Pels D. - Property and Power in Social Theory[c] A Study in Intellectual Rivalry (1998)(en)

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of political philosophy and political economy, the third imperialism of incipient sociology similarly expressed itself through a characteristic dialectic of part and whole. This section will chart some aspects of this double clash and of the imperial dialectic of positivist sociology.

Durkheim’s proposed science des mœurs, it is claimed, meant to encompass the various social sciences in roughly the same manner as both political philosophy and political economy had set out to do from their opposite vantage points of political idealism and economic materialism. His initial intellectual double play, we recall, was to ‘socialize’ and ‘moralize’ both political sovereignty and economic property by connecting them through the institutional staircase of the professional corporations. Throughout Durkheim’s early writings, his stated objective was to remove the unfortunate ‘isolation’ in which both the state (and political science) and the economy (and economics) dwelt, so as to bring them back into the fold of the truly social sciences. However, his more hidden and imperious ambition was to pull both the Staatswissenschaften and political economy from their elevated seats in order to establish sociology as the only viable scientific alternative. We have already highlighted the tendency of the staatswissenschaftliche tradition, as represented by von Stein and Treitschke but also by the Kathedersozialisten, to absorb the social into an encompassing conception of the state and hence to deny any specific autonomy to the sociological object.33 The following throws additional light upon the conflictuous interface which separated emerging sociology from the well-entrenched science of political economy.

In 1908, Durkheim confronted members of the ultra-individualistic ‘groupe de Paris’ such as Limousin, Villey, and Leroy-Beaulieu, which he had already censured two decades before for misreading Schäffle and the Kathedersozialisten, and for unwarrantedly claiming the disciplinary primacy of political economy. Limousin now again faced Durkheim with the characteristic claim that political economy served ‘as a focus (foyer) and to some extent as the mother of the other sociological sciences’. Dismissing Comte as a metaphysician and a utopian ‘sociocrat’, Limousin charged that the latter did not understand a thing about political economy, and, aiming more directly at Comte’s professed pupil, sharply concluded that sociology did ‘not yet exist’. Durkheim countered with confident reserve, limiting himself to a rejection of the idea that economic life constituted the substructure of all social life, and implying that political economy thereby lost its preponderance and should instead become ‘a social science like the others, linked to them in a close bond of solidarity, without however pretending to direct them’ (1982:232). Villey and Leroy-Beaulieu, however, dogmatically restated the acquired rights of their own master discipline. The latter went so far as to conclude that political economy was currently the only truly positive social science and hence legitimately occupied pride of place; it alone rested upon a basis that was indestructible and positive, because its laws were immutable, whatever the variations of opinion (1982:235).

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Already in his earliest works, however, Durkheim’s revindication of an autonomous science of morality and an independent être social had bordered upon similar totalizing claims. If economic facts were indeed functions of the solidary organism, political economy could not but lose its alleged autonomy; it had to become—as Sismondi had phrased it against Say—‘a branch of the art of governing’ (Lacroix and Landerer 1972:161, 168). Or as Durkheim wrote: it could ‘not do without a science of the State’ (1970:208). He went on to enumerate three particular sciences falling within the scope of general sociology, one of which studied the state, another the three great ‘regulative’ functions (law, morality, religion), while a third studied the economic functions; these were to be capped by a general or ‘synthetic’ sociology which alone was capable of restoring the idea of the organic unity of society (1970:213–14). Other writings, however, omitted a separate subscience of the state, although they likewise inserted both the study of religious and that of economic phenomena in the sociological framework (e.g. 1975:347; 1970:146–7). Apparently, this was not because political sociology ceased to occupy Durkheim (virtually the reverse would be arguable), but rather because he no longer distinguished it from the sociology of the regulative functions more generally. In any event, sociology was offered as the natural corpus organizing the particular sciences into a consistent whole, on the basis of a unité du genre which was defined by the ‘social fact in abstracto’, the organic unity of the social realm itself (1970:152; 1975:158–9).

