Politics, Social Theory, Utopia and the World-System: Arguments in Political Sociology

244 Pages·2012·1.14 MB·English

by  Chamsy el-Ojeili (auth.)

Politics, Social Theory, Utopia and the World-System
Also by Chamsy el-Ojeili
FROM LEFT-COMMUNISM TO POST-MODERNISM: Reconsidering
Emancipatory Discourse
CRITICAL THEORIES OF GLOBALIZATION (with Patrick Hayden)
CONFRONTING GLOBALIZATION (co-edited with Patrick Hayden)
GLOBALIZATION ANDUTOPIA: Critical Essays (co-edited with Patrick Hayden)
Politics, Social Theory,
Utopia and the
World-System
Arguments in Political Sociology
Chamsy el-Ojeili
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Palgrave
macmillan
© Chamsy el-Ojeili 2012
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 978-0-230-24610-2
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted
save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence
permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,
Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.
Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The author has asserted his right to be identified
as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2012 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries
ISBN 978-1-349-31925-1 ISBN 978-0-230-36721-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230367210
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12
For Jane, Mo, and Annie.
Contents
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 On Sociology 5
Chapter 2 Traditions and Concepts 25
Chapter 3 Transformations 43
Chapter 4 Ideologies and Utopias 64
Chapter 5 Masses 81
Chapter 6 Identities 100
Chapter 7 Movements 120
Chapter 8 Violence 138
Chapter 9 Globalization 157
Chapter 10 Equality 173
Concluding Reflections 192
Notes 195
Bibliography 201
Index 230
vii
Introduction
In the spirit of C. Wright Mills’s (1977, p. 10) famous suggestion that
the promise of sociology lay in its effort to grasp “the interplay of man
[sic] and society, of biography and history, of self and the world”,
I want to begin with the very inconsequential fact of my birth in Italy
in 1969. 1969 was the year of Italy’s “hot Autumn”, one moment in
the wave of contestation of the ’60s. My parents’ involvement in the
radical ’60s, and, more closely, their attachments to the politics of
what Arrighi et al. (1989) have called the “antisystemic movements”
– social democracy, communism, national liberation (in my parents’
case, first and foremost, the politics of Arab socialism and nationalism)
– profoundly shaped my intellectual formation.
Much more widely and importantly, the “irreverence” of the ’60s
(Therborn, 2009), the institutional and imaginative impact of this
contestation, is still with us and remains hotly contested – with various
forms of nostalgia, regret, and condemnation attached to that key marker
“1968”, in particular (Ross, 2002). What’s happening in the ’60s? In terms
of academic life, for a start, the number of, and enrolments in, univer-
sities in the West are growing, and sociology is expanding substantially
in this period. In the realm of social and political thought, you’re clearly
seeing a radicalization – a turn away from consensus models of social
order and sociology as technical problem-solving, in favour of conflict
and Marxist approaches, the interrogations of second wave feminism,
and so on. These intellectual trends are signals of what has been hap-
pening in the world outside the university: the post-war consolidation
in the West of the “social democratic consensus” – the welfare state, goals
of equalization of citizens, national progress and unity; the spread of
regimes of “really existing socialism” to embrace about a third of the
world’s people; decolonization – where assertive movements in the Third
1
2 Politics, Social Theory, Utopia and the World-System
World shook off colonial rule, where, as Jameson (2009) puts it, the
natives became human beings. But the ’60s is more than this, too,
because the success of these anti-systemic forces gets called into ques-
tion by these contestations, a questioning captured by the frequent
description of the ’60s as “counter-cultural”.
This profound questioning and the often bold utopian hopes of the
’60s, though, seem pretty quickly to get scattered, losing energy and
coherence – Jameson (2009) suggests that the ’60s end in the period
1972–1974. And my intellectual formation has been at least equally
conditioned by a very different world to that of ’60s radicalism – the
widespread counter-movement, even counter-revolution, that really
sets in from the late 1970s/early 1980s: here, the social democratic con-
sensus gives way to a new neo-liberal consensus, widely connected in
