Three Spaces of Social Theory:
Towards a political geography of knowledge*
Dick Pels
Canadian Journal of Sociology 26, 1 (Winter 2001): 31-56.
Abstract: This paper raises doubts about the traditional justification of the autonomy of the sociological object in terms of the ‘discovery’ of ‘society’ as demarcated from the state. Against the tendency to homogenize social theory from an overly ‘Anglosaxon’ or liberal image of its early history, it offers a triadic, ‘knowledge-geographical’ tableau of interpretations of the social object-and-project, which aligns it more closely with political ideology, resisting any clear-cut delineations in state vs. society terms. In the threepartite space of emerging social science, the French and German-Italian branches stuck significantly closer to the political and staatswissenschaftliche tradition than the Anglosaxon branch, and exemplified not so much a rupture with as an innovatory continuation of ‘Aristotelian’ political philosophy, extending and generalizing its scope of analysis from state sovereignty towards a more inclusive theory of the generation and distribution of social power. This approach introduces a new specification of the unity and diversity of the sociological object-and-project, which may be redescribed as that of knowledgeable organization: an appelation which at once defines the classical promise and the classical hubris of the sociological tradition in its three intellectual-geographical zones.
Resumé: Cet article argue du fait que les évaluations contradictoires des impacts du libre-échange en Amérique du Nord sont inachevées parce qu’elles n’analysent pas ces effets à la lumière du but principal des États-Unis de long terme: la reconstruction de l’hégémonie des États-Unis qui était sous le siège par le Japon et l’Europe. La compétitivité en baisse des circuits d’alimentation de matières premières premières des États-Unis a mal endommagé l’hégémonie des États-Unis pendant les années 70 et les années 80. La stratégie initiale des États-Unis était de créer un marché de l’énergie continental pour réduire les importations de pétrole d’outre-mer, l’accès de garantie au pétrole et au gaz naturel du Canada et le Mexique, et réduit l’instabilité des prix. L’évolution dans de plus larges accords a reflété les intérêts d’autres industries des États-Unis et les efforts des états et des sociétés canadiens et mexicains aux avantages de saisie de la restructuration. Cet article analyse l’intégration continentale de rôle des industries de matières premières premières jouées dans des efforts stratégiques de reconstruire l’hégémonie des États-Unis et les conséquences de ces efforts.
* I am indebted to Johan Heilbron and Frédéric Vandenberghe for their critical comments on an earlier version of this paper.
Contents:
The Elusive Object of Sociology | A New Theory of Politics? | A Political Geography of Knowledge | Varieties of Organicism | Sociology’s Third Way | Knowledgeable Organization | Notes | References |
The Elusive Object of Sociology
According to a widely held idol of the tribe, sociology started its career with the discovery of ‘society’ as an entity distinct from and independent of the state (Collins and Makowsky, 1972; Goudsblom, 1977; Bottomore and Nisbet, 1979; Heilbron, 1995; Vandenberghe, 1997; 1998). Sociology, Aron has argued, marks a moment in man’s reflection on historical reality ‘when the concept of the social, of society, becomes the centre of interest, replacing the concept of politics or of the régime or of the state’ (1965 I: 15). Early sociology, Gouldner agreed, rejected the dominance of society by the state, and more generally, defocalized the importance of politics in order to concentrate upon ‘civil society’ as its principal scientific object (1980: 363–4). Most significant in the sociological experience, Elias has written, is the conceptualization of ‘society’ as a self-regulating nexus of events, and as something which was not determined in its course and its functioning by governments (1984: 38).
The idea appears to add the virtues of simplicity to those of self-evidence, and offers a classical justification for the existence of sociology as an autonomous intellectual enterprise. It is the existence of this autonomous order of social events intermediary between private individuals and the strictly political sphere which is held to justify the territorial and theoretical claims of sociology vis-à-vis the other sciences of man, and especially, to mark a clear boundary with older-style political philosophy. Looking back gratefully to Durkheim, sociologists routinely affirm the presence of something like the social realm (règne social) as a reality sui generis, which has its own structure and regularities and generates its own quasi-natural patterns of development. To an important degree, it is this postulated autonomy of the sociological object which is taken to legitimize the relative autonomy of the sociological project. [1]
Despite its textbook popularity and its evident commonsense appeal, however, many social theorists and historians of the discipline have agonized over the irritating vagueness of the blanket term ‘society’, and searched for more specific delimitations through a study of the political and intellectual context of its discovery. In doing so, they have come up with widely divergent answers. Nisbet, for instance, found it ‘neither sufficient nor accurate to say, as many historians have, that the most distinctive feature of the rise of sociology in the nineteenth century is the idea of “society”. This says too much and too little’. It was ‘community’ rather than ‘society’ which had to be viewed as sociology’s most fundamental and characteristic unit-idea (1966: 48). In Therborn’s neo-Marxist perspective, on the other hand, society was defined as those ‘social arrangements determined in the last instance by a specific combination of forces and relations of production’. While reclaiming ‘society’ or ‘civil society’ as the scientific object of historical materialism, the prime contribution of sociology was said to lie in its discovery of the ‘ideological community’, i.e. the community of values, norms, and beliefs – which edged rather close to Nisbet’s conception (1976: 73). And somewhere in between Nisbet’s communitarianism and Therborn’s economism stands Gouldner’s attempt to retrieve ‘civil society’ as the legitimate object and ‘historical mission’ of sociology, now stripped of its materialist connotation and embracing the diffuse entirety of ‘social organization’ or ‘group life’ (1980: 363ff).
Without doubt, much of the vagueness of the undifferentiated concept of ‘society’ is ascribable to its historically defined negative or demarcative intent. [2] The concept was born as part of a polemic and a struggle for intellectual independence; and this circumstance has probably made it less pressing for (proto)sociologists to know what the social was than to agree upon what it was not. This polemic was conducted on several fronts simultaneously, since ‘society’ was generally taken as ontologically broader and more fundamental than the political state, while it also referred to a spontaneously evolving reality that was relatively independent from conscious individual designs — whether in terms of the actions of freely contracting individual citizens, or in the form of conscious interventions by princes, legislators, or founders of states. This double demarcation left much interpretative room, since the vast space ‘in between’ the discrete individuals or households and political institutions could be filled in quite different ways. In broad outline, Marx’s classical injunction to seek the anatomy of civil society in a critically revised political economy stood opposed to the French positivists’ equally classical attempt to demarcate their object against both the political and the economic; while mainstream German sociology tended towards a concept of civil society which retained a much closer continuity with the older staatswissenschaftliche conception of the State.
