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Structure, Culture and Gender: Makers of Global Society?
When I started studying history, culture was all the rage. We considered the ways that structures and discourses articulated with the practice of everyday life. Networks, not institutions, governed society – and the network came with holes, spaces for agency and interpretation that were enabling, and not constraining.
Later, this seemed a little problematic. I was able to describe a lot of historical meaning, but there was little in the way of vectors of causation or political-economic trajectory. Becoming attentive to the material and the structural has linked me much more to the kinds of themes Barry Buzan raises in Making Global Society: A Study of Humankind Across Three Eras. Though in reading it I also became conscious that my inner cultural historian still has, and wants, a voice. Let me explain.
I’ll start with the latter part of Making Global Society, which was excellent. In his discussion of deep pluralism, which he argues is currently emergent, Barry Buzan gives an insightful account of the possibilities and trajectories as ‘Western domination has given way to a wider diffusion of wealth, power and cultural and political authority’ (p. 334). In this context superpowers wane and tensions emerge between globalisation and nationalism. These tensions, he persuasively explains, owe as much to decolonisation as to protectionism. ‘It is about the ending of two centuries of Western-dominated, core-periphery, world order, and the opening of a multi-civilisational one’. This deep pluralism, moreover, goes beyond the geopolitical to be evident also in global or nationalist possibilities as we face climate catastrophe, the post-truth political order into which we seem to have stumbled, and the institutional frameworks – multinational corporations, a decoupling of capitalism from democracy, major shifts in birth rates, and transformations in gender hierarchies – that all go a long way towards explaining what we see around us. I found this most refreshing.
It all points to a politics for global society, however, that I found unlikely (though admittedly perhaps not more unlikely than Revolution). The key contribution of the book, as far as I was concerned, was possibly best encapsulated in this quote: ‘Instead of integrated world society defining a possible future, it is set up as the core structural framing that defines both a long past and most probable futures’ (p. 423).
One important effect of this type of analysis was that the environment is no backdrop to the global history of humans. If this had been recognised all along, perhaps we would not be in this mess. More, ‘serious acceptance of the obligation to protect the planet would mark a fundamental modification to the ground-rules of global society’ (p. 396). Though this is not, I would argue, only because of the institutions that are the real subject of Buzan’s work, but because of the logic of the hierarchy that placed Western civilisation at its pinnacle.
It was through the lens of that hierarchical set of values, norms and institutions that the narratives underpinning some of the long history Buzan gives were constructed. I know that when anyone does big sweeping work like Buzan’s, they are bound to get a few things wrong. And since Buzan’s overall conclusions are worthwhile and interesting I don’t want to labour this too much. But there were many places where I found historical errors very distracting. It is a long time since my undergraduate prehistory, but the idea that patriarchy may have emerged because of heavy farm work (pp. 92-6) contradicted even the evidence back then – let alone that emerging now – that women have always done heavy work, with evidence from early modern England suggesting work tasks were often more interchangeable between men and women than was the norm in later centuries. More, the suggestion that African people were selected as slaves due to capacity to survive in the tropics turns the essentialised racism of the time into historical fact. Without seeing that hierarchies, established during the age of empire, have also been used to construct historical narratives, they tend to be replicated, rather than interrogated. This happened too frequently in this book, for my comfort.
The issue of uncritically reproducing the hierarchies of past societies also affected my wariness about Buzan’s periodisation – his big eras. A key historical contribution, Buzan claims, is that he focuses less on the eras themselves as on transitions from hunter gather society to this awful acronym called CAPE (based on an equally hard to remember conglomerated agricultural and pastoral era), and thence to modernity. This hardly seems unusual. Again, as I recall my undergraduate study, transition was at the centre – the domestication of plants and animals, the emergence and growth of sedentary societies, the emergence of modernity. The Whiggish sense of progress embodied in such transitions was in question even thirty years ago – and as our own Dark Emu debate has shown, there is still a problem of imagining, idealising and patronising hunter-gather societies, while simultaneously failing to recognise that many aspects of agriculture also co-existed with nomadic and semi-nomadic forms of social organisation.
