinct, separate, but also more fundamental concern. In turn, this allowed for the study of politics to be rendered as contingent upon ground-clearing work provided by ‘the social science’, as Mill called it, using the telling singular. Insofar as a distinctive concern with ‘social’ affairs became an urgent matter for attention during the nineteenth century, I argue that it is possible to discern at least two distinctively different strands of thinking that attached to equally distinctive ways in which the challenges associated with social change and transformation were conceived. As I will seek to show below, these two different strands also entail quite different possibilities with regard to how questions of international and transnational flows, relations and exchanges can be understood, configured, and problematised.
Unfortunately, the kind of sociological thinking now dominant in IR constructivism owes effectively only to one of these strands. Oriented in terms of the question of the conditions and maintenance of order, it bears the imprints of Comte’s teachings on method, as well as of his tangible commitment to a naturalist ontology. Committed as it is to a comprehensively naturalist conception of the contiguity of knowledge of social and political worlds with the recently emboldened natural sciences, this scheme aligned swiftly with attempts to explicate the conditions of ‘order’ first and foremost within nation states (not all of which were well formed yet); in doing so it contributed to preparing the ground for the current conventional understanding of ‘international relations’ as the problem of creating or maintaining an order among units which are themselves comprehensively ordered internally. The issuance of political authority consequently, in this broad mode, attaches to the task of ensuring the stability of social order holistically understood, though the ‘totality’ this implies is already rendered as internal to the confines of national territorial polities.
This strand can usefully be contrasted with another, which also gained momentum during the nineteenth century, and which led into what is today often referred to summarily as ‘conflict theory’.Footnote 6 In this mode, the interest in ‘the social’ proceeds as a project dedicated to explicating the sources and modalities of antagonistic relations among different groups of actors (or classes), implicating political authority, legal-political arrangements, and factual order at least potentially in the perpetuation of such antagonisms.
The central claim of my article is that a bifurcation in theorising ‘the social’ arose in the nineteenth century, comprising distinctively different responses to the challenges experienced in the context of what Karl Polanyi referred to as the ‘Great Transformation’.Footnote 7 This was the bifurcation between the project of shoring up a robust concept of social order on the one hand, and a competing account rendering order contingent on the processing of conflict on the other. In the first part of the article, I sketch two constellational aspects against which this bifurcation occurs, the Great Transformation, and the French Revolution, and place them in the context of a sketch of changing conceptions of political authority and legitimacy. These constellational aspects, I argue, underpin the rise of the famous ‘Social Question’,Footnote 8 namely of how to respond to the risks of fragmentation and disorder arising in the context of the pervasive and trans-politically efficacious changes affecting the populations of Europe, and of its colonial empires.Footnote 9 I briefly focus on ‘who posited the social question’, and ‘who asked the social question’ respectively, in order to underscore my point that at least to very different orientations became formative for the tasks of social and political theorising in the wake of the two constellational shifts.
Against this backdrop, I draw out two responses to the Social Question. The first leads via Comte’s positive sociology to the functionalist imaginary, which would prove to become dominant in the new discipline of sociology. It established the practice of associating social inquiry with science, mandating a continuous and close conversation with developments in philosophical naturalism, and with trends and refinements in scientific method. In keeping with the stages-model popularised through Comte’s writings, and the relationship of ‘supervenience’ he established between the different scientific domains, the Social Question was to be answered through the explication of a rational order based on an inclusive account of human needs. This imaginary, which I argue throws its long shadows into the ‘social turn’ in IR theorising, subsumes politics under a quite specific and constrained form of observant reason.Footnote 10
The second response to the Social Question, signaled, inter alia, by Karl Marx, and particularly by Friedrich Engels’ studies on the conditions of the working class in England, took the question of order to be open-ended, and worked with a different, dialectical concept of ‘science’. While it, too, became formulated within the broad parameters of a progressivist philosophy of history, it took the conflict associated with the unfolding modern project to be the constitutive ingredient for attempts to shape and consolidate social and political order, and hence rendered the latter contingent on capacities to process conflicts appropriately. As I show, there is a distinctively different understanding of (legitimate) political authority at play, which links back to the two historical backgrounds I draw out in the first part of the article.
Finally, I trace these two different strands to the social turn inaugurated by the advent of constructivism in IR. Although the conditions behind the meta-theoretical commitments of the two strands of social theorising have changed significantly, they continue in modified forms to affect respective theoretical and explanatory efforts. For contemporary debates in IR theory the programmatic conception of sociology outlined first in the work of Comte still frames in particular constructivist understandings of social theories of International Relations. Not least the systematic problems with the study of norms and normative orders is indicative of this. The conflict-theoretic strand, which itself requires more conceptual and methodological attention in the context of the study of world politics, provides at least some conceptual tools for addressing the short-comings attributable to the continuing mainstream deference to naturalist paradigms.Footnote 11
Before turning to the first part of my argument, a few words on the scope of the undertaking below are in order. The reconstructive critique on offer here is limited in its explicit form to what can on a wider reading only be described as a fragmentary account of thought on matters ‘social’ and ‘political’. Focusing as I do on the positioning of canonical accounts of social theory within contemporary analytics in IR risks inadvertently a certain degree of ‘shoring up’ a highly undesirable and unhelpful eurocentrism. This is negotiated within the confines of the analysis below by bringing into play at least a selection of some of the critics of Eurocentrist historiography and ‘theorising’, whose contributions to thinking about world politics are as crucial and important, as their reception in the discipline of IR is, to put it mildly, ‘underdeveloped’. A more systematic approach to this is beyond what is possible in this article, which in a sense aims to lay tracks – by way of an emphasis on the immanent critique of Eurocentric schemes – that lead towards the more important task of rendering that version of immanence as problematic as it has in many ways always been.