While it is generally acknowledged that the concept of society arose within a political and evaluative ambience, it is also thought that this has somehow worn off with the passage of time and the growing maturity of the discipline (cf. Elias, 1984; Heilbron, 1995). However, it takes only a cursory glance at the above-cited definitions in order to realize that there is no question of a definitive transcendence of such normative and political commitments. Nisbet’s idea of community is manifestly designed as a normative counterpart to what he describes as the ‘Enlightenment’ conception of society; Therborn’s definition is unthinkable if divorced from the opposition between bourgeois sociology and historical materialism; while Gouldner’s notion of civil society represents nothing less than an attempt to cheat Marxism out of one of its master concepts. As we shall notice, even the traditional Comtean-Durkheimian notion of the relative autonomy of the social turns out to be heavily laden with polemics, although it is normally advertized as an escape from it. It is a move in the game which denies the existence of the same game in which it is a move. [3]
Apart from such — perhaps ineradicable — polemics, the commonsense notion of the social also labours under a peculiar ambiguity of parts and wholes. ‘Society’ can either be conceived as a residual category and refer to the nexus of relations and functions in between government and individual, or state and market, or polity and economy; but it may also describe the totality of social relations under which both individual actions and political relations are subsumed. Historically, the notion of société civile, as it emerged in the writings of the philosophes, typically oscillated between partial and holist definitions, designating rising sectors such as the economy or culture, but simultaneously expanding its scope towards all social sectors and units (Heilbron, 87, 91). As Gouldner has expressed it, sociology, especially in its early phase, hesitated between a view of itself as a ‘n+1 science’ which took up the leftovers of disciplines such as political philosophy and political economy, and a less humble conception of itself as queen of the social sciences, ‘concerning itself with all that the others do, and more; possessing a distinctive concern with the totality of sectors, with their incorporation into a new and higher level of integration, and with the unique laws of this higher whole’ (1970: 92–4). In The Two Marxisms, he reiterated the view that sociology’s object was largely residual, ‘including at the largest remove all groups and institutions not directly part of the state’; but his suggestion was not simply that civil society was intermediary between the political and the economic but also somehow transcended them, since both political and economic spheres were differentiations of a more basic social material (1980: 364, 356; cf. 1985: 240ff). This ‘sphere of human connectedness’ was hence not unequivocally co-extensive with what thinkers such as Montesquieu, Proudhon, Tocqueville, and Durkheim identified as the corps intermédiaires, but potentially encompassed the totality of social relationships and institutions.
It is disconcerting that this almost studied and deliberate ambiguity, which recurs in virtually all attempts to establish the distinctive nature of the sociological object/project, is so little reflected upon and so much taken for granted. Even if distance is taken from ‘domanial’ legitimations and distinctiveness is sought in sociology’s peculiar analytic perspective, one is tempted to premise the existence of a social element in all human relationships to which sociology provides privileged access. In Aron’s view, for example, the specifically social may be located either on the level of the part, the element, or the level of the whole, the entity; sociology, as the study of ‘the social as such’, is then characterized by a ‘fluctuation between element and entity’. It is not at all clear what is meant by this, not even when Aron adds that the social is ‘either the element present in all social relations or the larger and vaguer entity embracing and uniting the various sectors of collective life’ (1965 I: 15–6). The ‘partial’ concern with interpersonal relations and the ‘totalist’ concern with the global society do not quite combine into an acceptable and transparent view of what sociology is about.
A New Theory of Politics?
Taken in its simplest form, therefore, the idea of the ‘discovery of society’ stands as a truism which, at best, is too true to be good, and at worst, may be seriously misleading. Society, in this undifferentiated sense, does not exist, and cannot by itself legitimate the specific difference of the sociological enterprise (cf. Frisby and Sayer, 1986: 121–2; Urry 2000). The consensus which it commands has a superficial ring, because it tends to rule out and define away deeper-lying disagreements about what ‘society’ or the ‘social’ are like, and thus easily overstates both the intellectual uniformity and the historical originality of what is termed ‘the’ sociological tradition. More precisely, I shall argue, the presumption of a uniform and autonomous tradition tends to paper over significant discrepancies, tensions, and displacements between at least three major currents of thought, which have offered three divergent interpretations of ‘the social’ as the privileged object/project of sociology, and which are all much more closely aligned with contemporary political ideologies than is normally acknowledged in academic histories of the discipline. [4]
Accordingly, the discursive field of emerging sociology might be viewed as a tripartite space embracing a centre, occupied by the French positivist tradition, and two peripheries or ‘wings’, Western and Eastern/Southern, which accommodate the Anglosaxon liberal-utilitarian and the mid- and south-European etatist traditions. While the Anglosaxon wing, as represented most conspicuously by Spencerian utilitarian and anti-statist sociology, steers close to the Lockean and Smithian conception of civil society as market-based Gesellschaft, the other two currents are more nearly deployed around the Nisbetian ‘unit-idea’ of community or Gemeinschaft — that is, if we take immediate care to differentiate between the ‘French’ emphasis upon intermediary communal structures between individual and state and the ‘German’ and ‘Italian’ tendency to subsume the social more directly under the statal community. [5] In this scheme of things, Marxism occupies an intriguingly dual place, since it straddles the two peripheral paradigms, in continuing the ontological priorities of classical political economy while remaining subversively loyal to ‘Germanic’ etatist and centralizing sentiments (cf. Levine, 1995: 219–20). In this more differentiated tableau, the constitutive splitting of society from the state (and of social science from classical political philosophy) takes rather different routes and issues in incongruous conceptions of the social, some of which are polemically demarcated against the political, while others resist any clear-cut delineation in such terms.
