China's Modernization II: ProtoSociology Volume 29

ProtoSociology

An International Journal of Interdisciplinary Research

Volume 29, 2012

China’s Modernization II

CONTENTS

ON CONTEMPARY THEORY OF MODERNISATION

Multiple Modernities and the Theory of Indeterminacy – On the Development and Theoretical Foundations of the Historical Sociology of Shmuel N. Eisenstadt

Manussos Marangudakis

CHANGING CHINA: DEALING WITH DIVERSITY

Dissent of China’s Public Intellectuals in the Post-Mao Era

Merle Goldman

Modernization of Law in China – its Meaning, Achievements, Obstacles and Prospect

Qingbo Zhang

China’s State in the Trenches: A Gramscian Analysis of Civil Society and Rights-Based Litigation

Scott Wilson

Manufacturing Dissent: Domestic and International Ramifications of China’s Summer of Labor Unrest

Francis Schortgen and Shalendra Sharma

NEOLIBERALISM AND THE CHANGES IN EAST ASIAN WELFARE AND EDUCATION

Business Opportunities and Philanthropic Initiatives: Private Entrepreneurs, Welfare Provision and the Prospects for Social Change in China

Beatriz Carrillo Garcia

Time, Politics and Homelessness in Contemporary Japan

Ritu Vij

Educational Modernisation Across the Taiwan Straits: Pedagogical Transformation in Primary School Moral Education Textbooks in the PRC and Taiwan

David C. Schak

Is China Saving Global Capitalism from the Global Crisis?

Ho-fung Hung

ON CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY

International Development, Paradox and Phronesis

Robert Kowalski

Précis of The World in the Head

Robert Cummins

Communication, Cooperation and Conflict

Steffen Borge

Contributors

Impressum

On ProtoSociology

Published Volumes

On Contempary Theory of Modernisation

MULTIPLE MODERNITIES AND THE THEORY OF INDETERMINACY – ON THE DEVELOPMENT AND THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS OF THE HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY OF SHMUEL N. EISENSTADT

Manussos Marangudakis

Abstract

The essay presents the parallel development of Shmuel Eisenstadt’s historical and theoretical sociology from a critical correction of structural functionalism found in The Political Systems of Empires to the full development of the theory of indeterminacy of his later works that culminated in the ‘multiple modernities’ thesis. The key factor that shapes the course of Eisentadt’s theoretical progress is the crucial role of various elites to fill the open space between actuality and potentiality creating and sustaining institutions that permit the development of structural differentiation according to some fundamental cosmological and cognitive principles that shape the course of historical development inside these social systems. Infusing structural-functionalism with a strong dose of conflict sociology, Eisenstadt came to the conclusion that social development is not a process of internal systemic growth, but the unintended consequence of the elites’ efforts to institutionally control free resources. And while this process in the pre-modern past led to the development of relatively distinct civilizations, in the framework of modernity has created a global framework of fundamental contradictions of tensions intrinsically irresolvable.

From the study of agrarian empires (1963), to his later works on axiality (1986), modernity (2002), and revolution (2006) Shmuel Eisenstadt remained equally concerned about understanding historical change and developing a sound sociological theory; in fact, he considered them to be the two sides of the same coin: social theory is useless if it does not correspond to reality, and reality makes sense only through the lenses of social theory. A case of truism as it sounds, for Eisenstadt it became a vehicle first to correct and then to alter in a rather radical way structural functionalism, both in its historical context and in substance; I will call it the ‘theory of indeterminacy’. And based upon this theory, he developed the most radical historic-sociological model to understand modernity since the development of convergence-modernization theory in the 1960s and World System Theory in the 1970s, the theory of ‘multiple modernities’.

