Western civilisation?
When asked by a reporter what he thought of Western civilisation, Mahatma Gandhi is said to have replied that ‘it would be a good idea’. Apocryphal or not, Gandhi’s remark speaks to the ‘dark side’ of Western civilisation: its histories of imperialism and colonialism, authoritarianism and racism, genocide and mass warfare. In the contemporary world, these histories are under close scrutiny, both in the academy and the wider world. The former can be seen in the array of texts, from global history to postcolonial scholarship, which examines the interrelationship between the ‘rise of the West’ and the ‘decline of the Rest’.Footnote 1 The latter can be seen in the malaise that infuses Western international order, whether this is found in its forums of governance, deepening levels of inequality, or in increasingly polarised debates over immigration, race, and sexuality. A transnational movement of anti-establishment groups, present in much of Europe and North America, is but one barometer of a general atmosphere of discontent that permeates Western international order.
It is a brave individual who marches into this landscape arguing that the contemporary Western states-system is a singularly civilised order, the inheritor of advances made over several centuries. Yet this is the path chosen by Andrew Linklater. His trilogy of interventions into the shape and trajectory of modern international order (two books published; one to come) is nothing if not ‘untimely’ in that it cuts against the grain of trends within contemporary world politics, while simultaneously speaking to an earlier tradition of scholarship, one associated with Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler, as well as the two figures on which Linklater most heavily draws: Norbert Elias and Martin Wight. Much of this untimeliness is welcome – Linklater has written a big book (literally as well as figuratively), one that seeks to capture the principal contours of Western historical development from ancient Greece to the present day. It is that most unfashionable of contemporary academic texts: a grand narrative, so grand as to be bordering on the monumental in its scale and ambition. The scholarship that informs Violence and Civilization is deep and erudite, and its argument is arresting. It is a book that many will – and should – engage.
My goal in this article is to examine the historical sociology that informs Violence and Civilization – in other words, to assess the form and content of Linklater’s argument about historical development. I do so in three sections. First, I evaluate the conceptual, analytical, and theoretical apparatus on which Linklater’s argument rests, paying particular attention to his use of Elias and Wight. My argument is that Linklater’s reliance on Elias and Wight generates a number of problems, ranging from the former’s concern with fundamental human drives to the latter’s view of culture as unitary and bounded. At the same time, Linklater’s fusion of Elias and Wight is unsteady – where the former is relational, the latter is substantialist. The result is an unstable theoretical scaffolding. The second section explores the historical arguments presented in the book, particularly that concerning the ‘when’, ‘where’, and ‘how’ of modern international order. On the ‘when’: it was not fifteenth-century Europe but the nineteenth-century ‘global transformation’ that fuelled major changes to the character of violence. On the ‘where’: these changes emerged not from dynamics internal to Europe, but from transboundary interactions. And on the ‘how’: these developments were caused by a range of dynamics, particularly capitalism, which receive little or no attention in Linklater’s book. If the first part of the article questions the theoretical anchors upon which Violence and Civilization rests, the second section queries the book’s historical interpretation. A brief conclusion reflects on what should be expected from the next volume of Linklater’s ‘untimely’ work.
