© Immanuel Wallerstein 1997.
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[Inaugural Address, Convegno Internazionale di Studi of Associazione Italiana di Sociologia, Palermo, October 26-28, 1995. The theme of the meeting was "The University and the Social Sciences: New Paths to Public Rationality"]
"Ciò che è 'politica' per la classe produttiva diventa 'razionalità' per la classe intellettuale. Ciò che è strano è che dei marxisti ritengano superiore la 'razionalità' alla 'politica', la astrazione ideologica alla concretezza economica." (Gramsci, 1975, 134)
"What is 'politics' for the productive class becomes 'rationality' for the intellectual class. What is strange is that some Marxists believe 'rationality' to be superior to 'politics,' ideological abstraction superior to economic concreteness." (Gramsci, 1992, 231)
It is not only that intellectuals transformed politics into rationality but that this proclamation of the virtue of rationality constituted an expression of optimism on their part and served to fuel the optimism of everyone else. Their credo was: As we proceed towards a truer understanding of the real world, we proceed thereby to a better governance of the real society, ergo towards a greater fulfillment of human potential. Social science as a mode of constructing knowledge was not merely built on this premise; it offered itself as the surest method of realizing the rational quest.
It was not always thus. Once, social thought was dominated by a pervasive mundane pessimism. The social world was seen as unequal and imperfect and would always, it was believed, remain so. Augustine's bleak view that we are all irremediably marked by original sin dominated much of the history of Christian Europe. No doubt, by world standards, this was an unusually harsh chronosophy. However, even other more stoic visions, indeed even the more dionysiac visions offered few guarantees for the future. The Buddhist quest for nirvana seemed a very long and difficult path, to be achieved by very few, about the same number who might achieve the Christian quest for sainthood.
If the modern world has so long celebrated itself, commended itself on the "modernity" of its Weltanschauung, it is because it proclaimed a chronosophy that was this worldly, universal, and optimistic. The social world, however bad, could be made better, and made better for everyone. The faith in the possibility of social betterment has been a bedrock of modernity. It was not argued, it should be emphasized, that the individual would necessarily become morally better. Individual overcoming of sinfulness, an ancient religious quest, remained subject to the judgment (and grace) of God. Its validation and its reward were other-worldly. The modern world has been resolutely this-worldly. Whatever it promised was to be validated here and now, or here and shortly. Its quest was in fact resolutely materialist in that it promised economic improvement, ultimately once again for everyone. Its non-material promises, ensconced in the concept of liberty, were all ultimately translatable into material benefits, and supposed liberties that were not translatable in this way were usually denounced as false liberties.
Finally, we must notice how collectivist the promise of modernity has been. The philosophers and the social scientists of the modern world have talked so incessantly about the centrality of the individual in this modern world that we have failed to observe the degree to which the modern world produced the first genuinely collectivist geoculture in history, in that it produced the first genuinely workaday egalitarian social vision. We have all been promised that our historical system will one day achieve a social order in which everyone will enjoy adequate, ergo roughly equal, material comforts, and in which no one will have privileges that others do not have. Of course, I am talking only of promises, not of realities. Still, no philosopher in medieval Europe or T'ang China or in the Abbassid Caliphate predicted that one day everyone on earth would be materially well off and that privilege would disappear. All previous philosophies assumed the inevitability of hierarchies, and by this fact rejected earthly collectivism.
If therefore we are to understand the current dilemmas of our historical system, the capitalist world-economy, and if we are to understand why, in my view, the concept of rationality is tasting so sour in our mouths, I believe we must start from the awareness of the degree to which modernity has been justified on materialist and collectivist premises. For, of course, it was totally self-contradictory to do this. The raison d'être of the capitalist world-economy, its motor force, has been the ceaseless accumulation of capital. And the ceaseless accumulation of capital is totally incompatible with these materialist, collectivist promises, because it is based on the appropriation of surplus-value by some from others. Capitalism represents material reward for some, but in order that it be so, it can never be material reward for everyone.
We know, as social scientists, that one of the most fruitful routes of analyzing social reality is to focus on a central descriptive anomaly and ask why it exists what explains it and what are its consequences. That is what I propose to do here. I shall discuss why the philosophers of the modern world have made unfulfillable promises to its participants, why these promises were for a long time trusted but are no longer trusted, and what are the consequences of this disillusionment. And lastly I shall try to assess the implications of all of this for us as social scientists, that is, as proponents (if not always practitioners) of human rationality.
