Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T16:41:50.720Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Method or madness? Sociolatry in international thought

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 July 2015

PATRICIA OWENS
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

International theory has a social problem. Twenty years after the so-called ‘social turn’, the historical origins of distinctly social forms of thought are not subject to scrutiny, let alone well understood. Indeed, the problem of the ahistorical social is an issue not only for predominant liberal, realist, and constructivist appropriations of social theory, but also the broad spectrum of critical and Marxist modes of theorising. In contrast to practicing sociolatry, the worship of things ‘socio’, this article addresses the historicity of the social as both a mode of thought – primarily in social theories and sociology – against the background of the emergence of the social realm as a concrete historical formation. It highlights problems with the social theoretic underpinnings of liberalism, social constructivism, and Marxism and advances an original claim for why the rise of the social was accompanied by attacks on things understood (often erroneously) as political. To fully understand these phenomena demands a closer examination of the more fundamental governance form the modern social realm was purported to replace, but which it scaled up and transformed.

Type
Forum
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 41 , Issue 4 , October 2015 , pp. 655 - 674
Copyright
© British International Studies Association 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

Research for this article was supported by a year long Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. For comments on earlier drafts, I am grateful to three anonymous reviewers and co-panellists and audience members at the 2012 and 2013 ISA Annual Conventions and during presentations at the LSE, Oxford, Aberystwyth, Westminster, City University, Sussex, and Harvard.

References

1 Rosenberg, Justin, ‘Why is there no international historical sociology?’, European Journal of International Relations, 12:3 (2006), p. 335 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Hoffmann, Stanley, ‘An American social science: International Relations’, Daedalus, 106:3 (1977), pp. 41–60 Google Scholar.

3 Bigo, Didier and Walker, R. B. J., ‘International, political, sociology’, International Political Sociology, 1:1 (2007), p. 1 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Lawson, George and Shilliam, Robbie, ‘Sociology and International Relations: Legacies and prospects’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 23:1 (2010), p. 71 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Cf. ‘sociology and social theory… have so far played only a marginal role in the development of international relations’ (Bigo and Walker, ‘International’, p. 1.)

5 These terms are taken from Lawson, George and Hobson, John M., ‘What is history in International Relations?’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 37:2 (2008), pp. 415–435 Google Scholar.

6 Gordon, Daniel, Citizens without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 51 Google Scholar.

7 Weber, Martin, ‘The critical social theory of the Frankfurt School, and the “social turn” in IR’, Review of International Studies, 31:1 (2005), pp. 195–209 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Buzan, Barry and Little, Richard, ‘Why International Relations has failed as an intellectual project’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 30:1 (2001), pp. 19–39 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Wendt, Alexander, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 5 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Collins, Randall and Makowsky, Michael, The Discovery of Society (New York, Random House, 1972)Google Scholar; Hawthorn, Geoffrey, Enlightenment and Despair: a History of Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977)Google Scholar; Greenwood, John D. (ed.), The Mark of the Social: Discovery or Invention? (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1977)Google Scholar; Bottomore, Tom and Nisbet, Robert (eds), A History of Sociological Analysis (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1979)Google Scholar; Hundert, E. J., The Enlightenment’s Fable: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Swingewood, Allen, A Short History of Sociological Thought (3rd edn, London: Palgrave, 2000)Google Scholar; Coser, Lewis A., Masters of Sociological Thought: Ideas in Historical and Social Context (2nd edn, Long Grove, Il: Waveland Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

11 Baker, Kenneth Michael, ‘Enlightenment and the institution of society: Notes for a conceptual history’, in Willem Melching and Wyger Velema (eds), Main Trends in Cultural History: Ten Essays (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), pp. 95–120 Google Scholar.

12 Bigo, and Walker, , ‘International’, p. 4 Google Scholar.

13 Wagner, Peter, ‘“An entirely new object of consciousness, of volition, of thought”: the coming into being and (almost) passing away of “society” as a scientific object’, in Lorraine Daston (ed.), Biographies of Scientific Objects (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 132–157 Google Scholar.

