Social Change Theories in Motion

Explaining the Past, Understanding the Present, Envisioning the Future

Thomas C. Patterson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351137645
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book assesses how theorists explained processes of change set in motion by the rise of capitalism. It situates them in the milieu in which they wrote. They were never neutral observers standing outside the conditions they were trying to explain. Their arguments were responses to those circumstances and to the views of others commentators, living and dead. Some repeated earlier views; others built on those perspectives; a few changed the way we think. While surveying earlier writers, the author's primary concerns are theorists who sought to explain industrialization, imperialism, and the consolidation of nation-states after 1840. Marx, Durkheim, and Weber still shape our understandings of the past, present, and future. Patterson focuses on explanations of the unsettled conditions that crystallized in the 1910s and still persist: the rise of socialist states, anti-colonial movements, prolonged economic crises, and almost continuous war. After 1945, theorists in capitalist countries, influenced by Cold War politics, saw social change in terms of economic growth, progress, and modernization; their contemporaries elsewhere wrote about underdevelopment, dependency, or uneven development. In the 1980s, theorists of postmodernity, neoliberalism, globalization, innovations in communications technologies, and post-socialism argued that they rendered earlier accounts insufficient. Others saw them as manifestations of a new imperialism, capitalist accumulation on a global scale, environmental crises, and nationalist populism.

1
The Language of Change

Motion in Time

There have been moments when established explanations of social change no longer provided satisfactory accounts of what had happened or what was taking place. One of these moments occurred during the widespread contacts between Africans, Asians, and Europeans during the middle half of the first millennium B.C. (Bernal 1987; Jaspers 1953[1949]). A second coincided with the restructuring of the world economy that began in the mid-fourteenth century (Abu-Lughod 1989; Needham 1969). A third occurred in the aftermath of the crystallization of industrial capitalist society and empire from the late eighteenth century onwards (Hobsbawm 1968; Pomerantz 2000). Recognizing the novelty of these moments impelled commentators to develop new vocabularies to describe and explain changes that had been set in motion. Social theorists have typically formulated and refined their explanations of change in terms of concepts and ideas that were already part of the intellectual language they inherited from previous generations. While some analysts recycled earlier accounts, others refined them, and a few came up with truly novel insights about the processes of change. The thesis of this book is that the changes set in motion during the nineteenth century have had profound, long-lasting consequences and implications. They not only affected the views of the late-nineteenth-century analysts and critics—like Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber—who sought to explain what was happening. The views of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber have, in turn, influenced the perspectives of their successors as they have struggled to understand the world we live in.

Let us briefly consider what the word “change” means. On the one hand, it can mean a movement or shift from one place to another, usually with the implication that a passage of time occurred. On the other, it can mean a substitution of one thing for another; the succession of one thing by another; flux or flow, implying a continuous series of movements or actions; and growth, metamorphosis, or transformation—the appearance of new characteristics. These metaphors and synonyms involve spans of time and imply the existence of a past, a present, and a future. Some images suggest directionality or movement toward an end-product—e.g. development, progress, growth, or modernization. They may invoke (1) causal-mechanical descriptions or explanations of successions of events that investigate the extent to which the past causes the present, (2) teleological accounts that treat past and present temporalities (the condition of being temporary) as either descriptions or explanations of movement toward some future end or goal, or (3) present-oriented accounts that seek to shed light on how the past and the future are continually reconstructed in the present. Other accounts may not involve directionality. Of course, the idea and the reality of change raise other questions as well: Does it occur slowly, gradually, and continuously, or is it punctuated, discontinuous, and variable in rate—i.e. a series of revolutions? Is change in the past different from change in the present?

In this chapter, I want to briefly examine the more influential theories that have been proposed to explain social change and development and to consider the circumstances in which they emerged. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century social theorists have built on the images, analogies, metaphors, and synonyms used by earlier analysts to describe processes of change in the explanation of capitalist development and imperialism. These models still influence how we understand the processes being described.