Structural Functionalism Updated

Starting with the Political Systems of Empires (1963), the focus of Eisenstadt’s analysis was the systemic character of these regimes, the distinctive social structures and institutions that characterized them, and the social processes that were developed by their rulers to maintain the systemic boundaries of their empires. To achieve his goal, Eisenstadt employed a very particular methodology, that is, configurational analysis. To put it simply, configurational analysis is the analysis of the essential qualities of social structures, institutions, and patterned social actions that develop inside a social system and define it. Following this methodology, Eisenstadt first differentiated and conceptualized a social pattern (i.e., a configuration), then examined its essential characteristics, and finally interpreted its contribution to the maintenance of the systemic boundaries of the empire in question. The use of this methodology led to a very peculiar, even idiosyncratic, narration that would become the unique feature of all Eisenstadt’s works that will follow: eventless historical narration. The argument could be understood and followed only by readers who had already done their history homework; as for the rest, they could abandon all hope.

What is important about agrarian empires? They stand as peculiar institutions between antiquity and modernity without necessarily leading from the one to the other; in other words, without guaranteeing social evolution. Their peculiarity lies in their main and central characteristic: the institutionalization of autonomous political power, as well as the intentional development of ‘free resources’ and thus the intentional ‘encouragement’ of social differentiation on large scale, and above ethnic and city boundaries. Since ‘empires’ by definition extent beyond ethnic boundaries and geographic localities, their mere existence necessitated some form of political-institutional autonomy. Thus, for the writer, empires are the first instances of various systemic tensions and fusions between social and institutional structures and their derivates.

The key factor of the analysis of the agrarian bureaucratic empires is that of ‘free resources’, that is, means of social power that could be detached from their possessors and potentially be used by other social actors and groups, such as the peasantry that could either be controlled by the landed aristocracy, or be ‘free’ and thus strengthen the autonomy of the ruler vis. the aristocracy. Using ‘free resources’ as a guide, Eisenstadt examines the struggles between institutional actors and social groups to control such resources, and especially so between rulers and aristocracy. Following the specific historical developments, the author concludes that the social development of the agrarian empires was limited by the limited level of free resources; and that free resources were limited because traditional and undifferentiated political activities did not match political goals that were more differentiated. To put it in structural-functional terms, even though there was a ‘need’ for social differentiation, the political apparatus, in spite of the development of bureaucracy, did not ‘fulfill its functional role’; social and institutional development were not evolving hand in hand. Eisenstadt was questioning the cornerstone of structural functionalism.

While the conclusions of this magnum opus did not impress many as structural functionalism was becoming out of fashion when the book was first published, secondary findings of the study would lead Eisenstadt not only to a major reconstruction of structural functionalism, but to the construction of a new sociological theory and a new understanding of macro social development. First and foremost, Eisenstadt noticed that structural differentiation in the social system of the empires did not always lead to a corresponding institutional differentiation (as Parsonian structural functionalism assumed) but it was conditioned on the presence of political entrepreneurs or elites with a vision and ability to create original political institutions. Such a parallel development took place only when both components, i.e. semi-autonomous elites cum social differentiation, were present. Second, imperial political systems were ridden by internal contradictions inherent in their own existence – such as (a) between the creation and the control of free resources, (b) the goals of the rulers that bound the system and the inability of the system to implement the imperial polities, and (c) between the desire of the rulers to free themselves from ascriptive groups and functions and their ascriptive legitimation. And third, the fate of the empires depended on a combination of external threats and internal struggles or contradictions that were interwoven in the fabric of the imperial system itself.

The study’s findings were particularly critical of the evolutionary presumptions of structural functionalism: First, social change does not necessarily lead to structural differentiation. And second, even when structural differentiation leads to institutional developments, the latter might not be similar everywhere, but might lead similar social systems (e.g., empires) to different paths of institutional and structural developments. In a nutshell, structural differentiation and institutional formation are multi-directional: No social system could be taken for granted; institutional entrepreneurs are necessary for a social system to exist; the system cannot escape internal contradictions; the social system if under particular pressures might collapse.