Two constellational shifts as backgrounds to the rise of ‘the social’ and social theorising: the Great Transformation, and the French Revolution
The first constellational shift I focus on concerns alterations in the meaning of political authority. Though these occurred unevenly, incrementally, and with different and distinct local ‘flavours’ across Europe, it can be related to the emergence and growth of ‘civil society’. Polanyi’s magnum opus, The Great Transformation, as well as Fernand Braudel’s sweeping studies of the emergence of modern systems of production, distribution and social organisation,Footnote 12 focus on the eighteenth century as the historical context in which crucial changes were introduced, which led to the gradual consolidation of the ‘empire of civil society’.Footnote 13 The nineteenth century, during which the social becomes the object of specific interest, is witness to these transformations; of the messy and uneven transmission of the institutional conditions for civil society as a distinctive realm of political and economic dynamic change. Substantively, these transformations comprised in particular the gradual demise of subsistence economies, and the gradual consolidation of administrative power over what become populations, masses with ascriptive characteristics.
In many ways, the transformation from the mid eighteenth to the late nineteenth century involves the gradual (and frequently violent) inclusion of rural populations into the realm of ‘civil society’. The success of this inclusion – and the concomitant forms of exclusions it engendered – was dependent on novel forms of rule and control, according to which the rules of civil society (its formal laws, conceived out of exchange relations) could be policed and enforced.Footnote 14 The need to bring large numbers of people into the remit of formalised exchange relations was encountered on two fronts.
First, domestically, the peasantry, rural craftspeople, day labourers, ‘vagrants’, and bandits had to be brought under control and into line with the requirements of a transfigured labour market, and the demands for efficiency by capital-driven production and trade. Second, transnationally, the same had to be effected with the colonial subjects.Footnote 15 In both cases, civil society actors led the way; ‘societies’ formed of interested venture businessmen provided metropolitan lobbying power, fund-raising capacity, and hubs for knowledge sharing with regard to ‘frontier’ development opportunities. To succeed, labour markets had to be created, formally controlled, and policed; this comprised practices, which ranged from slavery through the monopolistic control of production by companies to various forms of debt dependencies.Footnote 16 The immensity of this task, which required nothing less than the extensive replacement of entrenched economic practices with those described by Polanyi in terms of the ‘market society’, or civil society with its formal freedoms and corresponding rules, could only be met by finding new tools with which to secure the necessary practices of inclusion and rule. This provides the context for the discovery and deployment of a range of innovations according to which ‘the social’ would become known. For instance, in the 1820s, social statistics emerged for the first time as a major concern, replacing the older ‘political arithmetic’. The latter had provided on the whole merely aggregative figures for births, deaths, and male-female ratios for the purposes of confirming princely wealth and power.Footnote 17 A novel orientation towards seeking patterns of regularity, together with the sheer amount of data gathered (and numbers to be processed) provided more and more texture to the sense that society operated according to its own laws, the latter seemingly impervious, or at the very least obstinate, to the controlling interference by the political power of the state.Footnote 18
The contiguity of such attitudes regarding the discernibility of law-like propositions about populations, and the governance of groups identified for the purposes of matching productive labour with efficiency demands under the unifying logic of pricing mechanisms is readily apparent. That it had to be established with a considerable amount of force is well known; and, again, the resources for this were developed in civil society first, with industrial inspectors instituted and supplied by companies, who, in this sense, formed at least institutionally part of the political horizon for workers, as well as the urban unemployed.
This first important piece of historical background for making the shift to ‘the social’ intelligible arises from the ways and techniques by which a transformation of political authority was effected during the emergence and increasing ‘inclusiveness’ of civil society as conceived in accordance with (commercial) formal freedom.Footnote 19 The processes of this transformation unfolded gradually, and, following Braudel, began in the late Renaissance period. But they took on particular urgency in the context of the more pervasive technological and institutional shifts emerging round about the middle of the eighteenth century, and this intensified phase lasted throughout the nineteenth century.
The second important historical backdrop to the rise of the Social Question is the French Revolution.Footnote 20 By now, the events leading up to this most visible assault on the prevailing political pre-eminence of the monarch and the nobility has been increasingly documented as a transnational event as much as one affecting ‘domestic’ France. Only a cursory glance at the significance of the Haitian revolution, its relation to the Assembly, and the significance of the experiences of transatlantic slavery and the Caribbean trading empire in patterning opposition between the ‘left’ and ‘right’ provides ample testimony.Footnote 21 The profound shock among political elites in Europe at the vehemence and comprehensiveness with which the old order was being swept away by ‘people power’ was more than matched by the trepidation caused by the complete reversal of the ‘normal’ order at the hands of the enslaved of Haiti, and the constitutional proposals which shaped the political outlook of that revolt.Footnote 22
As far as the reconfiguration of political authority is concerned, the substantial threat was comprised by the push towards a democratic understanding of legitimate rule. Robert Wokler in his reconstruction of early themes in social scientific thinking,Footnote 23 teases out the intricacies of this substantive challenge, which played out between two versions, one inspired by Rousseau’s conception of the common will (which would commit democracy to popular sovereignty proper), and one oriented towards representative government eventually adopted under the guidance of Sieyès’ accommodation. The trope of the threat of representative government had been with modern political thought since at the latest Hobbes’ attempt to guard against it in his work.Footnote 24 However, the events around the Revolution, and the return of absolutism to France under Napoleon, provided nourishment for both the forces for democratisation in the image of egalite and liberte and proponents of qualified defences of state-absolutism. Meanwhile, there was recognition on all sides that the Social Question had pushed the agents of revolutionary change towards the violence with which it sought to usher out the old order.Footnote 25 Widespread poverty and enforced changes beyond the capacity of people to respond in accommodative and productive ways, had built up into a political problem for which no plausible institutional resonance existed in the prevailing centers of political authority. The capacity to ‘represent’ oneself and one’s interests had been characteristic of the relationship between the nobility and the crown. This pattern of partaking in political authority had proven to be, at least to some degree, sufficiently expansive into the realm of the upper echelons of the emerging capitalist bourgeoisie. But no similar pattern of substantive participation was available for those further down the hierarchy in any plausible form.
