An Age of Limits

Social Theory for the 21st Century

R. Schroeder

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137314628
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

An Age of Limits outlines a new social theory for understanding contemporary society. Providing an analysis of why political, economic and cultural powers face constraints across the global North and beyond, this bold book argues that forces which address current challenges must confront the limits of the interplay between dominant institutions.

1

From the Birth of the Modern World to the Age of Limits

Ages and labels

What are the main patterns of contemporary social change? Looking across the landscape of contemporary social theory, it seems that social scientists have given up on this question. Classical sociological theorists are ritually invoked, but without any great faith that Marx, Weber or Durkheim can yield more than the occasional concept or insight. Labels proliferate, but their weakness is indicated by the fact that they are derivative: ‘late’, ‘post-’ or ‘radicalized’ modernity. Totalizing concepts such as ‘capitalism’ that were once regarded as central are nowadays seen as reductive: is society really driven by an economic logic? In any event, most current thinkers argue that there are no more ‘grand narratives’, and instead that there is ‘agency’ in how we socially construct the world, implying a plurality of these constructions without any means to adjudicate between them.

In this book I shall argue that the lack of an overarching theory of social change is an obstacle to advance in social scientific knowledge and that it can be remedied. At the same time, there are good reasons why a lack of coherence has come about. A major one is that the economy, politics and culture are either treated separately, or if they are treated jointly, there is little agreement about where to draw the boundaries between them. This has resulted in disciplinary ‘turf wars’, so that economists, for example, try to explain politics with ‘rational choice’, or cultural studies argues that states and markets are always already culturally constructed. In fact, this book will argue, these boundaries are much clearer than this disciplinary messiness suggests, especially if we take a long-term comparative-historical perspective. Indeed, from such a perspective, there is much substantive (though not theoretical) agreement about how markets, states and forms of culture have taken separate forms in the modern world, and how they interrelate. There is also a wealth of evidence about these relationships. And, as we shall see in the conclusion, with a systematic social theory in place, it is also possible to inform fundamental philosophical disputes, such as freedom versus equality, or the universality or otherwise of modernity.

This chapter will begin by outlining some key comparative-historical patterns and the concepts that can be derived from the agreement about these. It will start with the question of what contemporary society should be called, and where and when it became ‘modern’. Then it will move on to the question of how to separate the economic, political and cultural realms in different periods. The two – ages and labels – are connected. Yet, as we shall see, once ages and labels have been dealt with, the conceptual groundwork will have been laid for a detailed account of contemporary social change.

We can begin by probing how to label the contemporary social world. Use of the Marxist term ‘capitalism’ in an overarching way has fallen out of favour after the demise of communism and of Marxist sociology. ‘Capitalism’ has also always been associated with a perspective that reduces the workings of society to an economic dynamic, a perspective that is no longer dominant (though a lot of its tacit assumptions remain in place, as we shall see). The main alternative has been ‘modernity’, but this term is regarded as vague and empty, and also depends on the ability to specify a break between modernity and what came before. Moreover, ‘modernity’ is associated with modernization theory, which was popular into the 1960s when the prevailing view was that ‘the rest’ would catch up with ‘the West’. Nowadays, with China the world’s second largest economy and poised to become the largest one, such a Western-centric view seems outdated. Other labels, such as the ‘risk society’ (Beck 1992) or ‘liquid time’ (Bauman 2007) and the like fall within what Mann has called the ‘sociology of the last five minutes’, and are soon forgotten.

What is to be done? One idea, to abandon imposing patterns onto history altogether, can be disposed of immediately. As Gellner put it, ‘we inevitably assume a pattern of history . . . The only choice we do have is whether we make our vision as explicit, coherent and compatible with the available facts as we can, or whether we employ it more or less unconsciously and incoherently’ (1988: 11). If, however, we are to impose a pattern, then we also need concepts for different periods. And the same, as we shall see, applies to defining the relations between the different orders of social life.

A good starting point is to recognize that the two problems are linked – isn’t the relation between states and markets different depending on the period we have in view? I will argue that relations between, for example, the political and the economic order can indeed be identified throughout the modern period and distinguished from how they related before then, so that it is also possible to speak of a transition to modernity. As a consequence of this transition, a differentiation took place between the political, economic and cultural orders such that they became dominated by institutions – democratic states, free markets and rapid-discovery science – that have become ever more autonomous. This solves both problems – the transition to a new type of society, and the distinction between different social orders – at once. At the same time, this move puts the burden, of course, onto explaining how ‘modern’ states, markets and science differ from what has gone before, and how they have continued to operate autonomously since. And while the argument will need much further elaboration, it can be noted immediately that it entails that no one single institution characterizes or dominates modern society. Indeed, the argument will be that the tension between the three – their limits vis-à-vis each other – is one defining feature of the current period within modernity, roughly since the 1970s: the Age of Limits.

