The Formation of Modern Societies:
The Formation of Modern Societies:
Lecture handout for the introduction
Historical Sociology
FMS is mainly a course in historical sociology. Sociology develops in the C19th as an attempt to understand contemporary western societies in a scientifically systematic way. Arguably the impulse behind this is the emergence of an understanding of society in somewhat abstract terms as “a system of common life” (see Raymond Williams in the handout), rather than just a specific group of individuals, and a sense of societies in this abstract sense becoming harder to know, and of its becoming more important that we understand them. Rapid change, especially in the wake of the industrial revolution and the advent of popular nationalism after the French Revolution, posed a particular challenge, since it could seem that social order was changing fast, and risked disintegration, so one needed to understand its underlying principles in order to maintain it.
Among the key founding figures of sociology are Auguste Comte (1798-1857), Karl Marx (1818-83), Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) and Max Weber (1864-1920). These thinkers and others proposed several different theoretical models for sociology. The differences between these models have never been definitively reconciled. This may beg questions about sociology’s claims to be a science (rather than, say, one of the humanities).
Sociology has always had several dimensions. For example, some sociologists are mainly empirical (so-called ‘clipboard’ sociology: surveys, gathering data in the form of statistics, etc), and this calls for certain kinds of methodology, but in practice gets by for most of the time without much ‘high’ theory. Other branches of sociology develop into social theory.
Social form and social change
Some branches of sociology seek to map modern societies, by examining various dimensions of social life in the present (hence a preoccupation with class, and sociologies of religion, the family, work, etc).
Some kind of functionalism often informs this: the idea that the main aspects of a society have a social function (e.g. in securing social cohesion, which is a function often attributed to ritual), and sometimes also that seemingly disconnected aspects of a society all fit together as a whole (so, e.g., though they seem on the face of it to have nothing to do with each other, one can argue that Romantic love in some functional way fits with modern market capitalism because it fosters individuality and desire, and thus the kind of possessive individualism on which capitalism depends).
Functionalist explanations are easiest to apply when a society can be conceived as being fairly stable, at least in respect of its main social functions. If the functions keep changing, then functionalism’s explanatory power diminishes. What one then wants to know is How and why do societies change?
Therefore sociology also seeks to understand social change, and the processes by which modern societies develop from seemingly very different predecessors. This is the main remit of historical sociology: the examination of the systematic transformation of societies over history. This obviously involves historical data; but it also tends to involve high levels of theoretical discussion, especially concerning the underlying mechanisms of historical change, and the shape or narrative form (if any) of history. This is especially difficult, because, on some interpretations at least, modern societies seem to be historically unprecedented, and to have been brought about by revolutionary change, and thus very difficult to explain as a continuation of historical trends and causes.
The Problematic Problem of Modernity
Modernity is thus a special problem for sociology, whether it’s trying to map it in the present or explain its development. It appears (or it appeared to many of the founders of sociology, with the partial exception of Durkheim) to represent a form or forms of life paradigmatically different from anything that had gone before (and coincidentally, it’s because we have to examine that claim that we have to explore the formation of modern societies by going back to the evolution of humanity and to pre-modern societies).
Looking over the greater part of human history, before the advent of modernity, humanity seems naturally diverse in culture: languages, belief systems, myths, forms of art, etc. But that doesn't mean that cultural choice has been common in human history: a culture may represent only one of many possible forms of life, but it is likely to seem natural, normal and possibly inevitable to those within it. So for most of human history people have been caught within what from outside might appear to be quite arbitrary systems of belief.
Two key ideas inform the course:
1. the widespread sociological idea that modernity is something other than just another culture, or even set of cultures; that it represents some sort of break with the general run of human history; that some sort of value attaches to that, be it positive or negative (the modern world as progress (see Williams on C19th redefinition of ‘modern’); or modernity as a fallen world, lapsed from some golden age); and that possibly it represents human destiny; and
2. that this idea is deeply problematic.
Some Dimensions of a Simple Model of Modernity
• individualism: there is a greater tendency to organise and conceive of ourselves as isolated individuals, something manifest in phenomena as different as Romantic love, inner sense of self, market relations, and conceptions of property;
• nuclear families: as opposed to extended kinship systems;
• universal freedom and equality: as opposed to, for example, societies where hierarchy and status are the principle normative values; thus obligations are established by contract between formally free parties, not by ascribed unequal statuses;
• secularisation: religion, even if it remains significant as a private credo, diminishes in its social significance, and loses ground to secular discourses in many spheres of life (such as science, social policy, secular ethics, etc);
• rationality: modern forms of life have sometimes been seen as more rational than their predecessors, which might be seen, by contrast, as dominated by tradition or superstition, in terms of organisation and technology, or of mentality (given high levels of literacy and education in modern societies);
• division of labour: when basic needs can be met with few hours of labour, the number of different tasks can multiply, and people can specialise in one task, or in extreme cases in one sub-section of a task; this is associated with higher productivity; often also associated with high levels of mutual dependence and organisation; also occasionally connected with a sense of lost wholeness or self-sufficiency, in that each of us is now just a cog in a large system;
• capitalism — and possibly prosperity: in Karl Polanyi’s formulation, in pre-modern societies economic relations are embedded in social ones; in modern, capitalist societies it's the other way around; economic activity is systematic, sustained and capable of supporting unprecedented consumption for some;
• high levels of inner discipline (paradoxical, perhaps, given claims about freedom), supported by external checks: surveillance, quality assurance, certification, appraisals, examinations etc.;
• increasingly urban and industrial and technological;
• politics is based on clear lines of authority, articulated in a system of sovereign, territorial states (see Political Transformations), rather than, say, tribes, confused multiple jurisdictions, or Empires; some argue for a connexion between modernity and a culture of rights, constitutionalism and liberal democracy;
• subject to remorseless, rapid and inevitable change.
Paradoxical Modernity
The emphasis on change led Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to see the modern, capitalist world as inherently unstable:
“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising 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 training 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, and man is at last compelled to face, with sober senses, is real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
[Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, Manifesto of The Communist Party, trans. Samuel Moore, rev. edn. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), pp. 38-9.]
Marx and Engels saw this instability as nevertheless ultimately leading to progress and the emancipation of humanity. In the C20th modernity has increasingly come to be seen less in terms purely of progress and emancipation, than as paradoxical, with some of its alleged features undercut by others (compare, e.g., claims about freedom and discipline). This sceptical approach sees modernity as a condition in which achievements are offset by unexpected problems; and in which the ultimate realisation of humanity as the goal of history is called into question.
The connexion between modernity and the West has come to be seen as especially problematic. Most of the elements of modernity come together initially in the West, and this sometimes led to claims about the historical uniqueness of the West, and its being in the vanguard of history. There’s now a widespread (though not universal) view that these claims are questionable. They are sometimes characterised as ‘Eurocentric’, and seen as an attempt to justify western power.
The problem of historical change
If we are right to see modernity as something quite different from any previous form of life (and that is a big if), that begs the question of how it came about. Most cultures more or less reproduce themselves from one generation to the next, and usually exhibit a high degree of historical continuity (though there are exceptions). If modernity (or key aspects of it) is historically unprecedented, how can one explain it? This leads to debates about human agency, the nature of historical change, the meaning and shape of history, etc.
A simple explanation might be: modernity developed because we intended it. Talk of the modern project or the Enlightenment project tends to emphasise intention. But this begs further questions: how did people come to intend such a thing, and how did they come to be in a position such that their intentions proved effective? Are we talking about individual intentions, or the collective intentions of a whole society or even of humanity per se? Are we talking about conscious intentions, or something else (e.g. individuals may now choose consciously whether or not to have children, but at another level one can speak of humanity as a life-form seeking to perpetuate itself)? This gets us into problems about whether there’s some kind of collective human essence or informing spirit (life forces, the will to power, and Reason are among the candidates for this).
The main alternative to seeing modernity as the upshot of our intentions is to see it as produced by historical forces operating on and through us without our being aware of them.
Another key division here is between seeing the development of modernity as an inevitable outcome, and possibly therefore as the necessary expression of some underlying laws of history. This often leads to a view of history as teleological (i.e. having a goal towards which it is moving). The main alternative is to see modernity as an historical accident.
Many theories of history posit different phases, more or less distinct from each other (e.g. Ancient, Mediaeval and Modern). Some propose a direction to history: progressive, degenerative, or cyclical.
We’ll explore concepts of historical change further by looking at the excerpt by Comte, Marx and Weber in the handout.
The Formation of Modern Societies:
Lecture handout on Nature and Culture
We are going back to examine humanity’s evolutionary origins. Beware of assuming that the origins of a thing explain its current nature. However, people still argue about human nature in relation to political and social issues today, e.g. Are we naturally individualists? Or naturally self-interested? These arguments are sometimes abused, e.g. the way in which Darwinian evolution was invoked by social Darwinists to imply that the survival of the fittest in a Darwinian sense to justify market competition in the capitalist economy. The pseudo-science of race marked a low point in this questionable invocation of human nature, especially when it argued that some races were inherently more advanced than others. But the question remains inescapable, especially in the nature/culture and nature/nurture debates.
I. Nature and culture
Most of the principal human traits in ascribed at one time or another either to nature or to culture. They are either programmed into us by our biology, or we have developed them over time, and each generation has to learn them, and can learn them differently.
Edmund O. Wilson, a sociobiologist, tells a story to illustrate the difference, by imagining two races, one whose traits are entirely determined by nature, while the others are determined entirely by culture:
The Eidylons (skilled ones) behave strictly according to genetic control. The Xenidrins (strangers) act only according to cultural influence.
Eidylons are as intelligent as Earthlings, but they can respond only one way to a given set of circumstances. During embryonic development Eidylon genes build brains that are “hard wired” and thus capable of learning only one set of social behaviour. All Eidylon societies have the same political and economic systems. Details of language, art, and other elements of their cultures may vary, but the basic structures are unchangeable. At Eidylon festivals ritual hymns stir feelings of deep pleasure in the audience , but the music is always the same, note for note. Eidylons teach and learn all that they know, but they are capable of learning only one thing in each category -- one language, one creation myth, one courtship ritual. Like the white-crowned sparrows of California, they must hear the song of their species in order to learn it, but it is the only song they can learn.
At the opposite end of the spectrum are the Xenidrins, who are born with minds that are truly blank slates. Their every behaviour is shaped by their culture. Like Eidylons, they must be taught in order to learn, but they can learn any form of behaviour. In some Xenidrin societies the culture leads men to dominate women, but in as many others the culture leads women to dominate men. Some prohibit incest; others encourage it. Smiles are not the universal language among the Xenidrins; in some Xenidrin cultures the tradition is instead to wrinkle the nose or shake the head.
If Earthlings were guided entirely or predominantly, by culture, as social scientists often hold, a survey of Earthling societies ought to reveal a species something like the Xenidrins. Or, if human behaviour were entirely genetic in control, it ought to resemble that of the Eidylons.
Some people come close to ascribing everything to nature or to culture (e.g. a certain kind of radical likes to emphasise culture, in order to have the greatest potential for transformation; Conservatives often emphasise an unchanging human nature). But it seems on the face of it that neither extreme is plausible, and that the truth lies somewhere in between two. The question is Where?
II. Nature: human evolution
There's wide, though not universal, agreement that human nature is best understood in terms of Darwinian evolution (though there are other kinds, such as Lamarck’s). Unlike many of the creation myths humanity has devised, Darwinian evolution does not in principle accord us any special status.
Darwin noted how domesticated animals and plants had been developed from their wild predecessors by deliberate, human selection (to create, for example, all the breeds of dog out of wolves), and wondered whether there mightn't be a natural selection, effected by blind forces in nature, rather than by conscious intention.
II. i. Natural selection
Most living things are capable of reproducing in greater numbers than are necessary merely to ensure a stable population. As they reproduce certain random mutations are introduced, most of which are perfectly useless, but some of which may be advantageous. What decides which mutations survive? In any given environment some naturally determined traits will give their possessors an advantage over those that lack them. It will make their possessors better adapted to or fitter for that environment. They will therefore tend to survive and to pass on these traits to the next generation, whereas those without these traits, other things being equal, will be less likely to reproduce. It is in this sense that Darwin’s doctrine can be summed up as the ‘survival of the fittest’. Fitness has nothing to do with strenuous training: it’s to do with fitting into an environment.
There is no necessary progress in this process, and certainly no conscious design. Organisms fit together in a particular environment as a result of millions of years of trial and error, and fitness and only be measured relative to a given environment. It is not a synonym for "advanced", as some social Darwinists have claimed.
N.b. Darwin knows nothing of genetics, though modern genetics explains much of the mechanism by which traits were transmitted in the way Darwin described.
II. ii. Human evolution (see the table in the handout).
Darwinian evolution operates over immense timescale, starting with bacteria and algae 3.5 billion years ago. Monkey-like creatures appear only 30 million years ago; modern style apes 5-6 million years ago, and they give rise to various hominids (human-like creatures). Homo sapiens appears c.40,000 years ago.
Two points about this:
1. As Diamond argues, in evolutionary terms we are still very close to the apes: indeed, we share 97% of our DNA with chimpanzees, even though we insist on a very clear-cut distinction between ourselves and all animals.
2. What we become 40,000 years ago is so startlingly different from all other animals, including our chimpanzee relations, because we become creatures that make cultures.
III. Culture: human development
Culture in the sense being used here means a whole form of life. What's unusual about us is our capacity for making and remaking culture: not just one language, but many; and not just one religion or one economic system either.
Does this mean we have left nature behind entirely? If by nature one means blind overriding instinct, then maybe we have. But then so have some other animals.
Evolutionary biology may not determine our specific forms of life, but it does help to explain at least the development of our capacity for creating different forms of life, for example in its account of the co-evolution of brain and hand, making possible sophisticated motor control, and of our seemingly natural capacity for language, though not for any specific language: we seem ‘naturally’ programmed to learn whichever spoken language we are exposed to early in life.
IV. The fuzzy line between humans and other animals
IV. i. Hominids…
Tool-use in very rudimentary form may go back c. 2-3 million years. But where early hominids use tools they seem to be standardised (cf. Edmund Wilson’s Eidylons), and not to show our capacity for cultural variation. This may even be true of the Neanderthals.
IV. ii. …other animals
The evidence about culture in hominids is patchy, because so much is bound to have perished. However, other animals exhibit capacities which suggest some degree of continuity between humans and themselves:
• vervet monkeys use signs to warn of predators, and have to learn how to use them;
• chimpanzees have been taught to use a few words, and may have the linguistic capacity of human two-year-old;
• Harlow and Harlow demonstrated the importance of learning for monkeys: monkeys reared in isolation had failed to learn necessary skills, and were unable to mate, play, rear their young or defend themselves; by comparison rats raised in isolation have no problem mating;
• some animals, such as chimpanzees, use sticks or other objects is tools;
• baboons form complex social groups, whose members form bonds with each other and observe a social hierarchy;
• several animals have some capacity to learn behaviour which can then become part of their normal conduct, so one would appear to have here a natural capacity for learning, even though what is learnt is not preprogrammed.
Mayr distinguishes between 'closed' and 'open' programmes, where the former are completely preprogrammed, while the latter includes some capacity to respond in different ways to the environment. In other words, instinctual and acquired behaviour are not simple opposites, but overlap.
One should be aware that the appearance complex social arrangements does not necessarily indicate ‘open’ learning: complex behaviour can be preprogrammed, e.g. bees or ants.
Having said all this, the human capacity for language and symbolism, conceptual thought and communication, complex social formations, and learned behaviour is of a different order from any of this.
V. Human sexuality
Human sexuality is an interesting topic in this connexion, since clearly some of its key features are biologically determined (though even here there are plenty that aren’t, and room for dispute about which are which). Consider the implications and explanations of:
• Size of testes: gorillas = c.1 oz; human = c.1.5 oz; chimpanzee = 4 oz (arguably linked to frequency of sexual activity & to promiscuity & the difficulty of knowing paternity)
• Relative size of male and female (in species where the male is much heavier than the female, the tendency is for one dominant male to maintain a ‘harem’: what does human weight imply?)
• Cyclical sexual receptivity — e.g. female baboons going into oestrus or bitches being ‘on heat’, or female gorillas who will not be sexually receptive for 3-4 years after giving birth
• Concealed ovulation: when it’s the reproductively ideal time for a female baboon to mate, everyone knows about it: her genitals become swollen and brightly coloured; by comparison, human ovulation is concealed. We’ll review some possible explanations for this.
Some factors of this kind may point to natural traits which any human society has to accommodate.
But then what about more ambiguous things, such as:
• Incest taboo;
• the double-standard over male and female infidelity;
• socio-biological explanations of contemporary sexual behaviour in terms of a biologically programmed strategy to maximize one’s chances of transmitting one’s genes?
The Formation of Modern Societies:
Lecture handout on Hunting and Agriculture
Last week we examined the biological evolution of our species, and took the story up to what Diamond calls the ‘great leap forward’, about 40,000 years ago when we acquired culture — though, as with many of these processes such a formula risks making things sound too cut and dried. This week we consider the economic basis of the two principal forms of subsistence that preceded industrialisation: hunter-gathering (or foraging), and agriculture. We will inquire into the reasons for the change from one to the other and consider how to characterise it. Very different forms of social organisation can be constructed on these economic bases, and we will also ask ourselves whether there are basic features of social organisation common to each of these two main types of subsistence, respectively.
Hunter-Gathering
There is little or no deliberate intervention to cultivate food: you eat what you find. In some ways very similar to the ways of life of earlier hominids, so one might see hunter gathering as having been around for 2 million years.
Principal features
• Groups tend to be small — say 50 per group.
• Population densities tend to be low — of the order of one person per square mile.
• Groups tend to be nomadic to follow the food.
• Populations tend to be low, possibly because of calorific deficit, and because pregnancies have to be spaced: typically one every four years as opposed to one every two years for agricultural people.
• Social organisation tends to be loose, but also flexible: based on the family, and elementary division of labour, capable of some relations with other groups, and with leaders enjoying limited means of coercion, even where there are permanent leaders, which is not always the case (see last week’s handout on the social lives of baboons and humans).
Beware: the idea of a typical hunter gatherer lifestyle is something of a fiction because there were (and still are) so many different ones, from the Arctic to the Amazon.
Agriculture
Agriculture first emerges c.11,000 BC in the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East. Independently it also appears in other parts of the world, such as China, Mesoamerica, what is now the eastern USA, the Andes and possibly elsewhere. It means people grow their own food — though one shouldn’t assume a clear-cut change from hunter-gathering to farming. After all, we still do a little bit of hunter-gathering: fishing, mushroom-picking and so on, and a few people still live by it.
Domestication
Farming involves our systematic intervention in nature to change certain species by artificial selection (cf. Natural selection which we discussed last week). In so doing we ‘domesticate’ these species, often changing them drastically, and sometimes selecting the very things which natural selection would eliminate.
For example, wild grains have a mechanism for spilling their seeds on the ground: they have to, or the seeds would not be planted. But in some mutants the mechanism fails. These are the ones we chose, and this is why fields of grain stand with the grain ripening on the stalk, waiting to be harvested, instead of falling to the earth. In nature these would never have survived.
We tend to select for quantity of food: so today’s apples, pigs and so on are much larger than their wild ancestors.
We can also develop different breeds of certain animals to emphasise different qualities: some sheep are bred for wool, others for milk. Modern cows, for example, are much more docile and have much higher milk yields than their wild ancestors. All dogs derive from domesticated wolves and are technically of the same species.
Geographical factors
Why does agriculture develop first where it does? It’s important to answer this question, because it arguably affects the subsequent course of world history, in that the inhabitants of the continent where agriculture starts are likely to have an advantage over everyone else (see the table in the handout on ‘Factors Underlying the Broadest Pattern of History’).
Climate rules out some areas: a Mediterranean-type climate is best for farming, with wet, warm winters and hot dry summers. But Eurasia is not the only continent to enjoy those, so other factors explain why farming started there first.