Change as Recurrence and Renewal

Ionian commentators who lived in Asia Minor on the edges of the Persian Empire during the middle half of the first millennium B.C. sought to account for the origins of world they lived in. The poet Hesiod (c. 750–650 B.C.) imagined a world that began in complete chaos, which begat a genealogy of gods, each connected with a part of the physical world and each struggling violently with the others in a Hollywood-style family drama that underpins the world as it is coming to be. As you recall, Zeus eventually triumphs in this drama by destroying the powers that threatened the world and by establishing order among the remaining gods. In another poem, Hesiod describes the world differently as successive degradation from a golden age in which humans intermingled on almost equal terms with the gods in conditions of peace, prosperity, and harmony (order) to a current one beset by pain and evil (Curd 2012). In both images, society is a world in flux, completely under the control of external forces. Similarly, Homer, who was Hesiod’s contemporary, depicted the trials and tribulations of human beings who lived nearly five centuries earlier at the time of the Trojan War. They too had little effective control over their lives in a world that, as depicted by Homer, was saturated by gods. Hesiod and Homer were poets who envisioned a world structured by social order and disrupted by social changes emanating from above.

The pre-Socratic philosophers, who lived in Ionia fifty to two hundred years later, were already engaged in a dialog with their predecessors and with each other. They were less concerned with explaining the creation of the existing world (cosmogony) than with understanding it as a totality in time and space (cosmology). This totality (kosmos or ordered arrangement) was an organized whole whose structure and development, while not immediately apparent, could be discovered through rational inquiry and observation. It was inherently intelligible and not subject to super-natural intervention (Curd 2012). The philosophers did, however, agree with their predecessors to the extent that both saw the present state of affairs as deriving from some initial situation or set of conditions, and both believed that change operates “according to the order of time.” For Anaximenes (585–528 B.C.), air was the base material found everywhere; it was acted upon by the natural forces of compression and decompression. Compaction transformed air successively into wind, clouds, water, and stone; the force of decompression caused stone to turn into water, water into clouds, clouds into wind, and wind into air. Because one material was more basic than others, change was not necessarily directional; it could be sequential, but it could also be cyclical, periodic, and random, accidental, or not fixed by necessity (i.e. contingent) (Graham 2003; White 2008). The appearance of human beings merely represented the latest stage in the development of the cosmos.

Heraclitus of Ephesus (544–483 B.C.) attempted to answer two questions posed by his predecessors: What causes change? What is the mechanism that drives change? While he built on some of their arguments, he rejected others, most noticeably their notion of a single generating substance (Baert 2006; Graham 2008). Heraclitus argued (1) that the cosmos was a “unity of opposites”—simultaneously change and non-change (continuity)—recalling his remark that a road that goes downhill is, at the same time, one that goes uphill; (2) that the cosmos is in a continual state of flux because of the continually shifting interrelation of change and permanence; (3) that the world is changed through transformations ordered in and by time; (4) that time is responsible for the existence of a stable world; (5) that the cosmos exists through the transformation of substances into one another; (6) that the substances are not permanent; and (7) that fire is simultaneously the most unstable (changeable) and the most enduring of his predecessors’ generating substances, and it is also the one into which everything else turns. In other words, both change and permanence are constant and continually interacting features of the cosmos, and both may occur simultaneously at different levels of the totality; this was the basis for his comment that no one could step twice in the same river so long as the water flows continuously over their feet from one instant to the next, even though it may do so in a seemingly unchanging stream bed. Philosopher Daniel Graham (1997:44) notes that Heraclitus’s

transcendent insight is to see that constancy and flux, like all other opposites, are interdependent: constancy requires ongoing change and ongoing change produces stability. But stability and change are not ontologically equivalent: stability is supervenient [i.e. something additional] on change, so that change is prior to constancy, process is prior to substance.

To describe this theory, Heraclitus fell back on the familiar language of life and death as well as of recurrence and renewal. In doing so, he laid the foundations for future debates about the nature of human society and of social change.