14 Waltz, Kenneth N., Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979)Google Scholar; Cox, Robert, ‘Social Forces, states and world orders: Beyond International Relations theory’, in Robert O. Keohane (ed.), Neorealism and its Critics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 204–254 Google Scholar; Keohane, Robert O. and Nye, Joseph, Power and Interdependence (New York: Harper Collins, 1989)Google Scholar; Onuf, Nicholas, Worlds of Our Making: Rules and Rule in Social Theory and International Relations (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

15 Comte, Auguste, System of Positive Polity or Treatise on Sociology: Instituting the Religion of Humanity (London: Longmans, Green and co., 1875), p. 116 Google Scholar.

16 Sociologism is the belief that ‘sociology should become the new queen of the sciences of man, the magistra of philosophy, ethics, historiography, jurisprudence, political science, art theory, and the like’. Szacki, Jerzy, History of Sociological Thought (London: Aldwych, 1979), p. 278 Google Scholar.

17 The point is not to suggest that there is only one form of enlightenment thought, rather that claims about the ‘discovery’ of society are based on a particular reading of the enlightenment. See Baker, ‘Enlightenment and the institution of society’.

18 This article is the first effort to address the consequences of the historicity of social thought for international theory. For earlier analyses of different empirical domains see Owens, Patricia, Economy of Force: Counterinsurgency and the Historical Rise of the Social (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Owens, , ‘From Bismarck to Petraeus: the question of the social and the social question in counterinsurgency’, European Journal of International Relations, 19:1 (2013), pp. 135–157 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Owens, , ‘Human security and the rise of the social’, Review of International Studies, 38:3 (2012), pp. 547–567 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Owens, , ‘The supreme social concept: the un-worldliness of modern security’, New Formations, 71 (2011), pp. 14–29 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Due to lack of space, we cannot address the relationship between Realpolitik and the rise of Sozialpolitik. Suffice to say that modern political realism represents a primarily German reassertion of the autonomy of the so-called ‘political’ (state) domain against French and Scottish Enlightenment claims of the autonomy of society. See Steinmetz, George, Regulating the Social: the Welfare State and Local Politics in Imperial Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Owens, ‘From Bismarck to Petraeus’. We also cannot address Foucaultian work in any detail. However, this other dominant tradition of critical international theory also freely draws on Foucault’s assumed ‘analytics of the social sphere’ or his account of ‘political society’. See Huysmans, Jef, ‘The jargon of exception – on Schmitt, Agamben and the absence of political society’, International Political Sociology, 2:2 (2008), pp. 165–183 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Jabri, Vivienne, ‘Michel Foucault’s analytics of war: the social, the international, and the racial’, International Political Sociology, 1:1 (2007), pp. 67–81 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. These sociological readings of Foucault are dominant in IR, even though Foucault himself and many of his followers outside this field have been more circumspect about social language and more attentive to the historical conditions of its emergence. See Donzelot, Jacques, L'invention du Social: Essai sur le déclin des Passions Politiques (Paris: Fayard, 1984)Google Scholar; and Deleuze, Giles, ‘Foreword: the rise of the social’, in Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families: Welfare versus the State (London: Hutchinson, 1979), pp. ix–xviiGoogle Scholar; Owens, ‘Human security’.

20 See, for example, Weber, Max, Economy and Society: an Outline of Interpretative Sociology, Vol. 1, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978)Google Scholar; and McKeon, Michael, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

21 Habermas, Jürgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991 [orig. pub. 1962]), p. 127 Google Scholar; Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958)Google Scholar, part II, ch. 6; Owens, Economy of Force.

22 Habermas, , The Structural Transformation, p. 28 Google Scholar.

23 Withington, Phil, Society in Early Modern England: the Vernacular Origins of some Powerful Ideas (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), p. 112 Google Scholar.