Altogether, my inner cultural historian struggled against the book’s structural masculinism. I found it grating to read about patriarchy, but very little about gender. The selected categories, too, seemed gendered male. Sport was a secondary institution given value in the book, for example, but not art. Art is a cultural product for which we have, surely, the longest evidence of all. Political ideology got a run, but not discourse, or meaning, or agency. Perhaps my cultural history roots were rebelliously re-asserting themselves, but it made for a frustrating read, for me.
However, I remain committed to the task of understanding structure, and they were articulated very nicely in the excellent last section of the book. And yet in the lead-up to it, there was simultaneously too much being described, and not enough. Too many details that were too-frequently questionable were offset by the absence of really important structures like capital and labour, for example, which were hardly to be seen, despite Buzan’s lengthy discussion of slavery.
I am conscious that some of my frustrations as a reader were a matter, surely, of disciplinary distinction. As a historian, I was taught to never use an acronym that would not also be found in the Daily Telegraph and so I went a bit nuts trying, without a list of abbreviations, to keep track of them all. Despite feeling troubled by the masculinism of the structural analysis, I could also see that the book was much less so than most scholarship in International Relations, for which Buzan deserves some praise, at least. Even so, the argument that global society has produced structures that are leading us now into deep pluralism would have benefited, I think, by a deeper acknowledgement of the hierarchical discourses by which such received historical analyses have been constructed. Our rejection of some of the narratives that are (probably inadvertently) replicated in this book as historical fact, after all, are part of the process by which such pluralism has been brought into being.
The post Structure, Culture and Gender: Makers of Global Society? appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).
The Road To Redemption: Rehabilitating Your Business’s Online Image
A business’s online image is as crucial as the quality of its products or services. A single negative review, a misinterpreted tweet, or an unhappy customer can cause lasting damage to a company’s reputation. The road to rehabilitation seems long and arduous for businesses caught in such a whirlpool of detrimental online attention. However, it…
The post The Road To Redemption: Rehabilitating Your Business’s Online Image appeared first on Peak Oil.
Here is a long interview about creativity and making things!
I did this podcast interview a while ago and I don’t think I shared it at the time.
It’s pretty interesting I think! Put it on while you do the dishes or something, maybe you will be inspired.
Cryptic, quick, anagrammatic – Solutions
For subscribers only: the solutions to David Astle's cryptic crossword!
Vanity project or stroke of genius? The puzzle of Making Global Society
This is a story about institutional transition, and most importantly, about the institutional transition to a modern global society. Modernity, for Barry Buzan in Making Global Society: A Study of Humankind Across Three Eras, is not the period that was established sometime between the early modern and nineteenth century period in Europe, or as a ‘quick jump early in the nineteenth’ (p. 327). Modernity, characterised by turbulence and unevenness, is a longer era that begins in the nineteenth century and is only today coming into full being (p. 319). In other words, the period from the nineteenth century to the 2020s is understood as merely transitional, and its key outcome is the making of global society. This central argument, linked to a range of sub-arguments about institutional transitions during the last 50,000 years, is based on a major analytical binary between ‘material conditions’ and ‘social structure’. This binary cuts across societal, political, economic, military, and environmental sectors, and also connects three domains of interaction: the interpolity, the transnational, and the interhuman. These replace the classic English School triad of international system, international society, and world society (pp. 4-27).
The book’s other major, and more controversial I think, contribution is to provide a ‘new way to write world/global history’ (p. 42) and a conceptual toolkit that enables the understanding of human history as a ‘whole’ (p. 36). A ‘single’ social structural framework traces the movement from ‘integrated world society’ to ‘global society’ (35). True to its structuration credentials and objective to bridge the English School with Global History, this framework manages to avoid the classic domestic vs international fallacy of International Relations (IR) theory. It is an ambitious, perhaps even wild, attempt to ‘say it all’ about ‘how we got here and where we’re going’ in one book and through one key concept. If such an objective is to be desired, there is no doubt that this book is a very worthy and impressive attempt at meeting it. It takes wide-ranging knowledge and significant skill to pull off, and thus leaves me torn in terms of the tone of my critique, as I am perhaps as much impressed as annoyed by what is achieved.
