scholarly journals Geopolítica como Luta de Classes: Marxismo Político, Relações Internacionais e Sociologia Histórica | Geopolitics as Class Struggle: Political Marxism, International Relations and Historical Sociology

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 186-202
Author(s):  
Pedro Salgado
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
Historical Account ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Social

Ao inserir a luta de classes no centro da análise histórica, o Marxismo Político propõe uma reinterpretação da disciplina de Relações Internacionais que pode ser entendida em três passos. O primeiro é uma visão histórica da formação do sistema de estados moderno, a partir de transformações da geopolítica feudal após a origem do capitalismo. O segundo, uma metodologia historicista que parte da forma como a operação de tal sistema pode ser entendida através dos conflitos entre classes com suas respectivas estratégias de espacialização. Por fim, resta justificar a centralidade da luta de classe, e de “classe” enquanto categoria analítica, através do retorno à obra de Marx, resgatando a forma como a noção sociológica de agência é antecipada em sua filosofia da práxis. Assim, reinscrevendo a distinção entre “global” e “(inter)nacional” nas relações sociais que lhe dão origem, a disciplina de Relações Internacionais assume a forma de Sociologia Histórica.ABSTRACTBy bringing class struggle into the core of historical analysis, Political Marxism suggests a reinterpretation of International Relations that can be understood in three steps. Firstly, a historical account of of the rise of the modern states-system through the transformations in feudal geopolitics after the rise of capitalism. Secondly, the development of a radically historicist methodology that is explains this system's operation through the conflict between classes and their respective spatialization strategies. At last, the justification for having class struggle at the core of the analysis, and of "class" as an analytical unit, comes from a return to Marx's work to see how he grounds the sociological notion of agency in his philosophy of praxis. Therefore, by reviving the distinctiong between "global" and "(inter)national" in the social relations that give birth to this very distinction, the discipline of International Relations assumes the form of Historical Sociology.Palavras-chave: Relações Internacionais, Marxismo, GeopolíticaKeywords: International Relations, Marxism, GeopoliticsRecebido em 24 de Abril de 2017 | Aceito em 07 de Agosto de 2017Received on April 24, 2017 | Accepted on August 7, 2017 DOI: 10.12957/rmi.2016.28437 

16. Still a Discipline After All These Debates?

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ole Wæver
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Social System ◽  
Sociology Of Science ◽  
Intellectual Structure ◽  
Social Patterns ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Social ◽  
Relations Of Power

This chapter considers how the arguments associated with the thirteen different theories of International Relations discussed in the book sum up. More specifically, it asks whether IR is (still?) a discipline, and whether it is likely to remain one. The chapter examines the intellectual and social patterns of IR and the discipline as a social system, along with its relations of power, privilege, and careers. It also reflects on where, what, and how IR is today by drawing on theories from the sociology of science, whether IR can be regarded as a subdiscipline within political science, and the social structure of IR. It argues that the discipline of international relations is likely to continue whether or not ‘international relations’ remains a distinct or delineable object. It also contends that the core of the intellectual structure in the discipline of IR has been recurring ‘great debates’.

Historical Sociology

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John M. Hobson ◽  
George Lawson ◽  
Justin Rosenberg
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Past ◽  
Modern System ◽  
Constitutive Properties ◽  
International Systems ◽  
Second Wave ◽  
Core Features

Over the past 20 years, historical sociology in international relations (HSIR) has contributed to a number of debates, ranging from examination of the origins of the modern states system to unraveling the core features and relative novelty of the contemporary historical period. By the late 1980s and 1990s, a small number of IR scholars drew explicitly on historical sociological insights in order to counter the direction that the discipline was taking under the auspices of the neo-neo debate. Later scholars moved away from examining the specific interconnections between international geopolitics and domestic social change. A further difference that marked this second wave from the first was that it was driven principally by IR scholars working within IR. To date, HSIR has sought to reveal not only the different forms that international systems have taken in the past, but also the ways in which the modern system cannot be treated as an ontological given. Historical sociologists in IR are unanimous in asserting that rethinking the constitutive properties and dynamics of the contemporary system can be successfully achieved only by applying what amounts to a more sensitive “nontempocentric” historical sociological lens. At the same time, by tracing the historical sociological origins of the present international order, HSIR scholars are able to reveal some of the continuities between the past and the present, thereby dispensing with the dangers of chronofetishism.

Theorising the international system: perspectives from Historical Sociology

1999 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-271 ◽  
Author(s):  
STEPHEN HOBDEN
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
State Formation ◽  
International System ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
The State ◽  
Historical Account ◽  
International Context ◽  
Recent Interest ◽  
State Context ◽  
Inter State

Recent interest in the work of Historical Sociologists has concentrated on their renewed interest in the state. There is considerable regard for the historical account of state formation and development produced by writers such as Mann, Skocpol and Tilly. Surprisingly there has been less attention paid to another feature of their writings—the locating of states in an inter-state context. This article examines the international context envisioned by four historical sociologists. It argues that, although these writers have been successful at historicising state formations, this powerful account has not been matched with a historical account of international relations. If this project is to move forward, a complementary historical account of international contexts, or global structures, is required.