The upshot of this kind of radicalism, and its circumscription in terms of the Social Question, would be felt across Europe and the wider world. Responses ensued such as the ‘pre-emptive’ lancing of revolutionary pressures, including the violent suppression of signs of working-class discontent, or agitation among the poor; the punitive deportation of deviant populations to the colonies; or the proactive persecution of labour activist, pamphleteers, and petitioners.Footnote 26 In all of these contexts, there was an urgent problem of how a political order was to be conceived that corresponded to both the need for comprehensive authority to regulate civil society and the need to procure stability and a modicum of solidarity.Footnote 27 The answer to the problem of order and authority becomes a central, administrative (modern) state in charge of representing the nation as a whole. For this to be possible, the representatives themselves will have to be insulated from those they represent. As Wokler puts it in the context of his observations about Sieyes’ accommodation:
Sovereignty (thereby) passed from the nation’s multifarious fragments to the people’s delegates constituted as one body, the populace ceasing to have any political identity except as articulated through its representatives, who by procuration were granted authority to speak for the electorate as a whole.Footnote 28
If the French Revolution thus heralds a transformation of political order, it simultaneously can be regarded as inaugurating the legacy of a restriction of the political registers within which the new, emerging political order could be authorised. The representative script of legitimate governance is, on this reading, an important, but also contingent component of the emergence of the ‘nation-state’; as well as an important, but equally contingent circumscription of democracy.Footnote 29
Taken together, the two strands sketched above highlight the diverging and conflictual trends inherent in the spread of ‘civil society’ and the reconfiguration of political authority. The former, often not sufficiently recognised for its violence (particularly in the context of colonisation), and certainly not subjected to sufficient political analysis, amounted to forms of what became known as ‘societalisation’. It effected political change and upheaval, but these were conceived in terms of contract, private merchant law, and the abstractions of ‘classical political economy’. Political authority, in turn, circumscribed aspects of ‘civil society’ by domesticating some of the resultant conflicts under the comprehensive representative government of a fixed territory. Government underwrote the colonising expansionism of civil society incrementally, by providing military support, and ultimately by establishing sovereignty over the expropriated territories, though concomitantly denying the modicum of representational accommodation outlined above to the colonised. This feature of a ‘dual rule’, which comes to dominate the ‘domestic-international’ imaginary in IR theory is constitutively linked to the two constellational contexts outlined above. The move to ‘the social’ in thinking about the challenges of these transformations is, then, also a move informed by the absence of sufficiently cogent conceptions of politics, complete with the attendant registers in which social problems can be translated into practices tackling the ensuing conflicts politically.Footnote 30 With the demise of polycentric sovereignty,Footnote 31 and the shift in political authority away from royalty, the princes, and the nobility, politics had to be reconceptualised. With the great transformation in ‘political economy’, the forced displacement of rural populations (including the end of subsistence communities), the subjection of peoples in the context of colonial expansion, the creation of industrial labour, and the transfers of segments of populations to overseas territories, grievances arose for which political channels were not (yet) available. New codes in ‘private’ law had the effect of empowering an ascendant bourgeois segment, and disempowering (including expropriating) others, both ‘at home’ and abroad. Reconfigured political power could align itself with the former, and ignore, neglect, or ultimately pathologise the latter.
These two broad constellational backdrops signal both comprehensive changes in the organisation of human life as well as the contingency of the latter. Importantly, and for IR theorising particularly so, they index a setting in which the transformations in question cannot without gross anachronisms be mapped in terms of the methodological nationalism on which IR came to rely during its formation in the early twentieth century. The conflict-dynamics we encounter in this context correspond much more neatly with the notion proffered by Justin Rosenberg of an ‘empire of civil society’,Footnote 32 which impacts in various and uneven ways on questions and problems of state-formation, producing very different versions of the latter not only in parts of the world incorporated by Western imperialism, but also in Europe itself.Footnote 33 If this brief captures some significant aspects of the kind of integration into ‘society’ underway during the nineteenth century, and also its exclusions and subalternisations, the contrast with the newly found penchant for ‘social’ theorising in IR based on unit-reproduction,Footnote 34 evolutionary logics,Footnote 35 state-oriented normative change,Footnote 36 or internally differentiating world society Footnote 37 could hardly be greater. The two constellational shifts I focused on below are intelligible only if their transnational reach, impact, and implications are considered centrally. This is crucial not least from the perspective of having to account for the multifarious processes underpinning emerging state-formations, and the differential and uneven accommodations of sociopolitical conflicts that have reached through these. That the turn to sociological inventories in IR has not, on the whole, responded to this well, may seem surprising against this backdrop. As we will see below, to some extent this owes to the peculiar attachment of social theorising in IR to functionalist explanations with their roots firmly in naturalist schemes, of which Comte’s is perhaps the most well known.
‘Analysis and practice’: Who posits the Social Question – who asks the Social Question?