1. Modernity and Rationality
It is a commonplace of social science to observe the link between the rise of a capitalist world-system and the development of science and technology. But why have the two been historically linked? To this question, both Marx and Weber (and indeed most others) have answered that capitalists had to be "rational" if they were to achieve their prime objective, which is maximizing profit. To the extent that capitalists concentrate all their energies on this objective before others, they will do what they can to reduce costs of production and produce the kind of product that will attract buyers, and this means applying rational methods not only to the processes of production but also to the administration of their enterprise. Hence, they find technological advances of every kind extremely useful to them and lend their weight to encouraging the underlying development of science.
No doubt this is true, but it seems to me to explain rather little. We may assume that persons wishing to engage in profit- making enterprises and persons capable of scientific advances have existed, in not too different a proportion, in all major zones of human life, and for thousands of years at least. The whole monumental corpus of Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China, demonstrates the extensive achievements of scientific effort in the Chinese culture-zone. And we know in great detail how intensive and commercialized was Chinese economic activity.
This is of course then the classic question, "why the West?" I do not propose to discuss this question one more time. Many have done so, and I have done so myself (see Wallerstein, 1992). I would simply note here that it seems to me quite obvious that the crucial difference is that, in the modern world-system, there existed clear rewards for technological advance, and that what accounts for this difference is not the attitude of entrepreneurs, who had always had obvious motives for rewarding inventors and innovators, but rather the attitude of political leaders, whose motives were always far more mixed and whose periodic hostility to technological change had constituted the major inhibition in other places and times for the kind of scientific revolution that western Europe launched in the seventeenth century.
I draw the very clear conclusion that you must have capitalism first in order to make technological innovation central rather than the other way around. This is important because it is a clue to the realities of power relationships. Modern science is the child of capitalism and has been dependent upon it. Scientists received social sanction and support because they offered the prospect of concrete improvements in the real world wonderful machinery that would foster productivity and reduce the constraints that time and space seemed to impose, and greater comfort for everyone. Science worked.
A whole world view was created to surround this scientific activity. Scientists were said to be, adjured to be, "disinterested." Scientists were said to be, adjured to be, "empirical." Scientists were said to be, adjured to be, in search of "universal" truths. Scientists were said to be, adjured to be, the discoverers of the "simple." They were called upon to analyze complex realities and establish the simple, the simplest, underlying rules governing them. And finally, perhaps most important of all, scientists were said to be, adjured to be, uncoverers of efficient causes and not of final causes. Furthermore, all these descriptions and adjunctions were said to form a package; they had to be taken together.
The scientific ethos was of course mythical insofar as it pretended to describe fully and truly what scientists actually did. We have but to refer to Steven Shapin's lovely study, A Social History of Truth (1994), to realize how central social prestige and extra-scientific authority was in establishing the credentials and scientific credibility of the Royal Society of London in the seventeenth century. It was, as he notes, the credibility of gentlemen, based on trust, civility, honor, and integrity. Nonetheless, science, empirical science, indeed Newtonian mechanics as it was theorized became the model of intellectual activity to which analysts of the social world would repair, the model they would by and large aspire to copy thereafter (see Olson, 1993). And it was this gentlemanly scientific ethos the modern world would come to insist was the only possible meaning of rationality, and which became and has remained the leitmotiv of its intellectual class.
What however does rationality mean? There is a major discussion of this issue, well-known to all sociologists. It is the discussion found in Weber's Economy and Society (1968). Weber has two pairs of definitions of rationality. The first is found in his typology of four types of social action. Two of these four types are deemed rational: the "instrumentally rational (zweckrational)" and the "value-rational (wertrational)." The second is found in his discussion of economic action, in which he distinguishes between "formal" and "substantive" rationality. The two antinomies are almost the same, but not quite, not at least (it seems to me) in their connotations.
Allow me to quote at some length from Weber in order to discuss this question. Weber's definition of instrumentally rational social action is action that is "determined by expectations as to the behavior of objects in the environment and of other human beings; these expectations are used as 'conditions' or 'means' for the attainment of the actor's own rationally pursued and calculated ends" (I, 24). His definition of value-rational social action is action that is "determined by belief in the value for its own sake of some ethical, aesthetic, religious, or other form of behavior, independently of its prospect of success" (I, 24- 25).
Weber then proceeds to elaborate these definitions with more concrete examples:
Examples of pure value-rational orientation would be the actions of persons who, regardless of possible cost to themselves, act to put into practice their convictions of what seems to them to be required by duty, honor, the pursuit of beauty, a religious call, personal loyalty, or the importance of some "cause" no matter in what it consists. In our terminology, value-rational action always involves "commands" or "demands" which, in the actor's opinion, are binding on him. It is only in cases where human action is motivated by the fulfillment of such unconditional demands that it will be called value-rational. This is the case in widely varying degrees, but for the most part only to a relatively slight extent. Nevertheless, it will be shown that the occurrence of this mode of action is important enough to justify its formulation as a distinct type; though it may be remarked that there is no intention here of attempting to formulate in any sense an exhaustive classification of types of action.
