Classical Social Theorists NTU Lectures II

John Lie

May 2014

Reinventing Social Theory

• Why bother with the classics?

– Especially as there are serious flaws

• Two alternative (scientific) paths

– Deductivism

– Inductivism

• Two epistemologies (knowledge/truth claims)

– Coherence

– Correspondence

Deductivism

• The appeal of scientificity – Euclid, Hobbes et al.

– Revolutionary certitude (e.g. Descartes) • Contemporary heirs in evolutionary psychology, rational

choice theory etc.

• The inevitability of assumptions – Proofs and reputations

– A form of religion?

• Authoritarian temptations

• The challenges of “external reality”

Inductivism

• The “scientific method”

• The illusions of “scientism”

– The epistemic priority of concepts and categories – i.e. some form of theoretical a priori

• Immanuel Kant

– The difficulties of objectivity and neutrality

• Ideology effect: reifying the present

– What may not exist (e.g. racial science) as well as what may exist (e.g. domestic violence)

Pragmatism

• Combines the virtues of the two without certitude

– Abduction / hypothesis formation

• The assumption of change

– But the inevitability of the past (legacy)

• Whether in cognition or social reconstruction

• Epistemic corrigibility and accountability

Classics and Their Discontents

• Classics – “A book which people praise and don’t read” (Mark

Twain) – “Some one said: ‘The dead writers are remote from us

because we know so much more than they did.’ Precisely, and they are that which we know” (T.S. Eliot)

• Discontents – Accidents of the canon (which texts?) – Scholasticism and its pitfalls

• intellectual conservatism

– “Hegelian” faith and its implausibility

Why Read a Classic?

• Ancestor worship – Idol worship – Genealogy / Legacy

• Cultural capital • Model

– Abstract/concrete (historical/comparative) • Violence of abstraction (e.g. economic theory)

– Transdiciplinary (e.g. the state, the factory, machinery)

• Generative – Unanswered questions – Upstream vs. downstream

• The inevitable contextuality of knowledge

The Necessity of Theory

• Always a matter of good or bad theory – Irrelevance of social theory in non-democratic polities

• Though some other “theory,” be it religious or political

– Informs politics and everyday life

• The way forward – Learn from the past, seek rigor, and face reality, but

hope for better

– Reading and learning from past works as a necessary first step • Wittgenstein and the ladder

Critique

• Critical criticism

• Internal vs. external criticism

• Critique

– The primacy of understanding

– The necessity of transcendence (ladder)

Karl Marx, 1818-1883

• Born in Trier, 5 May

– Father converts to Lutheranism

– Enlightenment / Bildung

• Doctorate in Greek philosophy from Jena, 1841

• Journalist / writer

– A series of exiles

– Settles in London in 1849

Friedrich Engels, 1820-1895

• Meets Marx in 1842

• The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (1845)

• Runs a mill in Manchester

• Supports Marx financially, emotionally etc.

Two Main Contributions

• Historical materialism – Evolutionary (teleology)

• The primacy of class struggle

• The telos of communism

– Materialist • Anti-idealist

– e.g. the concept of gravity

• Critique of “ideology” – Particular interests as “general”

• “the laws of motion of the capitalist mode of production”

“The Communist Manifesto” (1848)

• A political prospectus for a non-existent party

• Ostensibly prophetic – The European revolutions of 1848

– Evidently not about the contemporary order’s “death throes” but rather its “birth pangs”

• Becomes increasingly influential – A series of 20th-century revolutions that featured

Marxism as a profoundly influential political ideology

Excursus on Translation

“Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa – das Gespenst des Kommunismus”

“A frightful hobgoblin stalks through Europe….”

(Helen Macfarlane transl. in Red Republican, 1850)

“A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism”

(Samuel Moore transl., 1888)

The Capitalist Manifesto?

“Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned…..” (trans. Samuel Moore, 1888)

The Shape of Capitalism

“The bourgeoisie … has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.”

Achievements

“The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization or rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground -- what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?”

Prophecy of Globalization?

“The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.”

The Contradiction of Capitalism

“Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence…. The modern laborer … sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an overriding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society. “

Communism, c. 1848

“Demands of the Communist Party in Germany” (1848)

1. progressive income tax

2. free schooling

3. state control of transportation

4. national bank

Other “demands”

universal “male” suffrage, secret ballot, child labor laws

Communism according to Marx

“makes it possible for me to do this today, and that tomorrow, to go hunting in the morning and fishing in the afternoon, to tend the cattle in the evening and after supper to criticise, just as I wish without ever becoming a hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic” (“The German Ideology,” 1846)

“from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!” (“Critique of the Gotha Programme,” 1875)

The Long Road to Das Kapital

• Only the first volume appeared in his lifetime (1867)

• “Do try and finish your political economy book, even if there’s much in it that you yourself are dissatisfied with, it doesn’t really matter; minds are ripe and we must strike while the iron’s hot… So try and finish before April….” (Engels to Marx, January 1845)

• “[I am] so far advanced that I will have finished the whole economic stuff in five weeks’ time” (Marx, April 1851)

“The Economic Shit”

• Material conditions

– Poverty

• Correspondent for The New York Daily Tribune in the 1850s

– Domestic troubles

– Health problems

• Intellectual development

– “academic” feuds

– Vanquishing ignorance generates new areas of ignorance (mathematics, languages etc.)