In some of its variants, the historical object/project of sociology is actually closer to that of political philosophy (and farther removed from that of liberal and Marxist political economy) than is brought out by the traditional idea of a state-society split. This demarcation, in other words, tends to obscure the extent to which major currents of early sociology represented not a rupture but a continuation or renovation of classical political philosophy, dissimulating that their conception of society-as-community was still heavily marked by this ‘Aristotelian’ genealogy. If this perspective is adopted, sociology is deprived of part of its taken-for-granted domanial legitimation (it loses some of the ‘property’ of its traditional object) because it is revealed as a critical successor to the older tradition of political theory; while the schism between academic sociology and Marxism, which was emphasized as constitutive by both academic and Marxist disciplinary historians of 1960s and 1970s (cf. Nisbet, 1966: viii; Zeitlin, 1968: vii–viii; Szacki, 1982: 368) does not so much result from a binary fission developing from Saint-Simon onwards (Gouldner, 1970: 111–3), but in some respects may be viewed as another instalment of the much older rivalry between the master sciences of ‘Aristotelian’ political philosophy and ‘Smithian’ or ‘Marxian’ political economy. [6]
In an influential mid-1970s work, Göran Therborn offered the suggestive idea that sociology began as a theory of postrevolutionary politics, focusing primarily on the relationship between politics and society at large: ‘sociology emerged as a discourse on politics after the bourgeois revolution’. In his estimate, the pioneer sociologists saw themselves first and foremost as critical heirs to the tradition of political philosophy; so that ‘political theory... seems to be the real intellectual background against which sociology’s claim to represent a new science of society should be analysed’ (1976: 416–417, 127). Both Saint-Simon’s physico-politique and Comte’s physique sociale were above all intended as new comprehensive sciences of politics, and did not distinguish sharply between social and political science (Comte, 1970: 467–471, 477; Ionescu, 1976: 6–8). Comte entitled his major sociological treatise Système de politique positive, and confidently rated his work as the crowning completion of the long tradition of political theory initiated by Aristotle (‘l’incomparable Aristote’, as he repeatedly chants) and continued by Hobbes (Comte, 1852: 299, 351; 1975: 433). Fletcher has likewise observed that Comte’s view of politics remained close to that of Aristotle; it was broader than conventional ‘politics’ and implied the study of political order as (part of) a social system (1974: 27–28). In Système de politique positive, Comte indeed proposed that ‘the admirable conception of Aristotle respecting the distribution of functions and the combination of efforts happily correlates the two necessary elements of every political idea: society and government’ (1852: 295; 1975a: 430). [7]
The suggestion that sociology began as a social theory of politics is inspiring; but Therborn drops this promising lead almost as quickly as he introduces it, in order to narrate the ‘remarkable transformation’ which soon changed sociology, in its classical period, into a discourse about the ‘ideological community’. But, as I shall argue, there is little evidence for such a remarkable caesura. The classical themes of community and value integration are not particularly distinct from the political concerns of the early positivists; and neither are the works of sociology’s classical age innocent of political theory in the above-cited sense. It is hardly fortuitous that Nisbet names ‘authority’ as runner-up in his hierarchy of sociology’s unit-ideas, encountering it dominantly even in Durkheim, the archetypal sociologist of moral community and moral discipline (1966: 47, 150). [8] The stronger suggestion, for that matter, was offered by Richter, who anticipated the extensive reappraisal of the Durkheimian legacy which has since been consolidated in the writings of Gouldner (1958), Lukes (1973, 1982), Giddens (1972b, 1977, 1982), Filloux (1977, 1993), Lacroix (1981), and Pearce (1989). [9] Durkheim’s political sociology, Richter proposed, could in fact be seen as the ‘parricidal offspring’ of Aristotelian political science (1960: 170). Filloux and Lacroix concurred that the object of Durkheimian sociology was ‘political in a broad sense of this term’ (cf. Filloux, 1977: 9).
Hence there is ample reason to pursue the idea that some branches of early sociology directly descended from the tradition of Aristotelian political philosophy (cf. Frisby and Sayer, 14–17); or that early sociology was identical in reach with a broadly conceived political sociology. [10] Theorists such as Saint-Simon, Comte, Mosca, Pareto and Michels shared the central project of a positive politics, and tended to use terms such as sociology, social science, and political science interchangeably. Their agreement did therefore not exhaust itself in the search for a new scientific foundation of political action, since they additionally shared the idea of an extension or generalization of the analysis of political institutions and processes towards the broader field of the social. Forms of government, it was argued, could not be properly analyzed if they were divorced from the determining laws of social organization in general (cf. Therborn, 1976: 145; Wagner, 1990: 491). [11]
The positivist emphasis upon moral community and the elitist emphasis upon hierarchy and domination were in this respect closer than is often realized. The axiom that organization necessarily implied authority and hierarchy was shared by both traditions; Saint-Simon’s sociocratic elitism likewise provided inspiration for both. Literally repeating Montesquieu (1969: 54), Comte laid down as the fundamental axiom of all healthy politics that ‘society cannot exist without government and government cannot exist without society’ (1852: 267, 281, 295). As in De Bonald and De Maistre, the necessity of government was derived from the ubiquitous fact of social organization and division of labour, the ‘separation of offices’ requiring a ‘concourse of efforts’ which was not spontaneous but resulted from ‘the force of social cohesion which is everywhere known under the name of government’ (1974: 227). [12] While it remains open to speculation whether Saint-Simon thought that government would die off in the industrial age (cf. Durkheim, 1958: 186ff), it was less doubtful that his pupil rejected this idea from an early date. In a first outline of the Système de politique positive dating from 1822–24, Comte wrote about ‘the government which in a regular state of affairs stands at the head of society as the guide and agent of general activity... the head of society destined to bind together the component units and to direct their activity to a common end’ — anticipating large elements of Durkheim’s notion of the state as social organizer and social brain (Comte, 1974: 115). Durkheim himself agreed that an ‘essential element of any political group is the opposition between governing and governed, between authority and those subject to it’; stipulating that ‘the State is nothing if it is not an organ distinct from the rest of society’ (1992: 42, 82, 91–92). [13]
This set of concerns does not differ radically from the early elitists’ preoccupation with a new science of politics, again if taken in the twofold sense of a ‘positive’ grounding of political intervention and of an extension of the scope of analysis from state sovereignty towards a more inclusive theory of the generation and distribution of social power. Mosca’s major work, of course, was entitled Elementi di Scienza Politica; and as a political scientist he took a considered distance to the Comtean neologism of ‘sociology’. Despite it economic origins, Pareto’s work has been justifiably characterized as ‘essentially a political sociology’ (Therborn, 122). Such a description also fits Michels’s surprising itinerary from Sorelian anarcho-syndicalism via elitist sociology towards fascist political philosophy (Beetham, 1977). The early elitist tradition, indeed, consistently opted for a more conflictual or ‘Machiavellian’ interpretation of the same quintessential phenomena of power, authority, and domination (and of the correlative distinction between rulers and ruled) which the French positivists gave a softer, more consensualist reading. [14] Gumplowicz’ social theory, for example, which deeply influenced both Italian and German thinkers, was entirely focused around such a ‘hard’ conception of the ewige Kampf um Herrschaft. He immediately joined the Aristotelian lineage by maintaining that Eigentum was essentially a means of Herrschaft, that society was not something different from the state, but the ‘same thing under another aspect’, and that sociology, as the positive science of Herrschaft, acted as evident foundation for all the other sciences of man (1926 [1885]: 39–42, 89–90, 97–99, 107). While he also routinely formulated the elitist credo in somewhat neutral fashion (‘It is of the nature of all domination that it can only be practised by a minority. The domination of a minority by a majority is unthinkable, since it is a contradiction’ (cit. Therborn, 193; cf. Szacki, 1979: 280–286), neither Gumplowicz, nor Mosca, Pareto or Michels after him took much trouble to hide the polemical intent which inspired the much stronger presumption at the background.
