Political anthropology

While sociology in early 20th century attempted to distinguish itself from psychology, it nevertheless flirted with fundamental questions regarding human nature and human essence. Historical, political, philosophic contexts of authors affected how (and in some cases, if) they formulated human nature. While both psychology and sociology concern themselves with human behavior, sociology presumably examines conditions that regulate behavior and personal values; as well as external contexts that influence formation of personal motivation that animate individual behavior. As the research attempts at basic characterization of human action, political sociology takes on an anthropological character (Kant 1798/2006) insofar as there are un-generalizable differences in cultures within and across societies affecting the way each socio-political writing theorizes human behavior.

Just like a particular branch of political philosophy reflects a particular political economic position, political sociology of classes express a particular anthropological condition. To describe this particularity only in sociological terms of race, class and gender would resemble a snake trying to catch its own tail. In this work, we will explain formation and theory of social classes through anthropological lenses. Philosophical and political dynamism of 18th and 19th century Europe makes it impossible to totalize the thinking and political movements as departing from common assumptions. In fact, the very questioning of what’s basic to political community fueled political agitation of last two centuries. Simultaneous yet not synchronous process of colonization and democracy, industrialization and proleterianization, citizenship and racism make it impossible to describe linearly and one-dimensionally the political sociological history of modernity (Hall, 1990). In each of its episodes and at every juncture one witnesses both radical expansion of thinking and violent erasures of human experience.

Historical Materialism

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Marx & Engels, The Communist Manifesto

Even though the concept of social class later on became a widespread theory applicable to many societies that go through processes of modernization, industrialization and colonization; at its inception this conceptualization bore the marks of a particular socio-cultural environment. Traversing german critical and dialectical philosophic traditions with political economic research and utopian aspirations Karl Marx developed his theory of historical materialism in collaboration with Friedrich Engels. While engaging with the work of political economists, they questioned anthropological validity of their basic assumptions regarding the individual underpinning their economic models (Defoe, 1719/2003; Marx & Engels, 1970). They specifically criticized atomistic conception of individuals as basic units that make up economic activity. Social precedes the individual. Society is not an aggregate of individuals but a working totality. While they theorized primacy of society this wasn’t a static and harmonious conception. Instead they thought that society is an epiphenomenon of different classes interactions. Hierarchically situated classes cohere together internally through their economic conditions and shared interest which then produce their sociopolitical position and force. Thus, they thought that class is not conceived as a passive container but as a primary agent of social change.

The totality of economic activity namely production, exchange, consumption and reproduction differentiates its modality across historical periods most visibly marked by the instruments operative in each configuration, e.g. agricultural and industrial modes of economy. Thus, if political economists are starting with the rational self-interested individual, Marx conceptualized that their view-point is grounded in their sociological and anthropological condition i.e. it merely expresses the particular class position of thinkers namely a class that privately owns property and therefore is able to engage in relatively free activity of self-realization through dispensation of wealth and free-time. Freedom is realization of a possibility. And, this possibility cannot be taken as a given, it is always in need of explanation. For Marx, political emancipatory project is creation of conditions of possibility of this freedom for all classes. For Marx, social conditions of labor define anthropological character of human being.

It is to some extent anachronistic to call Marx a German philosopher, as the nationality defined either in terms of citizenship or cultural ethos follows in the wake of his work. Marx was in practice an internationalist and exhibited this philosophy in his practice of associating with workers transcending nascent political borders of Europe and world at large. Therefore, Marx’s theoretical work that not only formulated but also set the ground of major political sociological phenomena including countless reform and revolutionary movements, has a transhistorical anthropological character whereby human essence is both defined and overcome in practice, thereby freedom is not posited merely as an abstract possibility but manifests as concrete realization. His life of exile, his collaboration with Engels and his leadership in workers’ movements demonstrate this conjunction between philosophy and history, anthropology and sociology.

In the theory of historical materialism, the labor of working-class will be shown as the precondition of freedom enjoyed by the individual members of the industrial merchant class, namely, bourgeoisie . Moreover, Marx and Engels argued that the norms regulating society with the backing of law and armed-forces, ideas discussed in public with legitimacy and seriousness, and revered aesthetic sensibilities reflect the interests of the dominant class. There cannot be discussion of consciousness and human nature that’s blind to class dynamics. The dominant class of capitalist economy is not facing the everyday limits others members of the society are struggling with. The worldview emerging from a class position then crystallizes itself in the philosophy grounding political economy.

Thus, by laying bare these hidden assumptions, Marx (1859/1970) offered a critique of political economy. Here, Marx elaborates on Kant’s critical project of exploring prerequisites for what one takes for granted. Kant had asked what are the necessary conditions for possible experience. He philosophized that mere experience is not sufficient to account for subjective understanding. It is as though we are in possession of mental equipment that allows us to organize myriad sensory stimuli into meaningful perceptions of reality. Thus, Kant proposed a new synthetic account that addresses both empiricist (experience driven) and rationalist (mind driven) accounts of human experience and thinking.