Theorising violence and civilisation
The central aim of Violence and Civilization is to ‘analyse the extent to which agreed standards of self-restraint that were linked with shared conceptions of civility or civilisation have shaped the development of Western states-systems’.Footnote 2 This is followed by a supplementary, if related, question: ‘what is distinctive about “international ethics” in the modern period?’Footnote 3 As with his previous work on harm,Footnote 4 Linklater seeks to answer these questions through a ‘higher level synthesis’ that blends insights from the work of Norbert Elias and Martin Wight.Footnote 5 From Elias comes the book’s principal motif: the interplay between civilising (‘integrative’) and decivilising (‘disintegrative’) processes; from Wight a focus on how these dynamics take place in international states-systems.Footnote 6
Linklater argues that there has been a decline in interpersonal violence – and a concomitant rise in levels of civility – over several centuries. The key concepts used to track this decline are: ‘we-feeling’, by which Linklater means collective attachment to a ‘survival unit’ (such as the state); ‘we-I balance’, understood as the extent to which individual demands are recognised by groups; and ‘social standards of self-restraint’, which captures processes ranging from ‘conscience formation’ to ‘collective learning’.Footnote 7 For Linklater, contemporary Western societies have a stronger sense of ‘we-feeling’ than previous states-systems, a superior ‘we-I’ balance, and a higher ‘standard of self-restraint’. The ‘preconditions’ for this ethical judiciousness are multiple, ranging from increasing levels of interdependence to a heightened aversion to pain and suffering.Footnote 8 As a result, the contemporary states-system is home to two types of ‘harm convention’: ‘international harm conventions’, which preserve order between states; and ‘cosmopolitan harm conventions’, which protect individuals and non-state entities.Footnote 9 Examples of the former include practices of non-intervention; examples of the latter range from the establishment of a global human rights regime to the development of rules surrounding warfare. Linklater tracks the progress of ethical restraints on violence from the relatively unfettered environment of the Hellenic states-system to the relative ‘taming’ of unnecessary suffering in the contemporary world.Footnote 10
There are several things to say about the conceptual, analytical, and theoretical apparatus that Linklater constructs. First, it is not clear that the ‘higher level synthesis’ between Elias and Wight is robust. As Linklater notes, Elias is a processual sociologist – his principal contribution is the notion of ‘figuration’, a vehicle for moving beyond the ‘conceptual polarization’ that bifurcates individuals and societies, and the dividing lines between an ‘inner self’ and the ‘outside world’.Footnote 11 For Elias, social orders are made up of multiple, overlapping figurations, by which he means networks of relationships, from families to states. Elias sees social orders as made up of ‘people among other people’, while individuals are ‘one among others’.Footnote 12 Figurations, Elias argues, are drawn both from these relationships (or ‘interdependencies’) and ‘human personality structures’: their ‘affect controls’, psychological attachments, forms of recognition, capacities to feel shame, guilt, pity, compassion, and so on.Footnote 13
This is a long way from Wight’s apparatus, which is concerned with the ways in which a common culture is a requirement of an enduring states-system. Wight states this point baldly: ‘a state system presupposes a common culture’.Footnote 14 Far from a figurational conceptualisation of interacting relationships, Wight’s international orders contain fixed attributes. Chief among these fixed attributes is culture, which Wight sees as bounded and unitary.Footnote 15 In other words, while Elias’s theoretical commitments are ‘relational’, Wight’s are ‘substantialist’.Footnote 16 The former holds that social formations are contextually bound, historically situated configurations of events and experiences. In keeping with this orientation, Elias’s figurations are not static entities with timeless properties, but ‘on the move’ – they are ‘entities-in-motion’ that are made in and through time.Footnote 17 In contrast, Wight’s position is substantialist. He posits coherent and durable entities (states-systems) that possess elemental properties (cultural unity). Far from seeing these characteristics, or indeed international relations in general, as contextual, Wight argues that world politics is a ‘realm of recurrence and repetition’ in which progress is, at best, limited.Footnote 18 In Wight’s world, history is circular rather than, as for Elias, directional, or at least dynamic.Footnote 19 The meta-commitments deployed by Elias and Wight could scarcely be more different: where the former is relational, the latter is substantialist; where the former sees history as on the move, the latter sees it as repetitive; and where the former is concerned with time and place specificity, the latter sees states-systems as transhistorical entities that contain timeless properties. Any synthesis that joins these meta-commitments must address these incompatibilities.
If the synthesis between Elias and Wight is uncertain, so too is the way in which Linklater adopts aspects of their individual theoretical apparatuses. The problems with Elias start with issues of scalability. As Linklater notes,Footnote 20 Elias made few attempts to discuss civilising processes beyond state borders. Rather, his interest was in how distinct state-society figurations generated distinct understandings of civility – his contribution sits firmly within the tradition of comparative rather than international historical sociology. Similarly, Elias assumes that the borders of the nation-state both map onto the boundaries of the nation-state and form a natural unit of analysis.Footnote 21 This ‘methodological nationalism’ means that Elias does not – indeed, cannot – theorise, even if he can – and does – describe, the interactions across borders that play a crucial role in civilising processes: the emulation of rituals, including manners, from more ‘advanced’ peoples, the role of transboundary conflict in developing ideas of just conduct, the fusions of cosmologies that regulate behaviour, the role of international non-governmental organisations in framing ideas of empathy, pity, shame, and more.Footnote 22 I return to this point below.