A Political Geography of Knowledge
My present effort to add plausibility to early sociology’s Aristotelian credentials is also an attempt to counteract the tendency to homogenize its past from what can be called an overly ‘Anglosaxon’ or liberal image of its early history. The fixation on the state-society split and on the demarcation from traditional political philosophy has resulted in an exaggeratedly anti-statist or laissez faire-view of the sociological object-and-project, which has critically foreshortened our perception of the differentiated historical canvas on which the early gestation of social theory was played out. If, admittedly, all three currents of emerging sociology tended to distance themselves in some way from the strictly governmental, top-down concerns of Aristotelian political philosophy, looking for structural realities ‘below’ the state in order to sociologize the political, the break was not everywhere as clean as often suggested, and reference points for disciplinary boundary work were rather unevenly spread across the differentiated cognitive field. Indeed, for rising social theory, boundary-drawing efforts against classical political economy were equally significant as those directed against political philosophy (cf. Wagner, 496), while the weights and measures of the various demarcative exercises (and their net balance) also differed markedly across various socio-geographical contexts.
As suggested above, both the unity and the diversity of the sociological project can be fruitfully re-specified by introducing a triadic historical tableau, which distinguishes between a central building and two wings, or a central zone and two peripheral ones, which simultaneously delineate geographical regions, political and economic contexts, and intellectual fields. In mapping a graded space of disciplinary rivalries, this political geography of knowledge attempts to do justice to the ambiguous position of emerging social theory as simultaneously caught up and weighed down by the venerable antagonism between Aristotelian political philosophy and Smithian political economy (cf. Pels 1998), and as occupying a precariously delimited third or ‘in between’ position which claims to supersede it. Where, as in Germany, the sociological imagination arose in the filiation of a historical economics which remained securely attached to the sciences of the state, the demarcation from ‘Manchesterian’ political economy was much more sharply drawn than that from the political philosophy of which it formed a virtual extension; whilst in France the distance measured by budding social science from economics was more or less equal from that taken from traditional politics. In the British context, by contrast, the rupture with traditional political philosophy tended to be more dramatic, while the cognitive continuities with utilitarian and liberal political economy were more diligently preserved.
If France can truly claim to be the heartland of predisciplinary social theory (Heilbron 1995: 271), the ‘central’ tradition of French positivism, through its dual rupture from politics and economics, also demonstrated the largest measure of independence from the historical rivalry between the two master sciences and their entrenched binary oppositions. While in France the new object of ‘the social’ was typically positioned in between political state and economic market, it was metaphorically drawn towards either the former or the latter in the German and British experience, without being completely absorbed by either of them. Both in the English and German intellectual zones, the state-society split accordingly tended to be conceived in binary terms (‘civil society’ being closely identified with ‘market’ or ‘sphere of production’), even though the weight of causal determination ‘in the last instance’ was placed at opposite ends of the societal spectrum. In France, by contrast, civil society was more nearly considered a ‘third’ option, since social relations were taken to fall outside political and legal frameworks without being reducible to a zone of merely private or economic affairs. Such a differential topography of state-society conceptions also defines the crucial importance of Marxism as a ‘traveling theory’, bridgeing at least two national contexts and intellectual traditions with its explosive mixture of economism and politicization. Marxism, indeed, doubly preserved and fortified the state-society binary and, in so doing, emerged as an inevitable adversary of those sociological currents that sought to mediate and circumvent such acute ontological polarization. In this context, Gouldner has justifiably contrasted Marxism’s neglect and ‘surrender’ of civil society (now taken in the ‘third’ or intermediary sense) with early sociology’s ambition to claim it as its principal object (1980: 346, 363).[15]
A cautionary note may be inserted here, which further details my provisional topography of the three spaces of rising social theory. The tripartite division, of course, repeats itself within the three knowledge-political zones themselves, whose internal structure of competition refracts the demarcative struggles which also divide the larger intellectual field. The triangular division between moral sciences, political sciences, and economic sciences which Heilbron has usefully delineated in the case of France (1995: 23), is also encountered in other national contexts, albeit in less symmetrical proportions, since the ‘field weights’ are everywhere differently placed. In this fashion, ‘English’ liberal individualists and ‘German’ etatists may equally be encountered in France as elsewhere, and national disputes are invariably codetermined by international ones. The familiar debate between Durkheim and Tarde, for example, may illustrate a conflict between a ‘French’ communitarian and an ‘Anglosaxon’ individualist on French soil; while Weber may be characterized as an ‘etatist liberal’ in the different context of dispute which ranged the younger against the older generation in the German Verein für Sozialpolitik. On the English scene, one might highlight differences between Spencer’s individualism, Hobhouse’s interventionist ‘liberal socialism’ and the etatism of the Fabian Society or, alternatively, some of the frictions which developed in the middle 1930s between the individualism of Ginsberg and the sociologism of Mannheim. From a cross-national perspective, one might accentuate crucial similarities between the liberal-socialist ‘third positions’ of e.g. Hobhouse, Durkheim, and Schäffle. All of these examples sensitize towards the close interpenetration and mutual reinforcement of internal and external intellectual affairs.
Varieties of Organicism
A strategic illustration of such entanglements is offered by the different national inflections of the organicist analogy which was broadly diffused in early social science, and by correspondent differences in the way in which one pictured the relationship between individual, society, and the state. Spencer’s influential essay ‘The Social Organism’ (1860) fed the sociological mainstream insofar as it purported to analyze social development on its own terms, as determined neither by legislators nor by the collective wisdom of individuals, but as evolving slowly, silently, and spontaneously (Spencer, 1969: 196). Political organization could only be adequately understood as part of a larger social structure, since the social organism performed as an integrated functional whole through a close mutual interdependence of parts. As was evident from his early The Proper Sphere of Government (1843) up to his mature The Man versus the State (1884), Spencer’s organicism was immediately bent in an anti-statist direction, and closely approximated to the model of economic organization, which was identified as the ‘all-essential’ one. The grand evolutionary shift from ‘militant’ towards ‘industrial’ society was primarily described as a development from ‘hierarchical’ towards ‘contractual’ or from ‘political’ towards ‘economic’ principles of organization, which substituted a coercive, omnipotent state for a minimal state of peaceful competition. The normative blueprint of ‘industrial’ society was modeled in all its major features after the Smithian perception of free market transactions as a system of spontaneous economic co-ordination.