If Kant posed the problem at the level of individual, Marx the philosopher asks it at the level society. Individual presupposes society. Society presupposes work. Work presupposes organization and technology therefore history. As a result of his processual critical philosophy upon which historical materialist political sociology raises, Marx argued that individualism is merely a consequence of a particular development of productive forces and cannot be seen as a natural category. In fact the very notion of nature is dissolved into a non-totalized concept of history where no overarching continuity is kept except life-itself.

While Descartes (1637/2008) found that thinking subject is undoubtable insofar as act of doubting presupposes a thinking subject, Marx underlined that life and labor presuppose one another. Life is never given but always produced under specific conditions. Labor is never mere expenditure of energy but in the name of a struggle for living. Thus, labor is not free individual choice. Labor always happens against the backdrop of a collectivity even when it is executed individually and it is organized in a historically and technological way. This theory becoming one of the pillars of modern worldview as it became commonplace to categorize societies by their dominant mode of production such as hunter & gatherer, nomadic, agricultural, industrial/capitalist or financial/information economy.

Subsistence of life is not mere struggle against environmental and material challenges but also against one’s own species. Marx and Engels describe formation of social classes as a result of accumulation of extra wealth that’s not immediately necessary for survival in the hands of one class which uses it to consolidate its hold over all aspects of society. While developing a comprehensive theory of how economical activity is thoroughly political, they also historicize political character of productive activity. There is an immanent dynamism to history.

Thus, against a timeless view of economic motivation and naturalization of market as a given; Marx historicized these social forms. In order to lay bare philosophic assumptions of political economy, he ventured towards philosophic inquiry into what constitutes human essence. Influenced by Hegel’s view of restless activity of Reason (Hegel, 1977, pp. 206-230) that attempts to realize its freedom through negating limits and becoming conscious of its own activity in this process, Marx conceptualized labor as the defining characteristic human essence that’s at the risk of alienation through underdeveloped relations of production.

For Marx, sensuous and practical engagement with the world where labor produces its own future conditions of possibility is where reason resides. As opposed to more externalized and objectified view of reason, Marx situates reason in the political struggle between classes that struggle over legitimate order of society. The forceful relation that grounds economical activity becomes basic driving force of history.

With Marx, ‘people’ stops being an aggregate of individuals which are evenly represented in the political order as individuated political subjects with equal rights of participation through representative democracy. Instead, looking at the civil society where economic activity takes place and where conflicts over production, exchange and consumption unfold; Marx conceptualized people as an unharmonized totality, essentially divided insofar as they are separated by their class position. What defines class attribution is the socially afforded ability to accumulate wealth. For Marx, social mechanisms ensures reproduction of class distinctions whereby societal production i.e. value, flows into the hands of only a segment of the population (Marx, 1976).

Marx argues that labor adds use. The value produced by labor on what’s otherwise less useful becomes the central point of contention. If labor’s production of useful objects, services, institutions, relations is basic engine of society; what is the value of this labor? If labor is categorically social, how can society decide on the measure of the compensation for this labor? Marx not only points out collaborative aspect of any productive activity but also on more general level interdepedency between different laboring groups where they are predicated upon one another. Thus, division of labor becomes one of the arguments for communal character of works, objects and relations that may seem isolated, self-contained and privately owned.

Thus, moving from political economic questions of how to govern the population to ensure best outcome for the state; Marx considers possibility of reorganizing society along the lines that corresponds to the discoveries made by this more fundamental inquiry into freedom, life, labor and conflict and political possibilities that are not yet materialized.

State or no-state?

Utilization of state-power is a central problematic of political sociology and political actors. To what extent one can instrumentalize state’s capacities to one’s goals? Is state as an apparatus provides a number of neutral devices such as armed forces, administration and taxation; or are these political bodies and practices the very limitations against which one raises the question of the political?

Is workers resisting the state or trying to seize it? Is individual liberty limited or protected by state? Does the state repress emancipation of oppressed groups or can it become a historical agent of progress?

The very nature of state is most fundamentally is asked in anthropological research. In response to growing bureaucratic apparatus of the state and entrenchment of hierarchical institutions of civil society, the very possibility of having social life without state is researched.

Different than political philosophic question of what’s the legitimacy of state and different than political economic question of how to govern economic activity of population, different than historical materialist question of how to appropriate state-power to transform class society; political anthropological question is “Are there societies without state?”

By relativizing state’s existence it then becomes possible to disassociate organization from state. There are perhaps possibilities of social organization without centralized hierarchy. What modularly became standard form that’s repeated across the earth has a particular Mediterrenean/European/Western historicity.

In the work of political anthropologist, Pierre Clastres, state becomes an immanent possibility social life. It is not what makes possible collaborative and regulated affairs of human communities but in fact state is an aberration from non-hierarchical organizations.  Drawing on the anarchist and anti-authoritarian political philosophies as well as ethnographic work, Clastres highlights how development of a centralized power structure is warded off through continual efforts in certain African societies. The chiefs have only symbolic power without the actual means of enforcing their will. Thus, there is a dependency and disjunction between political authority and political mechanisms. By separating force from office, the emergence of state as a result of the monopoly over means of violence is kept at bay. This ethos of decentralization will inspire a number of social movements in the second half of the 20th century drawing on not only alternative political trajectories but also subterranean traditions of direct-action.