24 Bartelson, Jens, ‘Towards a genealogy of “society” in International Relations’, Review of International Studies, 41:5 (2015)Google Scholar, this Forum. In Bull’s ‘English School’ definition, a society ‘exists when a group of states, conscious of certain common interests and common values, form a society in the sense that they conceive themselves to be bound by a common set of rules in their relations with one another, and share in the working of common institutions’. Bull, Hedley, The Anarchical Society: a Study of Order in World Politics (London: Macmillan, 1977), p. 13 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also see Bull, Hedley, ‘The Grotian conception of international society’, in Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight (eds), Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory of International Politics (London: Allen & Unwin, 1966), pp. 51–73 Google Scholar. This ‘definition’ of society derives from Durkheim’s attempt to offer a sociological – rather than political – explanation for the violent and extreme disorder of the Third Republic.

25 Kessler, Amalia D., A Revolution in Commerce: the Parisian Merchant Court and the Rise of Commercial Society in Eighteenth-Century France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 158 Google Scholar.

26 ‘“Asocial sociability”’, in Doyle’s influential interpretation of Kant’s idea, ‘draws men together to fulfill needs for security and material welfare as it drives them into conflicts over the distribution and control of social [sic] products. This violent natural evolution tends towards the liberal peace because “asocial sociability” inevitably leads toward republican governments, and republican governments are a source of liberal peace.’ Doyle, Michael W., ‘Liberalism and world politics’, The American Political Science Review, 80:4 (1986), p. 1160 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Locke, John, Two Treaties of Government, Introduction and notes by Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963 [orig. pub. 1689])Google Scholar.

28 Dubber, Markus Dirk, The Police Power: Patriarchy and the Foundations of American Government (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. and ed. Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller, and Harold S. Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989 [orig. pub. 1748])Google Scholar.

30 Hume, David, A Treatise on Human Nature, Volume 2 (Rockville, MD: Wildside Press LLC, 2007 [orig. pub. 1738])Google Scholar; Finlay, Christopher J., Hume’s Social Philosophy: Human Nature and Commercial Sociability in: A Treatise of Human Nature (New York: Continuum, 2007)Google Scholar; Singer, Brian C. J., ‘Montesquieu, Adam Smith and the discovery of the social’, Journal of Classical Sociology, 4 (2004), pp. 31–57 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 The language of ‘polished commercial nations’ pervades Ferguson, Adam, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995 [orig. pub. 1767])Google Scholar. As Koselleck put it, ‘under the protection of the Absolutist State … the new society created its institutions, the tasks of which … were “social”’. Koselleck, Reinhart, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988 [orig. pub. 1959]), p. 66 Google Scholar.

32 Gordon, , Citizens without Sovereignty, p. 53 Google Scholar; also see Elias, Norbert, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000)Google Scholar.

33 Smith, Adam, Lectures on Justice, Peace, Revenue and Arms (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1896 [orig. pub. 1763])Google Scholar.

34 Moravcsik, Andrew, ‘Taking preferences seriously: a liberal theory of international politics’, International Organization, 51:4 (1997), pp. 513–553 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Bull, Anarchical Society.

36 Deudney, Daniel H., Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007)Google Scholar. Contra Deudney, the ‘republican’ characteristics of eighteenth-century European polities were largely formulated through the new conceptual language of society. Indeed, modes and rituals of sociability were central to the transformation of, rather than realisation, of earlier republican conceptions of political virtue into nascent liberal notions of the proper humane conduct of individuals in commercial society.

37 For excellent accounts see Heilbron, Johan, The Rise of Social Theory, trans. Sheila Gogol (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Wolin, Sheldon, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (expanded edn, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Terrier, Jean, Visions of the Social: Society as a Political Project in France, 1750–1950 (Boston: Brill, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 Moravcsik, , ‘Taking preferences seriously’, pp. 513 Google Scholar, 517.

