Place and Politics

The Geographical Mediation of State and Society

John A. Agnew

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317630609
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

The first part of the book is concerned with developing the place perspective. Three dimensions of place are put forward: locale and sense of place describe the objective and subjective dimensions of local social arrangements within which political behaviour is realized; location refers to the impact of the 'macro-order', to the fact that a single place is one among many and that the social life of a place is embedded in theworkings of the state and the world economy.

The second part of the book provides detailed examinations of American and Scottish politics, using the place perspective. Contrary to the view that place or locality is important only in 'traditional societies', this book argues that place is of continuing significance in even the most 'advanced' societies.

1    Introduction

There is both an academic and a popular demand for simple answers to large problems. Intellectuals have acquired much of their influence from their ability to supply formulae that do just that. They have, so to speak, provided a “glue” that makes impressions of the world cohere. Their explanations not only enable people to make sense of the world around them but also determine in large part what they see around them. The field of political sociology – generally, the study of the social bases and background to political activities – has produced a number of key formulae that have become institutionalized over the past forty years. These share common assumptions, even if they also differ in various ways (see Ch. 2). A critical one is a unitary vision of society defined by the boundaries of the state. Explanations of political activities are sought in categories and concepts that relate all social cleavages to the level of the state. Febvre’s dictum “L’État n’est jamais donné, il est toujours forgé” (Febvre 1922) has been forgotten.

This book is an attempt to move beyond political sociology as defined by “the cult of the state” and focus on the geographical rootedness of political life. The central premise is that territorial states are made out of places. This is not to argue that state institutions are not implicated in political life. Far from it, they have become preeminent. Rather, it is to argue that the social bases of response and resistance to these institutions are best viewed in terms of the histories of places rather than in terms of universal or national structures (such as class-as-a-category) or individual agency (the isolated individual’s response to a national political stimulus).

The persistence of place-specific and regional voting patterns provides some support for the importance of place as a correlate of political activities. Of course, whether place is of explanatory significance remains at issue. The modernization theories that have dominated American social science since World War II (Tipps 1973) have had no role for place. Amongst popular genres of social science only the Annales school of social history and the idiographic, and largely atheoretical, tradition in historical geography have maintained a stress on place in explaining social and political behaviour. Sometimes this has reflected a backwards-looking or antiquarian orientation. Classical French social geography and the political geography of Siegfried (1913) both combined a focus on regional patterns with a lack of interest in regional change or social causation. Historical geography has largely continued in this vein. Focusing on places in the past or the “yoke of the past” in the present, they have tended to ignore questions of social and political dynamics. Only recently have exceptions to this rule appeared (e.g., Gregory 1982). But the Annales school, if “school” is still an appropriate term (Aymard 1972), has been at the center of attempts to map and explain the complex reality of human life by means of local and regional studies (Baker 1984). Its hallmark has been a priority to causal validity in places rather than generalization across places. There has also been an imperative to push local history through to the present; to understand the ways in which contemporary local mentalités, practices, and social structures have emerged out of earlier ones (Goubert 1971, Leuilliot 1974, Thuillier 1974). This emphasis provides an important inspiration to the perspective of this book.

Often in social science, places are merely the testing grounds for concepts or hypotheses with presumed general or universal significance. Such an approach denies the distinctive social and historical characteristics of places. They are case studies or instances of general “laws” or “tendencies.” An interesting example of this use of places would be Foster’s Class struggle in the Industrial Revolution (1975). In his study the places selected are mere instances of a general process. By way of contrast J. Smith’s (1984) “Labour tradition in Glasgow and Liverpool,” a paper referred to in Chapter 8, treats the places investigated as historically evolving and distinctive milieux rather than case studies of some overarching and transcendental historical dynamic.

Though not denying that human behaviour is subject to statistical description, it is simply inadequate to stop at that point if the objective is explanation (Szymanski & Agnew 1981). Any attempt at explanation in social science is faced with the need to identify the causes of human behavior. A major problem has been how to do this while allowing for the manifest reality of human agency. This in turn has directed attention to places as the social contexts for human behavior – the settings in which activity is caused and takes on meaning and purpose (Pred 1984). Thus, places, rather than being particular instances of general laws, are made out of human practices.

Even in a world dominated by a global division of labor, place maintains its significance. As N. Smith (1984) points out, uneven geographical development is a marked and continuing feature of the modern world. This reflects a perennial search by businesses for higher rates of return on capital invested and consequent disinvestment elsewhere on the part of global- and national-oriented business enterprises. The modern world-economy is differentiating in its effects more than equalizing. But place also retains importance because of the differential reaction of people in different settings to uneven development (C. Smith 1984). To insist on the continuing importance of place, therefore, is not to deny that processes beyond the locality have become important determinants of what happens in places. But it is still in places that lives are lived, economic and symbolic interests are defined, information from local and extra-local sources is interpreted and takes on meaning, and political discussions are carried on. Even in a world in which many sources of information and social cues are extra-local, especially as transmitted by the electronic media, information and social cues are meaningful only when activated in everyday routine social interaction. For most people, as later chapters should make clear, this is still defined by the locality. Home, work, church, school, and the like still form nodes around which everyday life circulates (Pred 1984).