Democritus (460–370 B.C.) was also concerned with questions about the composition of the cosmos and the reason for change. He conceptualized the universe as infinite, a totality composed simultaneously of both small irreducible, unchangeable particles (atoms) and voids (non-particles or bodies). Atoms inexplicably concentrate in particulars regions of the cosmos, form a vortex, collide with increasing frequency, and adhere together to produce worlds like ours. In the process, like things, both inanimate and animate, were attracted to one another. This provided an explanation of the beginnings and growth of human society. At the beginning, human beings foraged individually and lived lives of hardship; they gradually came together and formed communities for mutual aid. With their hands, language, and shrewd minds, they created arts and crafts to satisfy their growing needs. In this view, human beings are interdependent. Moreover, they are analogous to city-states. The gradual process of change that occurred was not without difficulties because there were both good men and evil ones, and strife between them undermined the ability of the community to provide for the common good. In Democritus’s view the way to avoid strife and maintain order was to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor (Cartledge 1999; Cole 1967:107–147; Hussey 1985:119–120).

The social milieu in which Democritus and his Ionian contemporaries—notably the historian Herodotus (484–425 B.C.) and tragedian Aeschylus (525–456 B.C.)—wrote was shaped by the Persian colonization of Asia Minor, the Ionian revolt against the Persian state, the subsequent destruction of Ionian cities during the disastrous defeat they suffered in 494 B.C. at the hands of the Persians and their allies, and the subsequent re-incorporation of the Ionians into the empire. It was a time of crisis for many Ionians. It was also a time when the Greeks were clarifying ideas about their identity and their relationships with their neighbors. They busied themselves with inventing the identities/concepts of Greeks, barbarians (all non-Greeks), and Persians and creating images of them (Ste. Croix 1972, 1981; Hall 1989). Their quest involved considering alternative accounts of the human past, alternative accounts of their non-Greek-speaking contemporaries and what they could teach them about Greek society and the human condition more generally, and alternative visions of what the best future might be.

Theories of change that involve notions of recurrence and renewal gain currency in times of flux (Trompf 1979). For example, between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, the nature of commerce, the distribution of wealth, and uses of the past were transformed in the Mediterranean world. Historical scholarship enjoyed a resurgence in both Mediterranean North Africa and Europe as thinkers struggled to explain what had happened to the traditional social order. Civil servants, clerics, politicians, and merchants began to study ancient texts and monuments (Ibn Khaldun 1967[1377]; Rowe 1965; Weiss 1988). They revived the ideas of writers from Classical Antiquity whose views were preserved in the copyists’ archives of monasteries and medieval universities and gradually subsumed Muslim knowledge and science into a common Renaissance European culture (Makdisi 1981; Rodinson 1987[1980]:23–44). Many intellectuals believed they could regain the freedom lost during the Middle Ages by retrieving and developing the capacities possessed by the ancient Greeks and Romans. In the process, they not only portrayed the artisans and writers of the classical world as models of excellence to be emulated but also began to see history as a series of cyclical ups and downs—recurrences caused by outside forces impinging on a relatively fixed human nature. One writer, Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), described it in the following way:

Usually provinces go most of the time, in the changes they make, from order to disorder and then pass again from disorder to order, for worldly things are not allowed by nature to stand still. As soon as they reach their ultimate perfection, having no further to rise, they must descend; and similarly, once they have descended and through their disorders arrived at the ultimate depth, since they cannot descend further, of necessity they must rise. Thus they are always descending from good to bad and rising from bad to good.

(Machiavelli 1988[1525]:185)

Recurrence theories of history—the idea that history repeats itself or that change is cyclical—have been around for more than two thousand and five hundred years (Caponigri 1968; Trompf 1979). Oswald Spengler, who had studied Heraclitus, invoked these theories when he wrote the widely read Decline of the West (1918–1922) in the wake of World War I and the disastrous consequences of the Treaty of Versailles for Germany. Arnold Toynbee began his twelve-volume A Study of History (1934–1961) during the Great Depression of the 1930s; he argued that civilizations are born as a response to challenges. They grow when their creative minorities successfully meet new challenges, and they decline when these elite “makers and shakers” become enamored with their past successes and fail either to recognize or to confront new challenges. Theories of cyclical change also involve characterizations of present conditions and comparisons with those that prevailed or that are presumed to have characterized particular societies or periods of time in the past—like the Middle Ages (e.g. Cantor 1991; Diamond 2005).