Reflecting the logic of Gouldner’s dialectic of recovery and wholeness (1985:240ff.), morality, authority, and the social—terms which Durkheim used more or less coextensively—loosely referred at once to a residual or ‘intermediate’ reality and to an all-pervasive and all-embracing one. In their Foucaldian idiom, both Filloux and Lacroix have likewise taken notice of this dialectical peculiarity. According to Filloux, the champ politique, as identified by Durkheim, did not coincide with the state, but encompassed all social phenomena which concerned ‘the direction of collective conduct in communal historical action’. Durkheim’s political sociology was therefore a general science of power which viewed the special organ of the political state as a modality of the pouvoir du groupe that formed the totality or global structure; as the Division phrased it, political power was only a ‘derivation’ of the force which was immanent in the communal conscience. The very term ‘derivation’ occurred because Durkheim acknowledged the difficulty of assigning to political sociology a field which was freed from all equivocation: it was not simply the state, nor the relationship between rulers and ruled, nor simply ‘power’, but all of these at one and the same time. Durkheim’s originality resided precisely in the fact that he situated his questions ‘in the centre of this equivocation’, between politics as a partial system and politics as an aspect englobant of the collectivity as a whole (Filloux 1977:220–3). Likewise, for Lacroix, Durkheimian politics was not so much incarnated by a specific institution, practice, or form of belief; it was

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not an instance that was analytically isolable from the social whole, but an aspect or an effect of its synthetic functioning. Power, for Durkheim, was not a quality or a substance belonging to an individual, or issuing from the unequal effect of a dual relation. It overflowed all institutions and all groups; it was disseminated across the entire breadth of society as a necessary modality of its constitution (Lacroix 1981:306–11).

Both Filloux and Lacroix hence appear to congratulate Durkheim for his ambiguous delineation of the champ politique as the object of sociology, and take his dialectical mixture of partial and totalist definitions largely for granted. The ventilation du pouvoir about which Filloux speaks and his idiom of derivation and articulation suggest a formal conceptual structure which closely resembles the Marxian dialectic of the last instance or the Althusserian theory of overdetermination. But here it is power and politics rather than property and production which constitute the ‘categories of origin’. Durkheim’s dialectic of the règne social, which is interpreted by Filloux and Lacroix as a dialectic of pouvoir/croyance, simultaneously ‘inverts’ the materialist dialectic of political economy and, on the opposite flank, the Hegelian dialectic of state sovereignty, but its own peculiar equivocation of part and whole nurses a similar conquistadorial intention. The Durkheimian dialectic of pouvoir/croyance does not therefore ‘open up our way’, as Lacroix wishfully supposes; rather, it must be explained as a product of intellectual rivalry, and as symbiotically chained to the counter-dialectics of sovereignty and property.

This complicitous inversionism was also evident in Durkheim’s doubleflanked dismissal of Marxism, which was criticized both as economic reductionism and as collectivist etatism (which in his view expressed another, political reductionism). By resisting both its Smithian and its Hegelian inclinations, the sociological critique of Marxism once again emphasized the latter’s intriguing bi-zonal position straddling the British economist and the German etatist traditions—which posed an obvious double challenge for any intellectual sparring partner who decided to rise ‘through the centre’. In this perspective, Marxism’s ontological prioritizing of the economy as causally determinant in the last instance both concealed and sanctioned the practical first instance determination of the political (including the claim to dominance of political intellectuals cognizant of historical materialism). From his early defences of Schäffle to his later adoption of the industrial socialism of SaintSimon, Durkheim did not cease to oppose the despotic tendencies lurking in what he regularly called ‘authoritarian communism’, while he also had no difficulty in extrapolating his earlier critique of individualist political economy to its radical collectivist successors. Durkheim’s lectures on socialism precisely identified the tendency towards economic materialism as a feeble element in Saint-Simon’s thought, and repeatedly praised Comte for having rectified this error; his reviews of books on socialism by Labriola, Merlino, and Richard extended this critique more explicitly to classical Marxism (1975: 236ff.; 1986:121ff.). Durkheim’s review of Labriola (1897) became notorious for his

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substitution of religion for economics as dialectical category of origin, from which in his view all other manifestations of collective activity (such as law, morality, art, science, and politics) had successively emerged. In a perfect mirror image of the Marxian multicausal-yet-last-instance model of economic determination, Durkheim suggested that such secondary structures, far from being epiphenomenal, enjoyed a relative autonomy and an independent effectivity in reacting back upon the religious substratum, which all the while remained determinant in the last instance (1975:253–4; 1986:135–6).34