In all, Eisenstadt infused structural functionalism with a good dose of agentic volition and uncertainty, but for the moment he had not altered the paradigm in any decisive way. According to Parsons, structural differentiation is an adaptive response of the social system to strains that restores equilibrium and functionality; what the system ‘needs’, structural differentiation ‘provides’. Eisenstadt shifted the epicenter of social change from systemic needs in general to political elites who satisfy their need for power by establishing new and more specialized, or focused, political institutions. But while there is a relief in the system, the status and power struggles of these new elites create new conflicts over scarce resources. Notwithstanding the significance of his critical comments, the Empires remained well embedded in the Parsonian framework as he remained committed to the problematique of adaptiveness, flexibility, systemic boundaries and productive capacity.

From Systemic Needs to the Institutionalization of Elites’ Power Struggles

This all started to change as Eisenstadt soon later shifted his focus of attention from social differentiation and organizational capacity to cultural forces like charisma, trust, solidarity, and religion; and from general social evolution to distinct civilizational paths.

The first step toward a more cultural analysis of the social system was taken in the new introduction of Political Systems of Empires (1969) and by a series of studies that paid attention to spiritual, symbolic and moral concerns and the ways they were articulated by political and intellectual elites.¹ His rationale is clear enough: ecological factors and contingency put aside, a deep and permanent social division of labor and the specifics of a social system must derive from an arbitrary yet authoritative source, that is, a cultural orientation. Eisenstadt first applied the scheme by developing the analytical dimensions of the concept of centre and periphery relations conceived as dealing not only with the organizational aspects of the social division of labor but with their connection to charisma as a key ingredient of social order.² As he had already distinguished between different types of centers in ancient and medieval social systems, he now came to recognize that this distinctiveness had much to do with the cultural orientations they articulate, and allow particular elite coalitions and ability to regulate and exploit social arrangements. Charisma was strongly linked to institution building through affecting major components of a social order, namely trust, solidarity, collectivities, regulation of power, the construction of meaning, and the legitimation of patterns of social interaction.

The significance of elites in affecting the structure of the social division of labor and of social systems, as well as the significance of the presence of a ‘centre’ from a ‘periphery’, were further elaborated in studies that explored the distinction between ‘organizational’ and ‘model-based centers’ as well as between ‘congruent’ and ‘non-congruent societies’ according to the distinctive structural role of the elites and elite functions such as regulation of power, trust and solidarity and the provision of models of cultural order. Examining the particularities of elite functions in various African social systems, Eisenstadt came to the conclusion that the level of stability and dynamism of a social system depended on the ability of the center to control and shape the periphery.³ The more specialized and culturally dissociated were the central elites from the structural differentiation of the periphery, the more autonomous they were, and more able to impose their will and their program upon it. Whenever a distinctive cultural order was developed in the center (that is, ‘model-based’ center – ‘non-congruent’ societies), the more difficult it was to interchange power and authority or to convert wealth into the symbolic functions of the center. The center could impose its authority on the periphery not by brute exercise of power, but by charismatic institutions developed and imposed by autonomous cultural elites detached from ascriptive units.

The argument emerging out of these studies was that the internal dynamics of a social system is closely linked to the relative autonomy of the elites, while the latter is closely related to cultural or even civilizational visions and programs cultural elites develop, visions that constitute potentially ‘free resources’ to be contested by counter-elites or social groups. To this argument decisive was the remark that there is an elective affinity between the substance of the cultural visions and the degree of autonomy of elites. And the more autonomous were these elites, the more able was the center not only to regulate existing social relations but also to attempt to transform the existing social order.

This argument was fully developed during the 1980s as Eisenstadt shifted his focus of attention to the examination of ‘Axial civilizations’ and their modern legacy. Axial civilizations, as they were understood by Eisenstadt, provide evidence for the power of cultural visions and of their bearers to shape societies forming enduring patterns of social interaction and organization.⁴

The Axial civilizations, arguably the most enduring forms of distinct social systems in the history of mankind, were formed in a short span of time around the 5th century BCE, when a series of archaic societies mutated into five distinct ‘civilizations’ based upon equally distinct, though homologous, cultural visions: Deuteronomic Judaism, Greek (platonic) philosophy, Confucianism, Buddhism, Hinduism. To these pristine and original visions later on were added two derivatives of Judaism: Christianity and Islam. These cultural visions, promulgated by a new social group of ‘intellectuals’ in turn became the decisive constituent ingredients of Israel, the Greco-Roman world, China, India, and later on of European Christianity and of the Muslim world, civilizations that were characterized by the institutionalization of specific cultural conceptions that perceived the cosmos as deeply divide between a mundane and a transcendental order.