Action is instrumentally rational (zweckrational) when the end, the means, and the secondary results are all rationally taken into account and weighed. This involves rational consideration of alternative means to the end, of the relations of the end to the secondary consequences, and finally of the relative importance of different possible ends. Determination of action either in affectual or in traditional terms is thus incompatible with this type. Choice between alternative and conflicting ends and results may well be determined in a value-rational manner. In that case, action is instrumentally rational only in respect to the choice of means. On the other hand, the actor may, instead of deciding between alternative and conflicting ends in terms of a rational orientation to a system of values, simply take them as given subjective wants and arrange them in a scale of consciously assessed relative urgency. He may then orient his action to this scale in such a way that they are satisfied as far as possible in order of urgency, as formulated in the principle of "marginal utility." Value-rational action may thus have various different relations to the instrumentally rational action. From the latter point of view, however, value-rationality is always irrational. Indeed, the more the value to which action is oriented is elevated to the status of an absolute value, the more "irrational" in this sense the corresponding action is. For, the more unconditionally the actor devotes himself to this value for its own sake, to pure sentiment or beauty, to absolute goodness or devotion to duty, the less is he influenced by considerations of the consequences of his action. The orientation of action wholly to the rational achievement of ends without relation to fundamental values is, to be sure, essentially only a limiting case (I, 25-26).
Now, let us turn to Weber's other distinction, which I again quote in full:
The term "formal rationality of economic action" will be used to designate the extent of quantitative calculation or accounting which is technically possible and which is actually applied. The "substantive rationality," on the other hand, is the degree to which the provisioning of given groups of persons (no matter how delimited) with goods is shaped by economically oriented social action under some criterion (past, present, or potential) of ultimate values (wertende Postulate), regardless of the nature of these ends. These may be of a great variety.
1. The terminology suggested above is thought of merely as a means of securing greater consistency in the use of the word "rational" in this field. It is actually only a more precise form of the meanings which are continually recurring in the discussion of "rationalization" and of the economic calculus in money and in kind.
2. A system of economic activity will be called "formally" rational according to the degree in which the provision for needs, which is essential to every rational economy, is capable of being expressed in numerical, calculable terms, and is so expressed. In the first instance, it is quite independent of the technical form these calculations take, particularly whether estimates are expressed in money or in kind. The concept is thus unambiguous, at least in the sense that expression in money term yields the highest degree of formal calculability. Naturally, even this is true only relatively, so long as other things are equal.
3. The concept of "substantive rationality," on the other hand, is full of ambiguities. It conveys only one element common to all "substantive" analyses: namely, that they do not restrict themselves to note the purely formal and (relatively) unambiguous fact that action is based on "goal-oriented" rational calculation with the technically most adequate available methods, but apply certain criteria of ultimate ends, whether they be ethical, political, utilitarian, hedonistic, feudal (stãndish), egalitarian, or whatever, and measure the results of the economic action, however formally "rational" in the sense of correct calculation they may be, against these scales of "value rationality" or "substantive goal rationality." There is an infinite number of possible value scales for this type of rationality, of which the socialist and communist standards constitute only one group. The latter, although by no means unambiguous in themselves, always involve elements of social justice and equality. Others are criteria of status distinctions, or of the capacity for power, especially of the war capacity, of a political unit; all these and many others are of potential "substantive" significance. These points of view are, however, significant only as bases from which to judge the outcome of economic action. In addition and quite independently, it is possible to judge from an ethical, ascetic, or esthetic point of view the spirit of economic activity (Wirtschaftsgesinnung) as well as the instruments of economic activity. All of these approaches may consider the "purely formal" rationality of calculation in monetary terms as of quite secondary importance or even as fundamentally inimical to their respective ultimate ends, even before anything has been said about the consequences of the specifically modern calculating attitude. There is no question in this discussion of attempting value judgments in this field, but only of determining and delimiting what is to be called "formal." In this context the concept "substantive" is itself in a certain sense "formal"; that is, it is an abstract generic concept (I, 85-86).
When I say that the connotations of the two pairs of distinctions are not quite the same, I admit this is a highly subjective interpretation. It seems to me that in distinguishing instrumentally rational social action from value-rational social action, Weber suggests considerable reserve toward the latter. He talks of "unconditional demands." He reminds us that from the point of view of instrumentally rational social action, "value- rationality is always irrational." However, when he distinguishes formal and substantive rationality he seems to tilt the tone the other way. Substantively rational analyses "do not restrict themselves to note the purely formal and (relatively) unambiguous fact that action is based on 'goal-oriented' rational calculation," but measure it against some value scale.
