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 an interdisciplinary branch formed during the mid-20th century in response to the particular political context of the time through cross-pollination across social sciences and governmental interests (Wallerstein, 1983; (Eds.) Solovey & Cravens; Erken, 2018). The bi-polar international system of the Cold War wherein competing and coalescing ideologies of liberal democracy, capitalism, socialism and nationalism brought forward the sociological problematic of states and revolutions —as desirable and undesirable future possibilities. Under what conditions do states go through profound transformations (Skocpol, 1977)? Similar to  Durkheim’s regulative view of social facts and his corresponding pathologizing conceptualization of urban experience through his concept of anomie, the social scientific research on the state’s leniency towards change is laden with the problematization if not pathologization of political change. Political historian Ernest Gellner humorously describes this political polemic in his foreword to 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 the, at times dangerous, and at times—supportive functions of civil society, political sociologists of the mid-20th century, in fact, returned to the question of potentialities dormant in civil society that had been 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 to classical 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 the 20th century—with its unique geopolitical distribution and new sets of media apparatuses affecting the shape of public culture. In the latter chapters, the 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. 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 and 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 as in the work of Thomas Hobbes. To end the fight of all against all, there must be a unification under the state’s sovereignty to avoid endless civil war. Produced in the context of the decline of the authorization of state power by divine rights, political philosophy opens the way for the secular rationalization of state power. The state must absorb into its body all means of violence 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 move towards the republic as a form of government entailed a departure from blood-based (family) and religion-based (divinity) authorization of political power and thereby ensured broader participation in the political community.

Yet the state’s involvement with civil society does not end with the former’s appropriation of the 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. The role of the state, then, is to maintain conditions under which these different interests are safely and freely represented, which facilitates the production of 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 the creation and protection of spaces where immanent differences of human culture are put in play.

In Karl Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843/1970), this faith in the ability of the state to smooth out or reconcile the contradictions of civil society is abandoned. 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 society 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 have sometimes played advisory roles in the running of the modern state, they have typically been less focused less on practical problems of sustaining a healthy governance. Their more common political role has been to debate process of legitimating state authority. Existing at the intersection of philosophical, political, and economic inquiry, political economy attempts to generate 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, involving ever closer examination of the population’s active life (Foucault, 2007).

The development of the modern state can be summarized as a search for ever-improved ways of accounting for the life of the population. Starting simply with the documentation of birth rates and date-rates, by the 21st century, the sensing of the population’s pulse is indexed by the technologies of the time which are employed by governmental networks effectively expanding from state to link up with private bodies.

To intensify such an intimate look at its constitutive body, the state cannot just focus on the outer limits of life but must zoom in on its active life by 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 the state, organized economic councils, and public opinion engage with this dynamic fluctuation of economic metrics?

With the politicization of economic life, productive activity becomes denaturalized. Emerging through such politicization as a conjunction of philosophic and economic perspectives, political sociology attempts to offer a comprehensive analysis that holds together several distinct yet interwoven layers of social reality, in the their concrete forms of reciprocal action, create enforced conditions of economic interaction. Thus, moving beyond disinterested inquiry into the best form of government (as advanced by political philosophy), in political sociological theory, political philosophies are taken as sets of powerful ideas (currents, ideologies, movements) that act as animating social forces. Such mobilizing ideas are seen as operating within the legal philosophies that underwrite laws. Whereas classical political philosophy seeks to critically elaborate normative explanations that legitimate state power, political sociology grasps the role of political philosophies as forms of ideology that animate socio-political strategies.

Works Cited

Erken, A. (2018). America and the Making of Modern Turkey: Science, Culture and Political Alliances. I.B. Tauris.

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)

Solovey, M., & Cravens, H. (Eds.). (2012). Cold War social science: Knowledge production, liberal democracy, and human nature. Palgrave Macmillan.

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