Spencer’s text was remarkable for its careful specification of the points of similarity and difference between biological and societal organisms (1969: 201ff). Society might be thinglike and objective, but it was totally unlike any other object. The original factor was the character of the individuals, from which the character of society was derived. The social community as a whole could not possess a corporate consciousness; this was the ‘everlasting reason’ why the welfare of citizens could not be sacrificed to some supposed benefit of the State, and why the State was to be maintained solely for the benefit of citizens. Corporate life was subservient to the life of the parts, not the other way around. Hobbes was criticized precisely for drawing too tight an analogy in his artificial construction of the Leviathan as a unified body politic (1969: 200–205). Spencer rejected a similar complicity between organicism and etatism in his ‘Reasons for Dissenting from the Philosophy of M. Comte’ (1864). Repeating J.S. Mill’s dismissal of Comte’s authoritarian politics, he stipulated that Comte’s ideal of society was ‘one in which government is developed to the greatest extent’, whereas ‘that form of society towards we are progressing, I hold to be one in which government will be reduced to the smallest amount possible’ (cit. Gordon, 1991: 431).
It might be argued in somewhat formulaic fashion that, whereas Spencer adamantly resisted all forms of reification of the social organism, and embraced methodological and moral individualism in close conjugation, Durkheim severed this connection by defending moral individualism while emphatically rejecting its methodological counterpart. The French positivists, in describing social facts as ontologically sui generis, explicitly prioritized the whole over the part, stipulating the thinglike existence of a collective consciousness and of collective bonds of solidarity as preceding and determining individual actions and beliefs. Simultaneously, the progress of moral individualism was viewed as eminently compatible with, if not constitutionally dependent upon, a managing and expansionary role of the state, which was positioned at the upper end of a graded organizational continuum as the ‘reflexive organ’ of social life. Unlike Spencer, Comte and Durkheim also held a rather low opinion of economics, and consistently subordinated it to the new master science of sociology. Anti-economism, however, was balanced by anti-statism, insofar as symmetrical distance was taken from the ‘German’ claim of primacy of the sovereign ethical state. More precisely: if Saint-Simon was still attracted to a more liberal view of the state, and Comte veered in the opposite etatist direction, it was Durkheim who struck the classical balance by outlining a reformist sociology which was demarcated at once against Spencerian individualism and against the etatism of the Kathedersozialisten. Durkheimian sociology thus negotiated successfully between the reductionary alternatives presented by Hobbes (society is constituted by the sovereign) and Smith (society is constituted by market relationships), suggesting a social ontology which located the fundamental cementing forces of society somewhere in the middle, in shared conventions, morals and beliefs, and in the secondary groups which mediated between individual and state. By executing soft, continuous demarcations on both flanks, this third position eschewed all strict dichotomizing between state and society.
While the French positivists thus tended to divorce methodological and moral individualism, German statist thinkers characteristically united them in order to reject them in tandem and claim a double priority of the ‘ethical’ state over both individual and economic action. If the whole was likewise taken to precede the parts, its true ontological weight and cementing force was not so much found in the intermediary structures but placed in closer vicinity to the state itself, while individuals were more emphatically viewed as constituted by and subordinated to the statal community. As elsewhere, political questions were increasingly addressed from a ‘societal’ perspective; nevertheless, in German social science the analytical and normative centrality of the State was never seriously contested (Wagner, 1990: 79). From its eighteenth-century inception, German Staatswissenschaft absorbed the study of both society and economy, liberally drawing upon classical Aristotelian conceptions of oikos and polis, and offering ‘state’ as a generic term for socio-political organization in general — as was reflected in the first German translation of Aristotle’s Politics, which virtually synonymized ‘state’ and ‘society’ (Tribe, 1988: 8ff, 153). This state-society symbiosis remained a self-evident point of departure throughout the entire tradition which linked eighteenth-century Cameralism to its nineteenth-century successor, Nationalökonomie; dominating even Weber’s 1895 inaugural lecture as Professor of National Economy at Freiburg University (Weber, 1994:1ff; Hennis, 1987). [16] Early Cameralist writers interpreted economics as household economy in the Aristotelian sense, in which patriarchal authority defined and dominated property relations, and subordinated it to what was called Polizeiwissenschaft, i.e. the general science of social regulation, discipline, security, and welfare (cf. Neocleous 2000). Such close linkages between the science of ‘good householding’ and the ‘science of police’ transformed Cameralistics into a truly political economy.
Due to the spreading influence of Smithian conceptions from 1790 onwards, however, German economic discourse shifted towards a more serious appreciation of market rationality and the novel independence of civil society, where the impersonal rule of social and economic laws replaced the regulative force of the ruler (Tribe, 149–150). The successor science of Nationalökonomie no longer considered economic action (or Verkehr) as synonymous with state regulation, but rather as creating a relatively independent social sphere which spontaneously proceeded from needs — and interest — oriented individual action. Nevertheless, for Von Mohl and other founders, ‘national economy’ clearly remained an auxiliary of political science. The school of Historical Economics subsequently initiated by Roscher, Hildebrand, List, and Knies likewise continued to describe this national economy in terms of Staatswirtschaft (Tribe, 204–205; Hennis, 33–34). Although pleading the necessity of a separate Gesellschaftswissenschaft that would address matters of production and distribution, division of labour, property, and family, Lorenz von Stein also sought to enlarge the concept of society with that of ‘community’, with the express purpose of reconnecting the discourse of the social with the political discourse of the Staatswissenschaften (Von Stein 1971: 21, 32–33). Influenced, as were the national economists, by the Hegelian conception of the State as the personified communal will, Gemeinschaft for Von Stein encompassed both state and society as ‘the two life elements of all human community’ (Riedel, 1975: 843–844; Weiss, 1963: 79).
A vigorous indication for the persistence of this etatist legacy is found in Von Treitschke’s Die Gesellschaftswissenschaft (1859), which elaborated a sweeping critique of sociology as pretended science of society, and mobilized the old Aristotelian postulate of identity against its ‘chimerical’ separation of state and society. Sociology, Treitschke charged, lacked an object of its own, since the Staatswissenschaften already included both state and society in their classical conception of the political. Because the State in fact constituted ‘die Gesellschaft in ihrer eigentlichen Organisation’, political science was legitimated to act as an ‘oppositional science’ against emerging sociology (Riedel, 793–798; cf. Freyer 1930: 159–160). While Von Treitschke’s broadside clearly manifested how much of a threat advancing social science had meanwhile become for conservative etatists, the second generation of Historical Economists, which was dominated by Wagner, Brentano, Bücher, and especially Schmoller, was much more sympathetically disposed towards it, although it did not relinquish its fundamental indebtedness to the Hegelian tradition. From 1873 onwards, the Verein für Sozialpolitik united scholars in search of a third way between Manchesterian liberal capitalism and fully fledged state socialism, who pleaded a reformist interventionism which nonetheless remained firmly wedded to the notion of the ethical mission of the state (cf. Lindenlaub, 1967). Schmoller’s view of the state harked back to Fichte and Hegel in identifying it as the pivotal social institution, the supreme ethical power which dominated individual existence and embodied the highest form of morality (Lindenlaub, 94; Wagner 1990: 89–90). It is hardly fortuitous that Durkheim, in his attempt to secure independence for sociology as an ‘intermediary’ discipline, early on preferred the organicism of Schäffle, who remained critical of the etatist leanings of the Verein and pleaded a more communitarian solution to the social question (Therborn, 245–246), over against the mixture of moral science and authoritarianism served up by Kathedersozialisten such as Wagner and Schmoller (Durkheim, 1975: 282ff, 379).