Only some wild animals and plants are useful: some animals, for example, are calorifically too inefficient to be worth raising for food; others refuse to breed in captivity; some grow too slowly to be worth farming (such as gorillas); some are too mean (zebras, for example); and some are too solitary. Herd animals are useful — but not all herd animals: some panic too easily (e.g. gazelles), some become territorial or fight in the breeding season. In order to domesticate them, it’s best to have herd animals that create a hierarchy amongst themselves, such as horses, who observe a very particular order as they go about (senior female and her foals at the front, other females after her, and the stallion bringing up the rear). Such animals ‘imprint’ on their dominant members, and they can be got to ‘imprint’ upon us, to take us as the senior members of the herd (see the table in the handout showing the dates and places of domestication of large mammal species).
Applying all these criteria, one finds that Australia originally had no animals useful for domestication, and the Americas could boast only the llama (a.k.a. alpaca).
Related limitations applied to plants: they must at least starts with seeds or fruits worth having even if one makes them larger by selection, and ideally they should be capable of vegetative reproduction to make it feasible to select for desired traits (see the table in the handout on ‘Examples of Species Domesticated in Each Area’).
The Fertile Crescent featured great variety of local conditions, which meant that many usable species were already available in the region, or could be imported. Wheat and barley were native to the region, and goats, sheep, pigs and cows by the already there or could be imported.
It also had the advantage of being on the largest continuous landmass on the planet, and one that furthermore ran east to west rather than north to south. Climates change more drastically as one moves North-South than as one moves East-West, making the movement of species much easier on the East-West axis, thus making it easier to assemble a farming package on the Eurasian continent.
Change from Hunter-Gathering to Agriculture
See also the discussion of ‘What caused the Agricultural Revolution?’ in the handout.
Why?
Once it would have been routine to claim that farming represented progress for humanity, and possibly to imply that the coming of farming was simply inevitable.
From the point of view of the average individual under each system arguably hunter-gathering at its best was preferable to farming. Marshall Sahlins spoke of hunter-gatherers as belonging to the original ‘affluent society’, and enjoying decent nutrition, good social life and much leisure (see the table below — and bear in mind Sahlins had his critics).
Initially at least farmers had worse lives: shorter, because with denser populations living close to their animals there were more diseases; less well nourished because even though they were growing food, there were more of them, and hunter-gatherers can enjoy a good and varied diet (e.g. it is estimated that the !Kung had 2350 calories per day, while expending 1975); work is harder and hours longer; and their politics tends to become more centralised and coercive.
So why make the change? Given that it seems unlikely to be a matter of completely free choice, and difficult straightforwardly to characterise as progress, at least from the point of view of the average individual, it is perhaps better to start instead by asking how the change was made.
How?
Diamond outlines a gradualist approach, with hunter-gatherers drifting into managing wild plants, and indulging in little patches of cultivation as an insurance policy against hard times. These were not people, he suggests, who had a master plan for inventing agriculture. It was something they drifted into little by little. This is not, however, to say that they did not have significant knowledge at their disposal: hunter-gatherers often have very detailed knowledge of flora and fauna because their lives depend on it.
So one can envisage a sequence of small changes, which collectively start and up to a bigger transformation, even though they are not intended as such. The change to farming is sometimes spoken of as the ‘Agricultural Revolution’ (not to be confused with the way this term is applied to improvements in farming technique in the 18th century). On an evolutionary timescale the change was fast, and possibly revolutionary. But by our historical timescale is it was slow — indeed it has not yet been completed, in that some hunter-gatherers continue to hunt and gather. For example, it seems to have taken about 1300 years for agriculture to spread 125 miles across what is now Germany. Some groups, perhaps rationally, held out against farming: e.g. the aborigines in NE Australia, who knew about farming from their contact with people from the Torres Straits Islands. Others turned away from it having adopted it: e.g. in Sweden people adopted farming in 3000 BC, ditched it in 2700 BC, and then took it up again in 2500 BC. (See the table showing the spread of farming across Europe)
We might ask ourselves whether the coming of farming was inevitable, and, if so, in what sense (perhaps bearing in mind the theories of history we considered in the first week). But arguably several factors made it difficult in the long-term to go back to hunter-gathering once farming had started on a large-scale:
• population growth: there’s no going back to hunter-gathering if it means that most people are going to starve;
• resources for hunter-gathering are likely to dwindle in the most favorable areas;
• agriculture tends to improve, to become better able to store its products, and to redirect surpluses, which may favour increasing complexity and political centralisation;
• coercion: because farmers are more numerous and more territorial, and are often governed in states that maintain military specialists, they tend either to force hunter-gatherers to join them or (as has happened in the last two centuries in North America and Australia) drive them off their lands, exterminating many of them.
Social and Political Causes and Consequences
of the Advent of Agriculture
Why does the band / tribe organization not work for large societies? (from Diamond, pp. 286ff.)
1. Multiplied possibilities for conflict, especially as different interest groups emerge. Spontaneous regulation of conflict, as in bands, becomes impossible.
2. Communal decision-making becomes more difficult — and even informal, situation-based leadership becomes tricky, though it may still work in some contexts.
3. Economic transfers become too complex to work entirely bilaterally (though some neo-liberals find this contentious), so there’s some need for a redistributive as well as a reciprocal economy – and political power is the usual agency for such redistribution.
4. Population density rises, which may make independence less feasible on smaller patches of land.
5. Competition can promote more formalized decision-making.
6. Higher population may mean war selects for larger units by merger or annihilation (as above).
Differences between chiefdoms and states
Ultimately what emerges are the earliest states — again in the region of the Fertile Crescent. However, there are often said to be intermediate stages between hunter-gatherer bands and states, though this is very much a matter of interpretation.
See the final table of the handout on ‘Types of societies’, and note how changes in food production (in the second column) correlate to changes in politics and organisarion.
i) States are usually bigger.
ii) They usually have greater concentration of stored wealth.
iii) Control is more centralized and potentially far-reaching, though bear in mind it is not even and equal: borders are often fuzzy; there are badlands, marches, etc.
iv) States likely to have more specialized functions.
v) They are likely to make more use of slavery.
vi) Procedures are relatively more formalized (law, bureaucracies).
vii) Early states are likely to have fully fledged religion, often focussed on the king (e.g. sacred status of Aztec or Inca Emperor).
Tactics for maintaining permanent authority
a) Disarm the masses; arm the elite.
b) Make the masses happy by distributing tribute.
c) Use monopoly of force to promote happiness.
d) Promulgate (religious) ideology to sustain power.
The Formation of Modern Societies
Lecture handout: Before European Hegemony
This week we are looking at Eurasia principally as it was c.1300 (before the plague epidemic known in Europe as the Black Death). We’re concentrating on Eurasia, not because forms of life elsewhere have nothing to teach us, but because, as Jared Diamond argues, this continent had advantages over the rest of the world, and was always likely to be the continent from which any globally dominant form of life would originate.
This is after the fall of the Western Roman Empire (Goths sacked Rome in 410, and the Western empire disintegrated over the following two centuries; the eastern Roman Empire continued in Byzantium until mid-C15th). It is also before Western Europe had positioned itself at the centre of transatlantic exchange system (which we’ll consider next time), and well before it has established superiority to other civilisations on the continent. As late as the second siege of Vienna (1683), the Ottoman Empire was capable of threatening Europe on European soil. The Chinese Empire achieved its greatest power under the Manchu dynasty in the 18th century — though by the 19th the Opium Wars made it clear that Britain had outstripped it.
At least four zones / civilizations and develop sufficient cultural, economic and organizational capacity to look like significant contenders:
1. The Chinese Empire (or Empires);
2. Indian subcontinent;
3. The Islamic world; and
4. Europe / Western Christendom.
C.1300 arguably either Europe or India looks like the least advanced — if cultural traditions as well as political and economic power are included, along with population, probably Europe. China, normally stable, under its new Mongol overlords, is getting towards the end of a turbulent phase — which is arguably why it’s also mobilizing resources to a greater degree than usual. The Islamic world is the carrier of a sophisticated civilization, capable of extraordinary military feats, with an interestingly tense relationship between polity and society, and politically divided, though the Ottoman Empire will partly address that. We’ll consider China and Islam.
Bear in mind the theories of history reviewed in the first session. In relation to modernity it used to be routine to explain the west’s performance vis-à-vis other civilizations in terms of innate dynamism, by comparison with which other civilizations were said to be stagnant or historically blocked. An inversion of this might lead one nostalgically to romanticize the timeless, spiritual harmonies of some unchanging civilizations by comparison with the crude hurry of the west. Beware of either extreme — or, more generally, beware of ascribing innate merits or demerits to civilizations as such. This risks essentializing them. This is not, for a moment, to suggest one should not seek to appraise the merits of particular spiritual or artistic achievements or traditions. And we have pressing ecological reasons to be more appreciative of stability than we used to be.
We’re thinking about these zones in terms of their interrelations (cf. Abu-Lughod), and their internal structure and tensions (i.e. historical comparative sociology — a study especially associated with Weber).
Some general factors to consider in each case:
• Kinship and state. Most of these zones include (or are) states — but they’re not of the modern type. In each case, a specifically political level vies with kinship based organisation: nomadic tribes threaten and even take over the Chinese Empire; the universal values of Islam are often in tension with the particularity of the tribal forms of life of the Prophet’s first followers; in mediaeval Europe royal ‘servants’ establish hereditary aristocratic status for themselves when kings are weak. All these polities have a tough time asserting their claims against those of family, kinship and tribe — though this plays out differently in each case (see Patricial Crone, ‘The Tribe and the State’ in John A. Hall, Ed., States in History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), ch. 2).
• Intensiveness and extensiveness of government. Some of these entities cover huge swathes of territory (i.e. their government is extensive). Do not assume that that means they have the kind of powers that a modern sovereign state possesses: politics in premodern states often has only limited power to remould society. Cf. Michael Mann’s contrast between despotic and infrastructural power. Many governments have to work for much of the time through local notables / gentry.
• Social structure and organisation. All of these civilisations tend to hierarchy, but with differences. In all areas most people are engaged in food production — typically all bar c.5%of the population, though there are variations. Thereafter there is steep inequality. But there are huge differences in equality of opportunity, and in the degree of normative prescriptiveness that underlies social stratification. The caste system represents one extreme; the egalitarianism of Islam another.
• Physical integration of territory. Transport, communications, etc. Trade is usually in a limited range of goods (luxury goods, spices, furs, precious metals, etc). Transport overland is hugely costly (one ox pulling a cartload of grain will have eaten its load in 100 miles). Transport by water is much cheaper — so one needs to note rivers, ports and navigable sea passages. Overland transport is only economic for goods of high value and low weight. Communications similarly are slow by our standards — and few of these territories are governed consistently throughout their nominal extent. All these zones are mainly agrarian: most production and consumption for subsistence is local, and most communities are ‘segmented’: laterally isolated from each other. That is one reason why peasant revolts seldom succeed: they cannot readily coordinate or communicate with similar groups across the territory (cf. revolts in China, which need gentry or Mandarin assistance). They do not constitute a state-wide class in the modern sense.
• Ideological integration. Arguably none of these zones contain ‘societies’ in the modern sense, partly because of the segmented character of local units (whether those be agricultural peasantries, or pastoral tribes). But some large-scale integration is possible at the level of high (rather than local) cultures. Religion and /or the ruling elite are likely to foster such a ‘high’ culture. But religion can, in some cases, create more widespread and zealous cohesion (e.g. Islam and Christianity).
• Other cultural resources. All these zones have writing — but in different forms. Chinese alphabet and calligraphy make literacy very difficult to acquire, though the written form of the language is the same throughout SE Asia, so this reinforces high cultural uniformity. Alphabetic writing systems (such as those used in Europe) will prove much easier to disseminate. But Europe is also divided between different language groups, with Latin serving as the language of high culture. Islam, at least as much as Europe (and possibly more) inherits classical learning.
• Technology and technique. China is arguably industrially the most advanced of these zones in this period: e.g. iron production of c.125,000 tonnes p.a. in 1078. It also develops printing and gunpowder ahead of the West. But nowhere is systematically devoted to the large-scale application of technical innovation.
• Military power and the capacity to defend territory and project force. Transport problems impinge here -- though, as it happens, the Mongol Empire (which, under Kubilai Khan, absorbed China, before China culturally absorbed its Mongol overlords) was able to project power overland, using tribal horsemen, across the steppe (see the map of the Khanates). Islam, as we’ll see, arrived on the world scene in C7th with a rapid sequence of conquests, starting from the Prophet’s homeland, and extending through the Middle East and across North Africa, and then into Spain. As for Europe, the crusades arguably show mediaeval Europe at full stretch in terms of organisation and projection of power — but they can only carve out modest ‘crusader states’.
• Geopolitical position. These zones differ in terms of the military competitors they have to deal with and the trading opportunities they enjoy. China, for example, has virtually no rival polities to contend with (though plenty of troublesome tribes). Islam develops at the centre of a network of trade routes. Europe is at the far end of the continental trading network, and internally divided between rival polities.
Chinese Empire
• Origins. The first emperor is said to have acceded 2697BC; first recorded history 1525BC, with the Shang dynasty. Conquered by the Chou dynasty c.1027BC, during which Confucius (or K’ung fu-tzu 551-479BC) teaches a philosophy that entails moral probity, humane government and the importance of duty, and which becomes the ideology of the elite, gentlemanly mandarins. Under the Han dynasty, founded by peasants (206BC-220CE), Confucianism becomes the basis of training for the civil service and a state religion.
• Dynastic cycles. Cycles of stability (e.g. the T’ang dynasty, 618-906 — which possesses the first city of a million inhabitants, Changan) punctuated by civil war and/or ‘barbarian’ invasion ensue. But always the Empire is re-established. NB there are no rival states to speak of. Occasionally China is divided between north and south, e.g., when the Sung dynasty (960-1126) is challenged by the Jurched tribe who reinvent themselves as the Chin northern dynasty, and from 1126 there are two capitals and two Chinas. The Mongols, under Genghis Khan, defeat the Chin in 1234. The Sung are defeated in 1279. The Mongols under Kubilai Khan try to retain their tribal ways, but become the Yuan dynasty, and reinstate the civil service. This is the China visited by Marco Polo, the Genoese merchant. Another phase of civil strife, and the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) emerges under Emperor Hung-Wu, a man of peasant origins. The Ming are ousted by the Manchu (who derive from the Jurched).
• Recurrent Empire. The political form of the empire keeps reasserting itself. Why? The Empire is a zone of comparative order surrounded by nomadic tribes. These have to be kept in check militarily — though they’re not simply enemies: some may be hired as mercenaries, and then they learn advanced military techniques. Military force thus accumulates on either side of the borders. Periodically it swoops to the centre and tries to take over. That’s partly why there’s a cycle of order and stability.
• Why can’t the empire defend itself better? Its government is extensive more than intensive. There’s a ‘civil service’, but it’s small by modern standards. The first Ming emperor aimed to have just 5,488 Mandarins. This rose to 20,400 at the end of the Ming dynasty, abetted by c.50,000 minor officials. These officials are mostly drawn from gentry families (typically younger sons). They have family obligations, besides their duty to the emperor. The gentry (local landowners) have no interest in seeing the state become very powerful, because it will be at their expense. But the state cannot afford to do without the gentry. So there’s often a standoff. Early on in dynasties, when the centre is at its strongest, the crackdown against the gentry can be brutal (100,000 are executed in 1371).
• Mandarins and Confucianism. The Mandarins remain true to their Confucian ideals — even as dynasties come and go. It’s very hard, even for the world-conquering Mongols, to do much without them. And, though the culture is multi-facetted, it remains resistant to outside cultural influences (Buddhism being a rare exception, though it was then suppressed in C9th).
• Overall effect: an ideologically unified elite, capable of re-forming under different dynasties, but set over against a society from which it usually draw only limited resources. Economic relations never become autonomous of political or broader social ones. The state’s interest is usually in containing social potential, not mobilizing it. The result is a ‘capstone’ state — so, e.g., 1371-1567 foreign trade is officially banned. Overseas exploration is curtailed. Gunpowder, having been used under the Sung, is marginalized as a weapon, as the state prefers to depend on its logistical capacity rather than technology to overpower challengers, because the new technology poses more dangers to a stable state than it’s worth. Mandarins have an investment in ensuring that their own power remains unchallenged — so even the military is contained and curtailed. The result was protracted, limited government. So there’s a paradox: a weak (if outwardly imposing) form of government proves capable of reasserting itself against all rivals.
Islam
• Origins. The Prophet Muhammad (570-632) was born into the merchant tribe Quraish in Mecca, and made his living as a trader. When about 40 he received mystical revelations, and began to preach. His small group of followers were not popular in polytheistic Mecca, so they leave for Medina, where he resolves a tribal dispute, and begins to serve, in effect, as governor. The result is beginnings of a legal code, for the whole umma (community of believers). See, e.g., the ‘Constitution of Medina’. Note the relation between religious and political authority at this stage, and the tension between religious and tribal identities. Islam offers itself as a unifying religion.
• Expansion and succession. He returns to Mecca at the head of an army, and expansionism becomes the way to maintain the Islamic unity of diverse (previously feuding) tribes. Dies 632, & is succeeded by Abu Bakr as leader and Khalifa (successor), who appoints Umar his successor in 634. Umar followed the policy of military expansion (see the map on the handout), defeating the Byzantine and Persian empires (through Christian Byzantium limps on until the Turks overthrow Constantinople in 1453), conquering Palestine, Iraq and Egypt. He was murdered in 644, and succeeded by Uthman, who was also murdered, and succeeded (by popular acclamation) by Ali, husband of the Prophet’s daughter, Fatima. These conquered peoples are usually converted to Islam — with their Arab governors initially seeking to remain distinct from them, but not succeeding in the longer term. NB quite different from the ideological divisions between the Chinese governing stratum and the people.
• Dynasties and the Ulama. Ali is challenged by Muawiya, governor of Syria, who founds the Umayyad Caliphate — giving rise to the schism between Sunni and Shia (= partisan, i.e. for Ali). The first four Caliphs constitute a phase of sacred history. Thereafter, still militarily successful, there’s a more marked concern among the Umayyads for earthly power. Their power extends across N. Africa and (by 711) into Spain, and (in C9th) into Sicily. Religious authority and guidance and political power are increasingly separate: the ulama (= religious-legal scholars) deliver guidance and rulings on how to live; the political leadership exert executive, military control. Law is thus partially separate from the state.
• Polity and law. The Abbasids (derived from the Prophet’s uncle) overthrow the Umayyad dynasty in 750, and renew the polity’s commitment to a pure form of Islam. The clarity of the Prophet’s teaching in the Quran and in the Hadith (‘sayings’), come to be elaborated in the four schools of law into detailed prescriptions for a whole ways of life. These are not usually upheld by the polity but by the Ulama — i.e. law remains partly distinct from and even hostile to political power. Malise Ruthven speaks of the result as less a system of law enforcement than of “socialization and acculturation”.
• Dynastic divisions. Islam retains a degree of cultural and religious unity (especially once the Sunnis marginalize the Shi’a), but divides politically. Umayyads survive in Spain. Abbasids shift their centre of power east, moving the capital of the Caliphate from Damascus to Baghdad. Rival dynasties arise in Syria and Egypt (Fatimids), and Morocco, while Muslim nomads remained outside direct political control (Turks, Mongols, and N. African tribesmen).
• Ibh Khaldun (1332-1406). Historian and judge. b. Tunis, d. Cairo. Effectively the pioneer of sociology. He theorises the cyclical nature of rule and renewal in the Islamic states he sees, especially in N. Africa. The tribal / pastoralist population is difficult to control: mobile and with high ‘military participation ratio’ — i.e. their way of life naturally makes them a formidable military force. But they are associated with cities, because they need them for some goods and for markets. Cities are the centres of political power, and they need protection. When the ulama judges that their city’s military rulers have deviated too far from true Islam, and when they have also grown weak and disunited through city-life, the ulama seek out a suitably powerful, zealous and righteous tribe as replacement leaders. Once installed, they rule righteously for a while, during which legal and political authority start by being closely allied. But the alliance gets strained, as the now urbanized tribe goes the way of the rulers they ousted. Ibn Khaldun reckoned this cycle took about three generations.