39 Prakash, Gayan, ‘The colonial genealogy of society: Community and political modernity in India’, in Patrick Joyce (ed.), The Social in Question: New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 81–96 Google Scholar; Kaviraj, Sudipta and Khilnani, Sunil (eds), Civil Society: History and Possibilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Bhambra, Gurminder, Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination (London: Palgrave, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 See, variously, Knutsen, Torbjørn L., A History of International Relations Theory (2nd edn, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997)Google Scholar, ch. 4; Keene, Edward, International Political Thought: a Historical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 2005)Google Scholar, chs 5–6; Pitts, Jennifer, A Turn to Empire: the Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hont, Istvan, ‘The language of sociability and commerce: Samuel Pufendorf and the theoretical foundations of the “Four Stages” theory’, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 159–184 Google Scholar; Habermas, Structural Transformation; Meek, Ronald, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976)Google Scholar; Jahn, Beate, The Cultural Construction of International Relations: the Invention of the State of Nature (London: Palgrave, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 Wagner, Peter, A Sociology of Modernity: Liberty and Discipline (London: Routledge, 1994)Google Scholar; on the formative role of the 1847 Indian Mutiny on social theory see Mantena, Karuna, ‘Social theory in the Age of Empire’, in Sankar Muthu (ed.), Empire and Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 324–350 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 Hobsbawm, Eric, The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962)Google Scholar; Bayly, C. A., The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004)Google Scholar; Buzan, Barry and Lawson, George, The Global Transformation: History, Modernity and the Making of Modern International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43 Comte, System of Positive Polity; Sir Maine, Henry Sumner, Village-Communities in the East and West (London: John Murray, 1876)Google Scholar; Tönnies, Ferdinand, Community and Association (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1955 [orig. pub. 1887])Google Scholar; Durkheim, Émile, The Division of Labour in Society, trans. W. D. Halls; intro. Lewis A. Coser (New York: The Free Press, 1984 [orig. pub. 1893])CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gierke, Otto, Natural Law and the Theory of Society, 1500-1800, Volume I, trans. and intro. Ernest Barker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934)Google Scholar.

44 Castel, Robert, From Manual Workers to Wage Laborers: Transformation of the Social Question (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2003)Google Scholar; Corrigan, Philip and Sayer, Derek, ‘The Working Class question: “Society” and society’, The Great Arch: English State Formation and Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985)Google Scholar, ch. 6; Seidman, Steven, Liberalism and the Origins of European Social Theory (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983)Google Scholar.

45 Gordon, , Citizens without Sovereignty, p. 240 Google Scholar.

46 Engels, Friedrich, ‘Preface to the English edition of 1888’, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London: Penguin, 2002 [orig. pub. 1888]), p. 202 Google Scholar.

47 Adler, Emanuel, ‘Seizing the middle ground: Constructivism in world politics’, European Journal of International Relations, 3:3 (1997), pp. 319–363 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wendt, Alexander, ‘On the via media: a response to the critics’, Review of International Studies, 26 (2000), pp.165–180 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 Polanyi, Karl, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001 [orig. pub. 1957]), p. 153 Google Scholar; also see Myrdal, Gunnar, The Political Element in the Development of Economic Theory, trans. Paul Streeten (London: Routledge, 1953)Google Scholar.

49 Ruggie, John, Embedding Global Markets: an Enduring Challenge (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008)Google Scholar.

50 Moravcsik, , ‘Taking preferences seriously’, p. 527 Google Scholar. This idea was extended to the period of post-Second World War US hegemony and the rise of an American regulatory state during the New Deal. ‘Just as the New Deal government increasingly took active responsibility for the welfare of the nation, US foreign policy planners took increasing responsibility for the welfare of the world’. Burley, Anne-Marie, ‘Regulating the world: Multilateralism, international law, and the projection of the New Deal regulatory state’, in John Ruggie (ed.), Multilateralism Matters: the Theory and Praxis of an Institutional Form (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 131 Google Scholar.

