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1 from the Birth of the Modern World to the Age of Limits Notes 1 From the Birth of the Modern World to the Age of Limits 1. This school of thought has been labelled the ‘California school’, see Goldstone (2006: 272–3). 2. Osterhammel’s 19th century in fact reaches further back in time as well as beyond the First World War in certain respects. 3. It is not possible to date this period more accurately than the 1970s and 1980s since a longer-term economic downturn began in the 1970s but the end of the Cold War was only confirmed as a political break in the late 1980s. As we shall see in the concluding chapter, economies and political change – and the transformation of nature – all have different time horizons. Still, these breaks will become clearer with time. 4. This dependence on innovation is also implicit in ideas about ‘post-indus- trial society’, which depends on information and communication technolo- gies as ‘prime movers’ for moving into a service- or knowledge-intensive society. 5. As Mann (1993: 26) has argued, only classes with organizational capabilities for change are of interest. 6. It can also be noted that although consumerism relies on technoscience or innovation – the first component of culture – this connection is at one remove: consumption rests on the transformation of the natural world, but consumer goods are exchanged via markets. This indirectness, that consumer- ism is driven by and drives economic forces, rather than being intrinsically linked to technoscience, is important for its ‘dispensability’. 7. Weber sometimes used ‘spheres’ and at other times ‘social orders’. The sub- title of the German original of Max Weber’s Economy and Society (1978) was ‘The Economy and the Social Orders and Powers [die Gesellschaftlichen Ordnungen und Maechte], but in his essay ‘Religious Rejections of the World and their Directions’ (1948: 323–359), he used ‘spheres’. Fligstein and McAdam (2012) speak of ‘meso-social orders’. 8. The specific points on which I differ from Mann will be discussed below, especially in Chapter 3 when I compare his ‘radical’ ideas with liberal ones. It is worth mentioning again that one reason that I am able to simplify his theory in this way is that I only deal with the modern period, approximately 200–250 years, whereas his theory covers the history of power from the beginning, more than 10,000 years. The same applies to the work of Gellner, Turner, Luhmann and Collins, whose work offers generalizations across human societies, past and present. 9. I use ‘nature’, ‘natural world’ and ‘physical world’ interchangeably. It would be better to use the more encompassing word ‘environment’, physical or natural, instead of ‘world’ here, but this might cause confusion with my use of ‘environment’ in the Luhmannian sense in Table 1.1. Nothing hangs on the difference. 221 222 An Age of Limits 10. Any claim about general primacy or mutual influence only constitutes a kind of re-description of social change in a different language (‘the economy is cultural here’ etc.) and so it is about language rather than substance, or otherwise it is vacuous. In Mann’s theory of power, primacy is the ultimate determinant of how the four sources are interrelated – even if they are also intertwined. For systems theorists like Luhmann, systems have their own operations and structural couplings between them, though for Luhmann, communication also acts as a kind of meta-transmission belt between systems. These two approaches illustrate how the logical possibilities are exhaustive – as long as the three orders or powers or systems are not inex- tricable from the start (in which case there is some general primacy), then primacy whereby one determines the other, or a coupling that provides an account of how the translation of one into the other occurs, are the only possibilities. The theory presented here will accommodate both and con- clude that both primacy and (limited) interaction of dominant institutions have their place (it can be noted in passing that Luhmann is sometimes regarded as a ‘conservative’ thinker, but as Moeller [2012] and King and Thornhill [2003: 201–25] have argued, he can equally be claimed for a left- leaning or radical theory). In any event, how orders affect each other in dif- ferent periods must be shown via a substantive and empirical account, rather than via philosophical or theoretical a priori. 