• This is a recipe for political division, and for forms of polity that remain tied to the military potential of tribal societies. Cities and their economic power never become properly autonomous of tribal military power. Arguably the situation was different further to the East, where the encroaching tribes were more formidable: Mongols and Turks, and where also the extension of Islamic power could take different forms — especially in India where Muslim rulers eventually come to preside over the Mughal Empire (founded early C16th): but their subjects remained mainly Hindu, following a different ethic, stratified by caste, and resistant to political interference. In the African interior, Islam can take different forms again, grafted onto a variety of tribal cultures, which assimilates to differing degrees.
• Cultural achievment. c.1100-1300 this extended Islamic world constituted a zone of exceptional cultural richness and achievement. Arab and other Islamic scholars inherited much of Greek philosophy, developed mathematics (algebra is an Arabic word), medicine and forms of art and poetry. Though always tending to develop different versions of itself, Islam also managed to retain a high degree of coherence (partly because Sunni eventually marginalized Shi’a). But it’s also diverse: in touch with Judaism and Christianity, which it thinks of itself as completing rather than replacing. Spain, especially, is a zone of cultural exchange (even if it’s often turbulent: e.g. at the battle of Novas de Tolosa in 1212 there were so many Muslims and Jews in the ‘Christian’ Spanish army that they had to have three days of prayer before attacking). It’s hard-pressed by nomads from the east, and by Christian crusaders from the west, though it fights the latter off (retaking the last Crusader stronghold, Acre, in 1291).
• Ottoman Empire. A further reinvention of Islamic power. Its origins go back to 1300, and it endured until 1922. It reaches the high point of its power in C16th. It starts from tribal groups. The Ottomans were a Turkic group that established a small polity in Anatolia, where, in nearly continuous war (with Christian Byzantium among others) they extended their territory, often at the expense of other Turkic tribes. By the Battle of Kosovo (1389) they occupied part of Europe. A combination of war and diplomacy established a loose network of vassal states and groups (cf. segmental tribal organisation), which (after a hiccup when Tamerlane defeats them) begin to be drawn under central imperial control, especially under Mehmed II and Suleiman I (‘The Magnificent’). They take Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, in 1453 (it’s renamed Istambul), and with it imperial ideology and institutions. Through the C16th they extend their rule throughout the Middle East, overwhelming the last of the Abbasids, and defeating the Mameluke slave-run regime of Egypt and becoming the guardians of pilgrims and the shrines, thus adding a specifically religious role to the Sultanate.
• Army and administration. The key institution was the army, raised from a combination of slaves, mercenaries, p.o.w.’s and (from C14th) by taking Christian children from the Balkans (devshirme). The point is to create forces that are tied, not to any particular tribe, but to the Empire as such. At their best (e.g. the Janissaries) these forces were disciplined and effective. But they were also costly, and the state was obliged to expand continuously to garner the resources for the army on which it depended. The key administrative class, from which even the Grand Vizier came, likewise had the technical status of slaves, and on their deaths their property became the Sultan’s. Many were Christian converts to Islam. This meant there was no hereditary aristocracy to challenge the polity: the polity had developed military and administrative classes dependent upon the state (cf. the Mamelukes in Egypt, where there developed a ‘slave’ government, which the Empire defeated, but continued to use). There’s a parallel hierarchy of judges and religious officials (qadis) for civil administration, but these are drawn from free-born Muslims. Unlike in other Islamic states, these are partly integrated into the imperial system.
• Note the stand-off between polity and society — even here in the most powerful and enduring Islamic state. Cf. the Chinese ‘capstone’ state. At its peak, it occupies parts of Europe, most of the middle east, and much of N. Africa, and dominates the eastern Mediterranean. It’s created a political power relatively autonomous of its social base (unlike the earlier tribal / urban model described by Ibn Khaldun); unlike China it’s expansionist; unlike the Mughal Empire, it’s able to realise something of Islam’s potential as a universal, unifying creed (though there are plenty of non-Islamic subjects, who pay the taxes).
Europe
By C15th and C16th European states, fragmented, and increasingly preoccupied with internal problems (the mediaeval world is one of conflicting lines of authority, especially between Church, polity and local notables), and with struggles with each other (the Reformation occasions a series of partly religious wars throughout C16th and into C17th), look like no match for either the Chinese or the Ottoman Empires. Early in C15th, before Portuguese and other European voyages of ‘discovery’, European states are marginal to trade routes, and possessed of limited resources. Their polities, certainly in 1300, are having a hard time asserting their autonomy from their societies and from religious authority. And after the Reformation, they’d lost the unifying factor of a single faith, which might have enabled these squabbling states and statelets to unify in the way that Islam was capable, at its cultural zenith, of unifying. Technologically and organisationally, they’re getting a bit better (some scholars claim there was a flowering of European culture and technology before the Black Death), but they’re a long way from being world-beaters. Yet that’s what they become. In the next couple of sessions we’ll considering how and why.
The Formation of Modern Societies:
Lecture handout on Early Modern Europe (i): Material Life
Europe in relation to the rest of the world
• We are now starting to concentrate on Europe, which is where many of the key factors of modernity come together. If one contrasts Europe with the rest of the world in the Middle Ages and in c.1900 the transformation is huge. In 1900 much of the world is under direct or indirect European control, or run by descendants of Europeans (e.g. in the Americas); modern industry, capitalism, organisation, science give Europeans almost overwhelming dominance.
• Internal division. By contrast in C14th Europe comprises a patchwork of quarrelling states at the far end of the Eurasian continent, which, while advanced by comparison with other continents (see p. 2 of the handout) usually acquired key advances in civilisation later than the Middle East and China (see the table from Diamond in the handout). European governments are struggling to assert themselves over their territories, but are usually caught between particularism and external threats. Lines of authority are confused (e.g. the church has its own courts; different districts may have their own jurisdiction; local lords, landowners or cities may exercise some of the rights we now ascribe only to states). There are several different types of political entity: states, city-states, the Holy Roman Empire, principalities, palatinates, city leagues, the papacy, etc. Central governments may have difficulty raising taxes and armed forces. Where they depend upon feudal rights to military service, these often have limits (e.g. in France often 40 days per year). Local nobles readily acquire their own armies. There is a shared high culture, thanks to the church; but there are many vernacular languages.
• Reformation. After 1517, Europe is also divided by religion (see the map on p. 4 of the handout showing the religious situation in 1560), and many areas, including Germany, France, England, Scotland and much of Central Europe are internally divided. Religion fuels bloodshed, though is never its only cause. Hence civil wars in France throughout the 16th century, the Thirty Years War, the English Civil War of the 1640s, and campaigns of internal repression (e.g. executions of Protestants under Mary I in England, anti-Catholic scares thereafter; the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572, etc).
• Intensive vs. Extensive Government. Ironically, the very conditions which appeared to weaken Europe arguably led it to develop kinds of strength of the rest of the world could do without, and especially to mobilise political, social and technological resources intensively. Internal competition made elites more receptive to innovations that might threaten their status (e.g. in relation to war-making). And the shared high culture made it possible for some people, confronted with repression or exploitation within one polity, simply to move to another one: thus innovators and business people enjoy a precarious degree of freedom, precisely because the political class of Europe is divided. Even religious divisions ultimately contribute to this intensification of governance in states which achieve a degree of confessional unity, so that the rulers and the ruled are bound to each other by their shared faith. We'll come back to religion and consciousness next week. Today were going to concentrate on technology and communications, war-making and trade.
Technology
• Attitudes to technology. Chinese and Islamic cultures were capable of sophisticated technology. Many of the technologies Europe develops in the late Middle Ages and early modern period originate in the east. E.g. in C12th and C13th Europe increases its use of water wheels, and windmills spread from C12th; but water power goes back to the Romans and possibly earlier, and windmills date from C7th Persia. Similarly gunpowder originates in China, and possibly came to Europe via Islamic culture. Though some scholars (such as Jean Gimpel) speak of a mediaeval flowering of European technology, Europe tended to be derivative. However, there was a tendency in more stable cultures for technology to be used in the production of courtly curiosities or to be suppressed. Thus, for example, having develop firearms, Japan under the Shogunate deliberately turns away from them: the Shogun elite regard them as a socially subversive weapon, enabling a peasant to kill an elite warrior. Europe's elite's have those kinds of shock (e.g. 1000 of the French mobility skewered on townsmen's pikes at the battle of Courtrai in 1302; or yet more of them shot down in a hail of English arrows at Agincourt in 1415), but they cannot afford to halt the development of these technologies. It is in Europe that the drive to exploit technology to achieve power takes off in a systematic way.
• Limits to early modern technology. However, beware of assuming that early modern technology is very advanced. For many purposes animal- and man-power is the primary source of energy (supplemented by wind, especially for overseas transport). Much production is essentially small-scale and workshop-based (factories in our sense do not exist — though possibly a shipyard such as the Arsenal in Venice anticipates them).
• Expansion of early modern technology. However, the pressure of war among other things, fosters greater efficiency and output in mining, metal-production and –working. A large early cannon needed 3-4 tons of bronze. Other weapons needed iron. The working of metal required ways of adapting energy (e.g. a 500-600 pound German water-driven hammer); the mining of it required pumps to clear the mines. So 1460-1530 European production of iron increases five fold; in 1563 Newcastle shipped 30,000 tonnes of coal to London; in 1658, 500,000. At the same time something like engineering emerges as a profession, and technical books, such as Georg Bauer’s (a.k.a. Agricola’s) De re metallica (1556) are circulated, enabling techniques to be disseminated, adapted and developed.
Military Revolution
• The key ideas of the military revolution thesis include the proposition that the early modern period witnesses a transformation of the means of making war, that has implications for state-formation, fiscal systems, and the organisation of violence. The thesis was first proposed by Michael Roberts in 1955, and has since been developed, challenged and modified — especially to suggest that its periodisation may be mistaken (Roberts discussed 1560-1660), or that it needs to be disaggregated into distinct phases and components: see esp. Jeremy Black, who puts the revolution later than Roberts, in emphasising the C18th; Parker, who stretches it over a longer period than Roberts, and Clifford Rogers, who sees it starting as early as the Hundred Years’ War. Novel material elements include: gunpowder and artillery, military organisation and tactics, systems of fortification.
• Military technology and state-formation: artillery and fortifications. A simplistic, technologically deterministic account would say that guns appeared in Europe in C14th with the battle of Crecy and war changed. Not really. Guns only develop into effective weapons because Europe is divided into consistently competing states. A slightly more sophisticated view: by 1494 and Charles VIII’s invasion of Lombardy, mobile artillery was sufficiently well developed to be used in siege warfare, and swiftly rendered castles and town fortifications based upon tall, vertical walls redundant. Countermeasures in the shape of the trace italienne were developed: earthworks behind low walls absorb the force of shot, while the field of outgoing fire is maximised by elaborately designed and shaped ramparts and gun platforms (see the handout). This is enormously expensive, so the only serious players left, in areas where this military technology becomes normal (mainly Italy, France and the Netherlands), have to be able to raise huge resources, thus putting pressure on fiscal and administrative capacities, and driving some competitors in the use of violence out of business. Wars such as those fought by Louis XIV on France’s northern border, involving Vauban’s construction of a series of fortresses, tested financial as much as military muscle.
• Technology, discipline and state-formation: infantry. The main innovation is the development of firearms: harquebuses, and then (from c.1520) muskets. Medieval armies were already using projectile hand weapons: long- and cross-bows. Muskets, especially at first, were less effective as weapons, but it was easier to train people to use them. But the optimum use of these forces required new tactics: musketeers were especially vulnerable while reloading (which took about 2 mins.). In the mid- to late-C16th the standard infantry formation combined pike and shot (with more shot as time went on). A typical tactic involved forming squares: pike could absorb the shock of a charge; the shot could mow down the enemy at a distance. The combination of these elements called for some training. In 1594 William Louis of Nassau outlined the ‘counter-march’: a system of ranks firing in volleys (see his illustration). This required extensive drill to synchronise — though arguably the perfection of such drill and discipline came only later, when absolutist states maintained standing armies. Cf Black on the timing of the Military Revolution, and the positions of Brian Downing and himself about whether the MR partly caused absolutism, or vice versa.
Overseas trade, exploitation and commerce
• Water is the commercially the most useful form of transport, land transport being hopelessly uneconomic for the transport of bulk goods. But many cultures are very reluctant to sail on the open seas: they hug the coast. The Chinese quite deliberately abandoned seapower, and phase of exploration under the eunuch Admiral Cheng Ho terminates in 1433. In C15th Portugal, and then other powers, developed overseas shipping and trade, and some European powers claimed vast empires, such as those of the Spanish and Portuguese in South America (see p. 4 of the handout).
• Portuguese Voyages and Empires. There are already trade routes overland across Africa for gold, and across the Mediterranean from the Middle East for other commodities. Placed on the Atlantic seaboard, Portuguese sailors started to explore, arguably not in the hope of doing something new, but finding alternative ways of doing already established enterprises: going to Africa by the Atlantic to outflank established trade routes, and undertaking crusader-style campaigns (e.g. the 1415 capture of Ceuta, a Muslim city in Morocco). Bit by bit they become more adventurous, reaching Guinea in 1460, and tackling technical and navigational problems to do with currents, prevailing winds, and the design of ships and instruments, in order to get home again. By the end of C15th, they realise they can outflank the Arabs in the eastern trade: in 1487 Bartholomeu Dias rounds the Cape of Good Hope; in 1497 four ships are sent in search of spices, and on 20 May 1498 Vasco da Gama (c.1469-1524) anchors off the Malabar coast. By degrees, this attempt to establish trade posts, to outflank existing trade routes, and (on occasion) to establish plantations (e.g. they colonise the island of Sao Tome of Cameroon, and establish a slave-worked sugar plantation), develops into the first Portuguese Empire. It is not primarily territorial, but commercial. However, to protect their interests they start having to project military force: so, e.g., in 1509 they defeat an Egyptian fleet; in the same year they claim Sumatra, and the following year they lay claim to the ‘Spice Islands’ (i.e. Indonesia). Similarly they use military force in establishing their trading posts on the Indian subcontinent, and defending a monopoly in the Indian Ocean, which involves warding off the Turks and other powers.
• The New World. Columbus (1451-1506) headed west in an attempt to find, on behalf of the Spanish, a new route to the East Indies: i.e. a new way of outflanking established forms of trade. In the early C16th Spanish and Portuguese are able to establish themselves in South America: 1511, the Spanish settle Cuba; 1519 Cortes (1485-1547) makes for Mexico from Cuba, and by 1532 the Spanish control Mexico. The Aztec empire falls, partly because of disease and because it has been weakened by civil war, and is not politically or culturally equipped to recognise or deal with the threat the Spanish represent (see Diamond’s account). In 1533 Pizarro (c.1470-1541) occupies the Inca capital Cuzco. Survivors of the native population are used as all but slave labour. By the mid-C16th German mining engineers and know-how are being used to improve imperial extraction of precious metals. In the 1540s Spanish possessions ship 1.5 million ounces of silver a year to Europe, and in the 1590s, 10 million. In North America, European settlement develops from 1536 onwards; Jamestown, Virginia is settled in 1607; the Pilgrim Fathers land at Plymouth colony in 1620. They find no precious metals, and had to knuckle down to settlement and development, starting (necessarily) with farming. In the long-term this proves the more profitable decision.
• Extraction vs. Commerce. South America’s export of raw materials and primary commodities, in combination with a tiny landowning classes, contributed to the region’s underdevelopment. Mercantilism disposed many European powers to achieve a favourable balance of payments in precious metals. However, high inflation partly induced by the import into Europe of precious metals, and the strength of the Dutch commercial empire (and, a little later, of the British), suggested that regular commerce, even in bulk materials, rather than extraction of resources and a concentration on precious cargoes, would yield greater and more regular wealth in the long run. This in turn favoured regular government, disposed to adhere to legal restraints in taxation, and with the backing of financial markets. Thus, e.g., Spain repeatedly defaults on its debts and therefore borrows at punitive interest rates; the Netherlands can raise money much more cheaply. Thus the C16th and C17th present the spectacle of the geographically puny Netherlands holding off the might of the Spanish military superpower.
The Formation of Modern Societies:
Lecture handout on Early Modern Europe (ii): Consciousness, Individuality etc.
• Material and ideal factors. We’re thinking this week about ‘ideal’ (rather than material) factors in early modern Europe. Arguably they need to be seen in relation to each other, at least for our purposes.
o Marx and Weber. Compare the views of history we looked at in week 1: Marx is officially a materialist (but a dialectical one); Weber is more willing to grant beliefs and ideas a role in historical causation (as we’ll see in two weeks).
o General themes. One way of starting to draw together the diverse material we’re considering is in terms of two themes.
▪ Authority and Uniformity. The period arguably culminates in crises of authority: religious, scientific, political. The responses eventually sought various kinds of uniformity: uniform scientific laws of nature, uniform administration in the sovereign state, and confessional uniformity.
▪ Individualism and Belief. Divisions within European Christianity led to clear definitions of each kind of faith, with a stronger emphases on doctrine and belief (rather than ritual), affect, and the inner spirit. Arguably these changes played a crucial role in fostering modern kinds of individualism.
• Renaissance. Generally deemed an intellectual and artistic movement of C14th and C15th.
o Rebirth or reassessment? Renaissance means literally rebirth, and implies both innovation and going back to the past, especially to the classical past.
o Definition of and relation to the middle ages. It’s at this point that some Europeans start to think of the period between themselves and the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome as a middle period, between ancient and modern times. So there’s a theory of historical phases quickening here, though with the modern often repudiating the immediate past to reconnect with the ancient past, whose prestige was immense.
o Attitudes to the past. Mediaeval learning, under the aegis of the church, had developed a sophisticated synthesis of classical and other sources, adding up to a world view that owed much to the classical Greek thinker Aristotle, but was also more or less consistent with the doctrine of the church. This synthesis adapted material from the past according to the needs of the present: original texts were often enveloped in commentary and interpretation. Renaissance scholars were increasingly concerned to get back to the original classical texts. As they did so, tensions between classical (pagan) and Christian thought often became clear, as did the need to attend to the context of writings from the past — and this fostered a stronger sense of history, of the difference of the past from the present, and of unrealised possibilities in the present.
o Humanism. Humanist scholarship attached special importance to the arts of language. Sometimes its textual criticism could be subversive (as when Lorenzo Valla demonstrated that the Donation of Constantine, which the church claimed endowed it with the powers of the Roman Empire, was a forgery). Erasmus (c.1467-1536) was foremost among those seeing education as the route to general enlightenment and the improvement of the human condition. Hence ideals of liberal education and the ‘humanities’, and the founding of many schools.
o Authority and subversion. But these ideals also had a subversive side, especially when applied to the sacred text of the bible: textual scholarship increasingly questioned the church’s claim to define the meaning of scripture and the text of the bible, e.g. by revealing poor scholarship in the Vulgate (the official Latin Bible).
o Rhetoric and power. Humanist and renaissance arts of language emphasised elegance and affect (rather than School logic). One should cultivate a clear and pleasing style. But they also put renewed emphasis on rhetoric: the art of persuasion, which was central to law, religion (through sermons) and politics. Language could become a matter of technique and power.
o Utopia and political imagination. Dissonances between classical and Christian learning, and dissatisfaction with the state of the church could foster political imagination, especially evident in Utopian writing, notably Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), which, of course, also owes something to exploration of the globe…
• Space. In various ways Europeans’ sense of the space they occupied was changing, leading to the reassessment of conventional wisdom on several fronts.
o Geographical space. As we saw last week, in the ‘New World’ Europeans had a whole new continent to take into account. Its exploration triggered a set of cultural questions, e.g. to do with the rights of the native populations, the notion that their ways of life might reveal something essential in human nature. That arguably feeds into political arguments based on the state of nature, and debates about human nature as such. Cartography develops conventions for mapping external space, such the individual mind can represent it more accurately to itself.
o Astronomical space. Copernicus (1473-1543) proposes a heliocentric plan of the cosmos, though somewhat speculatively and diplomatically. Tycho Brahe (1564-1601) and Johann Kepler (1571-1630) [New Astronomy (1609)] develop the heliocentric model, with more accurate calculations and observations. Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), using a telescope, lays down a challenge to the church’s conventional wisdom, partly because his discovery of sunspots challenges the doctrine of the perfect and immutable heavens vs. the changeable sub-lunary earth. Thus the larger order of the mediaeval universe (see p. 1 of the handout) is called into question. But it’s not immediately clear what to put in its place. Some of these ‘scientists’ look odd by our standards (e.g. Kepler and Brahe, with preoccupations with cosmic harmonies and astrology). See ‘Science’, below.
o Pictorial conventions, esp. perspective and the sense of geometrical order underlying nature (esp. Edgerton’s idea), possibly foster a new sense of how to approach nature, which eventually may contribute something to technology and science — if only by emphasising the need for accurate observation. Though in the end the new science was at least as much mathematical and abstract.