In the light of the sketches above, the answer to these two questions should now be relatively clear. The Social Question is posited first and foremost by the newly constituted masses, an entirely new phenomenon in thinking of political relations, and in significant ways the result of what Polanyi called the great transformation. Localised systems of support, distribution, and redress (including forms of clientilism, or parish systems) fell away for the large numbers of people who were, sometimes gradually, sometimes instantly and by force, moved either to urban centers, or the colonies, or were in other ways made dependent on access to wage-labour.Footnote 38 In efforts to redress the threats encountered by these novel forms of deprivation,Footnote 39 and not least spawned by the events in France, they would eventually settle on contesting the new relationships with landlords, factory-owners, the police, and the taxation authorities of municipalities and the state, initially through the medium of the mass protest, and eventually through the formation of collective agencies (for instance, consumer societies).Footnote 40 Public protest was immediately understood as the threat it no doubt was; the responses, before they eventually became ameliorative and led to ‘social policies’ (regarding, for instance, housing arrangements, health, or education), were often swift, brutal, and characterised by attempts to repress and subdue (on early nineteenth-century political violence in such contexts).Footnote 41 The practices of petitioning, which for much of the nineteenth century combined the new register of mass politics with the older practice of appealing directly to princely or noble power, continued, but met with the new reality that princes and nobles themselves now increasingly deferred to the new class of wealth-owners. Emblematically, this can be seen in the context of the history of the ‘northern radicals’ in England, and events around petition-processes, such as the blanketeers’ march, or the Peterloo massacre in Manchester. Engel’s The Condition of the Working Class in England is one locus classicus of an in-depth empirical study of the constitution of the masses in the context of urbanisation, industrial labour, unemployment, and capitalist landlordism.Footnote 42
The Social Question was also equally posited by the colonial subjects, where the question of their inclusion into, or exclusion from civil society was of acute importance, not least when ‘divide-and-rule’ strategies prevailed as integral to the maintenance of control.Footnote 43
In cases of settler-colonialism, such as in Australia, Canada, and the US, where frontier wars and a steady influx of settlers soon tipped the population balance firmly in favour of the ‘arrivals’ vis-à-vis their indigenous ‘others’, this had further consequences with lasting legacies. It became possible for the dominant to rely on assimilation strategies, which involved bluntly racist conceptions of exclusion;Footnote 44 these typically and problematically survived the eventual independence and establishment of the former colony as a sovereign nation-state. In either case, the administrative lessons learnt from managing – at least potentially – antagonistic people en masse traveled both ways, from the colonies into the ‘core’ and from the ‘core’ to the colonies.Footnote 45
Consequently, if the ‘Social Question’ was posited predominantly by the newly generated and discovered masses, it was asked by those concerned with the political threats they posed. On the one hand, those were the administrators and organic intellectuals of the incrementally consolidating order of nation-statehood in Europe (colonial, or not); on the other, it was the aspiring organic intellectuals of movement-driven politics, for whom that order was precarious, and preliminary at best.
It has become customary to read this sort of constellation through the lens of an ostensible juxtaposition of ‘conservatism’ vs ‘progressivism’.Footnote 46 For our purposes here, and probably most others too, this practice is spectacularly unhelpful, not least because it is only possible to make sense of the two strands of social theorising I am looking to explicate below by heavily refocusing the routine connotations of those terms. Thus, for instance, both, Marx and Comte were in recognisable ways progressive thinkers; both were, in some if not the same ways indebted to socialist thought. Likewise, both proponents as well as the strands of thinking they inspired, were, in their nineteenth-century manifestations, in broad agreement on significant aspects of methodological, epistemological, and wider philosophical issues. Marx and Comte (along with many of their European contemporaries) both articulated a strong version of the philosophy of history, allowing of ‘stages’ of development, and the supersession of more ‘primitive’ by more sophisticated forms of human coexistence and organisation. Both (though in quite different inflections, as we shall see) were committed to using a version of the dialectical method widely.Footnote 47 Both shared also, for instance, an epistemological proclivity towards evolutionary theories, which allowed either of them to set out their philosophies of history, their constitutive assumptions about pre-ordained developmental pathways, in close proximity to readings of natural history.
If they are nevertheless portrayed below as the respective stand-ins for what are argued here to be significantly and decisively divergent social-theoretic outlooks, I want to make the case that this is plausible predominantly because of the ways in which political problems are made to appear in their respective schemes.
Comte’s positivism: Social theory within the boundaries of the nation-state
The first strand of social theorising, of which Comte’s work is indicative, and which leads via maintaining strong conceptions of social evolutionism into the development of functionalism (at the hands of Durkheim), is concerned foremost with explicating the contours and prospects for order (now conceived as ‘social integration’) under the conditions of a new age. The crucial move here consists in the analytical domestication of the problem of ‘civil society’, together with the domestication of the processing of its exclusionary tendencies and effects (poverty, the ‘reserve army’). Comte’s concern was with the replacement of the old order by a new one, and with apprehending and outlining the features of the latter.Footnote 48 He set about doing this by introducing first a ‘stages’ model of principle features underpinning three distinctive phases in realising human potential. This was the developmental sequence of ‘theological’, ‘metaphysical’, and ‘positive’ stages that reflected epistemological (as well as methodological) premises. Second, a hierarchical model of knowledge established relations of supervenience based on increasing levels of complexity between different knowledge domains, which in turn reflected different aspects of reality and experience.Footnote 49 Comte distinguished between ‘celestial physics’, ‘terrestrial physics’, ‘organic physics’, and ‘social physics’, the latter conceived as the natural science of society. He considered most of the problems at the three more basic levels solved by nineteenth-century science, but argued the knowledge of social physics needed to yet be advanced to the positive stage.
For Comte, and for the discipline he was to found, Sociology, it was clear that society formed a distinct field of inquiry (characterised in particular by complexity), but equally clear that the general methods which had been successful in the natural sciences would be so in ‘social physics’ too. Against this backdrop, three distinctive themes emerging from the early conception of a science of the social are of particular interest for my argument about international social theory.