Sociology’s Third Way
As claimed, this political topography of the three spaces of social theory fruitfully exhibits the idea that early sociology, while striving for a ‘third’ object-and-project, also remained significantly constrained by the old rivalry between the master sciences of political economy and political philosophy, and at least in two of its three zones might be seen as theorizing a continuity rather than a dichotomy between state and society. It should be added at this point that, even in the central wing, where early sociology was negotiating an intermediate position and hence maximally retreated from the reductionary dilemma of economism vs. etatism, it did not drop the traditional totalizing, hegemonial claims of the rivalling master sciences of the Economy and the State, but installed a third imperialism which was grounded in an equally expansive conception of the Social. If the economy was still the modelling ‘last instance’ for Spencer, and the state remained the essential and grounding organization for Treitschke and Schmoller, Durkheim claimed a similar ‘essentialism’ and a similar hegemonial position for his encompassing science of social solidarity. The tradition of moralistics had already stretched the concept of morale into a general synonym for human reality; the philosophes, in turn, typically took ‘civil society’ to refer both to the social part and the social whole (Heilbron, 1995: 78–79, 91). In Saint-Simon, Comte, and Durkheim, the claim about the autonomy of social facts likewise continually shifted into a claim of ultimate constitutive dominance; the double demarcation from political and economic facts, far from simply destroying the alleged autonomy of politics and economics, actually prepared their annexation in a new scientific hierarchy administered by the master discipline of moral sociology.
Another feature of the tripartite model is its useful tendency to blur the strict boundaries that are believed to run between social science and political ideology. In all three intellectual spaces, emerging social theory remained enmeshed in ‘discourse coalitions’ which stretched across the traditional divide separating science from politics, and retained close affinities with various political configurations (Wagner, 1990). Across the entire breadth of the sociological spectrum, the ‘scientific’ problematic of the relationship between individual and society was constitutively interwoven with the ‘ideological’ opposition between individualism and collectivism (of both the socialist and the nationalist variety). In England, the first usages of both ‘social science’ and ‘socialism’ occurred together in the late 1820s in Owenite and Ricardian Socialist criticisms of the ‘individual science’ of political economy (Claeys, 1986). [17] Hobhouse’s ‘new sociology’ and his ‘new liberalism’ were clearly mutually supportive, and attempted to steer a middle course in the pervasive political opposition between laissez faire individualism and state collectivism, e.g. of the Fabian variety (Collini, 1979). Durkheim’s original formulation of the project which would eventually result in De la division du travail social was ‘Rapports entre l’individualisme et le socialisme’, to be changed somewhat later into the apparently more neutral ‘Rapports de l’individu et de la société’; but as Filloux has argued, the first formulation remained the key to and the point of convergence of the entire Durkheimian project (1977: 3, 15). [18] The search for compatibility, if not unity, of the opposite ideologies of individualism and socialism also defined the politics of Solidarism, which for some time offered something like the official social philosophy of the French Third Republic (Hayward, 1961). It was similarly constitutive of the reformist socialism of Jaurès who, like Durkheim, tended to view socialism not so much as a counterforce to but as the logical completion of individualism (Lukes, 1973: 326). These currents to some extent converged in the ‘societal’ corporatism preached by Durkheim, Duguit, Bourgeois, Fouillée and other Solidarists, and was also embraced by Social Catholics such as La Tour du Pin and De Mun, social nationalists such as Maurras, and social economists such as Gide (Hayward, 1960; Elbow, 1953).
In Germany, rising social science demonstrated a similar affinity with political discourse, as was especially manifest in attempts by the Verein für Sozialpolitik to trace another third way between liberalism and (especially Marxist) socialism. In the early decades of the twentieth century, this legacy of the Verein was subjected to something like a binary fission, marked by a (second) Methodenstreit in which a new generation of national economists, represented by Tönnies, Sombart, and Weber, moved to oppose the generation of Schmoller and Wagner. [19] This primarily epistemological debate on the supposed value-freedom of the social sciences was partly infused with the knowledge-political ambition of the younger generation to break with the mystification of the State as carried over by the older Kathedersozialisten from idealist philosophy, and hence to achieve a greater distanciation between state and social science (Proctor, 1991: 86–87; cf. Weber, 1968: 539). If Weber’s work, as compared with the etatist liberalism of his 1895 inaugural lecture, progressively developed in a more modernist and individualist direction, Sombart’s thinking gradually gravitated towards the opposite illiberal standpoint, ultimately linking up with the ‘conservative revolutionary’ and state corporatist ideas of Freyer, Spann, and Schmitt (cf. Lenger, 1996). Since sociology, Freyer wrote in 1934, had originated in the separation of civil society from the state, the end of this separation would eventually result in the absorption of sociology by the Staatswissenschaften (Muller, 1987: 271). Freyer’s fusion of the Hegelian and Weberian legacies in an explicitly normative sociology of Herrschaft and state-directed Planung was paralleled by like-minded efforts of Sombart and Spann to move the State to center stage, and plead the supersession of the liberal differentiation of state and society (Wagner, 1990: 344). [20]
Among the benefits incurred by mapping such discursive coalitions across the traditional science-ideology divide is a new openness to continuities between rising social science and what may be called the tradition of radical ‘anti-modernism’. If various conjunctions can be traced between social science and classical liberalism, conservative etatism, reformist socialism, and Marxism, there also exist important linkages with radical varieties of rightwing thought which develop into a coherent ideology of ‘national socialism’ in the course of the 1920s and 1930s. König’s familiar thesis that the development of sociology in Germany was ‘brutally arrested’ in 1933 tends to overlook the binary fission which distributed the legacy of the Verein over a liberal and an anti-liberal current, and accordingly underestimates both their common origins and the intellectual seriousness of the anti-liberal tradition itself (cf. Lepenies, 1985: 405–6; Klingemann, 1996: passim). In the same vein, one might thematize the close affinity which coupled Italian sociology to national-syndicalist and fascist political philosophy after the demise of a more positivistic and liberal social science in the closing decades of the 19th century (Wagner, 238ff), or the important filiation through which, in France, Durkheimian reformist sociology and liberal socialism were ‘etatized’ and politicized in Déat’s néo-socialisme of the late thirties.