Specifically, we need to think about why one would want to write such a story. The benefit of prioritising a coherent analytical framework to produce a single accessible story of institutional development may not be worth the cost of abandoning the structural uncertainty of empirical contingencies, the unplanned fruitfulness of theoretical debates, and the recent moves in the opposite direction by most critical scholars towards more analytical heterogeneity and disjunctures (e.g. Zachariades and Basu-Mellish, 2023; Lemke et al. 2023). Moreover, the breadth and mix of topics in the book, often rushed through, beggars belief and lends itself to too easy criticism. Admittedly, this is a theoretical original intervention, not an empirical one (p. 47). Yet considering the objectives of the theoretical intervention, the leaning on empirical material is particularly heavy; Buzan admits that ‘primary institutions cannot be deduced from any prior set of principles or functions’ and ‘identifying them has to be a matter of systematic empirical investigation’ (p. 13). Thus, combing through Buzan’s 50,000 years story will be a necessary task for commentators for this book to be adequately assessed.
Nevertheless, my thoughts concentrate on the theoretical contribution of the book, which provides an enticing analytical puzzle – not in the academic sense of a research problem or mystery – but as a jigsaw. Its limitations are based on the singular narrative and conceptual framework of the book, which flies in the face of a range of critical approaches that desperately seek to avoid singular narratives about human history. Through this theoretical critique, the review focuses on my specific area of interest, the history of capitalism. Two other key areas that are also of personal interest and which are astonishingly denigrated in this book are (critical) histories of international law, and histories of race and racialisation. I cannot elaborate any further here, but recent literature in these two areas has been so prolific and crucial in rethinking or abandoning notions of globality according to political/economic/cultural heterogeneity, that ignoring these debates is to the serious detriment of the argument presented.
It concludes that one of the key questions that the book provokes, i.e. explaining why the transition to modernity was so fundamental and ‘astonishing’ (p. 323) in how it differed from what came before in terms of pace and intensity, remains neglected. This is illustrated by the way in which the development of capitalism is ignored as a structural process to the benefit of that of modernity.
An enticing 3D jigsaw
One of the liberating and refreshing moments of reading this book was being advised not to read the early chapters necessarily in successive order and thus to skip the first ‘definitional essays’ of the introduction and return to them as needed (p. 1). I experimented with this injunction, which helped me not only to enjoy the process of focusing initially on the rich empirical sections, but also to reflect somewhat differently on Buzan’s methods.
From the first pages, and even the table of contents, it is clear that this book is not your run-of-the-mill academic text. I read this book as a labour of love and as a text written by someone who has decided to write more freely without some of the usual constraints of academic publishing (e.g. heavy referencing and attention to existing debates). In return, it felt as if Buzan also wanted us to read this book with a sense of joy and deep appreciation for what some may call the ‘mystic art’ of historical sociology, i.e. the search for patterns and logics that most historians have nightmares about. In many ways, embarking on the journey of Making Global Society requires a different reading grid or set of expectations. This book is, as Buzan asserts, a mainstream or conventional approach to global history and to IR theory, based on the English School institutionalist approach and more broadly on social constructivism and structuration theory (pp. 7, 158). It also claims to radically depart from aspects of this mainstream approach, and certainly achieves this in certain regards (p. 42).
A key methodological contribution of this book is its construction as a 3D puzzle representing three different eras (hunter-gatherer, conglomerate of agrarian/pastoralist empires i.e. CAPE, and modernity, understood through three phases). These are reconstructed with the same analytical pieces, i.e. the material conditions on the one hand (technologies, energy, materials, interaction capacity), and the primary institutions that constitute ‘global social structure’ on the other hand. One could think of Buzan as using different facets or mutations of the 3D pieces, with some disappearing and some being added (pp. 11-17, 318), but a core of these (the primary institutions, such as trade and kinship), remain throughout the eras. If you mix and reassemble the pieces differently, you get a different era (p. 162). For puzzle lovers like me, this is very exciting. The structure of the book is such that one can flick through the different eras and phases according to these different analytical pieces, and compare how e.g. international law, diplomacy, sovereignty, have evolved and changed from one era to another. This picture is neat, logical, and perhaps also reassuring. Buzan wants ‘more pattern with less mess’ (p. 2). It gives sense to the chaos and the uncertainty, the violence and the inequality, and reassures us that in the end, there is a logic, there is a pattern, there is a way in which humanity fits together as a whole.
