Status Updates From The Empire of Civil Society...

“The historical movement of ‘geopolitical’ expropriation (imperialism) which brought about the partial integration of non-European peoples into the world market (in some cases effected by a forced ‘liberation’ of labour) appears in its outcome, the world of independent ‘nation-states’, as the sovereign emancipation of the peoples.” 1/2

“The main factor which prevented non-European societies from being treated in the same way was the very different social structure of those societies, in which labour was not a ‘thing’ able to be commanded by money, production was oriented towards subsistence, and financial investment was therefore unable to lay hold of the means of wealth-creation.”

“Far from being just another great power [the United States, historically], this great, defining fixture of postwar international relations is the child of the industrial-capitalist transformation of Europe. Indeed, having no formal ethnic definition, its national (constitutional) identity is practically indistinguishable from the purest ideological expression of capitalist relations of production.”

“It is not enough to perform the usual exposé and walk away. To secure the ground we must pursue our methodological critique into the sketching of an alternative historical explanation. We must give our own answer to the riddle of historical appearances. And it must be a better one.”

“In the end, the ultimate judgement we can make of a substantive social theory is whether it enables us to write better history.”

“A substantive theoretical argument must remain permanently open to the threat of empirical refutation – otherwise it must give up its claim to be engaging with historical realities.”

“The very notion of a distinctive field of IR, separated somehow from what goes on inside nations or ‘societies’, is in some part symptomatic of the limitations in social thought […]. Although there must be divisions of labour and specialism within the social sciences, there can be no justification for the theoretical aberrations which this particular disciplinary partitioning tends to perpetuate.”

“IR as a discipline begins, it may be suggested, when we move beyond the ahistorical generalizations of realism, and start to map out something like a periodization of the successive institutional forms, agents and scope of ‘international power’ which have accompanied the precursors of today’s global nation-state system.”

“The Europeans did not carve up the planet in order to extend the states-system. But they did install the colonial state apparatuses for their own purposes of exploitation and control; […] and the mobilization for independence was supplemented from the outside by American pressure for unrestricted economic access, clothed in a rhetoric of freedom and selfdetermination.”

“IR remains, in terms of the sheer weight of numbers, resources and publications ‘an American social science’”

france cannot have equal amount of tanks as britain, no matter how much they hate each other, cuz the yellowjackets, farmers, and parisians as collective would make macron into a literal baguette and eat him >>> is an actual sentence a wrote as a note to a friend. needed to share. 🇫🇷🦅✨

“… what cannot be derived from a rational-choice model: namely, an account of those conditions of social power within a system which result not from balancing the numbers involved but from the reproduction of the core institutions which reflect its historical character, which position the individuals in terms of access to resources and which define the terrain of interaction.”

“Every realist consensus is, like the Roman Catholic distinction between the Church Spiritual and the Church Temporal, post factum. And while realism likes to think that it guides foreign policy, actually, it has often ended by simply legitimating it:”

“The price one has to pay for identifying the “timeless features” of the political landscape is the sacrifice of understanding the processes of change in world affairs.”

“Yet, while the realist is busy watching the statesmen playing the hands dealt them by the balance of power, those same international struggles are mediating a wholesale transformation of the form and conditions of social power in the world.”

i am surprised and delighted how readable and clear the writing is while remaining highly theoretical and quite dense on information.

“For the implied image of the circle really does miss the wood for the trees.”

bar.

“A work which begins ensnared in familiar debates and then struggles out onto a quite different intellectual terrain may actually be of more use than one which pitches its camp outside the recognized boundaries of the discipline.”

relatable.

“The real task of social science is … to dissolve the reified social forms of state and market back into the historically specific social relations between people which constitute them; and finally, to retrace our steps in order to rediscover the emergence and development of our modern social world as the history of these social relations between ‘real, living individuals’.”