WEBERIAN DIALECTICS OF HERRSCHAFT

At this point, let me briefly turn to Weber, in order to add substance to my thesis about the relative unity of the sociological project as converging, across its various knowledge-geographical divisions, upon the theme of ‘knowledgeable organization’ and a generalized theory of social power. Far more than the Durkheimian consensualist view of moral authority, it has been Weber’s darker view about the inexorable advance of rational domination which has provided the essential grounding of the modern sociological theory of power and organization, as well as the most formidable alternative to the Marxian theory of production and property. Like that of Durkheim, Weber’s sociology to some extent eludes the binary dimensions of our dilemma of reduction and occupies a third outpost which is demarcated both ways. In comparison, however, Weber stays closer to a more traditional state-economy problematic, while rising more seriously to the challenge posed by the contemporary spread of Marxist theory and politics. His primary emphasis upon the analysis of Herrschaft can therefore be plausibly interpreted as ‘counter-intelligence’ against the ‘property bias’ of historical materialism, while his view of the sequence of modern history is typically cast in terms of ‘organizational stages’ and ‘structures of domination’ rather than ‘modes of production’. Giddens has summarized this reversal as follows:

Rather than generalising from the economic to the political, Weber generalises from the political to the economic: bureaucratic specialisation of tasks (which is, first and foremost, the characteristic of the legal-rational state) is treated as the most integral feature of capitalism.

(Giddens 1972a:35; cf. Szacki 1979:366; Mommsen 1989:60)

Throughout his prolific writings Weber was concerned, at the very least, to elicit the autonomy of the political dimension (and especially the role of rational domination) against both liberal and Marxist economism, as he also demanded a relative autonomy for the role of ideas over against all types of sociological reductionism. It has been argued, in this context, that Weberian sociology suffered from a contrary ‘spiritualist bias’, since it ended up by

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assigning ultimate primacy to the logic of religious rationalization and its subsequent secularization, which allegedly subordinates all other societal domains to the commanding impulse of worldviews and ideas (cf. Breuer 1991:21–2). Other commentators, however, have vindicated Weber’s own methodological resolve not to exchange one-sided materialist causal interpretations for equally one-sided idealist ones, and to lend equal weight, at least provisionally, to various types and flows of causal determination (cf. Mommsen 1989:57; cf. Weber 1963:10–12, 83; 1968:294–6). In a sense, Weber exactly mediates between the two contrasting positions by saying that human conduct is directly governed not by ideas, but by interests (which can be both material and ideal), significantly adding that ‘very frequently the “world images” that have been created by “ideas” have, like signallers, determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of interest’ (Weber 1970b:280).

Weber’s Freiburger Antrittsrede, as we noted, was still heavily marked by the etatist inclination of ‘National Economy’ in its celebration of the supremacy of the power interests of the German nation above all other considerations (cf. Mommsen 1974:37ff.; Giddens 1972a: 16–17; Hennis 1987). Even though, as a member of the younger generation in the Verein, Weber adopted a more liberal and value-free stance than precursors such as Schmoller and Wagner, his core problematic continued to be political rather than economic, encircling the problem of the advance of rational bureaucracy and the erosion of political leadership in post-Bismarckian Germany. Simultaneously, the problem of bureaucratic management and leadership was set out in much broader terms than on the level of the state proper, since Weber tracked the progress of rational discipline in all the major social organizations and institutions, betting everywhere on the force of charismatic authority to avert the threat of complete imprisonment in the ‘iron cage’ of bureaucratic rule. This question also dominated his economic sociology, which in large part centred upon an analysis of the consequences of the ‘managerial revolution’ and the bureaucratization of private enterprise. It was not the Marxian ‘paradox of property’ (those who work lack property, while the propertied do not work) which acted as the explosive mainspring of capitalist society; on the contrary, the logic of managerial control which was implicit in the modern division of labour demanded an ever sharper separation between the worker or functionary and the tools of his or her trade.