Or does it? This leads me to my question of whether the neatness of the ordering and classification is necessary, and what it hides and says about the broader approach and method. The major analytical contribution of this ambitious project, i.e. the singularity of the process of world development it assumes and reproduces, is in my view a limitation. Others are also calling this out as essentialism (see the piece by Manjeet Pardesi in this symposium, and more generally, Barnett and Zarakol, 2023). Although the book develops a very useful toolbox and hierarchy of institutional and material concepts and categories, which one is very tempted to play with, it also enables the idea that all the pieces belong to one big jigsaw. Of course, transitions are seen as complex, and there is close attention to the various geographical contexts of the various eras and how they exemplify the movement and interactions between various societies – thus focusing on the intersocietal – but the general narrative remains shaped by the singular/unilinear image of the development of global society.
This goes against critical approaches that favour and observe a multiplicity of positionalities, not only in the choice of methodologies for understanding intersocietal interaction, but also in the actual development of the so-called ‘world’. This ‘world’ is increasingly assumed to have been lived in multiple ways temporally and spatially, even during the revolutionary nineteenth-century phase of the ‘global transformation’. For example, Buzan does not engage with debates on the nineteenth-century reception of classic and early modern thinkers, and the mixed and achronological lineages of intellectual history that shaped the construction and reception of so-called positive international law (e.g. Vergerio, 2019). Relatedly, indigenous studies today are calling for the acknowledgement of non-Western societies’ different temporal philosophies regarding their relationship to each other and the environment/ecology, and are struggling today to maintain or relive in these alternative temporalities and spatialities (Rosenow, 2023). In other words, there should be a commitment to take these societies and intellectual trajectories seriously by keeping the box of ‘global social structure’ more open to alternative trajectories and developmental paths that have been submerged by global society and that contest its premises. This is different to what Buzan understands by ‘deep pluralism’ (p. 332), his prediction of our common future that remains a feature of the singular ‘global social structure’ that emerged through modernity and its preceding eras.
However, it is also due to how one should methodologically approach the development of modernity, and resist the mono-causal mode of development it imposed on non-Western societies by acknowledging this process without necessarily accepting its consequences. In other words, IR should reflect more openly on the potential for analytical multiplicity of interaction and/or entanglement. This is what the latest generation of critical scholars in IR and historical sociology have been trying to do for several decades now (e.g. Duzgun, 2022; Morton, 2023; Salgado, 2023). Buzan sadly does not reflect on this scholarship, and remains fixated with ‘the global’, a product of the modernity he so richly presents to us but of which he remains a victim by reproducing one of its major fallacies, the path-dependency of development as one single linear process. In effect, ‘[o]ver the first two centuries following the CAPE era, the planet shrank into a single economic, military, social, and environmental space’ (p. 181). This is not a controversial point that the studies above would necessarily disagree with, as capitalism did have that effect. The real problem lies with how previous eras of the CAPE and hunter-gatherer bands are defined according to the eventual making of this one big global society. The book implicitly makes this argument throughout as we get a sense of the very gradual, slow, and then eventually very fast unfolding of history. However different the eras, they remain deeply connected and part of the same temporal trajectory or developmental path.
Modernity vs Capitalism and the lack of deep structural causality
One of Buzan’s responses to the above critique of the single analytical framework to trace global institutional development might be to highlight its grounding in ‘[uneven and combined development] UCD, multiple modernities, and varieties of capitalism as fixed features of the development of modernity’ (p. 160). In effect, Buzan’s project does try to incorporate multiplicity and dialectical evolution as necessary elements of the making of global society, even though they remain subsumed and functionally derivative of the main drive towards globality. The book also has significant appeal for a Marxist such as myself concerned with a more institutional aspect of the development of capitalism, i.e. its relation to the development of international law, or more exactly, jurisdictional processes of accumulation, since it brings together political and economic dimensions of large-scale intersocietal development (Pal, 2021). Buzan adopts an analytically structural approach to global history, situates global society as beginning its transition in the nineteenth century, and pays attention to developments in the nineteenth century that could be interpreted as acknowledging the structural impact of the global expansion of capitalism in explaining the unique and extraordinary shift to modernity. The discussion of trade in the CAPE era and its shift to ‘market vs economic nationalism’ in the modern era shows attention to some of the structural changes brought about by capitalism.