The institutionalization of these visions created new clusters of semi-autonomous cultural elites of clerical nature (Jewish prophets, Greek philosophers, Christian priests, Chinese literati, Hindu Brahmins, Buddhist Sangha, and the Islamic ulama) who transformed the political elites, establishing above all a new ethical-political concept, ‘accountability’. The Axial civilizations came to verify not only the existence of non-congruent societies, but the decisive role intellectuals plaid in pushing social development ‘forward’, at higher levels of social complexity without any apparent pre-existing systemic ‘need’ for such a development. While in congruent societies the center was copying the social differentiation and division of labor of the periphery writ large (kinship, territoriality), in non-congruent societies social differentiation was marked by the development of distinct elite functions that became connected with new, prescriptive rather than ascriptive, collectivities with ecumenical overtones and applicability.

The development of autonomous cultural elites created new types of social dynamics between center and periphery, between political authority and social strata, and new types of solidarity and protest. Above all it facilitated new forms of social protest and social movements that challenged political power either on grounds of accountability or of proper interpretation of the principles of the resolution of the tension between immanent and transcendental domains. These new social movements were primarily different sects and heterodoxies that upheld different conceptions of ‘salvation’ as well as of the proper way to define and institutionalize alternative conceptions of the social and cultural order. As the, charismatic by now, center defined not only political authority but also the proper interpretation of the cultural vision, in these civilizations emerged the possibility of ideological and structural linkages between peripheral social movements of protest and political struggles for the control of the center, thus linking in systemic ways the relatively autonomous political and ideological networks of power. Thus, axiality gave rise to systemic coalitions of secondary elites and the first ‘ideological politics’.

Eisenstadt himself describes this major mutation as follows:

It is thus that there developed a new type of civilizational dynamics. These new dynamics of civilization transformed group conflicts into political class and ideological conflicts, cult conflicts into struggle between the orthodoxies and the heterodoxies. Conflicts between tribes and societies became missionary crusades for the transformation of civilizations. The zeal for reorganization informed by each society’s transcendental vision made the whole world at least potentially subject to cultural-political reconstruction, and in all these new developments the different sectarian movements and movements of heterodoxy played, for the reasons outlined above, a central role.⁵

According to the specificities of the various cosmological visions that emerged during the axial age and later on by Christianity and Islam, and according to the relative autonomy of the cultural elite from the political center, various configurations of salvation (as definitions of solution to the tension between the mundane and the transcendental order) emerged that actually shaped and sealed the socio-political trajectories of the corresponding civilizations.

For example, in India, the cultural elites retained a high degree of autonomy vis-à-vis the political center which remained secondary in importance for the duration of the Hindu civilization. In contrast, in China the Mandate of Heaven, though it did hold the Emperor accountable to the principle of cosmic harmony, did not fuel or legitimized political struggles based upon reinterpretations of the Mandate; Daoism and Buddhism remained confined and isolated in the periphery providing no challenge to the regime. Rather, there developed relatively weak ideological and structural linkages between movements of change, sects and secret societies, and central and peripheral secondary institutional elites. The otherwise numerous movements of protest did not have the capacity to be linked with the central political struggle, or to restructure the major premises of the imperial institutions. In imperial China the class of Confucian literati, being absolutely depended on the imperial power, with no autonomous resources of their own to draw from, remained loyal to the imperial principles and institutional arrangements, strongly oriented to the political center as the major arena for the implementation of the Confucian transcendental vision. In Byzantium, Christianity and the semi-autonomous Church gave rise to a high emphasis on accountability of the emperors to higher principles generating and legitimating a very intense level of political struggle in the name of the byzantine version of Mandate, that is the Emperor as the viceroy of Jesus Christ on Earth and the Empire as a reflection of Heaven on Earth, while Christian sects regularly challenged the imperial interpretation of the mundane and transcendental orders and of the proper meaning of ‘salvation’.