The first concerns the mode of observation, which became crucial for the scientific study of society, and which is indicative of the early emergence of functionalist leanings. Nothing illustrates this more neatly than Comte’s treatment of religion. For Comte, the institutions of religious life played particular roles in focusing, structuring, and patterning the affairs among people; the functional contribution of religious observance and consociality thus appeared cogent from the perspective of explaining certain requirements for social cohesion and/or civility (not least via the iterative re-enactment and re-affirmation of moral codes of conduct). This separation of the (functional) social purpose of an institutional complex from the ostensible reasons for its existence (‘the truth of God, and reverence’) establishes a train of thought that informs the social sciences to this day.Footnote 50
The second concerns the introduction of ideas according to which social development proceeds akin to evolutionary precepts. Comte’s analytical distinction between social statics and social dynamics provides a basic framework through which methods have become oriented towards data on the one hand, and facts on the other. The promise of ‘social statics’ is that a given social order can be apprehended in its totality as it presents itself at a particular point in time; for this, the new statistics, as well as a range of descriptive operations aimed at demonstrating the orderly interrelation between the constitutive parts of social reality would be sufficient, and the orientation would, in this sense, be towards ‘givens’ (‘data’, from Latin dare ‘to give’; facere, which gives us ‘facts’ alerts us to the epistemological principle of the modern sciences: verum-factum, ‘the proof of truth is in the act of making’).Footnote 51 The investigation of the laws of social cohesion that coordinate and integrate the constituents of social life, which are the concerns of ‘social statics’, frame the methodological requirements for gathering up ‘what is actually there’, and for showing how it constitutes an order under conditions of complexity. The investigation of the laws of social change (‘social dynamics’) provides a diachronic meta-narrative for ascertaining ‘where a particular society is at’, relative to the stages-theory of historical development.Footnote 52
Thirdly, the outlines of this scheme display at the meta-theoretical level the commitment to structuralist explanations. Being able to articulate both order as social cohesion and change as a regulative constraint in terms of law-like propositions implies that action-theoretic premises are at best epiphenomenal to social explanation. Teleological commitments thus come into view, modelled after the conception of the world as layered in terms of increasing complexity, from simple though general cosmological laws through to the laws of social organisation, which, in turn, are codependent on cognitive evolution. To see the world from the vantage point of the positive (scientific) stage allows one to recognise the world-views of previous stages as quaint, relatively under-complex, and inferior. That this inadvertently entails a bias against action-theoretic accounts will concern us further below.Footnote 53
One general upshot of this is that questions of politics are relegated comprehensively to the realm of administrative and organisational tasks.Footnote 54 The promise of sociology is that the sphere of the social becomes transparent, and comprehensively explicated in terms of its laws and mechanism. The task of politics becomes to police in accordance with established knowledge about social cohesion for the purpose of maintaining order. On the programme inaugurated by Comte, politics as understood previously (political philosophy) is overcome together with the metaphysical stage.Footnote 55 Crucially, the scheme Comte introduced consolidated the notion that the question of ‘order’ arose, was to be addressed and ultimately also to be settled within the boundaries of nation states. A problematisation of the political effects and implications of the expansion of ‘civil society’ (see earlier) is scarcely possible within this scheme.
The reconfiguration of politics and social conflict
The second strand of thinking about the social works from a different set of premises, which can be usefully associated with political theories of what were now conceived as social struggles, the most famous precursor of which is Ibn-Khaldun.Footnote 56 Ibn-Kalduhn’s unique attention to methodological problems was matched by his sensitivity to the precariousness of ‘social’ order(s), and the need to provide inclusive analyses directed deliberately against the risks of systemic bias, to which Comte succumbed. In this, Ibn-Kalduhn prefigured central preoccupations of Marx’s conflict theoretic understanding of the great transformation, and the open-endedness of the question of order, which would always constitutively depend on the political processing of conflict-constellations.Footnote 57
As I have argued elsewhere,Footnote 58 the central intellectual commitment behind the orientation to conflict and struggle is to a comprehensive critique of relations of domination, the earlier outlines of which can be discerned in G. W. F. Hegel’s writings,Footnote 59 and subsequently in Marx’s reconstructive critique of Hegel’s philosophical inconsistencies with regard to the resolution of conflict through the modern state.Footnote 60
In Hegel’s discussion of the three distinct realms of modern societal life, the political question becomes that of how the realm of negative freedoms (associated with civil society), guaranteed by the rule of law, and the mutual recognition among rights-bearing individuals and corporations as rights-bearing individuals and corporations, could be sustained as a polity. He proposed the solution that the state is to supply the system of rules, as well as the wider purposes in accordance with which the potentially destructive forces of civil society could be kept in check.Footnote 61 Marx’s argument raises against this reconfigured account of the representative and integrative role of the state the democratic alternative. Instead of expecting order to be ordained from above (whether by God or sovereign), and integration to be supplied by however benignly imagined elites, the question of political rule is ultimately to be settled by popular sovereignty. The latter is understood substantively, meaning that those subjected to the rule of law at the same time have to be able to see themselves as the authors of such law, raising once again the tensions with merely representative models of democratic rule already mentioned.Footnote 62 The absence of political channels for recourse and of an effective set of institutional arrangements for bringing grievances generated the sense of polarisation in class-struggle, which so vividly informs Engel’s studies, and Marx’s theorisation of the social relations of capitalism as a political problem.