Change as Teleology, Change as Growth

Not every analyst of change in ancient Greece agreed with the atomic theory of the pre-Socratics or with Heraclitus’s view that the world was ordered by a continual state of flux.¹ For example, Empedocles (c. 490–430 B.C.) claimed that change was merely an illusion, and Plato (427–347 B.C.) argued that ideas, not flux, were the ordering principle for the reality of objects in the world. Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) was concerned with the causes of change and observed that his predecessors and contemporaries had variously attributed them to luck (Empedocles), necessity and spontaneity (Democritus), intelligence (Anaxagoras), god (Socrates), and form (Plato) (Johnson 2005; Woodfield 1976). He complained that their answers were reductive in the sense that they sought to explain the cosmos and living things solely in terms of matter, motion, and necessity. Aristotle pointed out that they did not distinguish clearly between inanimate objects and living things. He also observed that they were actually asking two different kinds of questions. One question involved explaining the causes of kinesis (the growth, alteration, or movement of a material), and the other was concerned with explaining the final cause of the motion—i.e. its purpose, goal, aim, or function in a state of completion, or telos—a Greek word that philosopher Monte Johnson (2005:64–88) suggests is better translated as “that for the sake of which” or “the cause for the sake of which.” Because change, causes, and purposes exist in inanimate as well as animate nature, complete explanations must answer the two questions for both the cosmos and living organisms.

Aristotle argued that nature is inherent in a body and that the body moves according to the principles it embodies. He discerned four principles of change: (1) locomotion or change of place in space, (2) generation and destruction, (3) growth and diminution—a change in quantity, and (4) alteration or qualitative change. In his view, the circular rotation of celestial objects and the eternal moving and resting of terrestrial bodies, which seek to imitate them, are explained by the realization of the principle of locomotion. This is also true of those inanimate elements that move from one cosmic realm to another and evince the principle of continual generation and destruction—e.g. seasonal rainfall in the Mediterranean world and its complex interrelations with the aspirations of farmers. Animals, which provide many of Aristotle’s examples of teleology, manifest all of the principles of change. In general, he argues that living organisms benefit from their organs and their developmental and temporal motion—e.g. the function or purpose of the development of the eye from embryo to adult is to see, and the function of a person’s walking after dinner is to aid in the digestion of food in the near run and to promote health in the long run. The former demonstrates the development of an organ through time, and the latter demonstrates a sequential order of actions through time. Both facilitate survival and reproduction.

Recall that in Politics, Aristotle regards human beings as “political animals” whose principle relationships occur in the household or the city. In his view, the city is a totality that has an existence prior to its interdependent parts—i.e. a city can exist without citizens or households as long as it has a legitimate governor. Its purpose is self-sufficiency, and it comes into existence for the sake of a good life, a contemplative life, so that its citizens can devote themselves to the study of the cycles of nature’s growth, decline, and renewal. In Aristotle’s words,

Every state is a community of some kind, and every community is established with a view to some good; for everyone always acts in order to obtain that which they think is good. But, if all communities aim at some good, the state or political community, which is the highest of all, and which embraces all the rest, aims at good in a greater degree than any other, and at the highest good.

(Politics 1252^a1–6)

He who thus considers things in their first growth and origin, whether a state or anything else, will obtain the clearest view of them. In the first place there must be a union of those who cannot exist without each other; namely, of male and female, that the race may continue (and this is a union which is formed, not of choice, but because, in common with other animals and with plants, mankind have a natural desire to leave behind them an image of themselves), and of a natural ruler and subject.

(Politics 1252^a24–31)

Out of these two relationships [i.e. with wife and slave] the first thing to rise is the family.

(Politics 1252^b10)

When several families are united, and the association aims at something more than the supply of daily needs, the first society to be formed is the village.

(Politics 1252^b16–18)

When several villages are united in a single complete community, large enough to be nearly or quite self-sufficing, the state [city] comes into existence. Hence it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal.

(Politics 1252^b28–29, 1253^a2–3)

Further, the state [city] is by nature clearly prior to the family and to the individual, since the whole is of necessi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface—Author’s Note
• Introduction
• 1 The Language of Change: Motion in Time
• 2 Modern Industrial Capitalist Society, 1820–1914
• 3 Imperialism and the National, Colonial, and Agrarian Questions, 1890–1929
• 4 Capitalism in Crisis and the Search for Social Order, 1918–1945
• 5 The Cold War, Decolonization, and the Third World, 1945–1970
• 6 The World in Crisis, 1970–2017
• References
• Index