The second concern with Elias – and, as a result, with Linklater – is the attempt to extract explanatory content from ‘psychogenetic’ origins: ‘emotional control’, ‘standards of self-restraint’, ‘attitudes to pain and suffering’, and so on.Footnote 23 As noted above, for Linklater, there has been a shift from the ‘aggressive impulses’ that marked historical states-systems in the West to the impersonal, ‘mechanized struggle’ of the modern world.Footnote 24 This point is well made. There is something novel about attitudes and practices of violence in much of the contemporary West. Violence is no longer primarily experienced by many Western publics as immediate, intentional, and physical, but often hidden from public view by the rise of states and other collective bodies, which administer and bureaucratise violence through systems of ‘coercive control’: surveillance, policing, incarceration, and more.Footnote 25 This, in turn, reflects a changing understanding of violence – interpersonal, corporeal violence has been widely delegitimised. Non-lethal weapons programmes focus on injuring, depriving, and tormenting, but not killing, their enemies.Footnote 26 ‘Surgical strikes’ seek to sanitise death and minimise civilian casualties. Huge anti-war marches speak to far-reaching normative debates about the appropriate use of violence. Because of the detachment – what Linklater calls ‘critical self-distancing’ – of many people from immediate interpersonal violence in the contemporary West, a set of ethical concerns around the practice of violence can be said to have emerged.Footnote 27
Linklater, therefore, is onto something. But it is not clear that he is onto this ‘something’ for the right reasons. In particular, claims about international ethics are difficult to link to psychogenetic influences. Leaving aside claims about who is the ‘we’ in concepts such as the ‘we-I’ balance, much interpersonal conflict takes place within ‘we’ groups, such as families. The same is true of ‘we’ groups internationally, whether these groups are associated with religions (Sunni and Shia, Catholic and Protestant), regions (consider Europe’s many centuries of inter-state wars), or political ideologies (Marxist and Anarchist). While it is clear that core attachments and capabilities play a role in how individuals perceive and act in the world, it is less clear that these factors significantly affect international processes. After all, human beings are, in comparison to other animals, not well suited to violence – children are defenceless for many years, while adults do not possess the teeth, claws, jaws, horns, venom, speed, smell, or eyesight of many other animals.Footnote 28 Rather than being ‘wired for violence’,Footnote 29 it may be that the relative weakness of human’s capacity for violence has prompted their development in other spheres, particularly cognition. As with other micro-dynamics, psychogenetic factors leave an indeterminate legacy at higher levels of social aggregation.
At the same time, it is not clear that, even with recent declines in interpersonal violence,Footnote 30 the ‘self-restraint’ of bureaucratic violence should be preferred to the more direct impulses of premodern ‘warriors’. The ‘weapons lethality index’ ranks a longbow at 34, an eighteenth-century flintlock musket at 150, a First World War rifle at 13,000, and a Second World War machine gun at 68,000.Footnote 31 On this scale, an eighteenth-century 12-pounder field gun ranks 4,000, a modern howitzer 3,500,000, a heavy bomber with conventional weapons 210,000,000, and an ICBM with a one megaton nuclear warhead 210,000,000,000. As interpersonal violence has declined in some parts of the world, weapons have become increasingly destructive. And the self-distancing that accompanies these weapons has generated a new rationality of killing, from the air campaigns against major cities in the Second World War to contemporary drone warfare, robotics, and precision targeting.
At times, as Linklater notes, the destructive power of modern weapons has led to their containment – agreements over chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons are cases in point.Footnote 32 But the twentieth century was the bloodiest in human history – its casualties from war and associated processes can be measured in the hundreds of millions.Footnote 33 It was also the century that saw a major increase in the speed of killing. In the Battle of the Somme during the First World War, over 50,000 British soldiers lost their lives in a single day. By the latter stages of the Second World War, the Nazi killing machine at Auschwitz had the capacity to gas and cremate over 20,000 Jews every day.Footnote 34 In the early part of the twenty-first century, up to one million Rwandans were killed in a genocide that lasted only 100 days. Today’s weapons of mass destruction make the spectre of a global ‘elimination contest’ immediate – the organisational and technological capacity for violence has never been greater.Footnote 35 It is worth remembering that the two largest employers in the world are the US Defence Department and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.Footnote 36 The threat of global annihilation is ever present, if made distant from everyday life through bureaucratic rationality, technologies of war, and a detachment between operator and target. I come back to this point in the following section.