We could discuss this inconsistency as an issue in the ambivalence of Weber's position on the role of the intellectual in the modern world. But that is not my interest here. I believe rather that the ambivalence or ambiguity of the distinction is built into our modern world's geoculture. It comes back to the quote from Gramsci with which I began this discussion. When Gramsci says that what the productive class calls political the intellectual class renames rational, he is pointing precisely to this fundamental ambiguity. By calling the "political" the "rational," are we not implying that issues of substantive rationality should be put in the background so that issues of formal rationality be the only ones that remain under discussion? And if so, is this not because issues of formal rationality in fact involve unadmitted but quite clear commitments to value- rational social action of a particular kind, the kind that takes conflicting ends, in Weber's words, "as given subjective wants and arrange(s) them in a scale of consciously assessed relative urgency." As Weber points out, this is what the principle of marginal utility is about. To decide, however, what is marginally useful, one must design a scale. He who designs the scale determines the outcome.
2. Rationality and the Dangerous Classes
To talk of rationality is to obscure the political, the value-rational choices, and to tilt the process against the demands of substantive rationality. In the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the intellectual classes could still believe that, in pressing the claims of rationality, their primary enemy was medieval clerical obscurantism. Their slogan was the one shouted loud and clear by Voltaire, "Ecrasez l'infâme." The French Revolution changed all that because it transformed and clarified the terms of the world cultural debate. The French Revolution, I have long argued (see Wallerstein, 1991, ch. 1), did less to change France than it did to change the world-system. It was the direct cause of establishing a viable and durable geoculture within the world- system, one of whose consequences (and not the least) was that it led to the institutionalization of something called the social sciences. We come therefore to the heart of what we are discussing.
The French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath spread two beliefs, which became pervasive in the world-system and which have dominated mentalities ever since, notwithstanding the ferocious opposition of some very powerful forces. These beliefs are (1) that political change is continuous and normal, that is, the norm, and (2) that sovereignty resides in the "people." Neither of these beliefs was widespread before 1789, and both have flourished since, persisting to this day despite their many ambiguities and mishaps. The problem with these two beliefs is that they are available as arguments to everyone, and not only to those who have power, authority, and/or social prestige. They can indeed be used by the "dangerous classes," a concept that came into existence precisely in the early nineteenth century to describe persons and groups who had neither power, authority, nor social prestige, but were making political claims nonetheless. These were the growing urban proletariat of Western Europe, the displaced peasants, the artisans threatened by expanded machine production, and the marginal migrants from cultural zones other than the one into which they had migrated.
The problems of social adjustment of such groups and the consequent social turmoil are familiar ones to sociologists and other social historians, ones we have long treated in our literature. But what has this to do with the concept of rationality? Everything, in fact! The political problem posed by the dangerous classes was not, as we know, a minor one. At the very moment that the capitalist world-economy was getting into full swing in terms of expanded productivity and major reductions in the impediments imposed by time and space to the rapid accumulation of capital (a phenomenon we have labeled incorrectly the industrial "revolution," as though it had just started then), and just as the capitalist world-economy was expanding to cover the entire territory of the globe (a phenomenon we have misleadingly called the onset of imperialism, as though it were special to this era), just at this time the dangerous classes were beginning to pose a most serious threat to the political stability of the world-system (a phenomenon we no longer like to call the class struggle, but was one). We can assume that privileged strata are reasonably intelligent and alert in defense of their interests, and will normally seek to meet emerging challenges with sophisticated tools. The tools this time were three: social ideologies, social sciences, and social movements. Each merits discussion, though I shall concentrate my attention on the second.
If political change is considered the norm and if sovereignty is widely believed to reside in the people, the question becomes how one rides the tiger, or to state this more academically how one manages the social pressures so as to minimize turmoil, disruption, and in fact change itself. This is where ideologies come in. Ideologies are political programs to manage change. The three principal ideologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries represent the three possible ways one can manage change so as to minimize it: one can slow it down as much as possible, one can search for the exactly right pace, and one can speed it up. We have invented various labels for these three programs. One is right, center, and left. The second (a bit more expressive) is conservatism, liberalism, and radicalism/socialism. We know them well.
The conservative program appealed to the value of long- existing institutions the family, the community, the church, the monarchy as founts of human wisdom, and therefore as guides to political judgment as well as to codes of personal behavior. Any proposed changes in the ways counseled by these "traditional" structures required exceptional justification and should, it was argued, be approached with great prudence. The radicals, on the contrary, believed basically in Rousseau's general will, incarnating the sovereignty of the people, as the fount of political judgment. Political judgments should, they argued, reflect such general will and do so as rapidly as possible. The middle road, that of the liberals, was one that based its case on doubts about the eternal merits of existing traditional institutions, too subject to the imperatives of maintaining existing privilege, but equally on doubts about the validity of expressions of the general will, too subject to the vagaries of impulsive, short-term advantages for the majority. They counseled remitting judgments to the experts, who would carefully assess the rationality of existing institutions and the rationality of proposed new institutions, and would come up with measured and appropriate reforms, that is, with political changes at precisely the right pace.