• Print
• Technology and Distribution
o Technical elements: press, ink, paper and moveable type. Printing per se goes back to the Chinese. Guttenberg’s key innovation was moveable type, which, given an alphabetic writing system, made it possible to produce a variety of books, reusing standardised type. The press was an adaptation of a wine press; the ink may have owed something to artists’ experiments with oils; for type he needed metallurgical skills, and printing would have been prohibitively expensive without the development of paper making (initially from old rags). See the images in the handout.
o Spread of the technology: starting from Mainz over a few decades it spread throughout W. Europe (p. 2 of the handout). Slow by our standards, but rapid by theirs.
o Book trade. By 1500 c.6m books had been produced. The overwhelming majority are religious texts.
• Effects
o The form of the book. Mediaeval books were written by scribes. No two copies of a text were identical. Mediaeval concepts of authorship were arguably grounded in the physical act of writing, and (for St Bonaventure) dependent upon how much one added. The printed book initially presented itself as a kind of mechanical writing: the Gutenberg Bible looks as much like a mediaeval manuscript as possible. But the printed book has features, especially in organising and distributing information, quite unlike manuscripts. It’s Renaissance IT (and more practical than Ramelli’ bookwheel): tables of contents, page nos. that are the same in all copies, and indices, for example.
o Mentality. These changes arguably shift the underlying assumptions and perceptions of people who start to use books.
• Authorship and authority. The stability of the printed (coupled in some cases with new textual criticism) has implications for the way one intuits an author ‘in’ or ‘behind’ the text. At one level the printed book is more impersonal, given its standardized type and layout, so the handcraft that makes it becomes less conspicuous (however well done), and the personality of the author can become a more important determinant of differences. But this can also foster a sense of a more impersonal authority in the book, given its stability across space (in all its copies) and time. The possibility of accurate references to geographically separate copies of the same book (because of the stability of the text and of page numbers), makes possible an identical experience for readers who never see the same copy and never meet. Thus individuality can now, paradoxically, be projected more dependably across space and time. But this may imply an ideal world of knowledge set over against the more variable human world.
• Reading and the inner self. At the same time, reading tended to become more inward and silent, possibly fostering an odd sense of reading being an encounter between oneself and another in the privacy of the book’s virtual space. Mediaeval reading seems to have been more social, and to have involved reading aloud, if only to oneself.
• Form of knowledge. Print had implications for ideal character of knowledge. Stability and organisation of the text implies a model of knowledge with more emphasis on internal consistency and completeness. Doctrinal contradictions, for example, become easier to identify. Cf. erosion of mediaeval synthesis.
o Language and proto-nationalism. Printing tends to hasten the establishment of consistent written forms of vernacular languages, and thus ultimately to pave the way for nationalism (see Anderson on ‘print-capitalism’).
o Governance. As we saw, the early states usually employed writing for administration and the production of sacred texts, laying claim to a sacred, mystical authority. Printing enhances some aspects of governance: the promulgation of laws or rules throughout a territory or organisation in identical copies implies an intensification of the central authority, and of the authority of abstract rules as such. But print could also be subversive, and early modern European governments sought to control the press.
o Communication of new ideas. Print proves crucial in sending new ideas around Europe. Letters still take ages (see the comparative maps in the handout). But some knowledge spreads much further than it would otherwise have done. E.g. new accounts of anatomy, using pictorial conventions, engraving and dissections. There’s possibly some sense of personal observation revealing new aspects of the world, and then having the means to put them into circulation. However, informal networks of correspondents are still very important in developing science.
• Religion
• Late mediaeval Catholicism had survived earlier challenges: e.g. Lollards and Waldensians. On the eve of the Reformation it emphasised sin, purgatory, annual confession and penance, and indulgences (the idea that the Church could grant some of its excess grace to a believer in return for good works (such as a donation)). There’s a pronounced ritualistic concern with salvation, and arguably these rituals do much to bind people to the church. Hence as many masses for the dead as one can afford.
• Reformation. The Reformation starts as a reform movement within the church (Luther had been an Augustian monk). But it becomes a more fundamental challenge, partly helped by print and by secular power. Thus the schism between the Roman Catholic and the Protestant Churches still exists.
o Martin Luther (1483-1546) initiates the challenge, with his 95 Theses (October 1517), challenging the sale of indulgences, among other things. The other main protestant reformer is Jean Calvin (1509-1564).
o Return to original doctrine. Luther’s initial appeal is to get back to basics: a return to what he takes the church’s doctrine to have been originally (cf. humanists and the classical past). Ironically, this seemingly conservative position can prove subversive, partly because it insists on clarification of exactly what the true and original doctrine is (cf. assumptions about knowledge fostered by print).
o New doctrine. What emerges strips away much ritual, and especially attacks the church’s claim that it can forgive sins. The new doctrines of sin put responsibility firmly on the individual believer, but deny the possibility of anything we do in itself saving us. If we are to be saved, it will be by God’s grace, not because of our deeds. So as ritual is stripped away, each believer’s anxious scrutiny of the bible and of the state of his or her own soul (for signs of God’s grace) intensifies. Arguably this fosters inwardness and self-consciousness.
o The Word. Reading becomes a crucial devotional activity, and protestant scholars learn certain critical skills from humanism, especially to provide texts of the bible. There’s a drive to broaden education, since no one can lift from you the responsibility for your own soul. But at the same time an intensifying dogmatism, and an emphasis on belief and the state of one’s soul, more than on communal ritual.
o Secular authority. Part of the reason why Protestantism survives is because it makes common cause with some secular princes. Luther explicitly argues for the role of secular princes in reforming the church. But overall protestant religion (especially the more Calvinist kind) proves subversive too — especially of public order in divided states, since for some fundamentalists there can be no compromise on matters on faith. Beware of dismissing religious motives as merely a mask for other things (such as class war), or of taking them entirely at face value.
o Millenarianism. Many were drawn to millenarian beliefs: the idea that the second coming and Christ’s thousand-year rule on Earth were at hand. Possibly this has implications for people’s sense of history and the shape of time, disposing them to see human life as radically transformable. Christopher Hill, for example, sees in some late C17th thought a kind of secularised milennarianism.
• Counter-Reformation. The Catholic church responds by defining its doctrine more explicitly, by intensifying the discipline and authority of the clergy. Eloquence and affect come to be emphasised to secure the faithful and reconvert the rest. Society of Jesus / Jesuits (f. 1540).
• Exclusive and systematic belief. Arguably the nature of religion, on whatever side of the divide, changes. Belief, doctrine and dogmatism come to count for much more (even in the Catholic church). It has been suggested that this kind of religious zeal paved the way for aspects of revolutionary political ideology (cf. Walzer on the Revolution of the Saints)
• Religious wars and strife. The social equivalent of the drive to get back to pure version of Christian doctrine involves the attempt to eliminate heresy and the need to purify communities of idolatry. By the late C17th there’s a greater willingness to argue for a degree of toleration. However, the impulse to purify the population is with us still (e.g. ethnic cleansing).
• Technology and organisation
• Technology vis-à-vis science. Most practical technology is less a question of applied science than of artisanal know-how, since science as an organised body of knowledge does not yet exist. Yet there were engineers (inc. Leonardo and Ramelli), who were involved in practical work (e.g. military operations) and speculative inventions (e.g. Leonardo’s ‘helicopter’; Ramelli’s bookwheel)
• Clocks. Clocks had been around for centuries, but only become accurate with Huygens’ invention of the pendulum clock. Perhaps the C17th most powerful technology, because it reshapes perceptions (like scientific instruments), not because it has a directly physical effect on the world. It helped to confirm the appeal of mechanistic ideas of nature (as proposed, e.g., by Descartes and Hobbes), and implied a concept of the uniformity in time, which will have immense implications for social organisation (e.g. of work and cities).
• Idea of the machine. The idea of nature as a machine promises explanatory power. The resoluto-compositive method claims that if you can break something down into its component parts, examine their function and interaction, and reassemble it (if only conceptually), you can then explain it. That informs mechanistic science. But there is also a handful of early examples of the division of labour applying this reasoning: Sir William Petty’s land survey of Ireland in 1650s analysed the task into its components, gave the simplest bits to the lowest paid workers, and so on up to a handful of gifted (and higher paid) mathematicians.
• Probability. Something like the modern sense of probability emerges c.1660. Implicitly it challenges, e.g., doctrines of special providence. It implies the ultimate uniformity of time. Coincidentally, it makes possible the insurance business and the statistical study of society.
• Greater security, esp. from disease by the end of C17th, possibly disposed people to believe in more uniform, impersonal underlying forces determining their lives (see Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic).
• Understanding nature
• Warring ideologies. C16th and even C17th intellectual culture is fragmented. There’s a bewildering range of approaches to understanding nature, including mysticism, neo-platonism. alchemy, occultism, astrology, natural magic and varieties of animism. Many of these are intertwined with what we’d now call science — see, e.g., the comment on Brahe and Kepler, above. Cf. Newton’s interest in alchemy.
• Scepticism and relativism. Against this war of ideas, one can set scepticism, which became a powerful influence on intellectuals (e.g. Montaigne). It was also partly an effect of violence fuelled by dogma: it seemed wise to deny the possibility of certainty.
• Science or natural philosophy. Science, as it emerged, drew on both these elements: much of the work done under the aegis of bizarre belief systems was useful, but one needed a principle by which to clear away the nonsense (handout, p. 4). To a large extent, a mechanistic and ultimately mathematically rule-bound model of nature (i.e. uniform and predictable) offered a standard by which sceptically to dispense with everything else as nonsense. But opting for an essentially inanimate (lacking in mind) conception of nature, possibly science made it impossible for it ever to answer questions about the meaning of life, which had loomed large many of its rivals.
• What was science for? We’ll hear more of this in the presentation. Some proto-scientists, such as Francis Bacon (1561-1626) envisage science as aiming to improve human life (and he dies experimenting with frozen food). More immediately, many scientists sought a form of knowledge that would transcend religious strife. But one might argue that science becomes devoted to increasing human power, since that might appear self-evidently good. And yet we may now wonder whether being more powerful is the same thing as having a better life. Cf. current debates querying instrumental rationality. More and more is treated in terms of calculability, with the risk that anything that’s not calculable is ignored.
• Conclusion
• Individualisms
o Self-consciousness. Inner space and conscience. Partly the inheritance of the Reformation, print and changing patterns of social organisation.
o Economic individualism and self-interest. The normative acceptance of self-interest.
o Affective individualism: usually seen as a more C18th development: the anchoring of our deepest feelings on other people, especially within the bounds of the nuclear family.
• Uniformities
o Of administration
o Of theories of nature
o Of knowledge
o And (allowing for permanent schism) of doctrine within particular sects or churches.
The Formation of Modern Societies:
Lecture handout on Max Weber (1864-1920)
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-5) is mainly concerned to advance an argument concerning the origins and causes of modern capitalism. To assess what is distinctive about Weber's case is worth starting by glancing at three other accounts.
Other explanations and characterisations of Capitalism
1. Adam Smith (1723-90). In The Wealth of Nations (1776) Smith outlines a case for free-market capitalism, and he sees it as an expression of a general human trait to “truck, barter and exchange”. That begs the question of why modern capitalism take such a long time to develop, and Smith argues that extensive trade networks need high levels of division of labour (so there are lots of goods to exchange, and lots of people who needs to exchange goods to meet their needs), and that this in turn requires good and cheap transport. Before these conditions are met, the market may well be subjected to political interference and misguided economic policy (e.g. feudalism and mercantilism). But as these conditions are met, this underlying trait can express itself more freely, and the result is an improvement in everyone's standard of living. In other words for Smith capitalism is what comes naturally to us, it emerges spontaneously as obstacles to it dissolve, and it is progressive and ultimately stable. It is the proper activity of society, and enlightened states will respect a degree of freedom from political control for the economy, while continuing to provide certain necessary public goods.
2. Karl Marx (1818-83. Marx presents a theory of history, in which successive phases are defined primarily by the mode of production predominant in each phase. The mode of production in turn is the upshot of the way in which the forces and relations of production combine. The underlying impulse is towards humanity's realisation of its productive potential, including ultimately its realisation itself. These phases give way to each other as contradictions develop within them generating an internal dynamic.
• The main contradiction is between relations and forces of production. So, for example, in feudalism's heyday, social relations (the way society is divided into classes, and the terms on which those classes are defined in relation to each other) are appropriate to realising what is possible. But the time comes when those relations become a fetter on the forces of production, and there will then be a transformation. In this case the transformation will be from feudalism to capitalism, and the social relations will accordingly change to produce class relations in which the main distinction is between the owners of the means of production, who live off the rent from their capital, and those who have to live by selling their labour.
• Marx espouses what is known as “dialectical materialism”. He is a materialist partly because he sees our meeting of material needs as foundational of human societies, which have to be geared to achieve these material needs, or they’ll cease to exist, and he is therefore inclined to see laws, political institutions, norms, religion and the whole world of concepts and ideas as a “superstructure” that is in some degree determined by what goes on in the economic base. Marxists who see this process of determination as straightforward and deterministic are often known as "vulgar" Marxists. But it's difficult to be a Marxist without, in Engels’ phrase, seeing the superstructure as determined "in the last analysis" by the base. There’s much debate about exactly what degree of autonomy this recognises in the superstructure. Marx himself could sometimes be quite deterministic (e.g. claiming that the state is simply the executive committee of the bourgeoisie is to see the main political institution merely as the reflex of class, economic power), but not always. Marxism arguably begs questions about the role of ideas in relation to material factors in realising historical change.
• For Marx capitalism is in some sense progressive, insofar as it represents humanity’s realising more of its productive potential. But it does so in a way that sharpens the opposition between classes, in that one class very obviously exploits the other. However, industrial capitalism brings about a situation in which the proletariat finds that (a) it has an objective interest in overthrowing the existing order, and (b) it is in a position to do so (concentrated in cities, united by the capitalists to work in large numbers, possessed of technical expertise). Thus capitalism will bring about the crisis which will lead to its own transcendence in revolution. Capitalism for Marx is not simply the expression of permanent human traits, since he envisages human nature and norms being refashioned in successive phases of history, and though it is ultimately part of a progressive pattern, it is not straightforwardly beneficial. It is unstable and destined to be superseded.
3. Karl Polanyi (1886-1964). In The Great Transformation (1944) Polanyi characterized C19th market society as seeking to effect an unprecedented and ultimately doomed inversion between economic and social relations. Once economic relations had developed within the framework of established social relations, which in a sense had priority over them, but the free market proposes to reverse this: economic relations will be treated as fundamental, and society will have to develop within whatever framework they provide. This attempted reversal was historically unprecedented, sought to realise an essentially Utopian vision, and actually produced conflict. For Polanyi unfettered market capitalism rests upon a dangerous delusion, and leads into an historical cul-de-sac.
Weber’s types of capitalism
Weber used the word capitalism to cover a wide range of activities directed to economic gain, some of them going back a long way into history, well before the advent of free-market capitalism, and developing in many different parts of the world. He has several labels for these different types, including: booty capitalism, pariah capitalism and traditional capitalism. These types of capitalism are often spasmodic, irrationally speculative, or dependent upon military or political opportunities for profit. The general love of gain interacting with different socio-political circumstances sufficiently explains them.
However, rational capitalism is specifically modern and specifically western.
Features of rational capitalism
1. Systematic and sustained enterprise, and bureaucratic management
2. Rational organisation of formally free labour
3. Calculability and book-keeping
4. Distinction between business and personal concerns; separation of business from the household
5. Formal and calculable law
6. Commercialisation of economic life
Rational capitalism is historically unprecedented. To get going in the first place, it would require in the first place a peculiar failure or qualification of ordinary self-interest, since it would require remorseless and systematic application to business for its own sake, not in the hope of windfall gains, but for only modestly dependable returns. Given the systematic effort required, these gains could not motivate the ordinarily greedy, pleasure- and leisure-loving person. Instead one needs people whose attitude to the world is unusual in its willingness to undergo rigorous discipline, subject the world and themselves to remorseless calculation and work long hours. This kind of attitude is what Weber means by the “spirit of capitalism”, though it might be clearer to speak of the ‘culture’ of capitalism. In the first instance at least, one would need a very unusual kind of person to start practising this kind of disciplined, self-denying pursuit of gain: i.e. to be irrationally systematic and rational in one’s devotion to gain. Weber gives the example of Benjamin Franklin as someone who exhibits this kind of mentality, even though his circumstances in C18th America, make it impossible for him to develop into a fully fledged capitalist. Once capitalism is up and running as a system, it could produce people of this kind by training and acculturation. Weber’s problem is therefore to identify a plausible initial source of this kind of attitude to the world, which can then be applied to economic activity, where, once it’s proved its worth, it will be reproduced.
Weber’s response to Marx
Weber admired Marx’s work, drew upon it heavily, but challenged it in several respects.
• Sense of history. There’s no unfolding of a theory of history, and modern capitalism in particular is historically unprecedented and did not have to happen. By contrast for Marx, capitalism may be an historical innovation, but it is part of an historically normal progression through necessary phases.
• Acceptance of material causes as necessary but not sufficient. Weber accepted much of Marx’s analysis of the material preconditions for capitalism. But by themselves they weren’t enough to bring it about. For that one needs in addition the “spirit” of capitalism.
• Role of ideas and beliefs. Marx’s dialectical materialism is capable of acknowledging some limited autonomy for ideal factors; but clearly Weber grants them a more salient role.
• Subjectivity and interpretation. As part of that, he’s also interested in the subjective perceptions and interpretations of the world of the typical actors whom he is studying. How they saw the world and were motivated to act matters to him, partly because their beliefs can be a powerful and independent cause of historical change.
Protestantism
Weber thought that certain forms of Protestantism, especially Calvinism, got their believers to adopt many of the attitudes and motivations that he identified as implicit in the “spirit” of capitalism. He took it that it was already established that capitalism had flourished most in Protestant areas of Europe, so Protestantism was an obvious suspect. But note that he never argues that Protestants of any sort believed as part of their faith that they should make money. After all, Weber’s model of the historical causation of capitalism implies that the initial generations of capitalists actually won’t be primarily concerned with making money, at least not out of mere self-interest. The gist of his case is that key features of Protestant, mainly Calvinist, doctrine created attitudes and motives, which, as an unintended side-effect, disposed those who believed in them to pursue their business affairs in a newly systematic, rational manner, and that this, given that the material conditions for modern capitalism were also in place, gave rise to modern capitalism.
• Salvation anxiety. Several factors made concern for salvation a source of peculiar and individual anxiety.
o Original sin
o Divine omniscience and omnipotence
o Predestination and prevenient grace
o Sense of impotence and anxiety
• Elimination of supernatural means of allaying anxiety. Several means that had been available in the mediaeval church to allay that anxiety (e.g. absolution, indulgences, rituals) were denied by Protestantism.
o Justification by faith, not works
o Elimination of supernaturally effective ways of purging sin
o Individual responsibility for salvation: “a condition of unprecedented inner loneliness”.
