Roots of Political Sociology

While the institutionalization of sociology as an academic discipline can be traced back to the beginning of 20th century, political sociology as a branch formed during the mid-20th century in response to particular political context of the time (Wallerstein, 1983). The bi-polar international system whereby competing ideologies of liberal democracy, capitalism, socialism and nationalism brought forward the problematic of states and revolutions —as desirable and undesirable future possibilities. Under what conditions do states go through profound transformations (Skocpol, 1977)? Just like Durkheim’s regulative view of social facts and corresponding pathologizing lenses of analysis of urban experience through his concept of anomie, the research on the state’s leniency towards change is laden with problematization if not pathologization of political change. Gellner humorously describes this political polemic in his foreword on a seminal work nomadism (see Ch II, part 7) which paradoxically represented to scholars both constant dynamism and historical stagnation:

“In Western anthropology and sociology, a rival theory or approach, known as Functionalism, was to be found. This took social cohesion and persistence as the central datum, and strove to explain it. The best known criticism of that school, so well known as to become a hackneyed and almost a joke phrase, was that it ‘failed to account for social change’. The critics of Functionalism sometimes went further and suggested that functionalists had a political motive for ignoring or denying change: perhaps they were paid by the established order to try and stop it, or to discourage anyone from endeavouring to initiate it, by pretending it did not or could not occur, and ought not really to occur; that society was essentially a self-maintaining, self-reproducing system, and that any deviation from this norm was pathological.” (Gellner, 1994, x)

With this conceptual opposition between the state and at time dangerous and at times supportive functions of civil society, political sociologists of mid 20th century, in fact, returned to the question of potentialities dormant in civil society which was developed in the philosophical works of Hobbes (1651/1996), Rousseau (1755/1992), Locke (1689/1988), Hegel (1821/1991) and Marx (1843/1970); as well as towards political economical analysis (Smith, 1776/2003; Ricardo, 1817/2004; Keynes, 1936/2007). In this regard, the field of political sociology borrows from historically older and well-established debates and discusses their problems in the peculiar conditions of 20th century with its own geopolitical distribution and new sets of media apparatus affecting the shape of public culture. In the latter chapters, state-centric approach will be deconstructed by foregrounding the analytics of network power.

Political philosophy

If profound societal change such as revolutions occur through the state and not just in opposition to the state, then there must be some organic link between the daily operations of society and its regulation by the state. The key term to understand this back-and-forth between society and state has been consent.consent If the state holds the monopoly over the use of violence to enforce the laws without friction, the state has to legitimize this monopoly. Sheer power needs to be socialized through the generation of authority. This authorization of state power then provides an opening for the generation of consensual participation into obedience to the state’s authority.

In the political philosophy of the early modern period, the existence of the state is often justified in contrast to a state of nature which is characterized as nasty and brutish lawlessness by Thomas Hobbes. To end the fight of all to all, there must be a unification under the state’s sovereignty to avoid endless civil war. Produced in the context of the decline of authorization of state power by divine rights, political philosophy opens the way for secular rationalization of state power. It’s not because a family line has been chosen by God, nor because an oracle has predicted the reign of the monarch but because it serves the needs of all members of society the state must absorb into its body all means of violence. The move to republic entailed a departure from blood-based (family) and religion-based (divinity) authorization of political power and thereby ensured broader participation in political community.

Yet the state’s involvement with civic society does not end with the former’s appropriation of means of violence by its apparatus of police and armed forces. Hegel shows that the conflict in civil society persists in other ways. It is in the nature of civil society to generate endless streams of conflicts of interest that fuel the civic debate that sustains the historical march of political culture. Then the role of the state to maintain conditions under which these different interests are safely and freely represented comes into play and produces new synthetic solutions out of differences. Through the legislative debate in the assemblies, and through public debate in public spheres law is given not only the repressive role against the use of violence but also the formative role of creation and protection of spaces where immanent differences of human culture are put in play.