Knowledgeable Organization
Rather than exploring such conjunctions and interfaces of the triangular model, I will conclude by singling out the theme of ‘knowledgeable organization’, which may introduce a more specific demarcation of the elusive object-and-project of sociology than is provided by freely stretcheable and tendentially objectivist notions such as ‘society’, ‘the social’, or ‘social facts’, while it may also lend greater clarity to its original ‘projective’ or political commitments. It conveniently straddles the science-ideology divide, and connects to the wider intellectual tableau without extinguishing the singularity of mainstream sociology as centering primarily in the French positivist tradition. It offers a natural bridgehead between the reformist sociologies of the mainstream and the more radical sociologies of the left and the right, and also permits of further specification which narrows down its scope in order to elucidate the core sociological project as a ‘third’ one. In this respect, it usefully approaches both the Nisbetian topos of ‘community’ and the Gouldnerian one of ‘civil society’, if these are similarly taken to circumscribe a third project set at equal remove from etatist and economistic programmes (cf. Cohen and Arato, 1992: 30). Finally, it illustrates the important extent to which the sociological tradition converges upon a generalized theory of the political or of social power, and thereby helps to accentuate its demarcative interface with the Smithian (and Marxian) tradition of political economy.
‘Knowledgeable organization’ seems an apposite term if we wish to do justice both to sociology’s historical affinity with the tradition of political theory and to its enduring polemical relationship with political economy — which is difficult if we stick with the conventional meaning of society or the social as demarcated first of all against the state. Indeed, the idea of ‘knowledgeable organization’ or that of ‘scientific social management’ would not fare badly as a modern rendering of ‘politics’ in the comprehensive Aristotelian sense. Even Nisbet, who otherwise championed the unit-idea of ‘community’, was tempted to cast the long-term development of sociology as a gradual extension of Tocquevillean political theory towards the general theory of rational organization and domination which was perfected by Weber. Weber was introduced as the prime sociologist of the ‘organizational revolution’, which was also the revolution ‘which Marx failed to sense, as he had to fail, given his single-minded emphasis upon the dominance of private property’ (1965: 147). This view is close to that espoused by Aron, who emphasized the organizational and managerial imprint of Saint-Simonian and Comtean sociology, and extrapolates this to the writers of the classical age. Durkheim, he argued, developed a socialist sociology which might be summarized in the key terms of ‘organization’ and ‘moralization’; while the core of Weber’s sociology was found to lie in the closely federated themes of rationalization, organization, and domination (Aron 1965 I; 74–75; II: 86, 188, 218, 239). Filloux has recently abridged Durkheim’s central project as that of ‘intelligent organization’ (1993: 221).
‘Knowledgeable organization’, in this sense, defines at once the classical promise and the classical hubris of the sociological tradition, which has always been tempted to replace the chaotic spontaneity of society-as-market, and its unconscious strivings and uncontrollable effects, by a consciously planned and scientifically based project of social reconstruction. The organizers were to be knowledgeable, and positive social science promised to lay an objective groundwork for this knowledge, which would offer trustworthy analyses of social facts and regularities from which reformers could safely operate. Organization and scientific knowledge were recognized as new, autonomous productive forces which had gradually risen alongside and increasingly came to dominate established forces such as land, labour, and capital. As a corollary of this prediction of the ‘knowledge society’, many early sociologists also envisaged the rise of a ‘new class’ of sociologically capable intellectuals which would theoretically spearhead this movement, and would collaborate with more practical men in the scientific reconstitution and management of society. This new elite could be seated immediately in the state institutions themselves, as was the usual tendency in the Hegelian neo-idealist tradition, or be placed at some remove from the administrative and executive system, as was the case in French positivist social philosophy. Even where such philosophers did not immediately aspire to be kings, however, and allowed for some division of labour between politicians and intellectuals, the sociological project of ‘knowledgeable organization’ introduced a distinct claim to power of the sociologically enlightened savants themselves.
Notes
1 Most outspokenly perhaps in Elias: ‘It was the insight into the relative autonomy of the subject matter of “sociology” which was the decisive step forward towards establishing sociology as a relatively autonomous science’ (1978: 45)(italics omitted). On the inversion of project and object see more extensively Pels (1983). This constructivist wordplay also occurs in Lacroix (1981: 62ff), Latour (1988: 73) and Haraway (‘objects are boundary projects’)(1991: 201). [back to text]
2 Carl Schmitt had an early inkling of this ‘rivalry effect’ when he emphasized the ‘polemical precision’ of political and social-scientific concepts, the polemical value of the concept of ‘society’, and the ‘oppositional’ origin of sociology (1931: 73–74n). [back to text]
3 Most typically, once again, in Elias (1984: 38). But Elias merely reproduces the argument of Durkheim’s inaugural lecture ‘Cours de science sociale’ (1970 [1888]: 78–85). Cf. also Heilbron (1995) and my critical review and ensuing discussion (Pels 1996a; 1996b). [back to text]
4 Cf. also Levine (1995) for an inspiring (re)vision of the sociological tradition which partly follows different themes and traces different fault lines, but is equally sensitive to the distinctive orientations which are entrenched in national traditions. Levine (251ff) includes a chapter on the American tradition which highlights its emphases on empiricism and subjectivity — suggesting that it does not occupy a separate space in the (admittedly schematic) three-zone scheme which I advance here, but broadly falls within the individualistic ‘Anglosaxon’ current. [back to text]
5 Cf. Tönnies’ multiple use of this conceptual pair as summarized by Szacki (1979: 343–344). [back to text]
6 This wide-ranging historical rivalry, and the intricate pattern of fission and fusion between what can also be called ‘power theory’ and ‘property theory’, is extensively discussed in Pels (1998). The present article is a modified version of the first part of chapter 5, ‘Social Science as Power Theory’. [back to text]
7 Becker and Barnes (1952: 575) early on advanced that Comte did not distinguish clearly between sociology and political science, but apparently regarded sociology as ‘the perfected political science of the future’. For similar views, see Gouldner (1985: 269) and Wagner (1990). For views of Comte which differ interestingly from the present one, see Vernon (1984) and Heilbron (1995). See also Pels (1996b). [back to text]