Such an argument challenged in a rather radical way the basic principle of structural functionalism, that is, institutions as tension-solving mechanisms, and put in question the whole idea of ‘systemic needs’. Construction of systemic boundaries and thus of systemic needs is effected through definitions of activities and interactions which cannot be arbitrary. Instead, they depend on ideological and symbolic evaluations that draw from basic ontological conceptions or worldviews that regulate social interaction and the flow of resources. It is these definitions that shape patterns of authority and power, models of hierarchies, modes of economic production etc. True, each type and each kind of social organization necessitates some basic institutional arrangements, not very different to the ones that Michael Mann specified and described in his theory of social networks.⁶ Yet, since there is no one single way to organize these functional arrangements, several types of functionally equivalent institutional arrangements may develop with very different boundaries, organizational structures and systemic links.

From Revised Structural Functionalism to Multiple Modernities

This might sound very much like Parson’s understanding of value institutionalization, yet Eisenstadt conceives it in a very different, paradoxical, way. Rather than solving the problem of internal tensions and systemic instability, institutionalization, as conceived by Eisenstadt, perpetuates instability albeit in a system that increasingly becomes more complex in a futile effort to escape instability. This is seen more clearly if we consider the three factors affect the construction of social order: The distribution of resources according to the predominate type of division of labor; the institutional entrepreneurs or elites able to mobilize and structure resources and social groups’ interests; and the nature of the ontological visions that inform the elites and derive from the major cultural orientations prevalent in the social system. Of these three factors, the last two constitute the cultural forms of social order: The institutionalization of the ontological visions concretizes charisma and meaning and crystallizes the activities, structure, boundaries, and the identity of the elites and elite coalitions. In other words, once the major ontological visions have been crystallized, center formation is bound to be developed in particular ways and functional prerequisites are set accordingly. Each ‘civilization’ then constructs its own environment, or civilization is the social transformation of each cosmological vision into particular ecological and social environments. But these cosmological visions do not determine the social system; rather they constitute general guidelines, or affordances, for social actors to develop various social patterns and institutions in wide civilizational frameworks, in the framework of which social division of labor, elite coalitions, and external factors participate and interwoven in various, historically specific, ways.

Furthermore, it is through these cultural arrangements of power that the social system changes. Social systems do not seek stability as such; rather they constitute organized efforts to secure access to resources, power and meaning in the framework of porous and precarious social systems. Culture provides means and ways to achieve such collective and selective goals, and as such it constitutes both an order maintaining and an order transforming factor. And while it provides legitimation to a given social order, it also provides the means to challenge it. The always present ‘need’ for legitimation and the fact that legitimation is not assumed but is an intentional and uncertain enterprise, denotes the not-for-given character of legitimation itself. This does not mean that culture is tautological. Instead, culture is the vehicle for order and change, and the specificities of culture affect the ways change and order are manifested. If social order is based upon an interpretation of the cosmological vision, then social change is based upon a reinterpretation of the same vision. The post-Octavian Roman empire desperately sought for a legitimating ideology to anchor its ecumenical claim and found it in episcopal Christianity; once the Nicene creed was established as the imperial ideology, the empire was forced to deal with legitimating issues that derived from various ‘sectarian’ and ‘heretic’ reinterpretations of this particular interpretation of the Christian beliefs, that where resolved either with dialectic syntheses (usually in the Christian West), or by the dissociation of the challengers from the political and ideological civilizational center (usually in the Christian East). In either case, one certain ‘solution’ was bound to become the cradle of a future crisis.