It is important to note that the emergence of state depends on not only centralization of violence in the institution of state but also development of class society. In fact, accumulation of surplus drives higher degrees of division of labor and thereby class society. From generation to generation, surplus becomes the wealth that fuels reproduction of hierarchies. Therefore, response to this historicity does not operate on a symmetrical temporality but on discontinuous experiments. On the other hand, the historical depth thanks to excess wealth leads to emergence of impersonal continuity of political office across time.

State is the historical continuity of class society. It is the institution that ensures transmission of wealth, culture and collective memory. As a result of identification of state with temporal existence of society, cultural dimensions such language and custom fall under the subordination of political power. For instance, the means of communication gets divided into official and private languages. Collective memory becomes official records. Political sociology examines contested character of subsumption of socio-cultural phenomenon by class structures and state.

By regulating culture, state then performs its historical function of either maintaining class hierarchies or disrupting them in the name of ensuring continuous existence of society. In this role, state is idealized and acquires a trans-historical status. Different speeds of transformation across culture, economy, technology will come into conflict with the speed of development/adaptation of administrative bodies (Bloch, 1935/1991; Wallerstein, 1974). Social movements will be divided on this subject of mediation of political agendas through state institutions (Buechler, 1995) (See part II, section 10). The category of power will prove to be a crucial analytical dimension to cut across worn out opposition of state to civil society.

It is in the work of Michel Foucault, inspired by philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger as well by the theorists that conducted the French inception of German philosophy such as Kojève (1933-1939/1980), Hyppolite (1947/1974, 1997), Canguilhem (1943/1991), Bataille (1985), Althusser (1965/2005) and Lacan (1993); a nontotalized theory of power will be developed overcoming founding analytics of political sociology on the binary division of state and civil society. The work of Foucault will break new grounds whereby beyond economic activity knowledge (discourses) and techniques (political technologies) will be analyzed as core political problematics. Through decentering of power from its exclusive seat in the state apparatus towards its dispersed yet organized manifestation across network, identification of population that’s under examination with the state-population will be challenged. Economic and cultural transnationalism will demand intellectual affordances of the concept of the networked power.

Works Cited

Althusser, L. (2005). For Marx (B. Brewster, Trans.). Verso. (Original work published 1965)

Bataille, G. (1985). Visions of excess: Selected writings, 1927–1939 (A. Stoekl, Ed., B. Frechtman, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press.

Bataille, G. (1991). The accursed share: An essay on general economy (Vols. I–III, R. Hurley, Trans.). Zone Books. (Original work published 1949–1953)

Buechler, S. M. (1995). New social movement theories. Sociological quarterly, 36(3), 441-464.

Canguilhem, G. (1991). The normal and the pathological (C. R. Fawcett, Trans.). Zone Books. (Original work published 1943)

Defoe, D. (2003). Robinson Crusoe (J. Richetti, Ed.). Penguin Books. (Original work published 1719)

Descartes, R. (2008). Discourse on the method of rightly conducting one’s reason and seeking truth in the sciences (I. Maclean, Trans.). Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1637)

Hall, S. (1990). Cultural identity and diaspora. In J. Rutherford (Ed.), Identity: Community, culture, difference (pp. 222–237). Lawrence & Wishart.

Hyppolite, J. (1974). Genesis and structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of spirit (S. W. Dyde, Trans.). Northwestern University Press. (Original work published 1947)

Hyppolite, J. (1997). Studies on Marx and Hegel (D. B. Allison & I. H. Grant, Trans.). Northwestern University Press.

Kant, I. (2006). Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view (R. B. Louden, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1798)

Kojève, A. (1980). Introduction to the reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit (J. H. Nichols, Jr., Trans.). Cornell University Press. (Original lectures delivered 1933–1939)

Lacan, J. (1993). The seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The psychoses, 1955–1956 (R. Grigg, Trans.). W. W. Norton & Company.

Marx, K. (1970). A contribution to the critique of political economy (S. W. Ryazanskaya, Trans.). International Publishers. (Original work published 1859)

Marx, K. (1976). Capital, Volume I (B. Fowkes, Trans.). Penguin Books.

Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1970). The German ideology (C. J. Arthur, Ed.). International Publishers. (Original work written 1845–1846)

Marx, K., & Engels, F. (2002). The communist manifesto (S. Moore, Trans.; G. Stedman Jones, Ed.). Penguin Books. (Original work published 1848)

Mensch, J. (2017). Kant’s faculty of reason. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition). Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-reason/

Newman, L. (2020). Descartes’ epistemology. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Fall 2020 Edition). Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes-epistemology/

Spivak, G. C., Colpani, G., & Mascat, J. M. (2022). Epistemic daring: an interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Postcolonial Studies, 25(1), 136-141.

Wallerstein, I. (1974). The modern world-system, volume I: Capitalist agriculture and the origins of the European world-economy in the sixteenth century. Academic Press.

Weber, M. (1946). Politics as a vocation. In H. H. Gerth & C. Wright Mills (Eds. & Trans.), From Max Weber: Essays in sociology (pp. 77–128). Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1919)