Similarly, a ‘pacified’ environment is not one that necessarily denotes civilising processes.Footnote 37 Elias saw stable monopolies of power as central to security and, thereby, to civilising processes. Linklater extends this point to the international realm. Given that civilising processes might, at times, require contestation (in the form of just war and just revolt, or through the actions of social movements), it is not clear how much stability is required for there to be a balance between security and civilisational processes. It is similarly unclear what happens when security trumps civilising processes. Very often, stability comes at a price. In the twentieth century, authoritarian regimes from apartheid South Africa to the Khmer Rouge used their monopolies of force to commit egregious acts of violence. Such policies had their roots in nineteenth-century ‘invasions of social life’, in which states sought to extend their control over populations through a range of measures, ranging from the advent of policing as a formal institution to regular censuses.Footnote 38 The despotic capabilities of states grew commensurately with these encroachments. In Britain, those out of work were forced into workhouses, where they were kept in abject conditions and paid a pittance for their labour. Orphanages and prisons became additional sources of bonded labour. Disciplinary forms of power, from surveillance to incarceration, have undergone a major expansion in recent decades. All around the world, there has been a coercive pacification of domestic publics – not for nothing did Charles Tilly call modern states ‘protection rackets’.Footnote 39 These histories have little place in Linklater’s account. Yet it is not possible to tell a story of power monopolies without them.
The third issue with the conceptual and analytical tools that Linklater appropriates from Elias is the latter’s focus on court society as the repository of civility.Footnote 40 For Elias, civility is rooted in the discourses, practices, and sociability of court society.Footnote 41 So it is for Linklater – in Violence and Civilization, psychogenetic changes take place within a ‘ruling strata’ before being internalised by the wider population.Footnote 42 This view limits historical agency to elite, white, European men. It is not a convincing argument. If the supposed source for this agency lies in the patrimonial orders that were common features of the Western states-system, it ignores the central role played by elite women in sustaining these orders.Footnote 43 Beyond elites, it omits the ways in which publics have played a central role in civilising processes, whether through radical action or by initiating reform processes. History does not flow in one direction, whether from men to women, or from elites to mass publics.
Nor does history flow from ‘the West’ to ‘the Rest’. Linklater largely replicates early English School accounts of the expansion of international society,Footnote 44 arguing that the Western states-system diffused from Europe to other parts of the world. But history presents a much messier picture of incorporation and adaptation.Footnote 45 In their interactions with European polities, the Ottomans and Chinese thought of themselves as the culturally and politically superior party. In Africa and the Americas, Europeans engaged in diplomacy and made treaties with local peoples, chiefdoms, and kingdoms. When they moved into the Indian Ocean, the Europeans found a well-developed international society in place.Footnote 46 Grotius’s seventeenth-century argument that Europeans should accept the principle that the high seas constituted international territory was based on the precedent provided by the Indian Ocean states-system,Footnote 47 just as trade between Britain and India helped to form Adam Smith’s ideas about free trade,Footnote 48 and utilitarian thought was forged in the imperial encounters between Britain and the subcontinent.Footnote 49 Any narrative of Western civilisational resources diffusing outwards misses the back-and-forth of these interactions, and the ways in which they spurred historical development. History is not unidirectional, but an interactive series of events and experiences that generate multilinear developmental pathways.Footnote 50
The problems with Linklater’s use of Wight are also multiple, if stemming from a common cause: the requirement that international orders contain a high degree of cultural unity. Linklater accepts Wight’s notion that states-systems can be understood as a ‘bounded cultural region’.Footnote 51 However, culture is not a coherent whole that is unified and bounded, but a diverse web of symbols and rituals that are negotiated, contested, and subject to diverse interpretations.Footnote 52 International orders regulate cultural diversity by authorising forms of cultural difference and tying these to political units: states and religion, empires and civilisation, etc.Footnote 53 In other words, cultural heterogeneity is not the mark of an unsuccessful international order, but a requirement of international order. Given this, it is no surprise that many of the most durable historical international orders have been culturally plural and geographically dispersed. The British imperial web, for example, encompassed China, Argentina, Fiji, Australia, Afghanistan, India, Egypt, Nigeria, Cyprus, and Ireland. This scattered geography was not maintained through the enforcement of cultural similitude, but through symbolic amalgams that regulated unequal recognition. The legal structure of the British Empire was a layered, ‘lumpy’ fusion of imperial and indigenous.Footnote 54 The penal code of the Raj blended British and Indian jurisprudence, and it was this blend that was exported to many of Britain’s imperial territories in South East Asia and East Africa.Footnote 55 Where British imperialism was successful, it relied on establishing close partnerships with local power brokers: the Straits Chinese, the Krio of West Africa, the ‘teak-wallahs’ of Burma, the Chettiar of South India, and others.Footnote 56