Yet the concept of capitalism is clearly of little interest to Buzan, who does not bother much to define or reflect on whether it further explains the ‘astonishing’, ‘extraordinary’, and mostly unexplained pace and intensity of the beginning of the transition to modernity. Instead, Buzan focuses on trade as the key concept and institution, carried over from the CAPE into modernity, albeit driven by the market as the key new institution (263-277). There is no distinct or structural break in economic processes or logics with the advent of capitalism, and it is not clear what position Buzan adopts on the transition to capitalism. As mentioned above, for each primary institution discussed, there is a sense of unintended slippage from one era to another, without any clear causal narrative for each institution.
Buzan rejects Marxism and what he considers to be a teleological approach to dialectics, and with it the potential for an alternative or even perhaps more complementary set of causal factors to explain events in the nineteenth century. He thus throws away the baby with the bathwater, as the drive to establish the single analytical framework is stronger than one of its unintended perhaps implications: why does global society emerge at this point in the story of humankind? What propelled the shift from integrated world society to global society? Buzan teeters around this big question, and states at the start that this project is not a grand theory looking for a ‘single causal driver or predictable pattern of events’ ([p. 42). Instead, he provides a rich narrative of interchangeable pieces of a grand jigsaw, the institutional vs material background and frontstage of events, leading up to and constituting this most significant moment of history. Yet the reader remains at pains to find out why those events specifically accelerated and came together in such a way as to shift what is a slow and more stable history for thousands of years, to the reversal of those characteristics from the nineteenth-century onwards.
Thus, Buzan shies away from any deep or thick causality, in exchange for a myriad of categories and concepts that the reader is offered to play around with as well (as long as they fit inside the main story of the making of global society). Nevertheless, he does have a clear approach to evolutionary development based more in ‘zhongyong’ than in Hegelian dialectics (pp. 20-23). This is presented as a non-teleological and non-conflictual approach that focuses on accepting and managing contradictions to reveal an overarching harmony that encompasses the contradictions. Accordingly, the structure of the book and of the framework reveals a linear consequentialism based on the single holistic idea of the making of global society. This is illustrated when looking at trade, and its role ‘as the signature accomplishment of the CAPE era in terms of laying the foundations for global society’ (p. 104). In spite of accusing Marxists of teleology through the adoption of Hegelian dialectics, Buzan’s making of global society is traced backwards to provide a slow and unique origin story, through which it seems inevitably that all primary and secondary institutions eventually lead to this process. In other words, the emergence of global society is not astonishing and extraordinary enough to be contingent or explained clearly through a key causal process. Instead, it is latent, waiting to be unleashed, as capitalism is conceived of in Weberian (Neal and Williamson, 2014) and some Marxist commercialisation models (Wallerstein, 1974). Its foundations are buried deep in previous eras and in the institutional taxonomy provided, and therefore do not need as much empirical explanation.
Beyond the analytical disagreement here on how to express and trace causality either through historical contingency or through the lens of specific outcomes, there is an empirical issue about the relationship between modernity and capitalism. Buzan obviously favours presenting the institutional factors that constitute modernity, whereas a Marxist would be weary of how this modernity becomes enmeshed with – and better understood as a product of – the transformations associated with the expansion of capitalism. This is not to replace the single ‘global’ framework to one determined by capitalism, au contraire. This is to reflect on how one of the features of capitalism was to produce this material need and sense of institutional inevitability that we associate with modernity. I agree with Buzan on the need to isolate institutional developments from the trajectory of capitalism, and I have tried to do this in my own work on jurisdiction and extraterritoriality. But I disagree that this focus on institutions justifies ignoring specific structural drivers or overarching structures that in certain temporal and spatial conditions, dominate the relations between primary and secondary institutions (such as capitalism, but one could add others such as feudalism, mercantilism, or indigenous societies).