Capital, vol.1 (1867)

• Vol.2 (1885) and Vol.3 (1894) edited by Engels

• The so-called fourth volume (1905) edited by Karl Kautsky (Theories of Surplus Value)

• Muted reception

– The first printing of 1,000 copies takes four years to sell

– 1872 Russian translation

• The imperial censor “passes” the book as “few would read it and still fewer understand it”

Long Posthumous Life

• George Bernard Shaw: “[Das Kapital] achieved the greatest feat of which a book is capable – that of changing the minds of the people who read it.”

• The foundation of Marxism-Leninism (Stalinism)

– “Je ne suis pas marxiste” (Marx)

– Cf. Marx’s motto: de omnibus dubitandum

Why Read Part 8

• Historical vs. dialectical materialism

– The salience of history

• Primitive accumulation

– Double meaning (as in “free workers”)

– The primacy of “force”

– The inevitability of “original sin” (ideology)

Capital

• Double meaning

• Commodity fetishism – Relations between people become relations

between things • Dialectics of people / nature

• Three levels of ideology – Distortions (lies)

– Interests (particular ones as general ones)

– Horizons of thought (hegemony)

Anglocentrism

• The case of England as the universal case

– “De te fabula narratur”

• The nation-state as the unit of analysis

– Cf. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System

• The presumption of social evolutionism

– The singular path to capitalism/modernity?

• Cf. Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy

Path Dependence

• Another way to talk about history / context

• Once capitalism begins, ushers in a completely different context for others

– True materially as well as intellectually (reflexive)

• The idea of late development – Veblen, Gerschenkron et al.

• A strong case against homogenous, evolutionary development

Marxism into Leninism

• Imperial Russia

– Marx’s letter to Vera Zasulich (1881)

• VI Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution (1917)

– Confirmation or refutation of Marxism?

– Coup d’état or social revolution?

– Hegel’s critique of the French Revolution

• Marxist rhetoric and peasant realities

– Eric Wolf, Peasant Wars of the 20th Century

Problems for Marxists in Asia

• Most critically in Japan

– All the more so because of the strength of Marxism / socialism

• 講座派 vs 労農派

– Indubitable particularity

– Mere temporal aberration or enduring particularity?

• If the latter, what are the sources?

– 天皇制

Max Weber (1864-1920)

• Born in Erfurt; dies in München

• Studies law at Heidelberg and Berlin

• Habilitationschrift : Die Rőmische Agrargechichte in ihrer Bedeutung fuer das Staats- und Privatrecht (1891)

• Marries Marianne Schnitger (1893)

Weber, Later

Conflicts and Torments

• Chair at Freiburg (1894) and Heidelberg (1896) – Works on legal and economic history, the “Polish”

question, agrarian and industrial sociology etc.

• Nervous breakdown (c. 1897-1903) – a Freudian case study?

• Comes back with the “Protestant ethic” essay in 1904

• Active politically (center-left nationalist)

• Resumes teaching at Wien and Műnchen

Protean Scholarship

• Comparative historical-sociology of religion – Ancient Judaism, “religions” of China, India

• Political economy / economic history – Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft

• Methodology / Philosophy • Politics

– Social policy, Russian Revolution

• And many, many other topics – Die rationalen und soziologischen Grundlagen der

Musik

What Was He Afraid Of?

• Hannah Arendt

• Conservatives – Organicist / idealist views

• Marxists – An alternative take on modernity, capitalism etc.

– Countering the “scandal” of materialism

• Nietzsche – Rationalization

– Disenchantment

The Protestant Ethic Essay

• Becomes a launching point for his massive project on world religions

• Curious: invites serious misreadings – Crude categories / variables of “culture” or

“religion”

– A “one-sided” interpretation (Wirtschaftsgeschichte)

• Curiouser: profoundly anti-sociological – An unlikely and unstable foundation for sociology

Explaining Change

• Sociological penchant for explaining order, stability, reproduction, and lack of change

– Paradoxically true for Marxists and radicals (e.g. Bourdieu)

• Not only about “ideas” about their seemingly random and irrational irruption

– A forerunner of chaos / complexity theory?

Rationalization of the Irrational

• In later works, seeks to tame the ostensibly random and irrational source of change

• Comparative analysis of religion

– Impressive range / erudition

– Pushes back differences to the origins of world-religions (cultures)

• In so doing minimizes later transformations

• The problematic as fundamentally teleological and ethnocentric

In the Case of East Asia

• Retrospective reformulation of East Asian history

– Not only the profound impact of European modernity but also the question of why not?

– Robert Bellah, Tokugawa Religion (1958)

• And numerous successor studies

• Parsonization and Modernization Theory