Although some Victorians favoured an Anglo-American alliance premised on cultural homogeneity, largely as a vehicle for maintaining white supremacy,Footnote 57 it was not shared culture, but a collective belief that it paid to make the system work (what Adam Watson calls ‘raison de système’) that served as the building block of modern international order.Footnote 58 The development of human rights, something central to Linklater’s argument, serves as an illustration. Contrary to Linklater’s claims, the contemporary human rights regime is not a Western invention that has been subsequently exported around the world, but the product of negotiations between northern and southern states in which histories of race and decolonisation have played leading roles.Footnote 59 In the contemporary world, it is the pluralist promise of the G20 and related institutions, not ideas such as the ‘Concert of Democracies’, a notion emanating from a commitment to Western cultural homogeneity, which provide the surest prospects of generating enduring order.Footnote 60
The ‘when’, ‘where’, and ‘how’ of modern international order
If the theoretical foundations of Violence and Civilization are insecure, so too are the book’s historical arguments. Implicit in Linklater’s historical narrative are three commitments. The first is temporal: that there is a disjuncture between ‘modern’ and ‘premodern’ eras when it comes to levels of civility and violence. The second is spatial: that there is something distinctive about Western states-systems and their development of harm conventions. The third is causal: that the primary dynamic that lies behind decreasing levels of interpersonal violence is self-restraint and its relationship to broader social forces, particularly increasing levels of interdependence. All three assumptions are questionable.
When
For Linklater, each states-system varies in its civility quotient. In the Hellenic states-system, despite relatively low civility metrics, hoplites practised ‘aristocratic principles of restraint’.Footnote 61 In the contemporary world, despite high levels of we-feeling and standards of self-restraint, civilising processes represent an ‘unfinished transition’.Footnote 62 Notwithstanding these qualifications, Violence and Civilization contains a central narrative in which the Western states-systems has travelled from a predominantly decivilised past to a predominantly civilised present, a journey, as Linklater puts it, from ‘taming the warriors’ to ‘taming the imperialists’ and, more recently, ‘taming the sovereigns’.Footnote 63 Linklater argues, following Wight and Elias, that the key rupture within the ‘long curve of European social and political development’ took place in the fifteenth century.Footnote 64 Although, for Linklater, there is an initial break around 1300 ce from disintegrated, decivilising societies to interconnected polities that begin to restrain violence,Footnote 65 it is Renaissance Italy that witnessed ‘a revolution in the history of the Western states-system that would alter the whole course of human development’. ‘Modern standpoints on violence and civilization’, Linklater writes, ‘first emerged in the Italian city-state system’.Footnote 66
The problem is that modern international order did not emerge in fifteenth-century Italy. For many centuries after this, life for most Europeans remained brutish and short, while levels of interdependence were minimal. Although commodity chains established long-distance trading networks in luxury goods that connected entrepôts such as Malacca, Samarkand, Hangzhou, Genoa, and the Malabar Coast, the vast majority of economic activities took part in ‘microeconomies’ with a twenty-mile circumference until well into the nineteenth century.Footnote 67 It was the revolutions in interaction capacity generated by the railways, steamships, and telegraph that brought the world into some kind of global commons. Although this process had long-roots and multiple points of origin, it was only during the nineteenth century that a cluster of deep changes occurred together, on a global scale, and within a relatively short time span.Footnote 68 Similarly, it is difficult to see how psychogenetic processes could have spread very far without mass travel or widespread media, developments that, once again, are found most prominently in the nineteenth century. It was during this period that industrial capitalism, imperialism, state formation, and novel political ideologies fashioned a world that was deeply interdependent. They also fashioned a world in which what Linklater calls ‘incentives to cooperate’ were sharply intensified by rapid, permanent advances in military technologies.Footnote 69