51 Dean, Mitchell, The Constitution of Poverty: Toward a Genealogy of Liberal Governance (London: Routledge, 1991)Google Scholar; Castel, From Manual Workers.

52 Castel, , From Manual Workers, p. 270 Google Scholar.

53 Durkheim, Émile, The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and its Method, ed. and intro. Steven Lukes, trans. W. D. Halls (London: Macmillan, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54 Szacki, Jerry, ‘Sociologism: Sociology as the fundamental social science’, History of Sociological Thought, ch. 10 Google Scholar.

55 Rabinow, Paul, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 10 Google Scholar.

56 Mead was highly influential on Berger, Peter L. and Luckmann, Thomas, The Social Construction of Reality: a Treaties in the Sociology of Knowledge (new edn, London: Penguin, 1991)Google Scholar.

57 Deegan, Mary Jo, ‘George Herbert Mead’, in John Scott (ed.), Fifty Key Sociologists: the Formative Theorists (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 113 Google Scholar.

58 Mead, George H., Mind, Self and Society: from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist, ed. and intro. Charles W. Morris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934)Google Scholar.

59 In Wendt’s formulation, ‘the meanings an actor attributes to itself while taking the perspective of Others, while seeing itself as a social object … is a key link in the chain by which culture constitutes agents’. Wendt, , Social Theory, p. 182 Google Scholar.

60 Ibid., p. 327.

61 McGeer, Michael, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

62 As Mary Pattison claimed, homemaking ‘could no longer be said to be a private undertaking. It is a public function, regulated and formulated by local and State authorities.’ Pattison, Mary, Principles of Domestic Engineering (New York, The Trow Press, 1915), p. 248 Google Scholar. Also see, for example, writing on ‘sociocracy’ by first President of the American Sociological Association, Ward, Lester F., Applied Sociology: a Treatise on the Conscious Improvement of Society by Society (Boston: Ginn & Company, 1906)Google Scholar.

63 Addams, Jane, ‘Problems of municipal administration’, The American Journal of Sociology, 10:4 (1905), pp. 425–444 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

64 Mead, George Herbert, ‘The problem of society: How we become selves’, Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936), pp. 361–362 Google Scholar.

65 Mead, George Herbert, ‘The genesis of self and social control’, International Journal of Ethics, 35:3 (1925), p. 275 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

66 Wendt, , Social Theory, p. 361 Google Scholar.

67 Shalin, Dmitri N., ‘G. H. Mead, socialism, and the progressive agenda’, in Mitchell Aboulafia (ed.), Philosophy, Social Theory, and the Thought of George Herbert Mead (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991), p. 48 Google Scholar.

68 Collins, and Makowsky, , The Discovery of Society, p. 164 Google Scholar.

69 A few decades later, New Deal ‘social security’ reforms similarly countered socialism. After 1945, the language of security extended from social regulation and marched forth with the lexicon of national security, international security, human security, and so on. For rare historical treatments of the expansion of security discourse see Neocleous, Mark, ‘From social to national security: on the fabrication of economic order’, Security Dialogue, 37:3 (2006), pp. 363–384 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Owens, ‘Supreme social concept’.

70 McCourt has extended Mead’s symbolic interactionism, arguing that ‘foreign policymakers come to recognize the boundaries of acceptable and therefore possible action because social roles structure the interactions of states in international affairs in much the same way they do for individuals in everyday life … [S]tate leaders take the role of the Other in their international interactions: … they view situations from the perspective of other states putting themselves in their shoes.’ McCourt, David M., Britain and World Power Since 1945: Constructing a Nation’s Role in International Politics (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2014), p. 14 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see McCourt, David M., ‘The roles states play: a Meadian interactionist approach’, Journal of International Relations and Development, 15 (2012), pp. 370–392 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

71 Wendt, ‘On the via media’.

72 Löwith, Karl, Max Weber and Karl Marx (London: Routledge, 1993 [orig. pub. 1960]), p. 42 Google Scholar.

73 Weber, Martin, ‘On the history and politics of the social turn’, Review of International Studies, 41:5 (2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, this Forum.