To understand the break inaugurated by modern institutions, it is necessary to take one step back (literally) in order to move forwards: the major debates about the emergence of capitalism and modernity have often located this break in a big transition in Europe during the 15th or 16th centuries. This made for an account of the ‘rise of the West’, whereby there was a break between the feudalism of the Middle Ages as against the modernity of capitalism. Yet this way of locating the origins of modernity, shared by Marx and Weber, has recently been challenged by the argument that Chinese levels of economic growth and living standards were similar to European ones up until the 19th century (Pomeranz 2000).¹ There is a related argument made by ‘world-systems’ thinkers, who want to submerge the early modern European ‘rise’ within more long-term shifts within a wider capitalist economy, thus making the West interdependent with its subjugation of ‘the rest’.

These debates are ongoing, but they can be sidestepped for our purposes since – even on the view which pushes the rise of the West to the 19th century – there was still, even for Pomeranz, a ‘great divergence’ during the 19th century, with Europe or the West leaping ahead and China falling behind economically (all these issues will be revisited later in this and other chapters). Historians are generally agreed that the industrial revolution (some would say that there were two of them) resulted in a breakthrough to permanent and sustained economic growth, and that this breakthrough took place sometime during the 19th century in Europe and the United States – or perhaps a bit earlier in England. This breakthrough, as we shall see, had as a necessary (if not sufficient) condition the emergence of an autonomous technology-driven science. It only needs to be added that this revolution was self-generated – it did not rest on exploitation and gains from European colonies or empires (a controversial point, evidence will be presented later). If these arguments can be supported in what follows, then we can locate the transition to modernity in the 19th century, and in the democratic revolutions of the late 18th century which caused a rupture similar to the industrial revolution in the political order, even if some of the patterns that will be described reach further back, and were uneven or delayed in places.

Where recent debates nevertheless need to be paid close attention to is insofar as they move away from a Western-centric perspective, or what Hodgson called ‘Westernism’ (1993). Put differently, the transition to modernity (or any other label for contemporary society) must be placed in a global context since we are nowadays far more aware of possible interconnections between, say, American and Chinese economic power. One advantage in taking a global purview is that the problem of scope can be avoided – after all, society at its largest extent is global. Yet one requirement then is to specify which concepts or patterns apply to the West (the origins of the processes of globalizing modernity, in a global context), and how they subsequently apply throughout what is nowadays also called the global North – and also to take into account wherever necessary the interplay between the West and the non-West during these origins and the global North and South in the later phases, for either of the pair (though again, we have just ruled out or suspended, for the moment at least, the relation between the West and ‘the rest’ in terms of the West being propelled into modernity via its relations of empire or colonization).

It can be mentioned straight away that widening the context to a global one does not mean accepting the idea of ‘globalization’, which has become an alternative master concept in social theory (Walby 2009; Martell 2010). ‘Global’ will be used here only when there are relations that truly encompass or affect all societies. Thus ‘globalization’ must be applied more sparingly than as another way to refer to ‘Americanization’ or to the spread of capitalist economic relations, which is how the term is often used.

This brings us to placing the transition to modernity in a global context in the 19th century. Global histories have recently charted how the 19th century marks the ‘birth of the modern world’ (Bayly 2004) or the ‘transformation of the world’ (Osterhammel 2009). On these accounts, the long 19th century began with the French and American Revolutions and came to an abrupt end with the First World War.² This caesura will provide our starting point in a moment. In the meantime, it will be useful to briefly chart a course from the 19th century to the present: what of the periods thereafter – as seen from a global perspective – the short 20th century which lasted from 1914 until 1989–91? On a global canvas, this was an ‘Age of Extremes’ (Hobsbawm 1994), which can be further subdivided into a period of World Wars (1914–45) followed by a ‘Global Cold War’ (Westad 2005), which was at the same time a period of rapid decolonization. The ‘Age of Extremes’ began with authoritarianisms of the right and left (fascism and communism), but later saw a ‘Golden Age’ of unprecedented post-war economic growth which tapered off in the 1970s. For the ‘Age of Extremes’, as we shall see, it is therefore necessary to recognize that global wars play havoc with the autonomy of the political and economic orders, while exceptional economic growth, which also came to characterize some emerging economies, as well as decolonization, also complicate a clear separation between the global North and South.

In any event, the period since then, which can be dated from the mid-1970s and the end of exceptional economic growth in the global West and North, including outside the Western/Northern alliance from 1989–91 onwards which saw the end of the challenge of authoritarianism, provides the label for the period that this book will focus on, the contemporary world which, I argue, is an ‘Age of Limits’. Much more will be said about these limits, but in terms of periodization, this period began with economic instability, a retrenchment of political movements, and growing awareness of how the transformation of nature rebounds on society. Arguably, these limits reach even further back: for example, signs of the negative impacts of the transformation of nature could already be seen during the industrial revolution. Yet these limits were not widely recognized until the 1970s, and it is still not universally agreed, to continue with this example, that open-ended growth is unsustainable now. This book argues, however, that these limits are not just characteristic of economies and technological transformation, but also politically, where the origins of limits lie in the narrowing of political options within democratic states, at least in the West or North. Further, the North, and most other parts of the world, are also constrained by giving a free reign to markets – not in an ideological or political sense – but in a structural one. These narrowings have only crystallized with the economic reforms in China and become entrenched globally with the decline of the Soviet Union in the 1980s. The ‘Age of Extremes’ (and within it, the Golden Age) has thus given way to an ‘Age of Limits’ beginning during the 1970s–80s, which can be defined as a period of relatively declining economic growth, a narrowing of political options, as well as constraints on the technological transformation of the environment.³