In Weber’s judgement, the socialist slogan about the separation of the producer from the means of production functioned precisely to conceal the crucial fact that this ‘expropriation’ was an essential characteristic of rational domination, defining all complex institutions and organizations in modern society. Factories, armies, universities, political parties, and states were all indelibly stamped by the progress of rational discipline, and could be analysed more fruitfully as Herrschaftsverbände or Herrschaftsbetriebe than as proprietary institutions (Weber 1968:475ff.). The trend towards disciplinary expropriation would only be extended by rationally organized socialism,

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since it ‘would retain the expropriation of all workers and merely bring it to completion by the expropriation of the private owners’ (Weber 1970a:199, 201; 1978: 218–19). In his 1918 lecture on socialism, the pressure of factory discipline was identified as the actual and original ferment of the socialist movement, and the rise of rational bureaucracy was defined as the most fatal of socialism’s unintended consequences, precisely because socialists had been trained to subordinate power questions to questions of property. The elimination of private capitalism was certainly conceivable, but it would fail to destroy the steel frame of discipline in which modern industrial work was encased. Abolition of private capitalism and private property would simply mean that the top management of the nationalized or socialized enterprises would become bureaucratic as well: ‘State bureaucracy would rule alone if private capitalism were eliminated’ (1978:1401–2).

Weber’s fascination with the interface of power and organization was clearly reflected in the conceptual framework which was prefixed to Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. His account of the various types of social action was immediately succeeded by a discussion of ‘legitimate order’, which prepared the way for a first conceptualization of the closely interlinked phenomena of organization, power, and domination. In between, he entered upon a seminal discussion of open and closed relationships, which departed from a general conception of ‘advantages’ (including material benefits and resources as well as workers’ jobs, managerial functions, or educational qualifications), which could be appropriated or enclosed with different degrees of permanency. However, domination and leadership were quickly identified as central phenomena of all social life, which were responsible for the very constitution of rational association (1978:941, 948ff.).35 Herrschaft, or power to command within an institutional setting (also referred to as Befehlsgewalt or Autorität), was seen as a specific instance of the exercise of power (Macht), which in Weber’s celebrated definition, was ‘the chance of a man or a number of men to realize their own will in a social action even against the resistance of others who are participating in the action’. As Weber himself realized, this definition was so broad as to be sociologically amorphous, embracing ‘all conceivable qualities of a person and all conceivable combinations of circumstances’. The concept of Herrschaft, however, though ostensibly placed on a lesser plane of abstraction, was hardly less comprehensive and not shorn of ambiguities of its own. In this manner, ambivalences of a dialectical kind appeared to be structurally latent in Weber’s political sociology, as they also were in Durkheim’s. They were clearly recognizable in his typology of domination, but equally in his definition of the scope of politics and his three-dimensional view of social stratification.

In an important passage, Weber distinguished two diametrically contrasting types of domination, namely domination by virtue of a constellation of interests and domination by virtue of authority, i.e. power to command and duty to obey. If it is seen that the purest type of the former was monopolistic domination in the market and the purest type of the latter was patriarchal,

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magisterial, or princely power, we are not very far from a distinction between economic property and authority as special cases of Herrschaft (Weber 1978:943). However, Weber also narrowed down the concept of Herrschaft to exclude market opportunities and to identify it with ‘authoritarian power of command’ (autoritärer Befehlsgewalt); Herrschaft then referred to the situation ‘in which the manifested will (command) of the ruler or rulers is meant to influence the conduct of one or more others (the ruled)’ (1978:946). Herrschaft accordingly figured both as the generic category which embraced market monopoly and as the narrower category which excluded it. This ambivalence resurged in Weber’s ambiguous demarcation of the scope of politics. In Politics as a Vocation, he defended an extremely broad conception of it as ‘any kind of independent leadership in action’, but simultaneously alluded to a more restricted view of politics as ‘striving to influence the distribution of power either among states or among groups within a state’ (Weber 1970b:77–8; 1978:54–5). Here politics was both the generic term which included all forms of economic, political, or cultural leadership and the specific term which was tied to the more restricted statal domain.