I shall not here retrace the political history of nineteenth-century Europe or of the twentieth-century world. I will rather summarize this history in a few sentences. The liberal via media prevailed politically. Its beliefs became the geoculture of the world-system. It established the forms of the state structures in the dominant states of the world-system, and the model towards which other states were, indeed still are, required to aspire. Most consequentially of all, liberalism tamed both conservatism and radicalism, transforming them (at least between 1848 and 1968) from ideological alternatives into minor variants, avatars, of liberalism. Through their threefold political program of universal suffrage, the welfare state, and the creation of national identity (combined with externally-oriented racism), nineteenth-century liberals effectively ended the menace of the dangerous classes in Europe. Twentieth-century liberals attempted a similar program to tame the dangerous classes of the Third World and seemed for a long time to be succeeding there as well (see Wallerstein, 1995, chs. 5, 6).
The strategy of liberalism as a political ideology was to manage change, and this required that it be done by the right persons and in the right way. Thus, first, they had to ensure that it be in the hands of competent persons. Since they believed that competency could be guaranteed neither through selection by heritage (the conservative bias) nor through selection by popularity (the radical bias), they turned to the only remaining possibility, selection by merit, which of course meant turning to the intellectual class, or at least that part of it that was ready to concentrate on "practical" matters. The second requirement was that these competent persons act not on the basis of acquired prejudices but rather on the basis of prior information about the probable consequences of proposed reforms. In order so to act, they needed knowledge about how the social order really functioned, and this meant that they needed research, and researchers. Social science was absolutely crucial to the liberal enterprise.
The link between liberal ideology and the social science enterprise has been essential and not merely existential. I am not saying simply that most social scientists were adherents of liberal reformism. This is true, but minor. What I am saying is that liberalism and social science were based on the same premise the certainty of human perfectibility based on the ability to manipulate social relations, provided that this be done scientifically (that is, rationally). It is not merely that they shared this premise but that neither could have existed without it, and that both built it into their institutional structures. The existential alliance was the natural consequence of the essential identity. To be sure, I am not denying that there did not exist social scientists who were conservatives or radicals; of course there were many such. But almost none of them strayed very far from the central premise that rationality was the key to what we sought to do, and that it was its own justification. What social scientists did not do, by and large, was face up to the consequences of the distinction between formal and substantive rationality, and therefore to a clear reflexive awareness of their social role. However, as long as the social world functioned reasonably well in terms of liberal ideology, that is, as long as optimism prevailed about the reality of steady, even if uneven, progress, then these issues could be relegated to the periphery of the intellectual arena. I believe this was true even in the dark days when the monsters of fascism achieved so much power. Their strength shook up this facile faith in progress but never really undid it.
3. Rationality and Its Discontents
I have chosen my title of course with an allusion to Sigmund Freud's important work, Civilization and its Discontents. This work is an important sociological statement, even if the essential explanation Freud offers is stated in terms of psychoanalytic theory. The underlying problem is stated simply by Freud:
Life as we find it is too hard for us; it entails too much pain, too many disappointments, impossible tasks. We cannot do without palliative remedies. We cannot dispense with auxiliary constructions, as Theodor Fontane said. There are perhaps three of these means: powerful diversions of interest, which lead us to care little about our misery; substitutive gratifications, which lessen it; and intoxicating substances, which make us insensitive to it. Something of this kind is indispensable (1951, 25).
But why is it so hard for humans to be happy? Freud finds three sources of human suffering:
namely, the superior force of nature, the disposition to decay of our bodies, and the inadequacy of our methods of regulating human relations in the family, the community and the state. In regard to the first two, our judgment cannot hesitate: it forces us to recognize these sources of suffering and to submit to the inevitable. We shall never completely subdue nature; our body, too, is an organism, itself a part of nature, and will always contain the seeds of dissolution, with its limited powers of adaptation and achievement. The effect of this recognition is in no way disheartening; on the contrary, it points out the direction for our efforts. If we cannot abolish all suffering, yet a great deal of it we can, and can mitigate more; the experience of several thousand years has convinced us of this. To the third, the social source of our distresses, we take up a different attitude. We prefer not to regard it as one at all; we cannot see why the systems we have ourselves created should not rather ensure protection and well-being for us all (1951, 43-44).