Linklater’s narrative also has a hard time explaining the intensification of decivilising processes during the twentieth century. Although he spends a chapter on the Holocaust, and does discuss the dark side of imperialism, Violence and Civilization reads like a game of snakes and ladders in which the game is rigged: the ladders (the climb towards global civility) are always more powerful, and more pronounced, than the snakes (the slide to decivility). Yet, as noted in the previous section, the scale of decivilising processes over the past two centuries takes some explaining. The casualty list of nineteenth-century imperialism numbered tens of millions.Footnote 70 The Japanese attempt to be accepted as racial equals at Versailles was rejected by Western powers, perhaps unsurprisingly: the British empire still encompassed more than thirty million square miles of territory in the 1930s. During the 1950s, the French fought a bloody campaign to ‘keep Algeria French’, while the Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya during the same decade stands as one of the more vicious episodes in British imperial history. Over twenty million people died in conflicts during the Cold War,Footnote 71 a period Linklater associates with the ‘taming of great power rivalries’.Footnote 72 If the first decade of the post-Cold War world were marked by genocide and war, the opening years of the twenty-first century have been even less hospitable to standards of self-restraint. Massacres, terrorism, expulsions, and the mass movement of refugees are depressingly familiar features of world politics. It is difficult to see how these processes can be squared with Linklater’s core dynamics: an ‘expanding circle’ of moral concern,Footnote 73 an increasing identification with the suffering of distant strangers, and a shift towards universal humanity,Footnote 74 let alone with his claim that ‘larger social webs have encouraged the dampening of aggressive impulses’.Footnote 75 Perhaps people’s capacity for ‘collective learning’ has seen them learn the wrong lessons, or simply learn how to kill and torture each other more effectively.
The directionality that lies behind Linklater’s historical sweep also induces misreadings of landmark events. One example is the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, which Linklater sees as ‘one of the more remarkable examples of “moral progress”’.Footnote 76 Despite the abolition of the slave trade during the early years of the nineteenth century, and slavery more generally during the middle part of the century, slavery remained a core component of the Atlantic economy until the latter part of the nineteenth century. During the nineteenth century as a whole, an estimated 3.3 million African slaves were transported from Africa to the Americas.Footnote 77 Abolition was accompanied by a marked increase in the numbers of both bonded labourers and transported convicts. Britain’s Asian convicts were transported to penal colonies in the Indian Ocean (such as the Andaman Islands, Penang, and Singapore), where they were put to work felling timber and draining swamps in brutal conditions.Footnote 78 These histories make it difficult to see the abolition of the slave trade as an illustration of how ‘the social gradient between Europe and other peoples became less steep because of increased support for the idea of human equality’.Footnote 79 It is even more difficult to justify these claims in a narrative that associates abolition almost entirely with Western reformers, and only marginally with the slave revolts that shook the Atlantic world during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.Footnote 80 Here, as in other places, Linklater’s theoretical commitments prompt questionable historical interpretations.
The wider problem facing Linklater’s historical narrative stems from the duality he maintains between civilising and decivilising processes, which he likens to a ‘Janus-faced’ process that promotes justice within the ‘civilised’ realm, and force outside it.Footnote 81 However, the ‘barbarians’ in the Roman states-system were not just ‘others’ whose influence stopped at the gates, but ‘insiders’ whose influence spread within the gates.Footnote 82 ‘Small wars’ in Ethiopia, Algeria, and Vietnam were deeply generative of historical trajectories in the core.Footnote 83 Or to take an example closer to Linklater’s core narrative – his analysis of human rights, as his account of abolition, rests entirely on elite Western agency. There is no mention of Hansa Mehta, the Indian delegate on the UN Human Rights Commission, who was responsible for the text of the Covenant reading as ‘all human beings are created equal’ rather than ‘all men are created equal’. Nor is there space for the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), with its 50,000 members from 40 countries and two Nobel Prize winners (Jane Addams and Emily Greene Balch), despite its centrality to the emergence of campaigns for human rights and social justice. As discussed in the previous section, and as I return to below, the substantialist commitments that Linklater adopts from Wight run-up against the processual interplay between people and groups that Elias endorsed, and that in large measure drive historical development.
Where
Linklater’s account of international states-systems draws far more heavily on Wight than Elias – as such it is resolutely substantialist. For Linklater, as for Wight, the fundamental shape of states-systems is bounded, and their fundamental logic is dualistic: a realm of self-restraint and we-feeling inside, a realm of force and violence outside. The procedure for examining what makes Western states-systems Western is, for both Linklater and Wight, a comparison, either explicit or implicit, with ‘other’ cultural blocs. Wight’s comparative method sought to establish both the importance of cultural unity to states-systems (as in his discussion of ancient China, the Greco-Roman system, and the modern West) and the ways in which the absence of a common culture contributed to failures to establish enduring states-systems (as in Persia, Carthage, and elsewhere).Footnote 84 Violence and Civilization follows a similar path. First, Linklater takes the West, a cultural unit he sees as historically identifiable over many centuries, as his definitive unit of analysis. Second, he outlines a historical narrative that takes place via dynamics both within this integrated, bounded cultural unit (for example, increasing expressions of self-restraint) and through differentiation with those outside the cultural unit (for example, ‘barbarians’).