• Vocation / ‘Beruf’. Every believer was now enjoined to practice special spiritual discipline — and that meant seeing oneself as having been called by God to live and serve in whatever capacity, and thus approaching mundane tasks with a religious seriousness.
o Abolition of formally separate status of priests and spiritual adepts
o Systematic effort in this worldly affairs
• This-worldly asceticism is the upshot of these things. One works systematically and remorselessly, but pointedly not in order to indulge oneself.
o Devotion to duty
o Trustworthiness
o Saving and accumulation
o Distaste for luxury and irrational consumption
• Reinvestment. Since one is not spending the profits on personal consumption, they’re available for other things, notably reinvestment in the business. Though God’s will is ultimately unsearchable, thriving in one’s affairs may be a sign of favour, so there was an added religious motive to make the business work.
• Disenchantment (elimination of magical forces), which tends to favour systematic calculation.
• Differences from mediaeval Christianity (116-7): ethical life for the mediaeval Christian entailed performing traditional duties, but was unsystematic. Calvinism, by contrast, demanded “a life of good works combined into a unified system”, and never gave one the psychological relief of atonement and forgiveness.
See Weber’s summary of his case on pp. 170-1.
Consequences
• Discipline and transition. Once this rational capitalism is functioning, it will tend to out-compete its rivals. So one either adopts the same approach to business, or one goes out of business. Weber laments the passing, e.g., of traditional capitalism under this onslaught (67-68).
• The ‘Iron Cage’. Generally the religious motivation fades into the background, but the new capitalism continues to impose in a materialistic way the discipline that the puritans embraced out of spiritual zeal. Weber evinces a powerful sense of the possibilities of human freedom and meaning diminishing (albeit with some doubts), and suggests we have become “Specialists without spirit, [and] sensualists without heart” (181-2).
The relation to Weber’s comparative sociology of religion
Weber realised that having shown, as he thought, that the West had indeed produced the requisite “spirit” of capitalism, he’d left the question hanging of why other parts of the world that had the requisite material conditions didn’t produce capitalism. This was one of the reasons why he embarked on his massive (and unfinished) comparative sociology of religion. He looked at Judaism, India and China, and never completed his work on Islam. Judaism had some tendency to produce the rationalising spirit he was interested in, which it then transmits to Christianity, where it is realised in some forms of Protestantism (see excerpt (c) by Weber in the handout). Confucianism is the non-Protestant belief system that seems to come closest to fostering the rational spirit in Weber’s view, especially in its emphasis on ethics and duty. However, the Confucian gentlemen’s highest ideals were oriented less to the realisation of impossible spiritual ideals, than to maintaining scrupulously one’s obligations to the world and family-relations as they already are (i.e. its ethos is traditional rather than radical) and to achieve an aesthetic perfection in their own lives (see excerpt (b)).
Related cases
• Robert Merton. Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-Century England (1938). Protestantism favoured the development of modern science, because it promoted the systematic investigation of nature as a means of knowing and worshipping God; and its version of God made for a world that might more reasonably be supposed to exhibit uniform underlying principles, such as the scientist might discover.
• Michael Walzer. The Revolution of the Saints (1966) argues that Protestantism, especially in C17th England, favoured the creation of a prototype for an archetypal modern political figure: the professional revolutionary. Such a figure seeks systemic change, based on a coherent overall vision, backed by systematic and militant action.
Criticisms
Weber’s thesis has been widely criticized from almost every point of view. R.H. Tawney in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism argues that, though there was a connexion between religion and capitalism, the lines of causation were largely the opposite of what Weber supposed: capitalism brought about changes in religion, not vice-versa. There’s an element of Marxism in this, and of course Marxists have been particularly concerned to respond to Weber’s critique of the Marxist view of the causation of capitalism.
Some accept the connexion between Protestantism and capitalism, but argue that it often had a more straightforward cause: Protestants were often persecuted and displaced, and turned to business because they had few other avenues open to them (e.g. Hugh Trevor-Roper in Religion, the Reformation and Social Change).
Others have queried Weber’s account of Protestant doctrine. Some urge that capitalism flourished where, on Weber’s reckoning, it shouldn’t have done (e.g. in Catholic Italy), or failed to flourish where it should have done (e.g. in Calvinist Scotland).
Some challenge Weber’s understanding and dating of capitalism (something that’s very hard to pin down, since more or less capitalist procedures coexisted with all manner of other things for centuries). Some challenge his selection and use of evidence, and methodology.
See the further excerpts in the handout for a taste of these debates.
The Formation of Modern Societies
Secularisation and Nationalism
Week 11
The general idea of the secularisation thesis is that religion in some way loses as modernization progresses. It’s sometimes told as a narrative of Enlightened reason emancipating us from benighted superstition (which should alert one to the awkward role values may play here).
Elements of religion.
Religion, whether organised by specialist priests tied to the state, or not, is extraordinarily widespread (though that begs questions about what counts as religion). Its elements may include the following:
• Cosmology. Some account, often in the form of myth, of the constitution of the cosmos, often in terms that relate especially to the believers’ position (e.g. the Lele deal in the contrast between village and forest; Christianity used to adhere (pre-Galileo) to an opposition between the mutable human sphere, and the immutable heavens.
• Ethics. Some account of how to behave, more or less closely tied to supernatural sanctions.
• Theodicy. An attempt to reconcile evil with belief, especially in God(s), and thus to explain the world.
• Ritual. Crucial to bear in mind this collective and performative aspect of religion, given the modern tendency to dwell upon individual belief.
Social aspects of religion.
Religion is often involved in sustaining the social and political order, and may prescribe social roles, most elaborately in Hinduism’s caste system (at its most schematic, with Brahmins / Priests, Kshatriya (princes / warriors), Vaisya (trades and professions), Sudra (farmers, servants) and the rest. But one can also find notions of social ranks more or less divinely sanctioned in the west (e.g. in the three estates: warrior nobility, clergy, and commoners). And other elements of religion, especially ethics and ritual, may relate to social order.
Durkheim on religion (see the handout).
Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) in The Elementary Form of Religious Life examines the totemic religion of Australian aborigines, and argues that, especially in its combination of belief and rituals, it seeks to enact and affirm social solidarity, in which the totem stands for the unity of the whole tribe. Religion is “the system of symbols by means of which society becomes conscious of itself; it is the way of thinking characteristic of collective existence”.
Sociology of religion: types of religious organisation.
Sociologists of religion often distinguish between different kinds of religious group.
• Church. A religious community that is coextensive with society; lays claim to exclusive truth (i.e. non-pluralistic — truth is one, not many, and it’s theirs); but there are no special qualifications for admission.
• Sects likewise lay claim to exclusive truth; but they are usually groups within society, not co-extensive with society as such; admission is difficult, since you have to prove your worthiness.
• Denominations. They are like sects in that they are not co-extensive with society (though it took the Anglican Church a long while to accept this); but they are usually like Churches, in not imposing severe tests for admission. But they are unlike Sects and Churches in not laying claim to exclusive possession of the Truth — so denominations tend to be fairly tolerant of each other.
• Cults are loose-knit groups, with no doctrinal programme, so heresy is irrelevent. Like denominations, they are pluralistic; but like sects, they are perceived in society as a whole as quirky or deviant.
Schematic outline of the history of Christianity in Europe.
Overall one might discern a general tendency for churches and sects to give way to or mutate into denominations or cults. This points to an important interpretation of secularization: the erosion of church-type social organisations (in the sociological sense; there are, of course, still plenty of organisations that call themselves churches).
• Pre-Reformation. The Church in principles includes everyone. It’s not necessarily or even primarily a matter of inner faith, but of ritual observance and participation. It’s also the sole or principal agent in several essential social functions, including education. In Steve Bruce’s useful formulation, “Christendom was made up of Christian societies rather than societies of Christians”.
• Reformation. (cf. Weber). Sects had tended to burst into life in response to dissatisfaction with the church. Both the church and the states tended to see them as subversive and to repress them. The Reformation brings such challenges, but they have never been reabsorbed into the church, partly because some of them acquire the protection of states, which make a determined (but often doomed) attempt to constitute a new version of Christianity as co-extensive with society within their particular political state: hence the church of England. But these would-be churches often retain a sect-like mentality: they are demanding of their adherents, and ready to exclude those who fail to make the spiritual grade. The attempt to combine some of the traits of sects with church-like society-wide extensiveness gives to rise bloodshed, war and intensified concerns over heresy, and states that are more clearly and ideologically defined against one another, especially in western Europe. To the extent that states manage to get these newly militant forms of religion to approximate to society-wide churches, rulers and ruled come to be more closely identified with each other: their shared religion sets them apart from many other states, and may be more important than differences in rank.
• Post-Reformation. Individualism of inner belief and some degree of egalitarian spirit (in that each has a soul to save), may contribute in the long run to secularised notions of democracy, and individual rights. But the violence of the Reformation and its aftermath is unsustainable. A degree of toleration of pluralism becomes difficult to avoid. Appeals to reason to qualify the rigours of revealed faith contribute to the rationalization of religion (e.g. into deism, and code of ethics) and to ‘disenchantment’ in Weber’s sense (the banishing of magical forces from one’s view of the world). Thus churches and the unstable sect-churches tend to give way to denominations (see H.R. Niebuhr on the tendency for sects to mutate).
• Proto-Nationalism. Religion loses its role in sustaining the coherence of entire societies, possibly resigning it to other things, including proto-nationalism. But the way in which rulers and ruled have become identified with each other in what Tom Nairn calls the “state-nations” (the handful of European states where nationalism evolved more or less spontaneously: principally England, Spain and France), while being more clearly differentiated from other states, arguably feeds into a kind of proto-nationalism. The assertion of the collective folk-ish identity of the people may look quasi-tribal, but it’s arguably operating in a society-wide manner, that’s been made possible by the ethose conjurd by claims about the fellowship of all believers. Yet this sense of fellowship is also increasingly individualistic in certain senses (see comments on Gellner below).
Two definitions of religion.
• Substantive. e.g. Robertson: “Religion is a system of communally shared beliefs and rituals that are oriented towards some sacred, supernatural realm” (in Sociology, 5 iii (1971): 289).
• Functional. Religion is defined in terms of what it does, especially (for our purposes) for what it does socially (though one might equally have a psychologically functional definition of religion). Durkheim is influential here, through his emphasis on religion’s role in sustaining social cohesion. In this sense many things may be deemed to be ‘religions’: political ideologies and movements, e.g. — or even football (for some…)
Note that, unless societies collapse, in talking about the eclipse of religion, we’re discussing it in a ‘substantive’ sense.
Dimensions or interpretations of the secularization thesis.
The general idea of the secularisation thesis can be articulated in relation to several aspects of religion.
• Personal belief. One would be claiming that fewer people believe in religious tenets. A moot point and difficult to assess, especially if one starts to distinguish between different aspects of belief (e.g. between official doctrine and a vague notion of the afterlife or of God).
• Religious practice may be measured, e.g., by church-going.
• Strength of and recruitment to religious organisations. Churches and other religious organisations may be becoming weaker, financially less secure, and be finding it harder to recruit personnel.
• Role of religion in social institutions at large, and the religious distinctiveness of that role. The position of religion in social, public life may be eroded, as a basis of authority or as motive for policy; the religious domination of such things as law and education may be eroded, and even institutions in these areas that remain nominally religious may be indistinguishable from their secular counterparts.
• Official state religions. One kind of secularization might consist in the abandonment or ossification of state-religion.
Sociologically the most plausible account of secularisation relates to the allegedly diminishing social role of religion.
Processes of secularisation include:
• Rationalisation.
o Some religious belief systems may be prone to secularization. E.g. in Weber’s account some kinds of Protestantism, (a) foster demystification of belief (e.g. hostility to some rituals), (b) conceive of religion in terms of this-worldly vocation, so religious virtue becomes a secular affair, and (c) locate a transcendent God outside nature, thus conceiving of nature in terms of orderliness and regularity.
o Diminished appeal to (and sense of being at the mercy of) supernatural agency. Cf. Keith Thomas’s case about Religion and the Decline of Magic: greater effective control over the world undermines some aspects of religion’s appeal.
o Increasing prestige of scientific explanations of nature.
• Social differentiation may leave people with less in common than formerly, and so increasingly in their own private worlds, which some claim makes for unfavourable conditions for religion.
• ‘Societalization’. Key social functions are assumed by society as a whole, rather than by communities. On the assumption that religion thrives more in strong communities, this may erode religion.
• Reaction to sectarian bloodshed in the wake of 1648 etc possibly leading to toleration and such rationalised versions of religion as deism.
• Economic life. Increasing economic output may lead to a greater emotional investment in this-worldly ambitions, and possibly to a secular doctrine of historical progress. It may also promote social mobility and erode hierarchically stratified, deferential social ranks, in a way that might undermine religion.
• Anti-clericalism. Possibly old-fashioned anti-clericalism finds new forms of expression. It’s arguably been strong element in France, e.g.
Problems with the secularisation thesis.
• Cases that may challenge it.
o USA. Churchgoing has tended to remain high by comparison with Europe (at one point 40% as against the UK’s 5%). And the salience of the Christian right in politics might seem to maintain its social role. But note that officially there is no established Church in the US Constitution, so it’s always been secular in that sense. There are other ways of trying to explain the USA’s situation, which we’ll pursue in the seminar and the presentation. One may need to ask what social roles does religion play in America in ways that are different from the way non-religious organisations would play them.
o N. Ireland. Arguably here religion remains salient, because it has a role to play in ‘cultural defence’ against perceived encroachments by others. i.e. religion can thrive socially in the modern world, where there happens to be a social role for it.
o Modern political Islam. This needs to be seen in the context, e.g., of finding a political ideology capable of functioning in the modern situation in the middle east and elsewhere. One should be wary of assuming that this is simply Islam persisting: the Ottoman empire, e.g., was an Islamic state, but its relation to Islam was very different from the kind of modern political Islam of the Iranian Revolution and its aftermath. Its salience as a political ideology and social movement may, again, have to do with cultural defence against perceived western threats. This, of course, to try explain away anyone’s personal piety (which persists to a greater or lesser degree in many faiths in the modern world), but to examine the socio-political positioning and modification of religion.
• Methodological or theoretical problems.
o Quantification. What to count and how.
o The problem of private belief. Sociology possibly has very little purchase on this, and in any case private belief seems readily (if sometimes eccentrically) to persist in modern societies.
o Euro-/Christiano-centrism. Is secularisation specific to the west, or just to Europe?
o Teleological linearity. Does the thesis in some of its form assume that secularization is necessarily geared to modernity in a one-way, necessary process.
o Questionable value-commitments? The thesis has sometimes been associated with proponents of secular attitudes (i.e. secularists), which may beg awkward questions.
Nationalism.
• Relation of the nationalisms of the ‘state-nations’ to religion. We’ve already touched on earlier.
• The self-image of nationalism often has to do with the cultural and historical roots of a people, who have an essential identity and unity going back in history. Nations, on this view, are evolved, not made, and are valuable because of this. They are especially (though not universally) associated with a shared language.
• Sociological appraisal of nationalism: nationalists make nations. The nationalist claim is that peoples evolve in history, and then demand that they be endowed with statehood (e.g. in doctrines of popular sovereignty in the wake of the French Revolution). But as Anderson, Gellner and others point out, usually the cultural homogeneity of the ‘People’ is created by the state, not vice-versa. Without state intervention, the ‘people’ would consist of lots of sub-groups speaking different languages or dialects. It’s states that impose educational and linguistic uniformity. In terms Gellner uses, states thus impose a ‘high’ culture (one that crosses local communities within a state), but dress it up as ‘low’ culture (as springing spontaneously from the people).
• Comparison with the social function of religion. However, having persuaded people to see themselves like this, it’s striking that nationalism can assume something of the society-wide role that churches (in the sociological sense) used to play. People within a society may have all kinds of differences, but when the chips are down, sometimes in defiance of their consciously held beliefs, they often express national unity. If nations are as synthetic as sociologists say, why? Partly, perhaps, because in a world where nation-states have become the norm, one needs, as a matter of urgent self-interest, to identify with and be accepted by some national group for protection. Strife about who qualifies as a member of a nation and who doesn’t, especially of an internecine kind, has some similarities to post-Reformation religious strife in Europe: e.g. ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia.
• Nationalism and modernity: Gellner’s thesis. Gellner argues that nationalism also has social functions specific to modern kinds of economies. Modern economies require (a) high levels of literacy, and (b) high social and geographical mobility. People have to slot into semantically complex organisations in very various ways (consider a typical professional career path). This makes low-context communication (e.g. written instructions, as opposed to face-to-face communication) especially important. So one needs to be readily accepted in different groups, and to be capable of considerable semantic sophistication in diverse settings. That’s what nationalism (esp. in a shared language and ways of doing things) secures for you, so it’s vitally in your interest to belong to and to some degree identify with a functioning nation.
The Formation of Modern Societies
Family and Demography
Week 14
This week we’re examining another way of charting and questioning the emergence of modern societies: in terms of changing types and levels of population and changing family types and norms.
Demography
• Background of Demography. Demography (the scientific study of populations) has a few C17th forerunners, such as William Petty and Gregory King. It develops in C18th initially in order to find out whether the population of Europe is rising or not. By the 1760s it was clear it was rising. There’s a further debate between those who see increasing population as good, and others who fear overpopulation. By the end of C18th the concern over possible overpopulation as possibly limiting or blighting human progress is widespread.
• Demography and social governance. Animated by such concerns, and against the background of the industrial revolution and threat of the mobilized masses represented by the French Revolution that demography comes of age in Thomas Malthus (1766-1835), An Essay on the Principle of Principle of Population (1798). See the excerpt in the handout. Malthus produces the first version of An Essay with political goals, as the full title makes clear (... as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet and other Writers). He’s offering a critique of what he deems to be Utopian schemes for human progress. His key claim is that the rate of population growth will always tend to outstrip resources: one grows geometrically, the other arithmetically, in the Malthusian slogan. Malthus’s work also has implications for social policy. Bk. III, chs. 5-7, for example, discusses social policy over poverty in early C19th. That debate was especially vigorous in the period from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the passage of the Poor Law Amendment Act in 1834. Traditional, parish based poor relief was stretched to breaking point, with c80% of local taxes going on the poor, to the detriment of other things, leading to a crisis of social governance, and pressure for the state to assume a greater roles in it. Demography is one of the social sciences that present themselves as the means by which the state can acquire the knowledge and expertise to do this. Malthus also has a particular conservative agenda: a fear of the poor breeding out of control, and a concern to see to it that moral curbs are imposed on them. From this point onwards, the complex social scientific discourse of population impinges upon a range of social policy issues: questions of welfare and how to motivate people to pursue courses of action that will ultimately produce the most desirable outcome (often counter-intuitive: to reduce poverty do not give money to the poor — that’s only encouraging it, by encouraging the poor to breed — hence more paupers; Cf. Malthus pp. 89-90 — or that parish assistance “may be said therefore to create the poor which they maintain”; poor relief causes the supply of labour to exceed demand [note how people have become a commodity] and thus depresses wages. Malthus is working with a broadly Smithian self-equilibrating model of the economy, and this means that there are problems of socio-economic governance that can only be solved only by a special social science.