8 For Durkheim, authority indeed constituted the dorsal spine of morality; in this respect, Nisbet’s first pair of unit-ideas are mutually substitutable. Social discipline is significantly referred to as ‘the vital knot of collective life’ (Durkheim, 1986: 145). As Durkheim typically argues, ‘there are no morals without discipline and authority, and the sole rational authority is the one that a society is endowed with in relation to its members’; the State is regularly identified as the prime organ to institute and preserve this moral discipline (cf. 1992: 72–3). In a text from 1886, he already affirms that the distinction between governors and governed is ‘presque contemporaine de la vie sociale’ (1970: 201). [back to text]
9 Similar considerations have e.g. been expressed by Wagner (1990), Turner (1992), Gane (1992), and Müller (1993). See also extensively Pels (2000: 49ff) on Durkheim’s sociological/socialist spokespersonship for social things. Challenger (1994) argues for a communitarian Durkheim who falls closely in line with neo-Aristotelian ethics; but curiously, he refrains from discussing professional ethics, democratic corporatism, or any other item in Durkheim’s omnipresent political vocabulary. On this see also Cladis (1992). [back to text]
10 Sociology as a critical continuation of classical political philosophy is also a guiding thread in Aron’s ‘Weberian’ history of the sociological tradition. Although Aron is less explicit about it than Therborn, the idea is much more consistently patterned into his thought. One major effect of his interpretation as compared with more orthodox communitarian ones is the relative displacement of intellectual weight from the Comte-Durkheim lineage towards the axis which links Tocqueville backward to Montesquieu and forward to Weber. This also involves a calendar change, since the beginnings of sociology are fixed earlier in historical time. In this perspective, Montesquieu is not so much a precursor of sociology but rather ‘one of its great theorists’ (as incidentally Durkheim also thought), whose work forged a trait d’union between classical political theory and early sociology (Aron, 1965 I: 62; Durkheim, 1966). [back to text]
11 The shift is clearly evidenced in Comte’s application of his Law of Three Stages to politics. If the ‘doctrine of Kings’ represented the theological state of politics, and the ‘doctrine of the People’ expressed its metaphysical condition, the Scientific Doctrine of politics ‘considers the social state in which the human race has always been found by observers as the necessary effect of its organisation’ (Comte, 1974: 135–136). [back to text]
12 Comte makes a special point of emphasizing that the principle of the division of labour was discovered by Aristotle far earlier and formulated more suggestively than in the works of the political economists. [back to text]
13 Heilbron has recently shown that early French social theory emerged to a large degree as a new branch of the already firmly entrenched ‘moralistic’ tradition, as it had evolved from Montaigne and La Rouchefoucauld to the philosophes and Montesquieu (1995: 20–21, 69–77; cf. also Heilbron, 1998). Its naturalistic descriptions of morale and forms of sociability departed from the core notion that social order represented a reality sui generis, occurring spontaneously and in relative detachment from the actions and decisions of legislative bodies. This view, however, easily overstates the ‘stateless’ character of what after all continued to be called the sciences morales et politiques, and erroneously extends this view to early Comtean and Durkheimian sociology, in which the state ‘plays a similarly negligible role’ (22–23; cf. Wagner, 163). Heilbron’s subsequent account, to be sure, suggests that the state-society distinction was never drawn very sharply; indeed, both Montesquieu and Rousseau are explicitly introduced as representing a synthesis of moral philosophy and the politico-legal tradition, so that social theory effectively emerged not so much from an effort to sever moral from political theory but rather from a concern to integrate them (80–81, 270). [back to text]
14 If there exists an important historical affinity between the ideas of ‘community’ and ‘polity’, we gain a view of the specificity of sociology’s historical object/project which differs equally from functionalist reconstructions which emphasize normative solidarity and from conflictual ones which emphasize domination and elite rule. The analysis of power and politics is central to the sociological tradition in both variants, and never very distant from the analysis of values, norms, and representations. Without wishing to deny that the breach between consensus and conflict theory indicates a major cleavage in the history of social thought, it is neither the only nor perhaps the most influential one. By neutralizing this old schism, we are better equipped to thematize the relative unity of the core sociological project vis-à-vis those theories and traditions against which it rose as a counter-science. [back to text]
15 However, Saint-Simon and Comte also reflected the state-society dilemma in their divergent assessments of political economy and economic behaviour and their different views of the role of the state. While understating Saint-Simon’s anti-statism, Gouldner somewhat overstates Comte’s commitment to ‘civil society’ (1980: 367). For an extended defence of the notion of civil society as a ‘third project’, which is also linked backwards to Tocqueville, see Cohen and Arato (1992). [back to text]
16 In a central passage of his lecture, Weber advanced that ‘In the final analysis, processes of economic development are power struggles too, and the ultimate and decisive interests which economic policy must serve are the interests of national power, whenever these interests are in question. The science of political economy is a political science. It is a servant of politics, not the day-to-day politics of the persons and classes who happen to be ruling at any given time, but the enduring power-political interests of the nation’ (Weber, 1994: 16). [back to text]
17 Shapiro has located an even earlier use in a 1785 letter by John Adams, where it vaguely refers to ‘political theory’ (Shapiro, 1984). [back to text]
18 Durkheim’s initial question, which continued to underlie his thinking, was: ‘are individualism and socialism irreconcileable? If not, what kind of individualism and what kind of socialism are compatible?’ (Filloux, 1993: 212). Cf. the classically ‘neutral’ formulation in the preface of Division: ‘The question that has been the starting point for our study has been that of the connection between the individual personality and social solidarity. How does it come about that the individual, whilst becoming more autonomous, depends ever more closely upon society? How can he become at the same time more of an individual and yet more linked to society? For it is indisputable that these two movements, however contradictory they appear to be, are carried on in tandem’ (1984: xxx). On Durkheim’s ‘third project’ of democratic corporatism see further Pels (1998: 147ff). [back to text]
19 The first Methodenstreit, at the beginnings of the Verein in the 1870s, had ranged Schmoller against Menger in a famous criticism of the latter’s individualism and non-interventionism. [back to text]
20 On Sombart’s ‘aristocratic turn’ see also Lindenlaub (1967: 314ff). Freyer explicitly traced the emergence of German sociology both to Von Stein and to an ‘anti-sociologist’ such as Treitschke. On Weber in the Nazi reception, see Klingemann (1996: 171ff); on the intellectual relationship between Freyer and, see also Mommsen (1989: 176–178). In his seminal work on Weber’s political thought, Mommsen extensively discussed Schmitt’s radicalization of Weber’s principle of plebiscitary leadership democracy (1974: 407ff; cf. Turner and Factor, 1987). The intriguing relationship between Weber and Michels is discussed by Beetham (1977: 175–177) and Mommsen (1989: 102–105). [back to text]
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