Similar vacillations occurred in Weber’s discussion of the master concepts of social stratification. Class position, for Weber as for Marx, was determined by the volume and kind of disposition (Verfügungsgewalt) over goods and services, which implied that property and lack of property constituted the basic categories of all class situations (1978:927).36 But the main thrust of Weber’s theory of stratification, of course, was to underscore that class (or economically conditioned) power was not coextensive with power as such, and to distinguish between an economic order, the seat of economically conditioned classes, a social order which gave rise to stratification by status, and a political order where ‘parties’ were seen to operate. The three orders were not unidirectionally dependent, but conditioned each other in multilinear fashion, whereas the Marxian view of class not only ranged these dimensions in a hierarchy of ultimate determination, but also introduced a broader conception of class which explained inequalities in the two other spheres as well. However, the Weberian dialectic of power reversed the Marxian dialectic of property in a much more immediate sense than is suggested by this multidimensional view. It is interesting to note that older interpretations of Weber’s model, such as those offered by Runciman, Lipset and Bendix, and Mills tended to discriminate ‘power’ as a third dimension adjacent to ‘class’ and ‘status’. Modern authors such as Parkin and Giddens have been critical of this, pointing to the obvious fact that the third dimension was referred to as ‘party’ and that, as Weber clearly stated, classes, status groups, and parties were ‘phenomena of the distribution of power within a community’. In this conception, the distribution of power was not a separate dimension of stratification at all, but rather its constitutive principle in all three dimensions.37 But Weber once again complicates things, so that the older interpretation is perhaps less misguided than Parkin and Giddens have realized. When discussing his notion of ‘party’, Weber indeed positioned classes within the

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economic order and status groups within the social order, but went on to locate parties in the sphere of ‘power’ (1978:938). Once again, Weber appeared to shuttle between a restrictive and an inclusive view of power, as he did in the case of domination and politics. Both interpretations therefore appear textually legitimate, even if neither of them really faces the complication that Weber’s political sociology is structurally undecided about the scope of its own master concepts.

POWER AND DISCIPLINE

This chapter has presented a rough and partial sketch of the early history and the intellectual specificity of the sociological project which differs in significant respects from what was termed the traditional or ‘Durkheimian’ view of its object. Our picture of the sociological enterprise, it was claimed, becomes more comprehensive and careful if we discard the tribal myth about the discovery of ‘society’, and recognize the varied historical ties which attached it to the venerable legacy of political philosophy. In the process, we have come closer to what might be called a ‘Foucaldian’ image of its historical project, in which the concern with the social is not particularly distinct from a concern with the political, and in which authority, power, and discipline are centripetal concepts. Given this original vocation, sociology does not enjoy the disciplinary uniqueness or independence which many present-day practitioners are still ready to ascribe to it. Rather, it appears to have been the sociologists’ prior search for social space and intellectual distinction within the then-existing field of the social sciences which has at least coproduced the discovery of ‘society’ —which was as much, and inseparably, a theoretical acknowledgement of a developing ‘objective’ reality as a transmission belt for the interests of specific social experts in the demarcation and justification of their own discipline. Thus, the sequence of cause and effect is also reversed: the object is to a large extent also configured by the project (Tenbruck 1981; Lacroix 1981; Pels 1983).

In redrawing these lines of intellectual descent, I have also submitted that the original project of sociology could best be characterized as the theory and practice of ‘knowledgeable organization’ —which could be taken as a contemporary translation of the broad scope of Aristotelian ‘politics’. This designation once more brings out the crucial impact of the competitional network in which sociology is locked together with political economy, both in its liberal and Marxist-socialist variety. Master disciplines such as political economy and political philosophy are not content to divide their intellectual labours, but channel their demarcative will and their imperial claims through the medium of rivalling ‘last instances’. Despite the sociological quest for a mediating ‘third’ position, the old reductionary dilemma therefore still to some extent survives in modern social analysis, and mortgages the definition of a whole series of basic concepts. ‘Power’ is perhaps the most important of

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these on the sociological side. Its sheer, almost totemic centrality, its logical primacy, the reduction of ‘property’ to a special case of it, the dialectical vagaries which surround its definition, which in its simplest versions invariably borders on the tautological, can perhaps be set in clearer perspective if we conceive of them in part as products or signatures of intellectual rivalry. Power cannot be ‘realistically’ taken for granted as the ‘stuff’ of social relations or as the stratificational spine of the social order, if only because it plays an additional and subliminal role as an engine of intellectual competition and demarcation.

