The changing structures and directions of future politics will surely deliver big surprises. The majority of people regard extension of prior experience as most plausible. The inexorable growth of national states has been indeed a major reality during the entire modern period. But what if the novel recombination of seemingly familiar factors at a planetary level turns out differently? After all, this is exactly what Randall Collins argues regarding the newest technological displacement. Although none of us considers anarchism a very realistic strategy, we must admit that the antiestablishment spirit of 1968 proved one of its most enduring legacies, both on the left and on the right. Perhaps this calls for taking more seriously the values and organizational alternatives represented by the nonstatist movements tenaciously surviving in the margins. The major transformative mobilizations of state powers and peoples in modern times have been associated with wars and violent revolutions. Anarchist or libertarian calls could not be politically effective in such situations. But what if the future delivers a major nonmilitary emergency, be it frightening extinctions of biological species or middle-class jobs? Let us seriously consider what makes us believe that states or interstate alliances will prove up to the task of organizing billions of people for the altruistic enterprise of planting trees and developing new technologies or educating the children, caring for the elderly, and overall sustaining life? A self-organizing dynamic might become rather the order of the day. Who knows? This might even open common grounds for bridging the hostility between the popular movements now raging on the right and left. Here we may identify another moving front of social science inquiry into the dynamics of contemporary ideology and popular politics.
SOCIAL SCIENCE IN A TRANSFORMATIVE FUTURE
Are political hopes blurring our theoretical visions? Our answer is this: Reflexively admitting a connection between our hopes and our hypotheses is a necessary component of theoretical honesty in social science, especially when dealing with our own times. Social theory is often likened to lenses of various cuts that enable us to discern patterns in human action. When the lenses are cut solely to confirm one’s faith and denounce whatever opposes it, the resulting vision is strictly ideological. Such lenses, commonly worn in politics and public debating, function more like blinders. Theory is different because it has to be testable. What constitutes tests in social science has been a matter of controversy. We are methodological pluralists insofar as we doubt attempts to legislate the one right way of doing social science. Yet we are not complete relativists. Different kinds of problems and scales of analysis leave researchers the choice of investigative techniques. Experiments and statistical correlations have an important place in the toolkit of social science but their role cannot be universal. Disciplined ethnographic observation is often more revealing in studying localized social environments. At the macrohistorical level, which is where we work, the main method might be likened to connecting the dots in a big puzzle. Another test for macrohistorical theory are counterfactuals, the alternative roads that seemed possible at one historical juncture but were not taken. In other words, we must show both how we get from one historical situation to another and what are the actual range of structural possibilities and the factors on which events turn. This is perhaps as close we can get to an experiment in our kind of research.
Historical social science from the outset has dealt with conflict, transitions, and mutations. Hence the main question of this book: What if the future is fraught with major crises? Social landscapes are fluid and often turbulent, perhaps more like weather maps. Local events are inherently contingent even if in retrospect we can explain them by pinpointing which structures had shifted or broken down, and what human action, emerging from specific positions, ended up taking the emergent opportunities. Predicting events in the longer run is futile, but predicting structural configurations is not. Take the weather analogy. It would be irresponsible to predict that next year, say, on the 13th of January it will snow in Chicago. This is the “short” time of contingent events. But it would seem trivial to predict that it will snow in Chicago next January. This statement belongs to the longer-run time of structures. However, what about several decades into the future when Chicago climate might come to resemble hurricane-prone Florida or, alternatively, frozen Siberian tundra?
Readers seeking exact future scenarios in this book may feel frustrated. Their frustration is unwarranted. Lack of precision in social forecasting means that collectively we face a certain freedom of action on a spate of structurally available options. The options are rather limited in normal times although even then there exists political choice between somewhat better and somewhat worse outcomes. But the options become vastly magnified in periods of crisis when the usual mechanisms of status quo are breaking down. Such times call for a conscious strategy of systemic transformation. Humans do make their futures, in conflict and association with other humans, even if not in the circumstances of their own choosing. Social science should clarify what are the circumstances and emerging possibilities, especially when the possibilities may be opening and closing rapidly.
On this score we are critical of contemporary social science for its willful abstraction from structural possibilities of historical change. Our charges equally apply to two very different mainstream currents—postmodernism and neoclassical economics—that have come to dominate academic social sciences since the 1980s. Both, in their own ways, reflect the nameless period following the crisis decade of the 1970s, the decline of leftist movements, and the relaunching of American hegemonic ambitions in the project of neoconservative globalization.
Various intellectual currents, stronger in the humanities and summarily grouped under the rubric of postmodernism, became extremely skeptical of any big theories or what they called “master-narratives.” Instead they celebrated doubt, irony, lived experience, deconstruction of beliefs, and the minute interpretations of cultural practices. This intellectual movement grew directly from the revolts of 1968 and the demographic shifts in the composition of academia with the advent of women and minorities. The shift of attention to the ways in which humans imagine themselves and envision their social universes helped to instill a new critical awareness of the matters of faith that had hitherto remained unspoken and unexamined. The postmodernist movement stirred many stagnant waters, but it left them muddied.
On the opposite side, the field of social science fell under the domination of neoclassical economics and its formalistic emulators in other disciplines. The structures underpinning this situation are not too different from the erstwhile influence of astrology. A healthy dose of Swiftean parody may be in order here. Astrology before modern times, like economics today, was established expertise. It enjoyed the ears of the rulers in virtually all civilizations, East and West. It brought generous remuneration because the highest remuneration is commanded by the experts in the areas of highest human uncertainty and anxiety. In the imperial and feudal political structures based on the familial control of rent, the greatest elite anxieties were associated with dynastic succession and rapidly turning luck in warfare. In much the same way, capitalist anxieties derive from uncertain investment choices, market volatility, and the popular opposition that their operations occasionally generate. Astrology, like neoclassical economics, both functioned as ideological disciplines conforming to the common sense of the contemporary dominant classes. Astrology at its heyday, however, was more than merely a reflection of elite ideology. At its best, astrology was a highly mathematized discipline based on centuries-long accumulation of empirical observations which became the foundation of modern astronomy. Since things turned out as predicted only about half of the time, practical forecasting was subtly corrected by intuition and political acumen. A successful astrologer had to master the demeanor of an astute courtier. Much the same applies to practicing business advisers and government economists in our day.