However, as discussed in the previous section, civilisations are the products rather than the producers of cultural flows – they are ‘hybrid amalgams’ rather than ‘self-constituting entities’.Footnote 85 These hybrid amalgams encompass a promiscuous array of ideas, inventions, and institutions, from cosmologies to productive techniques.Footnote 86 Major religions do not just cross borders, but are constituted in novel blends of indigenous and transnational; technologies and strategies of warfare are emulated and fused with existing capacities; and cartographic techniques used to map colonial spaces serve as the basis for territorial claims within metropoles.Footnote 87 In other words, history is not Western first and ‘other’ second; it is global all the way down. Any narrative that focuses on a dualistic logic between inside and outside cannot tell the story of the West any more than it can tell the history of any other part of the world. To take one prominent example: British industrialisation is necessarily conjoined with the de-industrialisation of India. After 1800, the British government ensured that British products undercut Indian goods and charged prohibitive tariffs on Indian textiles. By 1820, British products were being exported in bulk to the subcontinent. By 1850, Lancashire was the centre of a global textile industry, reversing centuries of subcontinental pre-eminence in this area.Footnote 88
Given the ways in which these dynamics are generative of the historical developments that Linklater examines, it makes more sense to see civilisations as constituted by transboundary encounters rather than as bounded units that subsequently interact with other blocs. In each part of Linklater’s account, civilisations are taken to be bounded units of analysis – he proceeds from unit to interactions. But this is the wrong way around. A processual sociology should run from interactions to units.Footnote 89
How
While the explanandum of Linklater’s analysis is clear (an increase in civility within the Western, now global, states-system), the explanans in his account is less so. Partly this confusion arises from fuzzy language. Linklater writes that there is an ‘interrelationship’ between psychogenetic processes and broader social forces, but the status of this interrelationship is unspecified. I noted above that a wide range of factors, from ‘reality-congruent knowledge’ to ‘incentives for cooperation’,Footnote 90 drop in and out of Violence and Civilization without being consistently applied or theorised. Nor is it clear how the ‘conveyor belt’ from the ancient to the modern worlds operates.Footnote 91 Linklater draws a line, albeit a jumpy one, from the past to the present. His is a stadial account, which begins with the ‘simpler civilisations’ of the Greeks and Romans,Footnote 92 with their limited attention to international ethics, through to Latin Christendom in which violence and cruelty are widespread, but that also witness a ‘civilisational offensive’ and ‘a religiously inspired quest to tame the warriors’,Footnote 93 to the emergence in the Renaissance of a sustained commitment to care, restraint, and non-violent dispute resolution.Footnote 94 But how exactly were standards of self-restraint carried from one era to another? For Linklater, the answer appears to be (broadly) humanist tracts:Footnote 95 the book spends considerable time on publications by Cicero, Seneca, Erasmus, Raynal, Kant, and like-minded figures. Ideas such as ‘virtus’ (‘the moral expression of manly virtue’) are seen as the carriers of civility,Footnote 96 working to ‘tame warrior impulses’.Footnote 97 But how did these figures and their publications infuse wider publics with self-restraint and we-feeling? And what is the relationship between their work and wider causal factors, such as interdependence?