• Profiling Populations. Demography is concerned with more than just numbers. Populations are conceived as dynamic entities, developing in relation to available resources (material and possibly also cultural). Two populations of the same size may nevertheless have very different characteristics as populations. Variables include:
o Density. People per square unit of territory.
o Age profile. See charts for Sweden on p. 6 of the handout.
o Growth rate. Populations grow or shrink or are stable.
o Birth and death rates. One might think this simply repeats the last point. But consider the different ways in which a population can be stable: in the absence of other factors, provided birth and death rates balance, they can be high or low.
o Immigration and emigration. This, from a demographic point of view, can be crucial. For example, in C16th / C17th London’s population grew fast. You might think this meant that births outstripped deaths in London; or that this meant that the population of the country as a whole was growing at a similar rate. No: London was a ‘demographic sink’: it was so unhealthy that people died faster than they were born. But it grew because of sustained immigration from the rest of the country.
o Customs and norms of reproduction. E.g. age at marriage; importance attached to procreation; frequency of pregnancies; use of birth control, etc. These can be related to economic factors, family types and kinship systems.
o Economic value of the population. This is a crucial concern of most modern governments, and impinges on fiscal projections and welfare and pension policy. Cf. the current debate about the pensions crisis, which is partly to do with the possibility of the number of pensioners growing in relation to the number of taxpayers. The typical western European population (barring immigration) has low death and birth rates, and is not quite managing to maintain its own numbers. This in turn impinges on the age profile of the population, and has implications for the affordability of various social programmes, and for the economic prospects of the country as a whole.
• Numbers and resources — the Malthusian trap. The following are the phases of population according to Paul Harrison
a. c. 10,000BC: c. 4 m people; low density (0.3-0.5 per km2); low growth rates;
b. Where agriculture is adopted, densities rise to 10-30 per km2; total numbers c. AD 0 are maybe 170 m.
c. AD 0-800:low growth rate — c. 0.03 % p.a. — i.e. on average an extra 63,000 people p.a. — economic & political problems keep growth down
d. 800-1700: agricultural improvements contribute to growth of 0.11% p.a., making for an average addition of 677,000.
e. 1700-1950: rate 0.57%; addition 7,624,000 p.a. – 1st billion c. 1820; 2nd billion c. 1930.(cf. graph on p. 6 of the handout, bottom left)
f. 1950-1980: death rates fall thanks to new medicine; immunization; better water supply; and high-tech agriculture. Growth peaks at 2.05% in 1960s implying an average annual addition 64 m. 3rd billion 1960. 4th in 1974.
g. Since 1980: growth rate is down to 1.74%; but the average annual addition is higher at c.77m. 5th billion in 1987. And since then, we’ve added another billion.
Plot these figures on a graph, and they beg an obvious question: given that resources are not infinite, where’s it all going to end? Some draw analogies with animal populations. For example, an experiment of 1925 by R. Pearl: flies (Drosophila Melanogaster) were bred in a sealed environment (so strictly finite resources). Their numbers followed the ‘logistic’ curve: they grew rapidly, and then levelled off. The ‘Neo-Malthusians’ see human population as unsustainable and as a threat to the environment (see the Ehrlichs’ ‘Take-Home Messages’ in the handout). Other claim that even as human ingenuity in developing new resources proved Malthus wrong (in the short term at least), it will prove him wrong again. Historically, various things have controlled population growth: disease, war, customs, famine, birth control, and (perhaps most surprisingly) a certain kind of modern prosperity — though a glance at the falling population of Russia suggests that certain kinds of misery stem population growth as well. To understand these things, one needs to think about types of families and their relation to economic production and broader mores.
An ideal type of premodern families
• Kinship and family. People are likely to be aware of their place in an extended family or kinship system. You have obligations to and claims upon these people. They’re your support-system. What westerners sometimes perceive merely as corruption in some countries is often the continuation of something of this ethic.
• Production, welfare and the household. In a typical peasant society, production is based in household and consists mainly of farming. In other words, there isn’t the modern separation of economic, adult life, from family life. Birth and death rates were both typically high. And the birth rate would often remain high, even if resources were tight. Children are themselves an economic resource. You may have to feed and clothe them, but they’re also unpaid labour, and they’re your pension scheme. High infant mortality also means you need many children. So the population may oscillate around the carrying capacity of its environment, but without there being any interest in population in control. See Mamdani’s account of the failure of the Khanna project in the 1950s in the handout.
• Ascribed status. Typically one’s social status is ascribed, rather than established by socio-economic competition within a class system. There isn’t much scope for competition. One needs a growing economy (and, more specifically, growing per capita GDP) for this to be a good bet for the average individual. It’s not that some aren't better off than others. Surpluses generate a tiny elite sitting on top of a large labouring population. One of the functions of kinship and lineage here is precisely to do what looks mad to us: prevent free competition, as Casey argues (shortly before the extract in the handout).
• Dynasticism is the most conspicuous instance of this: power goes by birth. But more generally, your life chances depend upon your extended family, and its network of alliances. They also depend upon property transfers in the form of inheritances or dowries, or (occasionally) family support of special training. The tendency is for the authority of the family to be strong, and usually patriarchal. You're a member of the family before you're an individual, if you think of yourself as an individual at all. There follow two examples of practices or attitudes that look strange to most western individualists.
o Arranged marriages. The concern is to form marriages that will work in the larger family context, since one’s life chances depend on it. There's a perfectly obvious sense in which marriage is central to the fabric of such a society: society and its needs are central to the fabric of marriages. It’s obvious how this works for nobles etc. But the communal regulation of courtship and marriage figured much lower down the social scale. See esp. Edward Shorter.
o Family honour. There is often an intense concern for honour — especially family honour. One is born into a family, and one's status depends upon its status. Women are valued perhaps not solely, but largely as breeders of children, so this concern for honour is often manifest in a concern for purity of womenfolk. cf. Sicily, even just a century ago. And in some ways, even in Southern Europe today, one can see attitudes that faintly remind one that these used to be (in Ruth Benedict’s terms) shame cultures rather than guilt cultures (where shame is about loss of face and standing, while guilt is about an inner conviction of failure or sin).
An ideal type of modern families. See also excerpts F-H in the handout for accounts of the modernization of the family.
• Fertility and mortality. Medicine and modern welfare and nutrition cause the death rate to drop. The logic of a cash economy in which one earns one’s living not in the household, but in paid employment elsewhere, means that there’s a trade-off between having children and economic security. One now seeks economic security possibly in order to have children, whereas previously it was the other way around.
• Work and contract. Work becomes a matter of contract (rather than social custom) (cf. Tonnies on Gemeinschaft vs. Gesellschaft). The mutual obligation of peasant and over-lord is ditched in favour of impersonal legal contract, in which both parties are formally equal. Cf. formal equality of all adults as citizens in modern states (e.g. after French Revolution). That also tends to undermine the role of the extended family in determining one’s life chances.
• Welfare and social governance. Systems for ensuring the functioning of social order tend to become specialized organs of government (police etc). Welfare states assume the role that family and friends used to play. On some interpretations, the state deliberately seeks to undermine the social role of the extended family (see Shoumatoff in the handout), in order to produce a society that is easier to govern, more responsive to market forces, and more dependent upon the state.
• Individualism. Individualism needn't mean everyone isolated, nor should individualism be confused with egotism. But does mean many areas of life come to be seen terms of individual choices and actions. The bonds that count are entered into between individuals — not groups (clans, whatever). This is obvious in economic, legal sphere. But it leaves, or rather constitutes, a private sphere, in which to cultivate intimacy, and possibly special inner depths of feeling and soul (e.g. by reading). This is manifest in house designs, with a new emphasis on seclusion, even in a household with servants. No more great halls for formal dining with one's dependents (cf. High Tables of Oxbridge colleges) (see excerpt from Tocqueville).
• Nuclear family. The modern nuclear family (just the parents and the children) is often said to be informed by affective individualism. The nuclear family is increasingly free of claims other than sentimental ones. It becomes a zone which, provided it can settle its bills with the outside world, is in some ways sealed off from it. In the process a special status is ascribed not only to children, but also, as until recently, to women (e.g. by assuming that women in professions had automatically resigned when they married, so that women remained, in effect, tied to a kind of ascribed status. Cf Engels's comment on patriarchal family cited in Shoumatoff).
• Romantic love. People are less to be thought of as being drilled to occupy preordained social roles; they have to become themselves, and find out what counts as truth to oneself. Their desires are specific to themselves, and define them. So people choose their partners on a personal basis. we're all supposedly Romeo and Juliets now. Deprived of its great socially constitutive functions, yet still necessary, our sexual and family lives get jazzed up with Romance of a kind that originated in mediaeval fantasies of courtly love. The argument is not that romantic love is previously unheard of, but that no one before imagined you could base a social order on such individual indulgence. Some argue that there is a correlation between the romantic emphasis on individual desire and the capitalist / consumerist emphasis on desire.
• Childhood. Aries argues childhood is invented as a special status: a privileged, yet isolated position. The pre-modern world tends to use children as work force. But in industrial societies children tend to be more of an expense than an asset. So sentiment becomes the mainstay of the value put on children. Hence striking contrast in the images in excerpt ‘E’. Some proponents of affective individualism argue that declining child mortality may have something to do with the alleged change: when a child was not likely to last long, emotional investment was limited (so the case runs — questionably). But it is the case that pre-modern formal deference to parents wanes during C18th — though not everyone goes in for the indulgent child-rearing on display in the picture on the right. More of this in the presentation.
Issues and themes
• Dating the change. Among the difficulties of applying this overly clear-cut model of modern vs. premodern family-types is the problem of dating the change. Young and Willmott in a well-known study of Family and Kinship in East London follow the fortunes of families moved from Bethnal Green out to a new estate in Greenleigh in Essex after WWII. See excerpt ‘I’. Many of the changes described above look as if they only impinge on these people at this point.
• Modern vs. Premodern? It is also possible that the model of the ‘modern’ family may be specifically European. It may be that different types of equally ‘modern’ family types are developing elsewhere. Equally, there may be crucial exceptions to the model of the ‘premodern’ family. Macfarlane, for example, points out: (a) there are simple kinds of society, such as the unpleasant Ik that are clearly premodern, and yet individualist to a degree; and (b) England is an odd case in Macfarlane’s view — one where capitalism didn’t cause the new pattern of family and demographic trends, but vice-versa. Romantic love goes back to middle ages at least; and late marriage and thus limited fertility predate capitalism here.
The Formation of Modern Societies
Welfare State – Society Relations
Week 16
Problems of definition.
The Welfare State is not one thing. There great variations, in character and functions, intentions and impact, political alignment, and perceptions.
• State or social order? As Esping-Andersen notes, it is not always clear that we have a definition: is it a state form, or a kind of social order? Since many WSs function in liberal-capitalist contexts (irrespective of the party in power), some kind of separation of state from socio-economic affairs is usually asserted.
• The essential feature of a welfare state is that in / under it one finds a channelling of welfare provision through state channels, or through channels that are ultimately regulated by the state. That’s a necessary qualification, given the roles of non-state actors in many welfare systems. Outside the UK a range of other agencies have some role in WS, especially churches and professional associations or unions. As Esping-Andersen notes, the degree of etatism is a key variable in assessing WSs; yet the reach of the state in almost all modern industrial democracies brings all these systems within its survey.
• Preconceptions about WS. There are many preconceptions about WS, especially from a British p.o.v: that it is mainly the preserve of the left; that it necessarily seeks to promote equality and is redistributive; that it’s essentially a post-war phenomenon; that it’s based on universal handouts. None of these is necessarily so.
• The range of welfare-state activities is enormous: social security system, education, health, housing, social work, parts of the pension system. All obviously qualify as welfare measure, and most look like they’re there to respond to need. But some of these items are hardly universal and equal in their application never mind their effect. If one adds economic policies (esp. over labour market flexibility), taxation regulations (which often carry social policy implications) and policing, the picture’s even more complex. And there are different instruments, with different effects in various states and various areas, e.g. differences between insurance based benefits and universal benefits. One might think that universal benefits would tend to greater equality — but then what of education in the UK? It is not just universal but compulsory, yet it’s not clear that it produces equality. It coexists with a private system, and even within public provision there are marked differences, and many believe it’s possible to purchase advantages indirectly (e.g. by moving to a favoured catchment area). Cf. council housing. Equality is complex, multi-dimensional. Set it alongside freedom, and a host of tricky questions arise.
Historical development
Why the need for the state to get involved in welfare? We’re all richer now; one might think that the need for welfare was earlier — pre-industrialization, or even pre-capitalism.
• Welfare before the WS. There was a huge need for ‘welfare’ before the WS — but not met by the state. Monasteries (when the monks and the townsfolk weren’t at loggerheads) and the church , or guilds did much. Extended kinship might contribute (though note MacFarlane’s caveat about England). Above all, labour wasn’t a commodity in a market-place. With most people working the land, most people had direct access to the means to produce food. They could still starve, of course, if the crop failed. But generally as Polanyi argues, economic relations were embedded in social ones. There were elements of paternalism here too: feudalism could beget some sense of noblesse oblige. And above all, the state’s capacity for social governance was so modest that it society had to organise & reproduce itself.
• Early social legislation: the British example. However, systemic economic change always a threat — and feudalism was seldom anything like as stable as rosy hindsight makes one hope. The Black Death and, then C16th inflation were very difficult, for there’s little capacity for systemic adjustment. The 1601 Poor Law (and things like the Statute of Artificers) in England was essentially conservative, and seeks to reimpose local organisation of welfare, albeit by the state’s act of parliament. There’s an obvious tension there. The poor are notionally to receive relief in their parishes. There’s an implicit ideal of a face to face community, animated by bonds of Christian fellowship, where you neighbours will know if you’re a deserving case or a scrounger. There’s also a concern for public order, which it was feared might be threatened by “sturdy beggars” and masterless men, i.e. oeople who’ve come unstuck from the normatively hierarchical structure this society. The economic salience of London in itself calls into question how adequate a parish-based system of poor relief (and of policing) can be.
• The Old Poor Law at breaking point. By the end of C18th England is clearly a largely capitalist economy. The commons have been mostly enclosed, so direct access to the means of food production is cut off (and nostalgia for this informs Cobbett, and then Owen and Chartism). The revolutionary and Napoleonic wars make for huge systemic and economic problems, and a working population that is probably more exposed to market forces than ever before — i.e. labour is more commodified. In 1797, the Speenhamland system of poor relief seeks to work within the 1601 statute, by levying wage supplements on the parish rates. But it defies the new logic to this world — especially as outlined by Smith. Markets are self-equilibriating, if they’re not constrained or distorted. If allowed to work properly, the market would deliver increased wealth for all. Hence the emergence of political economy and of demography with Malthus. There is a growing sense (a) of specialised discourses available for thinking about social problems, leading to the social sciences, and also (b) of the need for some kind of governmental intervention, if only to give properly free play to market forces.
• Civil society and the state. There are also demands for the emancipation of civil society (and the commerce that occurs within it) from politics: i.e. for the separation of state and society. The idea gains ground that modern liberty and civilisation are founded in the sphere of civil society, organised via the rule of law, but free from state control. NB this is something rather different from the way society had once been more or less capable of reproducing itself and looking after itself locally. The idea of the relative autonomy of civil society in this liberal discourse might be said to presuppose the fact that society’s practical autonomy is threatened, and to be a response to that. Liberals proclaim limits to the state precisely because there’s a real danger of their being transgressed.
• New Poor Law (1834). Ironically, in trying to clear the way for market forces, the central state in fact takes more determining role: outdoor relief is banned, and entry into the workhouse becomes condition of relief. The principle informing this is one of ‘less eligibility’: those in receipt of relief should not be better off than the poorest independent labourer: i.e. welfare provision should never be more appealing than paid work in the market. This bolsters commodification of labour, and is aimed at making the market work more efficiently. It provides minimal help but under conditions of loss of liberty, stigma, etc. Workhouses are meant to be bracingly unpleasant.
• Pressures for further welfare reform. These free-market assumptions are challenged by the experience of industrialisation: a mass proletariat, the growth of urban poverty and concerns over the ‘social question’. Concerns raised both regarding the health of those living in poor conditions and in relation to the dangers posed by this to the polity as a whole. The 1834 Poor Law had been a partial response to these problems, intended to reconcile market-freedom with welfare, but subsequent philanthropic and social scientific work identify continuing problems. The late C19th poverty surveys of Booth and Rowntree, and the revelation of the physical unfitness of recruits for the Boer War foster the idea that poverty is a social (and systemic) rather than an individual problem, and increase pressure for organised social intervention (e.g. Booth on primary and secondary poverty). Cf. Fraser’s account in the main reading on the Social Question of a developing body of social legislation, in which is made some attempt to preserve the principle at least of the autonomy of the male worker, while extending regulation. But the larger the problems became, the readier was recognition of an increased role for the state in providing forms of social security. There’s also a political dimension to this: campaigns to extend the suffrage raise the possibility of a democratic majority for the kinds of working class-based political forces that start to organise. So there are at least three pressures: (a) structural changes; (b) demands for political rights from below; (c) desire from above to defuse radicalism.
Comparison with Germany and France.
They industrialize later than Britain, and with more state-directed planning.
• Social cohesion. They are more obviously concerned with maintaining social cohesion. That’s true in (a) France, because post-revolutionary France is constitutionally fragile, with uncertain sense of social solidarity; and in (b) Germany, because it’s in the throes of unification as a nation-state. Napoleon III and Bismarck launch welfare state systems in the late C19th.
• Bismarck’s welfare measures. These were nothing to do with socialism, save as a way of warding it off. There’s a determination to cycle of benefits through the state as Esping-Andersen argues. A statutory social insurance scheme for old age is introduced in 1889. Benefits are related to contributions (cf. the UK’s national insurance provisions). Historically this is one of the reasons why pensions remain a salient item of expenditure in the modern German welfare system, especially after Adenauer’s 1957 overhaul, which preserved differentiation between groups. Much is organised via workers’ organisations, with different benefits for different groups. So Bismarck’s measures sought to incorporate the working classes, via their own organisations, into the state, whilst also dividing them by status and occupation. That’s a particular challenge to the German SDP, many of whose traits have to be seen in relation to conditions such as these under which it competed for political support.
• The role of conservatives in welfare. As Esping-Andersen notes, conservatives are often in the lead in developing welfare provision. Recall the sessions on liberalism from Political Transformations: for much of the C19th conservatives and liberals are at loggerheads. Liberals and socialists both start out as rational children of the Enlightenment, however much they diverge thereafter. Many conservatives hanker for community and hierarchy, instead of competitive and fractious industrial class-based society. They readily espouse welfare systems that preserve hierarchy, and sustain formal roles, e.g., for the Church in Catholic Europe.
Liberal reforms in the UK 1906-14.
It is trickier for British liberals to justify welfare measures, given a tendency to espouse individualism, contract and actuarial solutions. But there are many strands to liberal thought, and by emphasising the collective nature of progress, liberal administrations justify the following in liberal terms:
• limited unemployment protection via insurance schemes;
• labour exchanges (to improve the operation of the labour market);
• a range of measures to improve the health of children including medical inspection in schools (liberals, as often, are happier to intervene in the lives of women and children on the grounds that they’re not supposed to be fully autonomous contracting individuals in the first place).
But they are constrained by key anxieties and problems, as well as spurred by problems of mobilization in WW1. Given the prevailing economic wisdom at the time, it was hard to justify public expenditure rising as revenues fell, which was precisely what would happen if one sought to sustain, e.g., unemployment benefit on the basis of need rather than individual insurance. If one tried to do so spending would go up as the business cycle dived, taking tax revenue with it. The Great Depression shows up problems with this.
Comparison with the Swedish Model
The Swedish SDP comes to power in 1932 (after being in office intermittently in 1920s) and starts to develop its distinctive social programme, mainly by consensus, and usually in alliance with the Agrarian Party, in the 1930s. Wigforss anticipates Keynesian macro-economic management. The SDP is then in power almost continuously until 1976, partly because it faces a divided opposition. There is a high degree of negotiation and agreement, with welfare and labour and wage policies agreed between key players (from late 1950s onwards). The system confers wider social rights than the British Beveridge model. But it runs into problems in 1980s, partly because of exposure to international economic conditions, especially after joining the EU, and then with opening of capital markets in 1990s. Sweden pursues austerity measures and deregulation. However, the Swedish model, often looked to by people on the left elsewhere, is startling in the promotion of equality — cabinet minister : blue collar wage, goes from 8:1 (1939) to 2:1 (1989).