Let me, by way of conclusion, illustrate this proposition by listing some remarkable continuities between classical sociology’s ‘third project’ and the reinvention of ‘the social’ as the ensemble of disciplinary technologies in the recent writings of Foucault, Deleuze, and Donzelot. In their various conceptions, emerging social theory is clearly seen as complicitous with the rise of a general science of policing (la police, Polizei), or a general science of social regulation, which is intimately bound to the state but not identical with it (cf. Donzelot 1979; 1984; Foucault 1977:213, 305). Foucault has been among the first to have interpreted the Durkheimian sociological object as the ‘system of discipline’ and Durkheim’s ‘social realm’ as synonymous with ‘the disciplinary’ (Foucault 1977:23). His studies of the disciplinary society have also been read as complementing Weber’s formal analysis of the modern bureaucratic state and economy, and as extending the latter’s concept of rational-legal discipline (Weber 1978:1148ff.; O’Neill 1986; Gordon 1987; Warren 1992). In this light, it is arguable that Foucault’s conception of disciplinary power to some extent synthesizes the ‘productive’ or consensualist strand in the theory of power as represented by Durkheim and the ‘repressive’ or conflictual view which has been primarily diffused through Weber. In addition, Foucault’s grounding ontology has been widely criticized for offering a highly overdrawn, demiurgical, and elusive conception of power which, while ostensibly focusing upon the disciplinary mechanisms and institutions in between state and economy, may also be taken as synonymous with the social whole itself (cf. Habermas 1987; Fraser 1989; Cohen and Arato 1992; Pels 1995b).

Like Durkheimian sociology, Foucaldian genealogy is doubly demarcated against classical metaphors of sovereignty and classical ‘proprietary’ models of power and action. Rather than deriving from a single macro-institution such as the state, disciplinary power is considered to be coextensive with the social body. The state can only operate on the basis of a vast underlying system of micro-powers of surveillance, normalization, and control; it is ‘superstructural in relation to a whole series of power networks that invest the body, sexuality, the family, kinship, knowledge, technology, and so forth’. This ‘swarming’ of disciplinary mechanisms and technologies, which appear indefinitely generalizable (Foucault 1977:211), forms the privileged target of genealogical description. It is not the ‘uniform edifice of sovereignty’ that should retain us, but ‘the multiple forms of subjugation that have a

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place and function within the social organism’; we must not study power at its extremities, in its ultimate destinations, but in its local, capillary forms (Foucault 1980:96). Hence the need for a political philosophy that discards the problem of sovereignty and the prohibitive and ‘possessive’ conception of power which is derived from it. We must eschew the model of the Leviathan in the study of power; in political theory, we still need to cut off the king’s head (ibid.: 102, 97–98, 104ff., 121–2).

Simultaneously, Foucault entered strong reservations with regard to the economistic bias common to both the liberal and Marxist views of power, which conceptualized it respectively as a possessory right or commodity, or emphasized the economic functionality of power relations (1980:88–9). To counter it, he pleaded an autonomous conceptualization of power which transcended economic metaphors and economic causal determinism. New power techniques geared towards ‘the accumulation of men’, for example, have always been inseparable from and indispensable to the economic system that promoted the accumulation of capital (ibid.: 125; 1977:220–1).38 Hence the need for a ‘non-economic’ analysis of power which clearly acknowledged

that the power exercised on the body is conceived not as a property, but as a strategy, that its effects of domination are attributed not to ‘appropriation’, but to dispositions, manoeuvres, tactics, techniques, functionings; that one should decipher in it a network of relations, constantly in tension, in activity, rather than a privilege that one might possess.

(1977:26)

Power relations are not localized in the relations between state and citizens or on the frontier between classes, but go right down into the depths of society. Although it is true that its pyramidal organization gives this power machinery a ‘head’, it is the apparatus as a whole that produces power and distributes individuals across a permanent and continuous field. Like Durkheim, therefore, Foucault thematized not only the productive nature of discipline, and its infrastructural location with regard to the power of the ‘social brain’, but also the parallel progression of discipline and individualization, and the moralizing techniques for constituting individuals as correlates of power and knowledge (cf. 1977:193–4). But like Weber, he has also remained acutely aware of the sombre underside of rational domination as a disciplining ‘iron cage’ which normalizes subjects in houses of Herrschaft, and leaves precious little room for authenticity and resistance (cf. Turner 1987:231–3).

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