To conclude, my main issue with this book is that everything is thrown into the same bag, when more and more critical research is instead trying to disentangle and reclassify various movements and moments of development according to cultural, economic, geopolitical, ecological factors that interact but also remain autonomous. This book says so much that in the end, one wonders if it doesn’t end up saying very little, e.g. modernity is longer than we think, and environmental and technological conditions will shape tomorrow’s challenges. Of course, this is unfairly reductive. But there is a danger when producing such grandiose and holistic projects, that the finer granular detail that actually is at the core of explaining transitions gets lost. More positively, this book is a great resource and notable achievement, it stands as a highly impressive résumé of institutional interaction, it is very well written and accessible in spite of the quasi-ridiculous span of data and concepts it covers, and it manages to weave this material together in a coherent and often breath-taking argument and presentation.
The post Vanity project or stroke of genius? The puzzle of Making Global Society appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).
Yanis Varoufakis, Australia & the New Cold War in the Age of Technofeudalism
Yanis Varoufakis, ‘Australia & the New Cold War in the Age of Technofedualism’
Date: Monday 11 March 2024
Time: 10:00 am – 11:00 am AEDT
Location: Institute Lecture Theatre (1) N295, Institute Building (H03), Camperdown Campus, University of Sydney
Free registration: Australia & the New Cold War in the Age of Technofeudalism | Humanitix
About the talk
Join economist and former Greek Finance Minister, Yanis Varoufakis for a special talk at the University of Sydney. Yanis will discuss his new book, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, and its implications for Australia as the world enters a ‘New Cold War’ of geopolitical tensions between the United States and China.
Varoufakis argues that big tech has replaced capitalism’s twin pillars—markets and profit—with its platforms and rents. With every click and scroll, we labor like serfs to increase its power. This is Technofeudalism: the new power that is reshaping our lives and the world, and the greatest current threat to the liberal individual, to our efforts to avert climate catastrophe—and to democracy itself.
Drawing on stories from Greek myth and pop culture, from Homer to Mad Men, Varoufakis will explain this revolutionary transformation: how it enslaves our minds, how it rewrites the rules of global power, and, ultimately, what it will take to overthrow it.
The post Yanis Varoufakis, Australia & the New Cold War in the Age of Technofeudalism appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).
Best of 2023 in Australian Reading
Four of Meanjin's finest book critics look back on their favourite reading of 2023.
A mute voice has no echo.
We weren’t clear enough on this. We’ve made our position clearer.
Last call for free bonus game cards! (Only through Feb. 29)
UPDATED TO ADD: I forgot there’s an extra day in February this year! So I will leave the claim form open through FEBRUARY 29 and then close it down.
Thanks to those of you who have submitted your information to get free bonus game cards!
I figured I would wait a beat (until the holiday frenzy had passed) to give folks one final chance to submit, and then I’ll get the cards printed and sent out.
That final chance has come!
Claim your exclusive bonus cards now:
As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I would really like you to get copies of two of my recent tabletop games: Keep it 100 and Humblebrag.
Both are party games:
- Keep it 100 is a slightly adult-themed (but clean-up-able) survey-results guessing and betting game, similar to Family Feud meets Timeline.
- Humblebrag is a Scattergories-type quick-thinking game with a B.S. bluffing element.
If you already have (or choose to obtain) either game, just send me your receipt or a photo of your game — and I will mail you a free pack of 10 bonus cards for either game (or both)!
The Humblebrag bonus cards are just some fun new categories I thought up.
The Keep it 100 bonus cards feature 10 new survey questions. These are the same survey questions I asked you a few months ago! We’ve had about 500 responses to the surveys so far.
If you haven’t taken the surveys yourself, feel free to do so now! (Whether or not you have the game!)
It’ll be the aggregated answers to those specific questions that will feature on the bonus cards, so the larger the sample of respondents, the better they’ll work for the game.
Meaning, if you want to know the final cumulative answers… you’ll have to get the bonus cards!
I will leave the submission form open for the rest of the month — through February 28 29.
Then I will close the form, compile the survey data, print all the bonus cards, and mail them out to everyone who submitted their information! These cards will not be reprinted after this bonus offer.
To repeat: you just have to submit either your receipt (if you get either game now) or just a photo of your copy (if you already have one) to qualify for the free bonus cards.
Here’s where you can find these games:
- Keep it 100: Target (US) | Amazon (US) | Amazon (UK) | Amazon (Canada) | Rest of World
- Humblebrag: Barnes & Noble (US) | Amazon (UK) | Rest of World
Thanks so much and I hope you enjoy the game(s)!!
