Monday, 02 May 2005
Justin Rosenbug's Empire of Civil Society starts from a point similar to Scholte. He is critical of IR as a social science because of the way that it has divided up the social totality and focused on one aspect of it--the political. Scholte makes a similar critique, but Rosenberg gives a more compelling response. Whereas Scholte outlines a complex framework for critique which ends up seeming somewhat relativistic, Rosenberg presents an argument in favor of historical materialism and then makes the connections between the domestic and international, the individual and the global, that prove the usefulness of this approach. In doing this, he produces one of the more coherent explanations of the subject/structure problem in social science analysis.
He begins by looking at three foundational practitioners of the discipline (Carr, Morgenthau, and Walz), explicating and dissecting their arguments and problematizing the central tension of (domestic) sovereignty and (international) anarchy which the field seeks to explain through the instrumental mechanism of balance of power. In each case, Rosenberg shows the inadequacy and contradiction that mires each argument--usually because of its attempt to bracket the political from other social forces, the belief in the transhistorical character of the dynamics of the international system, and the failure to clearly define what the terms of the debate are. More importantly, and specific to Rosenberg as opposed to Scholte, the field fails to fulfill its goal as a social science. For Rosenberg, this goal is to explain what is unique in the emergence of the modern era. The short answer, for Rosenberg, is capitalism and the "strategic relationship" of wage labor.
The latter conclusion is, in part, reached about midway through the text, following a rigorous argument about the way that social structures should be conceived. Much of this section, like Scholte's work, is informed by Giddens' work on structuration. However, Rosenberg doesn't stick with one theorist but instead takes from Giddens to reinvigorate the "second way" of thinking about social structure. He says that the benefit of Historical Materialism as a theoretical instrument isn't that it is more rational or more evidential (52) but that it explains more than realism
This is because the central thesis of historical materialism is not economic determinism: it is the centrality of those relations which organize material production to the wider institutional reproduction of social orders. And exactly what those relations are in any given society is always an empirical question. (53)
Here Rosenberg and Scholte part ways. For where Scholte wants to speak of co-determinant social dimensions of local, national, and international, Rosenberg sees this as a more one sided process, quoting Gramsci's question from "The Modern Prince:" "Do international relations precede or follow (logically) fundamental social relations? There can be no doubt that they follow." Thus, IR must begin by thinking about the social structure before considering international relations or politics as such.
The following chapters are meant to show, simultaneously, the problems of Realist assumptions of history and the explanatory power of historical materialsim in better understanding of societies, their states, and their relations with other socially determined states. By looking back at the Greek City States and Reniassance Italy, he shows the inadequacy of thinking about "purely political authority" i.e. soveriegnty in a transhistorical way, projecting backwards the assumptions of the modern state. In each of these cases the state does not exhibit the realist notion of sovereignty, and, in any case, the social configurations could not be generalized beyond that context. Rosenberg eventually moves to Marx to discuss the unique emergence of the state within a capitalist social configuration where "this condition of the emergence of a discrete sphere of 'the political' is actually internal to the mode of production"(85). In this way, Rosenberg is in some ways admitting that there is cause for IR and political science to isolate the political as an object of study, but he is saying that the possibility of doing this, the emergence of this concept, is only credible or possible from a modern perspective. In this configuration, the separation of the political and the economic is analogous to the separation of the public and private spheres. As civil society emerges as a check on public political power, and as the concept of political liberty and freedom emerge as general social goals, the "unfreedom" of the "non-political," i.e. the economic, the private, begins to be seen as equally natural and of a piece with political freedom. Rosenberg quotes Ellen Wood as pointing out that this "differentiation of the economic is in fact a differentiation within the political sphere." But the point is that, on the surface it seems separate and it is this separation that IR (and much post-war, American social science) reifies.
More here on spain, portugal;
Roughly, Rosenberg uses the early Spanish and Portuguese imperial endeavors to show the differences in the "distinct historical structure of social relations embodying processes of 'international' accumulation" (93). This seems to follow in some ways from the articulation of Historical Structures of Robert Cox and certainly focuses on the particularity of each international expansion. Here he is arguing with both realist and World Systems articulations of the transformation of global order. And, roughly, this corresponds to a refusal to consider this form of imperialism as the same thing as that of the "Age of empire" in the late nineteeth century. His argument is that each pattern of expansion and the mode of social relations at the international level mirrors the fundamental structures that existed in each country and corresponded to particular class interests and assumptions. So that there wasn't the economic or political motive that drove the style or direction of these colonial endeavors. For example:
The encomienda system by which, following the opening round of slaughter and looting, the Spaniards institutionalized their command over native labour was adapted from institutions developed earlier by the Crown to allocate newly reconquered Moorish territories. And the distinctive role of the castilian town--both as a garrison planted in an alien countryside and as a co-ordinated grid of intra-Spanish relations of authority and appropriation was also carried over [the ocean].(110).
Thus thinking about these movements with attention to earlier social structures explains much more than simply trying to put these movements into a transhistorical framework about power or economics in the world system or international relations. The evidence that Rosenberg presents clearly supports his contention that "the dynamics and forms of geopolitical expansion are structurally specific--specific on the one hand to the historical identity of the social order which is expanding its reach and, on the other hand, to the particular social relations which it seeks to encompass and direct." (120) The latter isn't illuminated much, but he does talk about the attempt by Spaniards to step into the already existing social structure to direct expansion using this as a method of legitimizing their power.
anarchy in social structure and analogy of anarchy of individuals in market to anarchy of states.
Rosenberg's sixth chapter is a fairly complex argument which eventually comes out illustrating the homology between the individual in the anarchic market and the state in the anarchic international relations of capitalist modernity. It is a compelling argument and, for me, performs two related moves in basically synthesizing IR and Critical Sociol Theory: He overcomes some of the agent/structure dichotomy by discussing it in terms of an anarchy that capitalist modernity necessitates through the division of public and private aspects. And by extending this relationship to a global level, he shows that it is basically the same sort of understanding that IR has of the state--the latter being a unique formation of capitalist modernity rather than a transhistorical reality. In doing this, he shows the utility of the historical materialist method for exploring events and social formations in the last two hundred years in terms of what is unique in this development. By extension, he also shows the utility of the method for considering earlier social formations if only by comparison to the present day.
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