much commentary to rising privatization and consumerism, the demise
of class and the politics of equality, even the “death of the social” (Rose,
1996); the world of “really existing socialism” largely collapses between
1989–1991, encouraging the idea that history had perhaps come to an
end; and the debt crisis, structural adjustment, and the sclerosis of
national liberation movements sets in, in the poorer parts of the globe
(Wallerstein, 1991a, 2005a),1with the heroic ’60s figure of the colonial
militant seemingly giving way to a new figure – the pitiable, suffering
Third World victim in need of humanitarian assistance from the West
(Ross, 2002).
In the world of academia, by the time I entered the university system,
people were increasingly shifting away from Marxism, away from attach-
ments to science and progress, from the older modalities of critique,
representation, and political action, towards more post-modern stuff like
contingency, culture, identity, ambivalence, difference, and so forth.
And, very soon, the university was being beset by restructuring pressures,
with more and more calls for “accountability”, “fiscal responsibility”, and
“real world performance” (Miyoshi, 2005). For some commentators, here,
that opening, that “mutation” of the ’60s, where the universities were
no longer dominated by “prince and bishop”, or money and power, or
simply tools of national order and development – all of this was being
worn away, and a dystopian scenario loomed, where universities would
be transformed from a “learning place into a corporate system” (Miyoshi,
2005, pp. 33, 35). In this vein, major questions have been raised in grow-
ing volume about the value and future (if any) of social scientific reflection
(Wagner, 2001a; Fuller, 2006).
This world and these worries are still with us, perhaps even more
pressingly in some respects, but I think that by the close of the 1990s, a
Introduction 3
further shift occurs, a shift that we’re still in the midst of – where neo-
liberalism was faced by all sorts of “reality problems” (Alexander,
1995), where contestation returned on a major scale (and with it, a
host of attacks on the language of “no alternatives”), where something
perhaps more positive – against those various declarations of “ends”
attached to the post-modern moment – appeared to be taking hold of
the human sciences (McLennan, 2000, 2006). This all seems to me very
much in play, uncertain, and just damn interesting, and, in the pages
ahead, I’m wanting to wrestle with some of this. I’ve used the label
“political sociology” as a way of capturing the questions that interest
me, perhaps because the borders of this sub-field are extremely fuzzy
(doing little more than implying a rubbing together between sociology
and political science, and their objects, “the social” and “the political”),2
and partly because, in any case, all of the best sociology is already
political sociology.
The following chapters are dedicated to exploring transformations in
what Karl Mannheim called the “structures of knowledge” – the regu-
larities or patterns of thought – and those transformations in social
and political life that underpin the former. What is pivotal to me, here,
are those big questions raised by Ernst Bloch (1986, p. 3) at the begin-
ning of his sprawling, magisterial The Principle of Hope: “Who are we?
Where do we come from? Where are we going? What are we waiting
for? What awaits us?” These are questions, crudely, about interpreting
the past, mapping the present, and future prospects – about history,
the social, theory, and utopia. Equally pivotal to the chapters ahead, as
will soon be clear, are my own preferences and prejudices – theoretical,
ideological, utopian. That is, I continue to think out of (but not just
out of) the Marxian tradition, and I remain attached to socialism. On
this score, I’m keenly aware, on the one hand, that as Goran Therborn
(2009) puts it, “the Marxist triangle” – made up of a historical social
science, a philosophy of contradictions, and a socialist/working class
politics – has been broken. That is, this language is, in a certain way
“saturated” (Badiou, 2006). On the other hand, and paradoxically,
I think Perry Anderson (1983) is still right in his assessment that the
Marxian tradition is unmatched in “scope” and “moral force”, that
its wealth of resources continues to be illuminating and, in my view,
its categories of analysis inescapable if we are to understand our world,
just as we still can’t avoid bumping into socialism when we try to think
about better futures.
My sense of the need both to look back and re-commit to certain
concepts, problems, and political ideas, andto face and attempt to think