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On the history and politics of the social turn

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 July 2015

MARTIN WEBER
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Abstract

The emergence of social theory is closely linked to the transformations inaugurated by the rise of a distinctly capitalist modernity from the second half of the eighteenth century onwards. In this article, I reconstruct the outlines of two strands of social theorising that emerged in response to the radical challenges posed by ‘the great transformation’ on the one hand, and the French Revolution on the other. I juxtapose two responses to the transnational constellations these events signify, one heralded by Auguste Comte, and the other, inter alia, by Karl Marx. While the Comtean frame obliterates meaningful registers of thinking about political transformation, I argue that conflict-theoretic tradition indebted to G. W. F. Hegel and Marx is much more amenable to analytical and practical concerns with responding politically to the challenges posed by ‘the rise of the social’. In the final part, this is discussed with reference to the ‘social turn’ in IR theory.

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Forum
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Review of International Studies , Volume 41 , Issue 4 , October 2015 , pp. 693 - 714
Copyright
© 2015 British International Studies Association 

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References

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9 I use the term ‘trans-political’ here in order to imply that different polities across Europe and in the colonies had to deal with the effects of this transformation, leading not least to ‘different’ nation states, once that specific institutional form eventually becomes dominant.

10 There is no possibility to explicate this last point in the necessary detail. Suffice it to point here to the basic reflectivist problem it indexes: The need to provide an account of the conditions of possibility behind the analysts ability to stand apart from the ‘social order’ in order to both, describe it comprehensively, and to assign ‘politics’ its place therein. Below, I return briefly to this issue.

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