The legacy of the French Revolution is obvious, both in terms of the political practices and the intellectual challenges it had posed for thinking about the changing order. However, in this ‘conflict theoretic’Footnote 63 understanding, a very different line of inquiry is opened compared with the positivist project, which took its orientation from very similar problems. By focusing on antagonistic relations reinforced by wealth, privilege, and the ability to make and enforce rules affecting, though not significantly affected by, the newly constituted masses, the conflict-theoretic paradigm precisely deferred the concrete conception of a sociopolitical order, which for the positivists was already there to be found and explicated. Though this deferral comes, as already suggested, with the baggage of the Philosophy of History, it has the merit of keeping the question of the totality of relational constellations relevant to the reproduction of political order open. The positivist correlate, on the other hand, could be co-opted without obvious contradictions to the highly problematic idea that the concrete empirical wholes facilitating the reproduction of ‘order’ were nation-states. The conflict-theoretic tradition – despite its own severe limitationsFootnote 64 – at the very least provided a substantive analytical account of the great transformation, which reached through this architecture of ‘domestic’ vs ‘international’ societies’ that has remained attached to what is today criticised as methodological territorialism, and discrete unit black-boxing.Footnote 65
The two strands and their legacies: Towards the ‘social turn’ in IR
In the process of reconstructing two different strands of approaching the Social Question, I have accentuated crucial differences between two broad approaches with incompatible meta-theoretical outlooks. The dialectical imaginationFootnote 66 underpinning conflict-theoretic approaches conceives of the problem of order in terms of an iterative processing of antagonistic relations, based on the persistence of challenges to heteronomies extended through practices of domination, exclusion, and unequal allocation of resources and privileges. In this approach, to understand contemporary constellations as historically produced and relationally contingent, means to include in the scheme the natural sciences, as both circumscribed achievements and concrete practices with (sometimes highly) problematic implications for the processes of ‘societalisation’ to which they contribute. To glean what this is aimed at, consider the argument already advanced by Hegel that poverty is an inevitable correlate of the modern expansion of the realm of formal freedoms.Footnote 67 Also consider the scale, problems, and sheer institutional incommensurability attached to ecological problems and their ‘governance’, whether climate change, biodiversity, or food security. In all these contexts, the rules of societalisation, the epistemic authority of claims to scientific knowledge, and the implications of the application of technological practical knowledge are turning increasingly conflictual, and testify to deep-seated paradoxes.Footnote 68 This resonates with Bartelson’s critique in this Forum, through which he raises the specific challenges posed by a constitutively assumed split between ‘nature’ and ‘society’.Footnote 69 Although Hegelian-Marxist dialectics comprises its own problematic attachments to what Bartelson in this issue describes as the rather provincial idiom of Eurocentric modernity, it considers the identification of ‘nature’ with what is known about it in scientific terms to be a fallacy. This particular trope continues into the critical theory of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, which explicates at one level the effects of treating others as objects in the same way as the instrumentalising logic of scientific inquiry permits the treatment of objects in the world.Footnote 70
In the positivist strand, we saw the tendency towards treating the (natural) sciences as an epistemic model for the social sciences, with the commitment towards law-like statements confirmed in the first instance by the consolidation of social statistics. Subsequently, towards the turn of the century, the trends set in motion by Comte to locate ‘social physics’ relative to ‘biology’ consolidated in the programmatic development of functionalist sociology.Footnote 71 This research programme, which conceives of society in analogy with a complex ‘organism’, has had a series of reiterations, particularly in the works of Robert Merton and Talcott Parsons, but lately also in the post-Darwinian shift towards ‘complex adaptive systems’ as an analytic realigning organism with more contingency inflected approaches.Footnote 72 Through various stages of reception of instances of their work, it has also become the dominant social theoretic influence in IR. It is well known that Parsonian thought played a crucial role in shaping Kenneth Waltz’s formulation of neorealism,Footnote 73 and as I have argued elsewhere, also significantly framed the avowedly critical response to it by mainstream constructivism.Footnote 74 Consider the notion of an international system. Classical realists had provided the consolidation of the notion of an international realm constituted of formally equal nation states. Insofar as theirs is a conflict-theoretic orientation, relevant conflicts occurred between territorial units conceived in terms of a fit between state, nation, and society, producing a clear domestic-international delineation. We have seen that this conception is resultative, rather than generative (or, genealogical). Not only does it detract from the relevance of ongoing state-formation, as well as the capacity to give an account of the significant forces underpinning the latter, it renders, for instance, the reconstruction of colonial political relations theoretically exogenous; alternatively, it forces implausible constructions such as ‘latent universal nation-statehood’. Realism also screens out the spread of the ‘realm of civil society’, which, as we have seen, reaches through the political architecture described on the basis of methodological nationalist premises, with socially transformative effects, and correlating political problems and conflict-potentials. The main disagreement neorealism had with classical realism was that it lacked a (theoretically and scientifically) robust notion of the international system. An essentially Parsonian conception underpinned Waltz’s Politics.Footnote 75 The culture of the international system (in Parsons’ AGIL scheme the ‘Latency’ function which supplies integrative inventories such as ‘values’) becomes, in Waltz’s version, anarchy. The latter is the resource, which all (relevant) actors in the international system draw on, and which hence ‘binds them together’, even in antagonism. Recast in Comtean terms, this gives us the static elements of the ‘social physics’.
The dynamic elements (making room for notions of ‘facts’ among the ‘givens’) are subsequently provided by the critique coming through the social theoretic wing of the constructivist turn.Footnote 76 According to this version, without altering the integrative function of anarchy, actors in the international system can ‘play by’ different modulations of that cultural resource (‘anarchy is what states make of it’), prompting research programmes directed, once more, at essentially ‘evolutionary’ understandings of international systemic change. The heterodoxies attaching to the corresponding notions that states both have identities and can change them then makes some room for non-state actors to play their role in the reproduction of the international system as incremental ‘world society’.Footnote 77 World Society represents the ‘whole’, and the frictions among and between its various parts are the dynamic forces driving both deeper integration and further differentiation.
Such functionalist social theorising has held on tightly to its links with biology as already suggested by Comte. Surely aided by the resonance with older metaphors and tropes through which the association of the ‘body politic’ with a biological organism had been popularised functionalist thought analogised ‘society’ with just such an organism, whose constituent parts were defined in terms of their contribution to maintaining the ‘whole’. This very specific way of construing a relationship between the ‘whole’ and its ‘parts’ reappears in IR theory’s conception of ‘international society’.Footnote 78 There is (in concurrence with Owens’s analysis of the ‘social’ in this forum and elsewhere) really no room for political questions in this scheme: Conflict registers as ‘deviance’, which in turn is recaptured by further social differentiation and reintegration.Footnote 79
The analogy with biological organicism is as instructive, as its implications are problematic. To conceive of ‘parts’ in terms of the contribution they make to maintaining the ‘orderly whole’ (to reproduce recognisably stable patterns), that ‘whole’ has to be already known, given and identified in its essential features. To deliver this, the historicity of the international is conceived (as was the case in nineteenth-century positivism) along a logic of stages, the latest of which has now allegedly delivered the ‘universalisation’ of an international order based on nation-states. Not only does this identification of the whole in terms of its parts (and vice versa) beg the question of those political forms not contained within its terms (such as indigenous peoples’ struggles);Footnote 80 it also once again precludes any serious consideration of salient differences among, between, and across ‘units’, as well as questions of ongoing state-formation and (sociopolitical) transformation. In addition, it forgoes analytically (and, perhaps more importantly, politically!) questions regarding ongoing shifts in social and political configurations, and the dynamics through which they are driven. In keeping with the organicist temper, the identification of disturbances to the reproduction of the orderly whole is consequently thought of in analogy with infectious disease. In the social sciences, however, this inevitably incurs the problem of having to provide normative supplements by which deviancy can be justified vis-à-vis what is right and proper (that is, contributes to the reproduction of stable order).