In modernization theories, place is viewed as significant only in traditional or parochial societies and not in “modern” ones. These are “non-place realms” (Webber 1964) in which only “national” societies, as defined by modern armies and statesmen, are important and real. An extreme is reached in those accounts that see identity entirely in terms of class or other categorical abstractions divorced from the practices of everyday life. Two major political sociologists, Lipset and Rokkan (1967:18–19), for example, contend that:

The National Revolution forced ever-widening circles of the territorial population to choose sides in conflicts over values and cultural identities. The Industrial Revolution also triggered a variety of cultural counter-movements, but in the longer run tended to cut across the value communities within the nation and to force the enfranchised citizenry to choose sides in terms of their economic interest, their shares in the increased wealth generated through the spread of new technologies and the widening markets.

“Nationalization” and the declining significance of place or locality are likewise major themes in the political science and sociological literatures on “nation building” and the effects of national mass media on political behavior (e.g., Deutsch 1953, Geertz 1963).

At the outset, it is important to stress that the “nationalization thesis” is not just an intellectual position. It is also a political one. Therefore in criticizing the nationalization thesis one inevitably takes an antithetical political position. Its view of social change as the dissolution of customary, small-scale social life and the concomitant growth of national “citizenship” is familiar to us all from our school days. The implication is that the state, engaged, as Tilly (1979:19) puts it, in “a mission civilisatrice,” broke down the barriers of “local barbarism.” Light overcame darkness. But to argue to the contrary is not just to argue for place, so to speak, it is also to argue against this benign view of the state. Rather than a shift from autarky to control, state-building involved a shift in control over local interests from local populations and elites to national capital and the national state. However, this shift has been incomplete. Even in so-called totalitarian states such as Nazi Germany, state control was far from total, even if much greater than in most liberal democratic states (Kershaw 1983). In conditions of economic and political crisis, resistance, in the form of sectionalism, place-based mass abstention from established political routines, or political violence directed at the state, can threaten the continued existence of the state itself or the form that it presently takes.

A recent explicit effort to demote the importance of place argues that the electronic media have effectively separated “social place” from “physical place” (Meyrowitz 1985). Information saturation across physical places has created an increasingly undifferentiated social terrain. But even Meyrowitz acknowledges the limits of his argument. His last example, concerning airport lounges and the constraints they impose on social interaction, is of a physical place. Moreover, he provides a number of cases where the media are a “double-edged sword” as far as physical places are concerned. For example, many media-favored social groupings (Meyrowitz mentions “smokers” and “nonsmokers”) are based on one superficial attribute of people rather than complex and long-term shared experiences. The banality of such designations is apparent to all but the most incredulous. More importantly, in finding out more about other places and their inhabitants, one’s differences with them may be enhanced rather than diminished. At one scale, nationalism, and at another scale, parochialism, feed off the stereotypes in which the electronic media tend to trade. They reinforce rather than undermine the identity between, to use Meyrowitz’s terminology, “social places” and “physical places.”

To the extent that geographical variation in social organization and political behavior has been taken seriously in recent social science and political sociology, it has taken the form of either a focus on the spatial distribution of individuals exhibiting different traits and fitting into predefined national census categories or an emphasis on evidence for sectionalist or separatist political tendencies in specific regions. In the first case, geographical differences in levels of support for political parties or political participation in general are viewed as “composition effects.” Geography is epiphenomenal, it is merely the aggregate product of “individual” attributes that just happen to covary with location. For example, more poor people live at some locations, more affluent people live elsewhere. The second views territorial or sectional interests as capable of overriding national cleavages in certain circumstances to produce a geographically differentiated pattern of political expression. In particular, “core–periphery” cleavages in economic performance and political power can create conditions to which peripheral sectionalism (and core sectionalism?) is a necessary response. This has been the preferred alternative in attempts to account for the recent growth of separatist movements in Western Europe and Canada and other evidence against the nationalization thesis (e.g., Hechter 1975, Nairn 1977, Gottman 1980, Archer & Taylor 1981, Bensel 1984). In both cases, however, geography is extrinsic rather than intrinsic to political behavior. Ultimately, variation from the national “norm” is due to “special factors” that do not presuppose the inadequacy of conventional accounts in other settings and under other conditions.