Having said this, Freud then speaks historically. Writing in the 1920's, he reflects upon the attitude taken toward the social sources of our distresses and notes that an element of disappointment has entered the scene:
In the last generations man has made extraordinary strides in knowledge of the natural sciences and technical applications of them, and has established his dominion over nature in a way never before imagined. The details of this forward progress are universally known: it is unnecessary to enumerate them. Mankind is proud of its exploits and has a right to be. But men are beginning to perceive that all this newly won power over space and time, this conquest of the forces of nature, this fulfillment of age-old longings, has not increased the amount of pleasure they can obtain in life, has not made them any happier (1951, 46).
Let us see what Freud is telling us. People try to undo the social sources of their unhappiness because it seems the only truly tractable source, the only one they could, they believe, totally eliminate. Freud does not tell us if this perception is correct, only that it is the understandable perception. I have said that liberalism offered the dangerous classes the hope that, at last, it would now be possible to eliminate the social sources of unhappiness. It is no wonder that this assertion had such a positive response. It is no wonder that conservatives and radicals had to rally around liberal themes. Furthermore, liberals said that they could guarantee this success, via the spread of rationality. They pointed to the clear successes of rationality in the natural sciences, and said it would work as well in the social sciences. It was we, the social scientists, who made this guarantee.
Freud also said that humans protect themselves against pain in three ways: diversion, substitute gratifications, and intoxication. We should at the very least ask ourselves if the guarantees of rationality, the promises of a progress that was said to be certain, were not in reality a form of intoxication the opium of the masses said Marx, the opium of the intellectual class itself retorted Raymond Aron. Perhaps both Marx and Aron were right. And finally Freud suggested that perhaps, in his day, there were the beginnings of disappointment with the palliative. After all, intoxicants use themselves up. Addicts require larger and larger doses to have the same effect. The side effects become too great. Some persons die of this; others kick the habit.
Freud saw this beginning in his era. I see this having happened to a far larger extent in the 1970's and 1980's. As a result, the survivors are kicking the habit in a very big way. To understand this, we have to return to the question of the tools with which those with power met the challenge of the dangerous classes. I said there were three such tools: social ideologies, social science, and social movements. You may perhaps have wondered how I dared suggest that social movements were a tool of those in power, since by social movements we normally mean structures that oppose those in power, even sometimes seek to overthrow completely the basic structures that sustain those in power.
This standard definition of social movements is of course basically correct. The antisystemic movements which came into existence in the nineteenth century in their two principal forms labor/socialist movements and nationalist movements did oppose those in power and in many cases did seek to overthrow completely the basic structures that sustained those in power. Nonetheless, over time, these movements became one of the key mechanisms by which the structures of power were in fact sustained. How did such a paradoxical result come about? The answer is not conspiracy: those in power planned it thus, or corrupted the leadership of these movements. No doubt this was occasionally the case, but it was not the basic mechanism; it was not even a very important one. The true explanation, as most sociologists normally contend about everything, is structural.
Popular opposition to those in power has repeatedly taken the form of disruption, everywhere and throughout the history of the world. There have been riots, strikes, rebellions. Almost all of these have been spontaneous in the sense of their being some immediate situational provocation but no prior organizational base. As a result, such disruptions may have resulted in amelioration of the immediate problem but did not result in any continued social transformation. Occasionally, such opposition took the form of religious movements, or more precisely of dissident religious views which resulted in the creation of sects, or orders, or other ongoing organizational structures. The long history of the world's major religious communities has been one of the eventual absorption of such dissident movements into marginal but stable structured roles within the larger religious communities, whereupon they tended to lose most of their steam as expressions of political opposition.
In the post-1789 atmosphere of the nineteenth century, especially in Europe, oppositional movements took on more secular garb. The world-system revolution of 1848 was a major turning- point. It became clear in the defeat that popular forces suffered that conspiratorial sects were not going to be very efficacious. What ensued was a major social innovation. For the first time, antisystemic forces made the decision that social transformation, if it were to come about, had to be planned, and therefore organized. The victory of the Marxists over the Anarchists within the socialist/labor movements and the victory of political over cultural nationalists within the various nationalist movements was a victory of those who stood for the bureaucratization of revolution, that is, the creation of ongoing organizations that would prepare the ground in multiple ways for the gaining of political power.
What I am calling the bureaucratization of revolution had powerful arguments in its favor. They were essentially three. One, those in power would make significant concessions only if they were forced to do so by the threat of worse. Two, those who were socially and politically weak could become an effective political force only by assembling their forces within disciplined organizations. Three, the key political institutions were the state structures, which were daily becoming stronger, and no significant transfer of power could come about unless it was mediated by a change in the nature and personnel of the state structures. It seems to me hard to argue with any of the three postulates, and it is hard to see that, as of 1848, antisystemic movements had any alternative to the bureaucratization of revolution.