Britain Post-WWII: The Welfare State
• The Beveridge Report. The blueprint for the post-war welfare reforms was the Beveridge report (Social Insurance and Allied Services). Note its wartime context. It appeared in 1942. Wartime spirit was arguably significant in generating the social solidarity on which the WS proper was founded. NB Beveridge was a liberal, and Master of University College, Oxford. But coming just after the battle of El-Alamein, his report seemed to show the light at the end of the tunnel, and point to a time when the Five Giants of want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness, should be slain.
• The influence of Keynesianism. Keynesian macroeconomic management (General Theory had appeared in 1936) made counter-cyclical welfare spending look economically plausible. That in turn meant that the parliamentary road to socialism looked viable (as Crosland noted), since democratic socialist parties now had a programme that could promise fundamental social change from within the socio-economic system. Crucially, of course, Keynesian economic management promised full employment. And post-war growth made it seem feasible for a time.
• Political ownership. The Beveridge report was for a wartime coalition government, but Labour found it easiest to identify with it — since central organisation of economic life (already a feature or war production anyway) and redistribution fitted with their need for a plausible programme.
• Ideals of the WS. T.H. Marshall in a 1949 lecture suggested that the welfare state was the result of three centuries of historical development: the C18 had brought civil rights and the rule of law; C19th, political rights, in a widening of the franchise; and C20th would bring social rights: the provision of the conditions necessary for citizens fully to exercise their liberty. See the excerpt from Marshall later in this handout.
• Universalism: promises and problems. Crucial to the realisation of such ideals was the element of universalism in Beveridge’s provisions — and in the NHS, for example (even if there were areas in which contributions on the individual insurance principle still counted — e.g. in unemployment benefit as opposed to supplementary benefit). But it was a universalism based on need (enshrined in such slogans as ‘free at the point of delivery’). It looks as if it promises a high degree of equality, and promises to remove key areas of life from market forces. But in retrospect one might be more sceptical. Universal benefits as of right tend to be (a) at quite a modest level, and (b) expensive overall. As Esping-Andersen notes, the tendency is for these to become unattractive, and only to be used by those who cannot afford better. At the same time, a system that cannot maintain the loyalty of those who contribute most of the taxes to its maintenance may have problems.
• Social rights. We might also ask how coherently ‘rights’ can be extended like this. Especially, what becomes of the formal division of (civil) society from the state on which a liberal vision of civil and political rights had (in some versions) depended? Is there a danger of society being reappropriated by the state? Hayek certainly thought so. But fears of a passivity that could undermine any kind of active citizenship have been expressed from other quarters too (e.g. Bobbio; and see the excerpt from Offe in the handout, below)
Contemporary forms of state-society relation
• Esping-Andersen makes much of decommodification as a criterion for distinguishing three main types of WS (though there are many possible typologies). The “minimal definition [is] that citizens can freely, and without potential loss of job, income or general welfare, opt out of work [i.e. paid work] when they themselves consider it necessary”. In many ways they reflect the different histories of WSs in different states, as outlined above.
a) Liberal. This tends to use means-testing, and modest universal or insurance transfers; it seeks to sustain a liberal work ethic, with the recipients of benefits in danger of being marginalized or stigmatized. There are often strict entitlement rules. There is a tendency for a social division to open between the middle classes and the beneficiaries of WS. Overall this model shows limited decommodification. Examples include USA, Canada, Australia & increasingly UK (see table 2.1);
b) Corporatist-statist model. These often develop from states that has already set off down the corporatist path. There’s often a background of social conservatism, and a concern to maintain status differentials. The state (as under Bismarck) channels welfare, possibly using other agencies. But there is limited redistribution, given the desire to maintain status differences. Church and family values are often salient. Examples include Austria, France, German and Italy.
c) Social democratic welfare regimes. Universalism and decommodification are extended to middle classes, but graduated benefits are adjusted according to expectations. Examples include the Scandinavian countries.
• Political goals and social deals. Also characterized by (i) the political goals realised by the system, and (ii) the kinds of social deals that made the system possible in the first place. As you’ll have seen, Esping-Andersen approaches these last two factors by a well-trodden sociological road: playing off structure against agency. But he argues one needs to bear both in mind at once to see at all clearly (i.e. social categories and social relations).
Problems/contradictions in contemporary state-society relations
• Stratification. WSs, as Esping-Andersen argues, are also systems of stratification. The rules for entitlement, e.g., also define distinct groups, and then need procedures to decide who belongs in which group. They thus seek knowledge about the population, and in turn seek to deal with the population in terms of the categories so generated.
• Normalization. WSs can also impose norms on a population (e.g. assumptions about family type, who’s the bread-winner, who cares for the children). This is especially challenged by feminists, as prescribing a traditional, heterosexual and family role for them. WSs are also often criticized for being indifferent to cultural or ethnic difference, and thus as being prone to (possibly unintentional) racism. (See Fiona Williams in the handout).
• Underclass, dependency and social control. The WS has also been criticized from right as well as left: as either producing a hopeless and possibly criminal underclass, or as an instrument of social control and class war. Either way, the concern is that one gets an inert, managed population, not properly participating in society.
• Reappropriation of society by the state. Pushing these concerns a bit further, a number of writers (eg. Hannah Arendt, Norberto Bobbio, Jürgen Habermas) have suggested that the development of democratic citizenship within the welfare state indicates a reappropriation of society by the state, a shift from constitutional to social state, and that a conflict exists between the protected and the participating citizen.
• Economic critique. The welfare state was predicated on maintaining full employment and steady growth. 1970s 'stagflation' (stagnation and inflation) together challenged Keynesian orthodoxy, and opened the way for neo-liberalism. Without a suitable economic policy to partner it the WS was vulnerable to some of the concerns that had earlier impinged on liberal thinking about the WS.
The Formation of Modern Societies
Political Power and the Self
Week 18
Introduction: ‘Governmentality’ and power
‘Governmentality’ is an approach to political power and governance, especially associated with Foucault. We’ll start by positioning it in in general terms in relation to ideas about power, liberalism and absolutism that you’ve encountered on Political Transformations, and then consider Foucault’s work in more detail.
• Power (i) What governmentality is not. It depends upon an understanding of power quite different from liberal interpretations, from normative or juridical political theory altogether. So it boasts no theory of obligation, for example. Equally Governmentality is distinct from political realism, which is apt to treat power as an instrument to be wielded by political agents. Power here becomes, de facto, a kind of possession, and is often deemed in this tradition to be manifest in situations in which someone has got to do what otherwise they would not choose to do. Certainly it is the power to bring something about, but it is also often implicitly or explicitly repressive. Power is manifest to the extent that the powerful repress the desires of those they rule.
• Power (ii) Governmentality and power. Power functions in a relatively impersonal fashion, on the micro-scale. It is manifest as an effect of operations, not securely the possession of some defined subject (individual or collective — e.g. a class).
“The questions which Foucault has posed of power are first, ‘how is it exercised; by what means?’ and second, ‘what are the effects of the exercise of power?’, rather than ‘what is power and where does it come from?’ Briefly, power is not conceived as a property or possession of a dominant class, state, or sovereign but as a strategy; the effects of domination associated with power arise not from an appropriation or deployment by a subject but from ‘manoeuvres, tactics, techniques, functionings’; and a relation of power does not constitute an obligation or prohibition imposed upon the ‘powerless’, rather it invests them, is transmitted by and through them. In short Foucault conceptualized power neither as an institution nor a structure but as a ‘complex strategical situation’, as a ‘multiplicity of force relations’, as simultaneously ‘intentional’ yet ‘nonsubjective’. Last, but by no means least significantly of all, Foucault argued that ‘where there is power, there is resistance’, that power depends for its existence on the presence of a ‘multiplicity of points of resistance’ and that the plurality of resistances should not be reduced to a single locus of revolt or rebellion.” (Barry Smart)
“Power is not something that is acquired, seized, or shared, something that one holds on to or allows to slip away; power is exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of nonegalitarian and mobile relations. [... ...]
Power comes from below; that is, there is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power relations, and serving as a general matrix — no such duality extending from the top down and reacting on more and more limited groups to the very depths of the social body. One must suppose rather that the manifold relationships of force that take shape and come into play in the machinery of production, in families, limited groups, and institutions, are the basis for wide-ranging effects of cleavage that run through the social body as a whole. These then form a general line of force that traverses the local oppositions and links them together; to be sure, they also bring about redistributions, realignments, homogenizations, serial arrangements, and convergences of the force relations. Major dominations are the hegemonic effects that are sustained by all these confrontations.” (Michel Foucault).
• Relation to other topics on the course. In the context of this course, one might see such an explanation contributing much to our understanding of the way the sovereign state, once it is defined within its borders, and locked in competition with other sovereign territorial states, arguably sets about cultivating infrastructural power. In other words and governance becomes more intense, with a view to mobilising the greatest possible capacity from the available resources — those resources including the population.
• Liberalism and absolutism in relation to Governmentality. It is possibly significant that this approach was pioneered in France, with its history of absolutism, and its rather shaky relation to liberalism. A standard liberal account of the emergence of modern politics, plays off absolutism against liberalism. And there is a typically British misunderstanding of absolutism as a kind of latter-day despotism, in which individual freedoms are of no account, and in which the monarch whatever s/he chose. As you will have seen on Political Transformations, this is seriously misleading. Absolutist France functioned within a framework of law. Some recent interpretations of the 18th century European state suggest that both France and Britain cultivated state powers in ways that one might see as absolutist, or which might lead one to set aside the label of absolutism entirely. See, for example, John Brewer’s The Sinews of Power. The Governmentality approach suggests that the absolutist and the liberal state are not as different as they appear over this: in broad terms one might suggest three points of connection.
1. Not about coercion, but training people to choose what they ‘should’. The absolutist state, in Foucault’s portrayal of late 17th and 18th century France, is not primarily concerned with forcing people to do things against their will; it is concerned with making people choose to do things that will fit in with the larger project of the state; though liberals are typically queasy about ‘reprogramming’ people, they are enthusiastic about education and training — and latterly about therapy as well. This is not to deny the much clearer liberal grounds for valuing individual freedom, but this does question the notion that one system espouses freedom and the other destroys it.
2. Cultivation of Individuality. Each system is concerned to cultivate the powers of the individual in particular ways. One of the key claims of the Foucauldian approach is that in some sense individuality is produced by the operations of governance (provided one recognises that governance is more than just a question of what the state does). Liberalism too is concerned with the cultivation of the individual — though of course there is a distinction here between the cultivation of the individual as an end in itself (as in liberal education), and the development of capacities to enable people to fit into a socioeconomic system. But the Foucauldian approach would suggest this distinction is more apparent than real.
3. Discipline and the production of self-interested, market-oriented agents. Liberals would readily say that theirs was a more civilised world. Yet the process of civilisation, as Norbert Elias, for example, portrays it entails the internalisation of forms of discipline which make our kinds of society possible. Elias’s account makes a useful contrast with Foucault’s. They are arguably speaking of related phenomena. This training diminishes the amount of spontaneous violence in society, for example. It is also arguably intrinsic to the operation of market relations, and to modern industry. The use of machines, for instance, demands are high level of self-control, which has become so habitual as to be almost unbreakable. Think of car driving. It is astonishing that we only kill thousands each year not tens of thousands. That is an instance of a discipline that has been internalised. But it is also an easy one to isolate as a separate and optional skill. What about the kind of reshaping of oneself and one’s sense of one’s desires that is necessary in order for one to operate within a free market, where one lives by selling one’s labour, and where one is supposed to be motivated by rational self-interest (for example in pursuing higher wages). Liberals of course assume that this rationally self-interested individual already exists. The kind of approach one can develop from Foucault might suggest that this way of understanding ourselves has to be brought about.
• Critique of liberalism. Seen in this way, this approach to understanding government certainly undermines the opposition of absolutism to liberalism, but it also implies a critique of liberal values and assumptions — especially about how well grounded, philosophically, our claims to freedom are. Cf. issues over the welfare state and liberal critiques of it as undermining individual freedom. Cf. City-state model vs. Pastoral model: People as subject of government (in the name of the people) and its object. Cf. debates about citizenship. This kind of approach also makes it possible to connect emergence of modern individualism and sense of selfhood with the emergence of social scientific systems and forms of knowledge — in other words it is one way (but only one way) of making the kind of connection be explored in thinking of demography on the one hand, and individualism in relation to family types on the other.
Foucault’s account of the emergence of modern governance
• Reason of State. Traces the emergence of reason of state, going back to treatises on the art of government and before that ‘advice to the Prince’. Argues for a wider sense of ‘reason of state’ than the commonest one today: “… in the late 16th century and early 17th century, the art of government finds its first form of crystallisation, organised around the theme of reason of state, understood not in the negative and pejorative sense we give it today (as that which infringes on the principles of law, equity, and humanity in the sole interests of the state) but in a full and positive sense: the state is governed according to rational principles that are intrinsic to it and cannot be derived solely from natural or divine laws or the principles of wisdom in prudence. The state, like nature, has its own proper form of rationality, albeit of a different sort.” (‘Governmentality’, Essential Works, III, 212-3). Note what is being set aside here: first, the idea intrinsic in humanist writings about government, that government was the organised application of moral wisdom, and accordingly that discussion of it was a branch of ethics, and it was the duty of men of wisdom to teach ethics to the powerful; and second, the Machiavellian model of the Prince concerned to exercise a rational technique for the augmentation of his own power in what is usually interpreted as a zero-sum game (i.e. the world as Machiavelli presents it). The art of government may initially be trammelled by war, instability and crisis, but an age of expansion gave it the chance to develop more fully — especially in the 18th century.
• Marginalisation of Sovereignty. Foucault presents this as setting to one side issues of sovereignty. As he sees it, the art of government, until the beginning of the 18th century “…was trapped within the inordinately vast, abstract, rigid framework of the problem and institution of sovereignty” (214).
• Economy , Population and the Family. So he traces the emergence of concepts of the economy, and of population as an economic resource, and of family, now relocated as a structural component within a population that is conceived in relation to economic effects, and increasingly understood by statistics and in terms of the theories of political economy (215-6).
Family is an interesting category for Foucault — it remains in some degree exceptional, but is displaced as an ideal model of good government (the king as the father of the nation; the nation as family), and now becomes an instrument of government: “it is from the middle of the 18th century that the family appears in this dimension of instrumentality relative to the population, with the institution of campaigns to reduce mortality, and to promote marriages, vaccinations, and so on.” (216) [See also the excerpt from Donzelot in the handout, discussing the significance of Foucault for the kind of approach he is pursuing, and linking the modern family with the history of modern governance, and pointing to Foucault’s importance in linking politics and psychology.]
• Foucault’s definition of ‘governmentality’. Foucault proposes to his students that Governmentality means three things:
1. The ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses, and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power which has as its target population, as its principal form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential technical means apparatuses of security.
2. The tendency that, over a long period and throughout the West, had steadily led toward the preeminence of what all other forms (sovereignty, discipline, and so on) of this type of power — which may be termed “government” — resulting, on the one hand, in the formation of a whole series of specific governmental apparatuses, and, on the other, in the development of a whole complex of knowledges [savoirs].
3. The process or, rather, the result of the process through which the state of justice of the Middle Ages transformed into the administrative state during the 15th and 16th centuries and gradually becomes “governmentalised.”
[quoted from ‘Governmentality’ in Essential Works: III 219-20]
This kind of understanding of government is also sometimes referred to as ‘police’ — in the French rather than the English sense. Police derives from polis, the city-state, and is cognate with policy, and La Police amounts to the conduct of government in this emerging modern fashion. [see also quotation at the end of the Donzelot excerpt].
• Power and non-state institutions. However, it is important to bear in mind that for Foucault government is not a purely political or state affair. Many significant forms of power are to be found outside of specifically state institutions.
Indeed crucial to this approach to understanding power and government, is the recognition that the distinction between the general principles of law on one hand, and administrative regulation on the other, risks becoming confused in the modern situation. State government clearly employs administrative regulation — but so do many other areas of life.
• Power / Knowledge. This is where some of the institutions Foucault had examined in works prior to the Governmentality essay, including Discipline and Punish, are significant.
• Great confinement and normalization. Institutional connections between praxis, knowledge, the management of bodies, and power is a recurrent theme in Foucault’s work. The emergence of these special enclosed spaces, and their significance in relation to the training of the population, and the imposing of norms upon the population (i.e. normalisation) Foucault sometimes speaks of as the ‘great confinement’ — something which he links to (a) the emergence of a semi judicial structure in government, i.e. administrative systems to one side of the courts; and (b) to the drive to economic efficiency. The great confinement throughout Europe had the same meaning, he says: “It constituted one of the answers the 17th century gave to an economic crisis that affected the entire Western world” (The Foucault Reader, p. 131), and “outside of the periods of crisis, confinement acquired another meaning. Its repressive function was combined with the new use. It was no longer merely a question of confining those out of work, but of giving work to those who had been confined and thus making them contribute to the prosperity of all”. One can see this rationale informing workhouse.
• Madness and Civilization. In Madness and Civilization he discusses madness and the development of the lunatic asylum: a special enclosed space for the regulation, observation, and development of knowledge about lunatics. And note how, in a characteristic move, the institution which exercises power over lunatics also develops knowledge about them, and in turn uses that knowledge to inform its own operations, and justify what it is doing.
• Discipline and Punish. In Discipline and Punish Foucault plays off premodern and modern ways of handling the criminal. He opens with the image of Damien the regicide ritualistically executed on 2 March 1757 (p. 3), and compares this with Leon Faucher’s rules for ‘the house of young prisoners in Paris’ (p. 6). Everything is regulated, but it is also behind closed doors in specific spaces and rooms. Features include: attention to hygiene (article 21 & 25); productive work in the workshops; and silence when they are in their cells.
Public punishment (whether hanging or the pillory or whatever) disappears almost everywhere during the 19th century, so that “Punishment, then, will tend to become the most hidden part of the penal process” (p. 9).
There is a change. Initially, power is conspicuous, spectacular, and exceptional — a conspicuousness at its clearest in the person of the monarch, who was ritually staged before his subjects in various ways, and evident also in the conspicuous punishment meted out to Damiens. By comparison modern power operates upon underlying, abstract principles and knowledge. Its operation is not conspicuous, discontinuous and local, but pervasive, inconspicuous, systematic and enmeshed in daily affairs. The transformation is often told in terms of increasing humanitarianism and rationality, and progress. Foucault is not so sure. Something about him finds the modern system insidious and questionable. Once upon a time the criminal was locked in a theatrical conflict with the power of the state; the criminal had put himself outside the community, and was treated as an outsider. In the new system the criminal is increasingly treated as an object in need of reform, and becomes an insider — quite literally: becomes an inmate. For one sees prison, especially prisons as reformatories or correctional facilities, emerging as the dominant form of penal institution. And even where the death penalty is retained, one often has a strange impulse on the part of the punishers to administer it in the most ‘humane’ manner possible.
• Biopolitics. If sovereign power was ultimately the power of death — as manifest in the demise of Damiens, then modern power was power exercised over life: a power that seeks to regulate, shape and cultivate the capacities of life at every turn. This is what Foucault means by biopolitics. He describes bio-power in the excerpt from volume one of The History of Sexuality in the handout. A mass of techniques, knowledges, institutions, statistics (especially those from which one could arrive at supposedly normal standards by which to measure particular individuals, and thus measure deviation from prescribed norm), bring many dimensions of life into the orbit of administration — the administration of capitalism as much as of the state.
• General features of disciplinary institutions. Thus this power is no longer merely a question of punishing those who have committed crimes against the law: it is a generalised technique capable of application in any system of training and production. Hence Foucault’s discussion in the chapter on ‘Docile bodies’ of military training, of schools and of factories.
Foucault identifies four key elements to this new type of training and organisation:
a) segregation in space and functional organisation of space;
b) breaking down of activities into component parts and organisation of these into a series;
c) series linked to a programme;
d) economic organisation of these elements into a whole.
This produces new techniques of power organised to enhance the productivity of the population by focusing on its individual members and the development of their capacities.