The significance of culture in general, and of the cosmological visions in particular, of shaping the trajectory of social development and of the social division of labor, is confirmed by the investigation of the most dramatic instances of social change, the Great Revolutions.⁷ While structural and psychosociological factors are useful in detecting and explaining the causes of the breakdown of a regime, they fail to explain the radical alteration of the basic premises of the regimes, and the outcome of the revolutionary process. Eisenstadt rightly notes that revolutions do not just signify a breakdown, or a stasis, but also the establishment of a new social system, a new social division of labor and a new political order that is legitimized and established by a new ontological vision, or, more precisely, by a radical reinterpretation of the old vision.⁸ The new vision becomes the guiding spirit for the radical alteration of the definition of truth, of trust, of the crystallization of new constellations of elites and elite boundaries, of social organizations and modes of social interaction and institutional patterns: The intensification of state power in post-revolutionary France but not in post-revolutionary America, in soviet Russia but not in post-revolutionary England or Latin America is to be explained not in functional-structural or class terms of balance of power, but in ideological terms: The revolutionary ‘imagined society’ was envisioned and promulgated in radically different ways by the specific revolutionary elites.

Yet, all civilizations are not equally prone to revolutionary changes. Instead, it is only this-worldly and combined this- and other-worldly civilizational frameworks that attract revolutionary processes; and in this framework, it is only imperial and imperial-feudal regimes that are open to revolutionary processes, that is, civilizational frameworks that consider the political arena as a proper means to resolve the tension and bridge the gap between the immanent and the transcendental orders, thus ‘achieving’ salvation. Yet, as it was mentioned earlier on, this tension is never really resolved, only updated and renewed. The reason is that the cultural programs of all Axial Civilizations in general, and of this-worldly (Confucian China) and combined this- and other-worldly (the three monotheistic) civilizations in particular are ridden with internal contradictions or antinomies that could be amassed into three categories: First is the contradiction between the vastness of the range of possibilities of transcendental visions as such, and the small range of possible implementations of these visions; second, the contradiction between reason and revelation of faith; and third the contradiction between materialization-institutionalization of the visions and freedom entailed in the charismatic dimension of social action and of personal experience.

These are antinomies, tensions, and contradictions that by definition could never be resolved. Yet, they ignite major projects of social change as their instigators, revolutionary institutional entrepreneurs, yearn to resolve a deep spiritual tension, to bridge the chasm between the sacred and the profane, to bring the ideals of justice and eternal harmony down to earth. Institutionalizations then, in general, and revolutions, in particular, neither constitute organizational responses to strain, nor a process of socialization, but an effort to resolve a perceived moral tension. What is institutionalized in revolutions is self-renewal and faith, exemplary cases of which are the Jacobin and fundamentalist movements and revolutions that define modernity. The inquiry into the Great Revolutions of modernity, the liberal revolutions of the early modernity (English, American and French), the socialists revolutions of mature modernity (Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese and Cuban), the revolutions in the Islamic world (Turkish and Iranian), a series of post-colonial nationalist revolutions in the third world, and the non-axial ‘revolutionary restoration’ of Japan, as well as the absence of revolutions in other civilizational centers, allow Eisenstadt to examine the legacy of the Axial civilizational patterns and their impact long after their imperial and feudal political regimes that nourished them vanished.

All these revolutions had one common denominator: autocratic modernizing regimes face the contradictions inherent in their own legitimation and collapsed under the pressures of modernizing social strata and semi-autonomous class of intellectuals who advocated a new vision for the future based upon total mobilization and participation of the periphery to the political center, promulgation of secular ecumenical values, charismatization of the revolutionary process, glorification of violence, the radical dissociation from the past, and trust in science, reason and volition, that humanity could control its fate and nature and achieve an eternally harmonious society.

Great Revolutions define the passage from agrarian empires to modernity and for Eisenstadt the passage from the study of classical Axial civilizations to the study of multiple modernities.⁹ And contrary to the liberal and Marxist perception of one unified universal system of modernity to be found in the ‘convergence’ or ‘world system’ theories, Eisenstadt reasons that, instead, we witness the development of several