74 Again, due to limitations of space, we cannot examine in any detail realist defenders of raison d’état. However, in the words of Johann Caspar Bluntschli, ‘The whole concept of society … is … a Third Estate concept, although we have grown used to identifying the state itself with bourgeois society.’ Quoted in Gödde, Christoph, ‘Editor’s notes’, in Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to Sociology (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 164 Google Scholar.

75 Marx, Karl, ‘The Holy Family’, in David McLellan (ed.), Selected Writings (rev. edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 146 Google Scholar. Marx was actually writing about Proudhon.

76 Pilbeam, Pamela M., French Socialists Before Marx: Workers, Women and the Social Question in France, 1796–1852 (Durham: Acumen Publishing, 2000)Google Scholar.

77 Heyer, Paul, Nature, Human Nature, and Society: Marx, Darwin, Biology, and the Human Sciences (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1982)Google Scholar.

78 Barberis, Damiela, ‘In search of an object: Organicist sociology and the reality of society in Fin-de-siècle France’, History of the Human Sciences, 16:3 (2003), pp. 51–72 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

79 Marx, Karl, The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), p. 41 Google Scholar.

80 Engels, Marx and, The Communist Manifesto, pp. 224–225 Google Scholar.

81 House, Floyd Nelson, ‘The concept “social forces” in American sociology’, American Journal of Sociology, 31:2 (1925), pp. 145–156 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

82 Marx quoted in Rigby, Stephen Henry, Marxism and History: a Critical Introduction (2nd edn, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 108 Google Scholar.

83 Cox, Robert W., Production, Power, and World Order: Social Forces in the Making of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; for another early account of ‘social forces’ see Halliday, Fred, ‘A necessary encounter: Historical materialism and International Relations’, Rethinking International Relations (London: Macmillan, 1994), pp. 47–73 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘Production is, in that sense, life, for the dispensation of energy (work) which results in life (product). “Social forces” was the identifiable social energy precipitated by production, the expenditure of which affected directly or indirectly the existing order.’ Harrod, Jeffrey, ‘Social Forces and international political economy: Joining the two IRs’, in Stephen Gill and James H. Mittleman (eds), Innovation and Transformation in International Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 109 Google Scholar.

84 Amin, Samir, Unequal Development: an Essay on the Social Formations of Peripheral Capitalisms (London: Monthly Review Press, 1976)Google Scholar; Gilpin, Robert, War and Change in International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 108 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

85 Marx, Karl, ‘Economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844’, Collected Works, Vol. 3 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), p. 229 Google Scholar.

86 Rosenberg, , ‘Why is there no international historical sociology?’, p. 336 Google Scholar.

87 Marx, Karl, Grundrisse, trans. M. Nicolaus (London: Penguin, 1973), p. 265 Google Scholar.

88 Rosenberg, , ‘Why is there no international historical sociology?’, p. 335 Google Scholar, emphasis added.

89 Ibid., p. 308. For Rosenberg, Trotsky’s notion of ‘uneven and combined development’ is just such a theory. See Rosenberg, Justin, ‘The “philosophical premises” of uneven and combined development’, Review of International Studies, 39:3 (2013), pp. 569–597 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

90 Rosenberg, , ‘Why is there no international historical sociology?’, p. 335 Google Scholar.

91 In practice, social language usually ends up as descriptive shorthand for something else, with scholars writing of global social change, social relations and practices, social institutions and processes, and particular social contexts. Joseph, Jonathan, The Social in the Global: Social theory, Governmentality and Global Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

92 Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, The German Ideology (New York: International Publishers, 1970), p. 50 Google Scholar.

93 Linklater, Andrew, Beyond Realism and Marxism: Critical Theory and International Relations (London: Palgrave, 2000)Google Scholar.