With a more systematic turn to social theorising in the context of the constructivist challenge to the intellectual hegemony of the Neo-Neo synthesis, a door was potentially opened towards a comprehensive engagement with the legacy and problems of the conflict-theoretic tradition. An advantage of this would have been that problems of integration into ‘society’, shot through with transnational relational lineages, would have come into view as political problems. Instead, the social theoretic imaginary, which has underpinned mainstream constructivism, has remained much closer to the Comtean project than many of its proponents would probably assume. Consider constructivists’ own reflections on the silences and/or omissions of their research programme. Here, I have only room to consider three vignettes, and indicate the ways in which they are linked to the problematic attachment to the order-oriented, Comtean sociological approach.
The first concerns the problem of normative theory, identified by contributors to constructivist IR theory consistently as an area of further concern.Footnote 81 Constructivist success in demonstrating the efficacy and salience of norms in international relations leads on to questions over whether established, enacted, and/or enforced norms are actually good, desirable, justifiable, or defensible on other grounds. The encounter with political philosophy which is conjured up by this short-coming requires analytical and theoretical readjustments away from constitutive assumptions about ‘fact-value’ distinctions, for which the constructivist project in its current form seems to have no adequate conceptual inventory.Footnote 82 When constructivists treat norms as action-constraining and enabling social facts (backed by force or commitments), rather than relationally inflected discursive practices intrinsically dependent on justification(s) and/or contestation, they simply short-circuit the questions of intersubjective intrinsically relational logics that render normative discourses politically potent, transformative, and politically interesting. Comte’s project of a comprehensive ‘social physics’ shines through here in the alignment of the study of ‘norms’ with naturalist premises, in the shunting off of political philosophy into the realm of the metaphysical (or, equally often, mere preferences), and in the construal of social facts as objective (enabling) constraints on actors.Footnote 83
The second vignette concerns the continuing paucity of action-theoretically oriented research in IR. Noted, among others, by Kathryn Sikkink,Footnote 84 the relative absence of explicitly action-theoretic workFootnote 85 should be a surprise given that the constructivist project was originally set out in terms that would suggest a much wider scope for agential explanatory understanding. Indeed, some versions of IR constructivismFootnote 86 are clearly more amenable to action-theoretic frames. By and large, though, constructivist scholarship in IR has stuck much more closely to the perspective of the reproduction of international order, and focused on the adaptive pressures (state-)actors face in order to be recognised and enabled as successful players. This reflects the discussion of the tendency to derive explanations regarding the ‘parts’ from a salient, though mostly disarticulated notion of the ‘whole’. Even in schemes as ostensibly oriented to new actors in international relations such as Margaret Keck and Sikkink’s Activists Across Borders,Footnote 87 the contribution agents make is, in the final analysis, read in functionalist terms. That is, as a form of ‘messaging’ subsequently processed by the international system, the vanguard of which is defined in terms of those who can successfully mainstream a new norm into the institutional fabric of international society. A more consistently action-theoretic frame would move the social theoretic project in IR towards the political register of how peoples in both concert and contest make their world, always under the proviso that it could, and perhaps should, be made otherwise.Footnote 88 Under such an approach, it would be feasible to interrogate the conditions and possibilities of bringing together diverse preconceptions about order, legitimacy, justice, and the use of force, without the need to read them through the lens of a settled, essentially resultative conception of international ‘society’.
The final vignette echoes points raised above concerning the assumptions about staged progress and evolutionary change, which Comte introduced comprehensively as part of the sociological imagination and which continue to reverberate in contemporary constructivist projects. The stages-model has entailed too many obvious continuities, particularly in development policy and politics to remain insulated any longer from serious critical attention. This does not mean that the latter has been sufficient, or sufficiently mainstreamed at this time.Footnote 89 To conceive of ‘social’ change in evolutionary terms, likewise, entails short-cuts with crypto-normative implications. This is not unlike attempts to link understandings of politics and social life to the disclosive power of theoretical physics and cosmology.Footnote 90 The reinscription of political events and upheavals into grand naturalist schemes premised on the very longue durée flattens politics and history. In the light of the real possibility of anthropogenic ecological disaster the progressivist tempers associated with naturalist conceptions of historical change and unreconstructed imaginaries about ‘increasing complexity’, or evolutionary advances in what is assumed to be generally either ‘the right direction’ or inevitable, ought to be just as suspect today as the thick versions of the philosophy of history with which colonial domination was justified in the nineteenth century became during the twentieth century.
Constructivists’ insistence on theoretical and methodological pluralism Footnote 91 is taking place in a much more restrictive register than its proponents believe. This has significant consequences for the political analysis of formations of international and transnational authorities, and the questions of legitimacy and legitimation constructivists are ostensibly interested in. By operating from the premises of an over-institutionalised conception of political contestation, constructivism misconstrues the substantive grammar and implications of political contestations related to detrimental effects of ‘social integration’. As James Scott has shown, the order established by the political production of nation states is often precisely the problem for some people;Footnote 92 the relentless march to greater efficiency and prosperity involves choices, which separate populations from their livelihoods, not infrequently by force;Footnote 93 and the readiness to accept the need to sacrifice some in efforts to consolidate the standards of ‘civilisation’ assumed to be set by liberal democracies through brute force has political implications, which cannot be deferred to the envisaged orderly integration afterwards.Footnote 94
For IR theory, the turn to ‘the social’ involves an increase in complexity, requiring more factors, perspectives, and interactions to be considered than in the tidier setting of studying the interactions of ideal-typical Weberian nation-states, while assuming those not fitting such types to eventually be on a convergence course. In the context of the disruption of the latter scheme brought on by ‘complexity’, the two strands of thinking I have outlined offer distinctively different disclosive possibilities. The capacity to understand conflicts and contradictions as political challenges and possibilities, rather than as pathogens in open systems’ capacity to adapt and evolve, marks out the conflict theoretic approach against the naturalism of much social theorising in contemporary IR.