Surprisingly, perhaps, geographers have usually shared the dominant models of spatial variation with other social scientists. In the realm of political sociology, electoral geographers have concerned themselves with the spatial organization of electoral areas, boundary definition, gerrymandering, and so forth; mapping election results; and explaining election results in terms of certain “behavioral processes” such as interpersonal information transmission, reception, processing, and electoral choice. By and large they have drawn their inspiration from the literature of political sociology and share its biases (see, e.g., Johnston 1979, Taylor & Johnston 1979). One of these is a penchant for juxtaposing within one study a macroscale approach to the state, such as that of Easton’s (1953) systems analysis, with a microscale or behavioral approach to political behavior (Johnston 1979, Muir & Paddison 1981). Another has been a tendency to avoid the concept of place or see it entirely as a source of “local effects” that can be divided from the effects of other scales in explaining political behavior (e.g., Johnston 1976). Geography in the 1960s and 1970s, when electoral geography became popular, was, as a discipline, in retreat from its “exceptionalist” tradition. This tradition, it was argued, generated a stress on “areal differentiation at the expense of areal integration” (Haggett 1965:3). Geographers told one another that the scientific status of their discipline depended upon the acquisition of generalizations. Such generalizations, it was hoped, would come if geographers studied spatial form and patterns. Insofar as processes are invoked, they tend to refer to “factors” affecting spatial form rather than to the geographical imprint on social process implied by the concept of place. Recent geography therefore is not much help in developing a geographical political sociology.

It is in fact to recent developments in sociology and to the work of a small coterie of geographers that one must turn for conceptual materials that provide the building-blocks of a place-based political sociology. In particular, the writings of Foucault (1980), Giddens (1979, 1981), and Pred (1983, 1984) are all sensitive to the fact that human activities take the form of concrete interactions in time–space. They all argue, if in different ways, that in order to explain human behavior one must deal with the material continuity of everyday life, or the process of “structuration” whereby the structural properties of social life are expressed through everyday practices which in turn produce and reproduce the micro- and macrolevel structural properties of the social groups in question (Pred 1983). Attention is thus directed to the settings and scenes of everyday life: to place.

In a more analytic vein, three aspects to place can be identified: locale, location, and sense of place. Locale refers to the structured “microsociological” content of place, the settings for everyday, routine social interaction provided in a place. Location refers to the representation in local social interaction of ideas and practices derived from the relationship between places. In other words, location represents the impact of the “macro-order” in a place (uneven economic development, the uneven effects of government policy, segregation of social groups, etc.). Sense of place refers to the subjective orientation that can be engendered by living in a place. This is the geosociological definition of self or identity produced by a place. These three elements of place are discussed in more detail in Chapter 3.

The major theme of this book is easily stated. It is to argue that political behavior is intrinsically geographical. The focus is on the concept of place. The social contexts provided by local territorial–cultural settings (neighborhoods, towns, cities, small rural areas) are viewed as crucial in defining distinctive political identities and subsequent political activities – from votes to strikes to street violence. In this book, votes receive rather more emphasis than other activities only because they have become the currency of political sociology rather than because they are more “special” or necessarily more legitimate than other activities.

The book is organized into 12 chapters. Chapter 2 provides a review and critique of dominant modes of theorizing in political sociology. This is not a complete review but an attempt at identifying an intellectual crisis in the existing literature to which this book is responding. Chapter 3 lays out the argument for explaining political behavior in terms of place. Chapter 4 examines some important themes in political sociology from the place perspective. Chapter 5 attempts to explain why the concept of place has not received much attention or welcome in social science and political sociology. Chapter 6 provides empirical evidence questioning the “nationalization thesis” that lies at the heart of most contemporary political sociology, and critically reviews various attempts to deal with this. It ends by proposing the place perspective as a superior alternative. Chapters 7 through 12 present attempts to illustrate and support the place perspective using the examples of popular political behavior in Scotland (Chs. 7 to 9) and the US (Chs. 10 to 12) over the past 100 years. Taken together it is hoped that this book demonstrates the truth in the words that for political behavior, “It is the local reality that determines the total picture, and not the reverse” (Granata 1980:512).

2 Dominant modes of political sociology

The field of political sociology is characterized by several distinct modes of theorizing. One major division is normative; between those who are mainly preoccupied with the operations of existing political institutions and their role in creating political and social “stability”; and those who are concerned mainly with the forces which produce instability and possibilities for change (Bottomore 1979:12). Other differences revolve around the presuppositions or assumptions about the nature of “man,” “society,” and “knowing” that underpin different genres of political sociology.

A major objective of this chapter is to describe the main or dominant modes of political sociology. Another objective is to pinpoint areas where the dominant modes are under challenge. Rather than provide a fully fledged review of pol...