94 Schwartz, Nancy L., ‘Distinction between public and private life: Marx on the Zōon Politikon ’, Political Theory, 7:2 (1979), pp. 245–266 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McCarthy, George E. (ed.), Marx and Aristotle: Nineteenth Century German Social Theory and Classical Antiquity (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 1992)Google Scholar.

95 Marx, Karl, ‘Excerpt-notes of 1844’, in Marx: Selected Writings, ed. Lawrence H. Simon (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1994), p. 45 Google Scholar.

96 Engels, Marx and, Communist Manifesto, p. 222 Google Scholar.

97 For a small sample, see Hunter, F. Robert, Egypt under the Khedives, 1805–1879: From Household Government to Modern Bureaucracy (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Mertes, Kate, The English Noble Household, 1250–1600: Good Governance and Politic Rule (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988)Google Scholar; Booth, William James, Households: on the Moral Architecture of the Economy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Herlihy, David, Medieval Households (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; McIntosh, J. L., From Heads of Household to Heads of State: the Preaccession Households of Mary and Elizabeth Tudor, 1516–1558 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Faroqhi, Suraiya, ‘The Ottoman Empire: the Age of ‘Political Households’ (eleventh–twelfth/seventeenth–eighteenth centuries)’, The New Cambridge History of Islam: Volume 2, The Western Islamic World, Eleventh to Eighteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 366–410 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

98 Sir Filmer, Robert, The Patriarcha and Other Political Works of Sir Robert Filmer, ed. Peter Laslett (New York: Transaction, 1984)Google Scholar; Sir Maine, Henry Sumner, ‘The patriarchal theory’, Quarterly Review, 162 (1886), pp. 181–209 Google Scholar; Riesebrodt, Martin, ‘From patriarchalism to capitalism: the theoretical context of Max Weber’s agrarian studies (1892–93)’, in Keith Tribe (ed.), Reading Weber (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 131–154 Google Scholar; Dubber, The Police Power.

99 Booth, William James, ‘Politics and the household: a commentary on Aristotle’s Politics, Book One’, The History of Political Thought, Vol. 2 (1981), pp. 203–226 Google Scholar.

100 This also accounts for Marx’s deeply contradictory writings on politics, which when translated into international theory, yield an inability to develop a compelling non-functionalist, non-realist conception of politics as an expression of force and violence. For an excellent account see Davenport, Andrew, ‘Marxism in IR: Condemned to a realist fate?’, European Journal of International Relations, 19:1 (2013), pp. 27–48 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

101 Hobson, John A., The Social Problem: Life and Work (London: James Nisbet, 1901)Google Scholar.

102 Lapointe, Thierry and Dufour, Frèdérick Guillaume, ‘Assessing the historical turn in IR: an anatomy of second wave historical sociology’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 25:1 (2012), pp. 97–121 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

103 Chiu, Yvonne and Taylor, Robert S. ‘The self-extinguishing despot: Millian democratization’, The Journal of Politics, 73:4 (2011), pp. 1239–1250 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Cf. Pateman, Carole, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge: Polity, 1998)Google Scholar; Valverde, Mariana, ‘“Despotism” and ethical liberal governance’, Economy and Society, 25:3 (1996), pp. 357–372 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

104 Foucault’s influential account of the ‘discovery of population’ identified the family as the model of government that was eliminated with the rise of ‘society’. Hence, alongside the common conflation of household and family, Foucault and his followers were unable to identify how populations were governed through new household forms of rule. Foucault, Michel, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave, 2007), p. 71 Google Scholar.

105 Arendt, Human Condition, p. 40; Ring, Jennifer, ‘On needing both Marx and Arendt: Alienation and the flight from inwardness’, Political Theory, 17:3 (1989), pp. 432–448 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

106 Xenophon, , Memorabilia, Oeconomicus, Symposium and Apology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923)Google Scholar.