Nonetheless, it was a medicine with fatal side effects. On the one hand, the medicine worked. In the 100-125 years thereafter, the political strength of these movements grew steadily, and the political concessions offered to these movements grew accordingly. They achieved many, even most, of their short-run objectives. Still, at the end of this process, for argument's sake let us say as of 1968, the situation seemed very unsatisfactory from the perspective of popular forces. The inequalities in the world-system seemed very far from having been liquidated. Indeed, many of them seemed to be worse than ever. While formal participation in political decision-making seemed to have increased notably for the mass of the population, only a small percentage of them felt that they had any real power. As Freud said, they were disappointed.
Why should this have been so? There is a downside to the bureaucratization of revolution. One of them was documented a very long time ago by an Italian social scientist, Roberto Michels, when he spelled out the ways in which the process of bureaucratization of revolution transforms the leadership of the movements, and in effect corrupts and defangs them. This finding is now considered a commonplace sociological truism. What Michels's analysis omitted was the impact of the bureaucratization of revolution on the followers. This seems to me even more important.
I believe here is where Freud's discussion of intoxification comes in. Basically, the antisystemic movements intoxicated their members and followers. They organized them, mobilized their energies, disciplined their lives, and structured their thinking processes. The intoxicant was hope, hope in the rational future that beckoned before them, hope in the new world that these movements would construct when they came to power. Nor was this just simple hope; rather, it was inevitable hope. History, that is God, was on the side of the oppressed not in the afterlife, but here and now, in the world in which they lived or at least the one in which their children would live. One can see why, from the point of view of those in power, the social movements could be described as a tool with which to manage change. As long as popular angers were channeled via social movements, these angers could be limited. The bureaucratized movements became the interlocuteurs valables of the defenders of privilege. These movements guaranteed in effect the restraint of their followers against certain kinds of concessions, including the social mobility of the leadership and its children. By the twentieth century, it could be said that the only thing that effectively stood in the way of real revolutions were the revolutionary movements themselves. This is not to say that these movements did not bring about important reforms. They did. What they did not do was transform the system. By postponing to the Greek calends such transformation, they became the guarantors of systemic stability.
The world revolution of 1968 was when these popular masses began to kick the habit. The popular antisystemic message was for the first time turned against the leadership of the major antisystemic movements in the world themselves the social- democratic movements in the Western world, Communist movements in the bloc from the Oder to the Yalu, national liberation movements in Asia and Africa, populist movements in Latin America. Kicking the habit is never an easy task. It took twenty years for the revolution of 1968 to reach its climax in 1989 (see Arrighi et al, 19), and for popular disillusionment with antisystemic forces to overcome the legacy of loyalty engendered by past indoctrination, but eventually it succeeded in breaking the umbilical cord. The process was aided and abetted by the reality of the fact, which became clear in the 1970's and 1980's. that the social improvements of the 1945-70 period had been a passing chimera, that the capitalist world-economy could never offer a real prospect of universal prosperity that would overcome the ever-growing gap between core and periphery (see Wallerstein, 1995, ch. 2).
The result of this disillusionment has been the turn against the state, so visible worldwide in the 1990's. It is being touted as the turn to neo-liberalism. But it is in reality the turn against liberalism and its promise of salvation via social reformism that would be implemented by the states. It is being touted as the return to individualism. It is in reality the resurgence of collectivism. It is being touted as the return to optimism. It is in reality a turn to a deep pessimism. Freud's essay once again offers us help in understanding what has happened:
Human life in communities only becomes possible when a number of men unite together in strength superior to any single individual and remain united against all single individuals. The strength of this united party is then opposed as "Right" against the strength of any individual, which is condemned as "brute force." The substitution of the power of a united number for the power of a single man is the decisive step towards civilization. The essence of it lies in the circumstance that the members of the community have restricted their possibilities of gratification, whereas the individual recognized no such restriction. The first requisite of culture, therefore, is justice that is, the assurance that a law once made will not be broken in favor of any individual. This implies nothing about the ethical value of any such law. The further course of cultural development seems to tend towards ensuring that the law shall no longer represent the will of any small body caste, tribe, section of the population which may behave like a predatory individual towards other such groups perhaps containing larger numbers. The end result would be a state of law to which all that is, all who are capable of uniting have contributed by making some sacrifice of their own desires, and which leaves none again with the same exception at the mercy of brute force.