This issue is not helped by the interchangeable way in which Linklater treats terms such as interdependence and interconnection. These are not the same thing. The latter describes points of connection, as with those provided by a train line, telephone, or diaspora. The former is a stronger claim, denoting mutual (if asymmetrical) dependence. Take the example of the failure of the British bank Barings in 1889, one of the largest investment houses in the world, following its failure to sell a large issue of Argentinian bonds. When, the following year, the Argentinian government defaulted, Barings’ holdings became worthless. The subsequent ‘panic’ meant that capital flows to Argentina all but ceased for five years. Here an event in one sphere of activity (banking) in one part of the world (Britain) caused a general crisis (a depression) in another part of the world (Argentina). No wonder that the great student of banking, Norman Angell, was keen to stress the interdependencies that banking generated.Footnote 98 So too did Karl Marx, albeit in an altogether more critical register.Footnote 99
The lack of conceptual clarity between interconnection and interdependence speaks to a surprising – and crucial – absence in Linklater’s book: capitalism. The word ‘capitalism’ appears twice in the main body of the text, neither time in an analytical or explanatory sense. Related terms, such as commerce or market, appear more often, but again, without forming part of the book’s causal apparatus or analytical schema. In fact, commerce is seen mainly as a form of restraint,Footnote 100 something that would be news to most observers of the practices of new world plantation owners, late nineteenth-century robber barons, and early twenty-first-century financiers. Given Linklater’s previous interest in Marx,Footnote 101 as well as the return of broadly Marxian themes in recent tracts by Thomas Piketty and Branko Milanovic,Footnote 102 Marx’s absence from Violence and Civilization is surprising. A deeper engagement with this tradition would have bolstered the book’s theoretical resources by offering alternative segues into relational, perhaps even dialectical, thinking. Substantively, they would have linked Linklater’s interest in global ethics with issues of inequality, exploitation, and dispossession, issues that are central to many of the dynamics that underpin both integrative and disintegrative processes in the contemporary world.
The untimely historical sociologist
In an essay written almost one hundred years ago, the South Asian writer, B. K. Sarkar critiqued the ways in which Western writers essentialised India.Footnote 103 Sarkar turned the gaze of the West back on itself, using a reading of the Iliad to ‘Occidentalise’ the Europeans as ‘fractious; immoral; licentious; polygamous; in thrall to despotic government and the rule of tyrants.’ Writing a few years earlier, Okakura Kakuzō, a prominent Japanese scholar, wrote of Western civilisation: ‘In the days when Japan was engaging in peaceful acts, the West used to think of it as an uncivilized country. Since Japan started massacring thousands of people in the battlefields of Manchuria, the West has called it a civilized country.’Footnote 104 For many people around the world, both a century ago and now, Western civilisation stands not for ‘self-restraint’ and ‘emotional control’, but for violence and cultural debasement.
How much has changed since Sarkar’s essay and Kakuzō’s book? Linklater’s long-term project to foster a more just, empathetic global order is one that many people will support. And he is right to point to the many dynamics that support this vision in the contemporary world: the depersonalisation of violence in many parts of the West, the legal structures and resolution mechanisms that often foster restraint, and heightened reflection about ethical responsibilities towards collective violence. However, in explaining how we got here, Violence and Civilization works back from the present day to a pre-ordained point of origin, retroactively feeding the ingredients of today’s world into the past. This serves to make history closed rather than open-ended, predetermined rather than contingent, and linear rather than multilinear. At the same time, the principal cast list of Violence and Civilization is made up of a handful of elite, white, European men who exemplify a ‘cosmopolitan ethos’.Footnote 105 The book has little place for labour movements, suffragettes, anti-colonial thinkers, slaves or serfs. The result of this narrow vision is that the dynamics Linklater rightly stresses end up being less important than the thematics and histories that are omitted from, or marginalised in, the book. The main thematic that is lost is the notion of history as relational, driven by interactions between peoples. When it comes to lost histories, both movements from below and transnational connections receive short shrift. This article has sought to explain why these omissions matter.
The question to come is whether these lost, or at least minimised, thematics and histories will be recovered in the third volume of Linklater’s trilogy. What is clear is that it will not be enough for Linklater to extend his historical purview beyond the West while retaining a substantialist view of culture and civilising processes, and an internalist approach to Western historical development. No convincing historical sociology of global historical development can be constructed as ‘West first, then global’, just as no such enterprise can proceed from the standpoint of bounded units defined by the cultural attributes they share, or lack. If these commitments are retained in Linklater’s next volume, the result is likely to be more of the same, except with an ‘add and stir’ spice of diffusion, emulation and imitation thrown into the mix. This would be a shame. Because if it does come to pass, Linklater’s trilogy is likely to stand as an ‘untimely’ reminder of a historical sociology whose time has come – and gone.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to John Hobson, Joseph Leigh, Chris Reus-Smit, Adrian Rogstad, Justin Rosenberg, Ayse Zarakol, the editors of the Review, participants at a BISA panel on ‘Violence and Civilisation’ in Brighton in June 2017, and three anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. I am always delighted when my work is improved by others; this article is no exception.