We will need to return to this periodization later. For the moment, it is sufficient to note that the global and the modern are not alternatives; indeed, we can speak of a globalizing modernity, whereby modern patterns increasingly take on a global scope. Globalization is thus a way of moving away from a Western-centric perspective to one which specifies the processes of modernity as and when they characterize a Global North. Again, this argument rests on the idea that the rise of the modern Western world was not initially reliant upon the non-Western world or the South. Once this ‘reliance’ has been ruled out (again, evidence will presented in due course, and caveats introduced for certain periods and processes), we can focus on the modern developed world or simply the North, which consists of Western and other market democracies. These arguments can now be taken further to specify how the transition to modernity led to a differentiation of the political, economic and cultural orders. Again, the argument will be that modernity began not just with industrialization and the emergence of markets, but also with the advent of democratic states in the political order, and of the separation of a technology-driven rapid-discovery science from the rest of culture. These three distinct modern processes began in the long 19th century, and all of them have since become globalized – even if this global spread has varied in depth and scope.

Disciplinary approaches to politics, economics and culture

Before we chart the emergence of uniquely modern institutions in the three orders, a brief excursus is necessary about why they are not typically treated as autonomous – or if they are, why they are treated differently by different disciplines without making the relationship between them explicit in structural terms. To begin with, we can note that in contemporary social thought, the economy is dominated by economists and fellow-travellers in other disciplines whose approach rests on treating people as individuals and their choices as rational. As we shall see, there is some truth in treating economic actions as divisible and the aggregations of these actions as maximizing. Yet in much of the rest of social science, this autonomy is not recognized, and it is argued instead that the economy is subject to political direction, as in the school of ‘political economy’ (which we shall encounter later).

In the realm of culture, as already mentioned, it has become fashionable to argue that people have ‘agency’ in their everyday practices, and the idea of science as separate from culture is rejected. Yet while I will agree here that people’s everyday life ought to be an anchor for grounding claims about social change, it will also be shown that culture explains little unless it is seen as part of larger structural changes. Moreover, cultural – and political and economic – structures are often only indirectly related to everyday change: science is a good example, because the institutions producing rapid-discovery science are remote from everyday culture, even if science indirectly, via consumer technologies for example, has profoundly reshaped everyday life. In what follows, I will provide a sociological account of science, but draw frequently on anthropology and social history for understandings of culture and everyday life (but argue that, ultimately, much of everyday life can be relegated to history and anthropology as being outside the scope of understanding macro-social changes).

This leads to a further point, which is that macro structural changes are only discernible over longer periods. Science only dominates modern culture at one remove since its abstract worldview must be adhered to only within a specialist realm which leaves large swathes of culture untouched. At the same time, this scientific worldview has come to monopolize – again, over a long period and in a diffuse way – serious knowledge. Similarly, disembedded and atomized economic interactions provide a ‘structure’ only in the diffuse sense that markets shape our everyday life at an aggregate level of the distribution of resources. Finally, the same indirectness applies to the political realm, where everyday life is transformed only by longer-term changes in the distribution of political power. In the case of politics, however, there is more than the diffuse structure of markets and of science as worldview: modern states concentrate power within a centralized structure with boundaries in which rights and resources are distributed; the nation-state.

It can be seen that the relations between these autonomous spheres or orders and the relations between them are rarely addressed because of an academic disciplinary division of labour. Again, the exceptions are sweeping social theories like Marxism which have tried to reduce social change to underlying economic forces, and these have been swept aside, leaving us with economists and their rational actors, or cultural studies with ‘agency’. Other sociological theories such as ‘structuration’ also rely on actors reflexively shaping social change (Giddens 1990) and thus leave macro-relations rather open-ended in the sense that they are somehow interdependent with this micro-reflexivity. Only a few theories systematically tackle the relations between different macro-social orders (Gellner 1988) or powers (Mann 1986, 1993), and these will be engaged with below. Before embarking on an account of how the economic, political and cultural orders became separated, it is worth pointing out that, whatever autonomy we will ascribe to them, these structures will need to be systematically related to one another in some way – in spite of any disciplinary differences – since otherwise it could indeed be possible that one determines or suffuses the other(s).

My approach, in contrast to theories with a single model of power or a single (economic) approach to institutions, will be to ask three questions simultaneously: which institutions dominate at the macro-level and with what scope? Where are the cleavages between the dominant institution in one order or domain of society as against other orders or domains? And how does power, or how do these dominant institutions, operat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 From the Birth of the Modern World to the Age of Limits
• 2 Convergence and Divergence
• 3 Paths towards Pluralist Democracy: Liberal versus Radical Interpretations
• 4 Free and Unfree Markets
• 5 The Paradoxes of Science, Technology and Social Change
• 6 The Limits to Transforming the Environment
• 7 Three Cultures
• 8 Modernization and the Politics of Development
• 9 Social Theory in the Face of the Future
• Notes
• References
• Index