Conclusion
I have argued that there are at least two distinctive idioms in which social theorising has entered into IR theory, and that both have important and problematic linkages with central transformations, conceptual and historical, which underpinned the formation of thinking about ‘the social’ in the nineteenth century. I have juxtaposed the positivist project inaugurated by Comte, with a conflict-theoretic one, whose epigone became Marx, not least with the intention to demonstrate that of the two strands the latter operates with a political understanding of social strife, and the dialectics of ‘social integration’, which the former merely resolves from the position of an already posited conception of ‘wholes’, and their constitutive parts. Throughout, I have parsed the conflict theoretic tradition away from naturalist premises, in ways, which some readers might find either surprising, or positively wrong. It is, for instance, less than clear whether a sociologist like Randall Collins would agree with the line I take in this regard; likewise, it is incumbent to acknowledge that a great many historical materialists do embrace a close integration of the social sciences with the sciences of nature. If I insisted here in stressing the anti-naturalist proclivities in the dialectical tradition, I did so in order to highlight that the latter provides resources for working through social and political conflicts and institutions in ways only awkwardly or unconvincingly rendered in accounts based on the ontological, epistemological, and methodological premises of apprehending and manipulating material objects.Footnote 95 That within the broad imaginary established by the modern scientific division of labour any critical reflection of scientific practices depends on bringing this point to bear on them, as was already thematised by Edmund Husserl,Footnote 96 should have become a great deal more plausible (and urgent) in the context of the rise of ‘sociogenic’ environmental crises with trans-politic and global implications.
I am in agreement with Owens’s argument in this Forum that the turn to ‘the social’ entailed a significant turn away from questions of politics and the political. In earlier work, Owens’s reconstruction of Arendt’s separation of the realms of politics and ‘the social’, the distinction between the public and the private spheres recuperates an important critical register particularly vis-à-vis practices invested in the authorisation of violence in support of ‘security’ and counterinsurgency.Footnote 97 However in my reading, the ‘rise of the social’ also signals issues of political significance. While Owens is surely right to stress that the emphasis in critical theory as it emerged in a broadly Hegelian-Marxist vein was – at least initially – firmly on the analysis of the social transformations inaugurated by the rise of the ‘project of modernity’, there is a sustained interest in the political conditions, implications, and possibilities throughout, which in my reading render her claims regarding the entrapment of critical theory in an ontologised monism of the ‘the social’ problematic.Footnote 98 The central conceptual register of the critical theoretic tradition I have in view here is lodged firmly in the critique of domination; though I have argued above that all this needs to be, today, provincialised, too, the possibilities for political analysis in this register to establish connectivity with other approaches to political thought are quite radically different from what I have glossed as naturalist approaches, which are in turn invested much more firmly (and less reflectively!) in the reproduction of quite specific institutional imaginaries. Nevertheless, I suspect that our disagreements on this issue would turn out to be fewer and less significant than they may seem, if I supplemented the argument I made here about two distinctly different strands in social theorising with a more textured reconstruction of the ways in which both have developed up until the present. Such a reconstruction would, in the case of critical theory, clarify that some affinities exist between conceptions of politics there, and Owens’s Arendtian leanings; the pervasive discontent with ‘normal’ (and ‘normalising’) sociology particularly in the Frankfurt School tradition could then be seen to quite comprehensively refute the notion that a conception of totality operates as the standard of critique in the form of an ‘ontology of the social’ in such a way as to cancel out any more genuine conception of the political.
As I argued above, in the conflict-theoretic understanding, social ‘issues’ may index a move in the registers and institutional settings of politics and political contestation, rather than the latter’s comprehensive evacuation. In good dialectical fashion, and perhaps also echoing Robert Cox’s classic adage of critical theorising, this also serves as a reminder that what is rendered by some in some context as a social problem may well be on closer inspection an interested side-stepping of genuinely political problems.Footnote 99 The social world, on this reading, is constituted politically, echoing the indication in my reconstruction above that the conflicts entailed in enforced social transformation implicate political arrangements and institutions. Nevertheless, this leaves me in agreement with Owens’s critique of merely ‘social’ modes of theorising, insofar as the latter side-step such conflicts, or preclude their analytical processing by meta-theoretical feat.
I have already signalled my agreement with Bartelson’s thematisation of the modern ‘nature/culture’ differentiation, which he cogently traces through to the establishment of ‘society’ as a domain of its own, generative of its own knowledges divorced from ‘material’ circumstances. The constitutive problems were in some outlines already considered by Marx and Engels, pointing to the persistence of the dialectical imagination as a critique of contemporary dominant practices.Footnote 100 Nevertheless, and in line with Bartelson’s conclusion, the puzzle of the separation of ‘society’ and ‘nature’, which is simultaneously entirely implausible, and pervasively hegemonic in Western thought, is perhaps best addressed by following his advice to work to translate the questions of those, whose cosmological and epistemic commitments do not reflect our own. This line of inquiry provides additional support for my problematisation of the naturalist temper within which so much of the constructivist sociological project in IR theory operates. Since it makes clear that nature, too, cannot be merely apprehended in its ‘totality’ within the epistemic confines of what we have come to know as the natural sciences, it underlines the point also that it is erroneous to forgo political analysis in favour of naturalistically conceived social wholes.