11. Mann distinguishes spatially between extensive and intensive power: ‘Extensive power refers to the ability to organize large numbers of people over far-flung territories and to engage in minimally stable cooperation’, while ‘intensive power refers to the ability to organize tightly and organize a high level of mobilization and commitment from the participants, whether the area and numbers covered are large or small’ (Mann 1986: 7). The distinction is a useful one and is adapted to my purposes in Table 1.1: power vis-á-vis nature, where I use the label ‘intensive’, as against the ‘extensive’ ordering in market exchanges. It can be added that the spatial limit of technoscience to the planet is necessary because natural resources from beyond the planet have not actively been harnessed for social purposes in a significant way. 12. Mann (2013) also argues against such a ‘world society’. 13. The main exception to the nation-state as a unit is the European Union, but this has been added to – rather than superseding – nation-states. 2 Convergence and Divergence 1. A different approach would be to compare the ‘most similar cases’; see Archer (2007) for the political trajectory of the US and Australia; and Sejersted’s (2011) comparison of Sweden’s and Norway’s social democracy. 2. Steinmo compares not just Sweden and the US, but also Japan (2010) and Britain (1993). 3. Swenson (2002: 5) argues that the origins of the welfare state in Sweden are later, in the 1950s, whereas in the US Roosevelt’s welfare reforms had already emerged in the 1930s, which supports his focus on employer rather than worker strategies. As Mann (2012) argues, however, Swenson’s focus on employers does not rule out other explanations. Notes 223 4. Hall and Lindholm (1999: 54–8) note that a similar ‘peasant-worker alliance’ could have emerged during the Depression in the US, but it was prevented by religious and ethnic cleavages and also by the unusually high levels of violence against workers (see Archer 2007). 5. For the earlier roots of the ‘folkhem’ idea at the beginning of the 20th cen- tury, including in community centres and libraries for workers, see Bjorck (2008). 6. Pontusson (2005: 99) gives the following figures for union density: Sweden in 1980, 80 per cent (80 per cent covered by collective bargaining) and in 2000, 79 per cent (90 per cent); versus the US in 1980, 22 per cent (26 per cent) and in 2000, 13 per cent (14 per cent). 7. Health care provides another example: we can think of the diverse interests shaping American health care reform, in contrast to the comparatively monolithic Swedish health care system. 8. The average for the OECD in both cases lies between the two; figures come from Tanzi and Schuhknecht (2000: 141) based on OECD data; see also Steinmo 2010: 38–40. 9. Steinmo (1993) argues that attitudes towards taxation are not so different in Sweden and the US, but that it is elites that have been responsible for creat- ing different tax regimes. It is also not clear how attitudes to taxation trans- late into policy: Bartels (2008), for example, found that Americans voted for the tax cuts of President George W. Bush even when it was not in their best economic interest to do so. 10. A good summary of the literature about ‘small states in world markets’ can be found in Campbell and Hall (2006). 11. Separable here does not mean separate ‘to the same extent’ or ‘in the same way’: as we have seen, the state in the US is also more exposed, for example, to private economic actors, the Swedish one to union power. 12. The question of the extent to which American culture has been influenced by Sweden can be left to one side here, or perhaps to Minnesota local historians. 13. Steinmo (2010: 202, see Table 4.8) notes that ‘the US has a much worse level of inequality than other developed societies, including Sweden: for example, the share of income or consumption of the richest 10% to the poorest 10% (in 2000) in Sweden was 6.2, in the US it was 15.9’. Gender and ethnic inequalities fall outside of the scope of the argument made here (but see Walby 2009: esp. 250–76). 3 Paths towards Pluralist Democracy: Liberal versus Radical Interpretations 1. Mann, the exception to this statement, will be discussed shortly. Fukuyama (2011) makes the same complaint. 2. ‘Liberal’ is used here in the British-English or John Stuart Mill sense, not in the American-English usage of a left-wing political inclination. 3. Arguably, as mentioned in Chapters 1 and 2, for contemporary advanced states, these ‘outside-in’ forces only play a critical role where they impose a fiscal burden on the declining hegemon; the US. This is Mann’s argument (2013) about the American empire. 224 An Age of Limits 4. The fact that civil and political rights do not discriminate between pluralist democracies should not be taken to diminish the importance of their being achieved in the first place; in this respect the former communist states of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, for example, have come further than China. 5. Hall puts it differently (2006: 33): hope must not come before analysis. The political views of the three thinkers discussed here will be left to one side.
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