In Karl Marx’s work entitled Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843/1970), this faith in the ability of the state to sustain the contradiction of civil society is lost. The relative autonomy of the state from the conflicts in the economy and culture is questioned as the state’s repressive monopoly is overpowered by financial and ideological forces. Marx shows that hierarchies of civil society are reflected as discrepancies in representations of interests in the state’s affairs. The state will pass and enforce rules that consolidate the economically and culturally dominant groups. As a result, Marx argued that civic work through legislative activity and public debate would be insufficient to create an authentic synthesis of societal contradictions and differences. A political program that traverses state and civil societies has to be developed and progressively updated. With this philosophy, Marx invented the idea of a revolutionary program.

Political sociology in the 20th and 21st centuries looks at this tension within civil society. How is it kept at bay? How is it released? Is civil society limited to one country or does it traverse nation-state boundaries? How is it used to fuel meaningful change by attending to the voices heard in these strifes? Under what conditions, do people still believe in the functionality of systems of representations and when do they start searching for alternative modes of politicization away from state-sanctioned modes of communication and socialization?

Political Economy

While political philosophers also at times play advisory roles in the running of the modern state they often focused debates on processes of legitimation of its authority and focused less on practical problems of sustaining a healthy governance. Political economy attempts at generating a dynamic picture of society. By documenting and analyzing the material characteristics of the population, political economists offered updated pictures of the state’s power that leaned on the population’s vitality.

Throughout history, the sheer size of the population offered an important metric to understand a state’s power as this number gives a rough idea of what’s possible in terms of taxation for a state’s expenditure and recruitment in case of warfare. Yet to intensify the state’s power ever more intricate methods of analysis are developed out ever more close examination of the population’s active life (Foucault, 2007).

The development of modern state can be summarized as a search for ever-improved ways of accounting for the life of the population. Starting with documentation of birth rates and date-rates, in the 21st century the sensing of the population’s pulse is indexed by the technologies of the time.

To intensify such intimate look at its constitutive body, the state cannot just focus on the outer limits of life but zoom in on its active life thus developing lenses to examine productive and reproductive processes. Moving from the static picture of society in demography to the dynamic picture of society through economic analysis, political economy studies the allocation of scarce resources in the context of conflicting interests in civil society. An interest in higher wages is opposed to an interest in lowering the cost of production. An interest in maintaining monopoly or cartels over certain sectors is opposed by an interest in opening markets to competition. How can state, organized economic councils and public opinion engage with this dynamic fluctuation of economic metrics?

With the politicization of economic activity, productive activity is then denaturalized. In this conjunction of philosophic and economic perspectives, political sociology attempts to offer a comprehensive analysis that holds several layers creating enforced conditions of economic interaction together. Thus, moving beyond disinterested inquiry into best form of government, in political sociological theory political philosophies are taken as sets of powerful ideas (currents, ideologies, movements) acting as animating social forces. Ideas are seeing at work in legal philosophies underwriting laws, ideologies animating socio-political strategies instead of itself participating in a discussion of what normative explanation can be offered to justify state power.

Works Cited

Foucault, M. (2007). Security, territory, population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78 (M. Senellart, Ed.; G. Burchell, Trans.). Palgrave Macmillan.

Gellner, E. (1994). Foreword. In A. M. Khazanov, Nomads and the outside world (pp. ix–xxvii). University of Wisconsin Press.

Hobbes, T. (1996). Leviathan (R. Tuck, Ed.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1651)

Hegel, G. W. F. (1991). Elements of the philosophy of right (A. W. Wood, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1821)

Keynes, J. M. (2007). The general theory of employment, interest and money. Palgrave Macmillan. (Original work published 1936)

Locke, J. (1988). Two treatises of government (P. Laslett, Ed.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1689)

Marx, K. (1970). Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’ (J. O’Malley, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work written 1843)

Ricardo, D. (2004). The principles of political economy and taxation. Dover Publications. (Original work published 1817)

Rousseau, J.-J. (1992). Discourse on the origin and basis of inequality among men (D. A. Cress, Trans.). Hackett Publishing Company. (Original work published 1755)

Skocpol, T. (1977). States and social revolutions: A comparative analysis of France, Russia, and China. Cambridge University Press.

Smith, A. (1976). An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations (R. H. Campbell & A. S. Skinner, Eds.). Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1776)

Wallerstein, I. (1983). The politics of the social sciences. Sociological Forum, 1(2), 272–288. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01112759