The liberty of the individual is not a benefit of culture. It was greatest before any culture, though indeed it had little value at that time, because the individual was hardly in a position to defend it. Liberty has undergone restrictions through the evolution of civilization, and justice demands that these restrictions should apply to all. The desire for freedom that makes itself felt in a human community may be a revolt against some existing injustice and so may prove favorable to a further development of civilization and remain compatible with it. But it may also have its origin in the primitive roots of the personality, still unfettered by civilizing influences, and so become a source of antagonism to culture. Thus the cry for freedom is directed either against particular demands of culture or else against culture itself (1951, 59-60).
4. Social Science and Substantive Rationality
Today, the guarantees that rationality once seemed to offer guarantees to those in power, but guarantees as well, other guarantees, to those who were oppressed all seem to have vanished. We are faced with the "cry for freedom." It is a cry for freedom from the relentless subordination to formal rationality which masks a substantive irrationality. The cry for freedom is growing so strong that our essential choice, as Freud said, is whether it is to be directed primarily only against particular demands of culture or more fundamentally against culture itself. We are coming into a black period, when the horrors of Bosnia and Los Angeles will be magnified and occur everywhere. We are being placed before our responsibilities as the intellectual class. And the last thing that will be helpful is to deny the political by designating a particular politics the rational and refusing thereby to discuss its merits directly.
Social science was born as the intellectual pendant of liberal ideology. If it remains this, it will die as liberalism dies. Social science built itself upon the premise of social optimism. Can it find something to say in an era that will be marked by social pessimism? I believe that we social scientists must totally transform ourselves or we shall become socially irrelevant and relegated to some minor corner of some minor academy, condemned to while away our time in meaningless rituals as the last monks of a forgotten god. I believe that the key element in our survival is to return the concept of substantive rationality to the center of our intellectual concerns.
When the rupture between science and philosophy became definitive at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, social science proclaimed itself science and not philosophy. The justification of this deplorable split of knowledge into two hostile camps was that science was deemed to be empirical in its search for truth whereas philosophy was metaphysical, that is, speculative. This was an absurd distinction, since all empirical knowledge has metaphysical foundations which are inescapable, and no metaphysics is worth considering unless it can be demonstrated to speak to this- worldly realities, which means that it must have empirical markers. In the effort to jump out of the frying pan of imposed, revealed truth, the intellectual class jumped into the fire of the mysticism of formal rationality. We all did it, even the Marxists as Gramsci reminded us.
Today, we are tempted to jump back in the other direction, and we are being burned again. Disillusionment has given birth to howling intellectual critics. They are making very powerful critiques about the irrationality of the scientific enterprise. Much of what they say is very salutary, but it is going far too far, and threatens to end in a kind of nihilistic solipsism that will get us nowhere, and will shortly begin to bore even its most ardent adepts. Nonetheless, we cannot ward off their critiques by exposing their weaknesses. If that is the path we follow, we shall all crash together. Social science must instead recreate itself.
It must recognize that science is not and cannot be disinterested, since scientists are socially rooted and can no more escape their minds than their bodies. It must recognize that empiricism is not innocent, but always presumes some a priori commitments. It must recognize that our truths are not universal truths, and that if there exist universal truths they are complex, contradictory, and plural. It must recognize that science is not the search for the simple, but the search for the most plausible interpretation of the complex. It must recognize that the reason we are interested in efficient causes is as markers on the road to understanding final causes. It must finally accept that rationality involves the choice of a moral politics, and that the role of the intellectual class is to illuminate the historical choices that we collectively have.
We have wandered down false paths for two hundred years. We have misled others, but most of all we have misled ourselves. We are in the process of writing ourselves outside the real game of the struggle to achieve human freedom and collective welfare. We must turn ourselves around, if we are to have any hope of helping everyone else (or indeed anyone else) to turn the world around. We must most of all lower our arrogance decibels. We must do all these things because social science really does have something to offer the world. What it has to offer is the possibility of applying human intelligence to human problems, and thereby to achieving human potential, which may be less than perfection but is certainly more than humans have achieved heretofore.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Giovanni Arrighi et al. (1992), "1989, Continuation of 1968," Review, XV, 2, Spr., 221-42.
Sigmund Freud (1951). Civilization and Its Discontents. London: The Hogarth Press.
Antonio Gramsci (1973). Quaderni del carcere, Vol. I. Torino: Einaudi Editore.
Antonio Gramsci (1992). Prison Notebooks, Vol. I. New York: Columbia University Press.
Richard Olson (1993). The Emergence of the Social Sciences, 1642-1792. New York: Twayne.
Steven Shapin (1994). A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
Immanuel Wallerstein (1991). Unthinking Social Science. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Immanuel Wallerstein (1992). "The West, Capitalism, and the Modern World-System," Review, XV, 4, Fall, 561-619.
Immanuel Wallerstein (1995). After Liberalism. New York: New Press.
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