• Individual cases and ‘scientific’ knowledge. Differentiating practices are grounded in rational criteria, and provide a calculus of differences, which locate individuals in relation to differences from norms (age, sex etc). These differentiating practices and the calculus of differences that guides them are organised around two dimensions of activity – conduct and performance. Thus people are treated as individual cases, but they are also linked in larger systems. The systems are often contrived so that specific individual differences can easily be read off from them. They tend to generate data and records that fit in with this process, e.g. exams, with results presented in statistical tables, and averages, and distribution charts; or individual records on each student (as happened at Westpoint in the C19th).
• The Panopticon (i) Theory. The Panopticon is a crucial example for Foucault: a scheme devised by Jeremy Bentham for the reform of people in accordance with utilitarian precepts. It is a building, and it exposes its inmates to inspection. As the picture in the handout shows, it consists of cells organised around a central observation tower. This is so contrived that the inspector can see every inmate without being seen. It is crucial that every inmate believe at every moment that she or he might be under observation. Each inmate is alone in their cell isolated from the influence of others. Bentham’s is a materialist psychology, and he sees people as being capable of being remoulded by systematic training, including rewards and punishments. He was emphatic that the Panopticon was for all kinds of establishment and people, not just law breakers. The panoptic principle was: “…APPLICABLE TO ANY SORT OF ESTABLISHMENT, IN WHICH PERSONS OF ANY DESCRIPTION ARE TO BE KEPT UNDER INSPECTION; AND IN PARTICULAR TO PENITENTIARY-HOUSES, PRISONS, HOUSES OF INDUSTRY, WORK-HOUSES, POOR-HOUSES, MANUFACTORIES, MAD-HOUSES, LAZARETTOS, HOSPITALS, AND SCHOOLS” (Panopticon Writings, 29). And the prisons were to turn a profit, and their governors to be a species of entrepreneur. For individuals are produced by this machine to produce, and turn a profit. If one were to select one kind of establishment to stand for the others, it would have to be, not the prison, but the factory (Bentham, Panopticaon Writings, letters ix-xiii, xv, xviii; Bauman, Freedom).
• The Panopticon (ii) Practice. The panoptic principle was incorporated into prisons, though quite not as Bentham wished, since he never got the contract for building his Panopticon. See the picture of Stateville penitentiary in the handout. Solitary confinement proved a serious problem: those subjected to it as a matter of routine often went mad or suicidal.
• The Panopticon (iii) Freedom. It raised questions about freedom and autonomy, which Bentham, in an uncharacteristically ironic passage whose real force is debatable, dismissed. To those who might wonder “whether the result of this high-wrought contrivance might not be constructing a set of machines under the similitude of men”, Bentham has a simple answer: call them machines if you like, “so they were but happy ones, I should not care”.
Examples: New Lanark and since
• New Lanark. One could see some of these principles in operation in the early 19th century — for example at New Lanark, the model factory community run by Robert Owen. He used a “silent monitor” so the factory manager could appraise everyone’s performance at a glance, kept records on everyone, and treated what might have seemed to be moral problems as administrative ones, and in 1816 added the Institute for the Formation of Character, a School. It was a fundamental principle of his that “the character of man is, without a single exception, always formed for him”, and benign as he was he referred to as workers as the “living machinery” of the factories.
• Governmentality today. Many claim to see these techniques in operation today, as we’ll hear in the presentation, and as the final excerpt in the handout suggests. Nor are these necessarily exercised by one group of people over another. Take this as far as it will go, Foucault claims, and this is the way in which we are encouraged to produce our sense of ourselves. The modern individual is not, as liberalism sometimes maintains, distinct from government, but produced by its operation. The very terms in which we conceive and classify ourselves and our desires owe much to these forms of knowledge, normalisation and administration — especially Foucault would argue our classification and self-identification as sexual subjects. More of this in the presentation based on Rose’s book. The whole idea of the homosexual is enmeshed in medical and psychiatric discourse, as well as being a term used to identify oneself by many. Questions therefore of identity and of resistance (of which more next week) connect with Governmentality.
The Formation of Modern Societies
Post-industrial society
Week 20
Introduction
For some time there’s been speculation that one might see the most ‘advanced’ economies developing into a ‘post-industrial’ phase. Various things have fuelled this speculation, including the rise of China and possibly India as industrial producers. But there’s a special concern with the socio-economic impact of new technologies that seem to promise broad social, political and cultural changes. Foremost among these are communications and computing technologies, which are sometimes seen as together paving the way to the ‘networked society’. There is much discussion of the possibility of a paradigmatically new era, realised by an ‘information revolution’ to rank with the agricultural and industrial revolutions, and possibly taking us into a post-industrial era. In this session we are going to assess some of these ideas, by putting them in the contexts of the theories and historical changes we’ve already encountered on this course.
Technology and social change
• New technologies in historical context. The idea that new technologies might be the basis of new forms of life has been around for some time. Things seldom go quite as planned. E.g. Robert Owen (whom we mentioned a couple of weeks ago) progressed from running his model factory and community at New Lanark to more generally Utopian schemes in society at large, on the basis of which he’s come to be known as one of the fathers of socialism. These later schemes incorporate Owen’s earlier organisational techniques on a larger, more idealistic scale, but were short-lived. But it’s the C20th industrialized world, especially the US, that’s most prone to get enthused over technologies as such pointing the way to a transformed future. E.g. the telephone (in the early days of the telephone there was much talk of telephone exchange as an image of the human mind); or the early hopes attached to nuclear power that it would be so cheap as not to be worth charging for. These technologies are used as fuel for social thinking (or pipedreams). E.g. the technocracy and social engineering movement of early C20th looked to apply engineering rationality to the solution of social problems that were often seen as springing from irrational class conflict; or the automation debate, especially post-WWII (on which see Wiener on cybernetics — and many SF texts); and, especially since 1970s, accounts of various kinds of post-industrial socio-economic (and political?) order.
• Paradigmatic social change: the example of the industrial revolution. It is important to note the basis for this: manifestly for us processes in which new technologies loom large have and do change forms of life. That’s one lesson of the Industrial Revolution. If one goes from 1750 to 1850 one sees pronounced changes in economy, society and politics in Britain (coming a little later to other countries): mechanization of industry; shift away from muscle power; growing scale of enterprises; factory discipline and regulation; disruption of communities; redrawing of public versus private spheres, with family life now definitely in the private sphere; urbanization; emergence of class-based politics; end of the anciens regimes, etc. Agriculture of course persists, but becomes comparatively less significant. The scale and speed of the transformation leads to its being widely spoken of as a revolution, by analogy with political revolution (such as the French) — though one should note that this is an interpretation of these changes, and not, no matter how routinely it’s used, simply a description (though Marxist theories of history link political and economic revolutions closely). One of the key questions to pose of theories of post-industrial society is whether they convincingly make a case for a similarly broad and deep socio-economic transformation, such as would justify one in saying that the industrial era had been left behind.
• Social governance and steering social change. As we saw, in the wake of the industrial revolution, the state arguably becomes more engaged in social governance — ironically at the very moment at which Liberalism wants to insist that in some ways society is distinct from the state (maybe one only insists on something like this when it’s felt to be endangered). It is not necessarily that the arbitrary power of the state is greater, but its infrastructural power grows, and its capacity to measure, prescribe, educate and discipline its population grows too. To a greater or lesser degree these measures may be thought of as seeking to control the direction of social transformation — and one can see marked differences still between different kinds of industrial capitalism over how far one can direct its development, especially in the interests of an entire society. Cf. differences between US and European capitalism. These pose awkward questions: at one extreme the state threatens to exercise kinds of control that might abrogate individual liberty; at the other it loses control over social change entirely, and one may head off into a dystopia of conflicting classes. These dilemmas, or versions of them, arguably also inform debate about post-industrial society and the information revolution.
• Technology and historical change. Proponents of the idea of an information revolution see it as a wide-ranging package of complexly linked changes. Part of what’s being claimed in discussions of the information revolution is that changes (in IT especially) may be caught up in changes as wide-ranging as those of the industrial revolution. Some want to claim that technology is the motor of these changes: i.e. technological determinism, which we’ve looked at before (Renaissance technologies; industrial revolution). Some want to prescribe a future for humanity: often Utopian (though occasionally dystopian to the point of despair). One needs to distinguish between different kinds of claims and intervention in this debate. No work is just neutrally descriptive: all works represent interpretation in some degree, and, however tacitly, express some hope or fear for the future.
Daniel Bell on Post-industrial society
To get some perspective on this, we’ll look at the work of Daniel Bell: The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973; rev. edn. 1999 with a new foreword). There is some continuity between this and current concerns over the information revolution, and Bell has revised and extended his position to address them. Proponents of the information revolution share with Bell a vision of an industrial mode of production and social order being overtaken by a mode based less on the machine-production of goods, than on information.
• Transformations. The principal changes Bell considers are:
o a shift from an emphasis on the production of material goods to the production of knowledge and the delivery of services;
o a corresponding shift from blue collar to white collar work (though note Wiener on automation of clerical work);
o the emergence of theoretical knowledge as the ‘axial principle’ of post-industrial society (see the table from Bell, below);
o the centrality of such knowledge in policy-making and innovation, possibly shifting politics towards technocratic problem-solving; though Bell might challenge the notion that he’s simply advocating technocracy, he sees technical skill as becoming more significant as a basis for power, and argues that experts will need to be taken more into account in the political process; a conflictual politics of class-based parties and interest groups will be superseded; and
o the consequent emergence of a paradigmatically new social order.
So, using statistics relating the USA based on Mark Porat’s 1977 calculations, 46% of GNP and 50% of salaries and wages derive from the primary and secondary information sector. But how big does this figure have to be before we’re in a different kind of economy? There’s always been a primary and secondary information sector (e.g. writing novels; producing log. tables, and signalling on the railways; or marketing and advertising). Between 1970 and 1997 numbers of US workers in the service sector rises from 26% to 36%.
• Bell’s interpretation. For Bell, writing just before the Oil Crisis of 1973, these changes look hopeful, and pave the way to: greater control over social processes; a tendency for people to work more with each other (later the social/human quality of machine mediated interaction will become important); and a more human society. He includes social services in the burgeoning world of information- and knowledge-based services. But even at the time others (such as Ivan Illich) were wary of this emphasis on the therapeutic (cf. our discussion of ‘governmentality’), or of other aspects of Bell’s case (see, e.g., Kumar on Touraine, below).
• Automation and human value. Bell supposes that work will shift towards functions inherently difficult to automate. Cf. earlier debates about automation going back into C19th with Marx, Ure, Carlyle et al.; and Wiener and Kennedy on the displacement of workers as mechanization spreads — and latterly (as globalisation has become a buzzword) that displacement is often said to have taken the form of the export of industrial jobs to low-wage economies. Given the opposition of industrial to information revolutions, one might want to ask how distinct mechanization and automation are. By contrast Bell looks to teaching and social work, e.g., as necessarily interpersonal and impossible to automate. These are typical types of work in a caring and possibly more communal society (like many in this field Bell had been a Marxist).
• The direction of social change. Bell argues for qualitative social changes resulting, e.g., from the increased salience of ‘theoretical knowledge’. This is disembedded, codified and abstract (and that may sound suspiciously like Weberian rationalization, which is not usually seen as notably humane in its outcomes). He posits, as part of his general case about our getting control over socio-economic change, a tendency for innovation increasingly to proceed upon known, established theoretical principles, rather than trial and error. Some of these kinds of hope had been expressed in the social-engineering / technocracy movement of the early C20th. But they’d been followed by concerns over excessive social governance and control had emerged again in US political sociology in the 1950s in discussions of the ‘military-industrial complex’. One might see here a tendency to oscillate between hoping we can now get control over our socio-economic evolution, and fearing that some very powerful interests have already consolidated that control.
Bell in 1973 expresses optimism: social structure will change; white collar planning will make possible a self-conscious and self-directing society. There are underlying philosophical questions here regarding what counts as control. It’s a preoccupation of cybernetics, and runs through the history of the interaction of market-societies with sovereign states. We might want to ask whether the way technologies play out socially is really amenable to Bell’s model of the benign and progressive accumulation of scientific-technical knowledge. For some time there has been widespread concern that technological change is spiralling out of control with unpleasant social and environmental effects (see e.g. Collingridge, The Social Control of Technology). This is something for which the Industrial Revolution supplies precedents. From a (neo-)liberal p.o.v. we might also want to ask what kind of political control of society would be necessary to render it predictable and controllable. Here there are debates about the extent of feasible and proper political control and direction of society that go back through Hayek and Popper into the C19th, and thence to Adam Smith. In C20th debate they are informed by a wish to defend individual freedom, to leave future historical development open, and by the danger of totalitarianism.
Other perspectives on recent socio-economic transformations
• Information, communication and empowerment. Networks of information and communication are sometimes seen as corresponding to transport connexions in industrial revolution (e.g. railways — cf. Roszak in the handout on technophilia for rail): one freed the movement of things, the other frees the movement of ideas and knowledge. On an optimistic view these opportunities for communication are seen as empowering, for example by opening economic opportunities (though we might ask ourselves about access and cost). In some versions of the case for the information revolution and post-industrial society, such networks are seen as tending to collapse hierarchies by making for more ‘horizontal’ decision making (cf. the pro and con excerpts in the handout). But then the same had been said of market forces, because the consumer allegedly decides. We might wonder whether consumer-freedom doesn’t offer a world in which we’re all equal, but some are more equal than others, and whether this doesn’t apply here too.
• Space / time compression. See David Harvey on postmodernity. Changes in production, especially in the speed with which production can react to information coming from the market, makes for a transformation of space and time. Economic processes become increasingly dependent on data and ability to process it and respond quickly (e.g. Bennetton and short-run changes in production, using computerized feedback from stores and computerized factories to produce different patterns (taking us back to the origins of the computer in Jacquard looms?). Cf. excitement over the global trading of shares round the clock in ‘real time’ [but cf. Standage on the ‘Victorian internet’: the telegraph].
• Nature of work. Bell sees work becoming more satisfying. The changes he discusses can be seen as leading to other outcomes. E.g. call centres: they are highly technologized, but hardly high tech., high value, skilled work. A recurrent concern here (going all the way back to the musket versus the long bow) is the use of new technologies to deskill and outmanoeuvre the work force. There is a general tension here between:
a) work becoming more appealing, possibly with the formally separate working space of industrial production (typically the factory), blurring with home (cf. Toffler’s electronic cottage); and
b) deskilling and redundancy wrought by automation.
Other perspectives on the transformation of work include the following.
o Taylorism, Fordism and Post-Fordism. These terms are often used by sociologists to indicate paradigms in the organisation of work. Of particular relevance to us is the possibility of there having been a paradigmatic shift from Taylorism and Fordism to Post-Fordism.
Before WW1 Frederick Taylor pioneered time and motion studies: tasks were broken into components, timed and optimized. This becomes a cornerstone of scientific management, and increasing productivity. Fordism (named after Henry Ford) is often seen as using Taylorist approach to organising the mass output of consumer-goods in a factory production line, allied with management and promotion of consumerism (e.g. through Ford paying his workers enough so they can buy the cars they produce). So one has here a highly managed kind of consumer freedom, with what, especially in retrospect for occupants of historically blue-collar towns in the US, can look like a very appealing degree of security. One might see this kind of management of production as blurring into the post-war managed economies, especially of European and Asian capitalism, again to produce a high degree of security and consumption (cf. our discussion of the welfare state). Post-Fordism possibly needs to be seen in tandem with 1980s neo-liberalism, and heralds (if the foregoing big hypotheses hold) various changes: a shift away from corporatism and managed interest groups; a loss of union power; a degradation of welfare provision; lower job security; greater worker flexibility and multi-skilling.
This poses the question of whether it’s industrialism per se that we’re shifting from (if we’re shifting from anything) or just a particular, highly managed, consolidated version of it. Has the disciplining of the worker to maximum production and profit, which was a feature of Taylorism, really changed? Frank Webster sees post-Fordism as a kind of extension of Taylorism. If nothing else, Webster’s position is symptomatic of political ambiguity and interpretative difficulty here.
o Women and work. Sadie Plant in Zeroes and Ones (an odd, wonderfully written, visionary text) sees this kind of flexible, technological work as something women are better prepared for than men. Several features of it have long been features of women’s work: work in the home; a degree of insecurity and the lack of the self-defining job; flexibility. Others emphasise the way new technologies impinge on areas of work, ‘feminizing’ them to women’s disadvantage. E.g. clerical work becomes ‘feminized’ the more automated and humdrum it gets. Women’s work has historically been associated with lower incomes, poorer conditions, especially of job security, and higher levels of employer-control since that from the Industrial Revolution onwards they are supposed to be more biddable than men.
• Media / Culture. Emergence of new media may change the way we relate to and perceive reality, and possibly break down the sense there might once have been of there being a consolidated ‘public’. Multiplication of choice and channels, and ‘narrow-casting’ in addition to ‘broadcasting’ makes possible specialized media markets. Near instantaneous news transmission and internet news services may pave the way to less official control of the news (cf. the Belgrade radio station which was able to outfox regulation by switching to the net when its signal was jammed by the Milosevic regime).
o Mark Poster (The Mode of Information, 1990). Burgeoning information and IT makes complicates one’s sense of self and of reality, in that reality, as distinct from simulacra and signs, becomes hard to distinguish (cf. both Gulf Wars and the Kosovo campaign: which are sometimes seen as having been reported, at least in part, virtually as war-games on computers and in arcades). Cf. Baudrillard and the idea of ‘hyper-reality’: images become more ‘real’ than the real. But possibly this is not as new as it seems. E.g the frequently restaged photograph by Joe Rosenthal of marines erecting the US flag on Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima, in WW2, which was the basis of the 1954 Marine Corps Memorial at Arlington, and also part of John Wayne movie (Sands of Iwo Jima), which even ‘originally’ was staged. These men, three of whom died in the battle, became war ‘celebrities’ heroes, essentially for having their photograph taken — something that deeply troubled at least one of the survivors. What of Nelson’s heroism and public image? Or the way Napoleon became a figure in imagination? In what ultimately more authentic way did we ever know public events?
• Politics and Democracy
o Surveillance and privacy: There are tussles between state regulation and ‘hackers’ (et al.) trying to outwit the state — e.g over the monitoring of e-mail traffic and encryption/privacy programmes. More generally, there are tensions here between security and freedom, exacerbated since ‘9/11’ (which are not reconciled by political rhetoric that reclassifies security from attack as the most important freedom). There are questions here not just of control, but also of accuracy and confidentiality of records. See Burnham on this. There is a tendency for incorrect data to spread.
o Political activity. Possibly new media (including mobile ‘phones) make possible the rapid mobilization of protest groups (e.g. petrol protests; anti-capitalist demonstrations). Apart from rapid electronic voting machines (of kinds increasingly used in the US) new technologies may make possible direct democracy. There’s some hope expressed about the possibility of better informed, more engaged citizens. But information is not the same as knowledge.
o Virtual community? The political hopes pinned to IT pose the question of whether one can constitute civil or political space in cyberspace. Is the medium in itself capable of supporting the kinds of interaction and dabate that, e.g., Habermas had seen as producing a ‘public sphere’ of discourse and opinion partially distinct from the state, but which the state would need to respect.
General questions about post-industrialism and the information revolution
• A revolution? What’s changed? Can one see (as Beniger argues, from one point of view, and as some on the left argue from another) marked continuities? i.e. a continuation of capitalist modernity by other means.
• Technology. How far is technology an independently powerful cause of social / economic / political / cultural change? This is something we’ve discussed before in connexion with technological determinism. Various arguments figure here: some like to see technology as a powerful agent of change in itself because of the possibility of thereby transforming existing social relations and power structures (Marx has a hint of this); others castigate the impulse to see technology in such terms as obscuring the extent to which it’s an expression of interests, policies, political and other power, and thus distracting us from the social and political criticism which we ought to pursue to get a grip on our situation.
................
................
In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.
To fulfill the demand for quickly locating and searching documents.
It is intelligent file search solution for home and business.