The Concept of Primacy in Historical Explanation

1982 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Milton Fisk
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Technological Development ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
The Political ◽  
Historical Explanation ◽  
The Social

AbstractG.A. Cohen interprets Marx as a technological materialist: the productive forces are “primary” in history. There are several mistakes here. First, for Marx technology is neither always nor predominantly the direct stimulus - either causal or functional - of the social relations of production. Second, it is not even the case that for Marx primacy in explanation is a matter of being a direct stimulus. It has to do rather with being a framework that underlies interconnections between direct stimuli and their results. It turns out that this framework cannot be technology but only the relations of production. Third, technological development is not an autonomous process but is for Marx one that is dependent on the cooperation of producers. This introduces the political element of the class struggle into technological development and refutes a technological reading of why a given class rules.

Units, Markets, Relations, and Flow: Beyond Interacting Parts to Unfolding Wholes

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naeem Inayatullah ◽  
David L. Blaney
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Life ◽  
International Political Economy ◽  
Scientific Practice ◽  
European Expansion ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Violence

Heterodox work in Global Political Economy (GPE) finds its motive force in challenging the ontological atomism of International Political Economy (IPE) orthodoxy. Various strains of heterodoxy that have grown out of dependency theory and World-Systems Theory (WST), for example, emphasize the social whole: Individual parts are given form and meaning within social relations of domination produced by a history of violence and colonial conquest. An atomistic approach, they stress, seems designed to ignore this history of violence and relations of domination by making bargaining among independent units the key to explaining the current state of international institutions. For IPE, it is precisely this atomistic approach, largely inspired by the ostensible success of neoclassical economics, which justifies its claims to scientific rigor. International relations can be modeled as a market-like space, in which individual actors, with given preferences and endowments, bargain over the character of international institutional arrangements. Heterodox scholars’ treatment of social processes as indivisible wholes places them beyond the pale of acceptable scientific practice. Heterodoxy appears, then, as the constitutive outside of IPE orthodoxy.Heterodox GPE perhaps reached its zenith in the 1980s. Just as heterodox work was being cast out from the temple of International Relations (IR), heterodox scholars, building on earlier work, produced magisterial studies that continue to merit our attention. We focus on three texts: K. N. Chaudhuri’s Asia Before Europe (1990), Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History (1982), and L. S. Stavrianos’s Global Rift (1981). We select these texts for their temporal and geographical sweep and their intellectual acuity. While Chaudhuri limits his scope to the Indian Ocean over a millennium, Wolf and Stavrianos attempt an anthropology and a history, respectively, of European expansion, colonialism, and the rise of capitalism in the modern era. Though the authors combine different elements of material, political, and social life, all three illustrate the power of seeing the “social process” as an “indivisible whole,” as Schumpeter discusses in the epigram below. “Economic facts,” the region, or time period they extract for detailed scrutiny are never disconnected from the “great stream” or process of social relations. More specifically, Chaudhuri’s work shows notably that we cannot take for granted the distinct units that comprise a social whole, as does the IPE orthodoxy. Rather, such units must be carefully assembled by the scholar from historical evidence, just as the institutions, practices, and material infrastructure that comprise the unit were and are constructed by people over the longue durée. Wolf starts with a world of interaction, but shows that European expansion and the rise and spread of capitalism intensified cultural encounters, encompassing them all within a global division of labor that conditioned the developmental prospects of each in relation to the others. Stavrianos carries out a systematic and relational history of the First and Third Worlds, in which both appear as structural positions conditioned by a capitalist political economy. By way of conclusion, we suggest that these three works collectively inspire an effort to overcome the reification and dualism of agents and structures that inform IR theory and arrive instead at “flow.”

scholarly journals Autoanthropology, Modernity, and Automobiles

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierre Lemonnier
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Material World ◽  
Shared Representations ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Social ◽  
The 1950S

The chapter deals both with the changing relations boys and men have had and have with ‘classic’ cars of the 1950s–1960s (notably British sports cars), and with the social relations classic cars aficionados have had and have between them apropos these machines that have survived and are still used, and therefore illustrate what has to be done so that artefacts do not become archaeological items. It raises an anthropological question having to do with what is at the core of the anthropology of objects, techniques, and material actions, namely: What do interactions with the material world do that words alone could not do? The answer the chapter proposes is that by doing and making things in relation to these cars, men build, in a partially non-verbal way, a core of shared representations. In turn, this shared mixture of thoughts and actions is central to diverse social groupings and manifestations.

Moral Regulation: A Reformulation

1997 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 277-293 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannu Ruonavaara
Keyword(s):  
Social Control ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
Marxist Theory ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Ruling Elite ◽  
Moral Regulation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Foucauldian Analysis

Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer introduced the concept of moral regulation to contemporary sociological debate in their historical sociology of English State formation, The Great Arch (1985). In their work they fuse Durkheimian and Foucauldian analysis with a basic Marxist theory. However, this framework gives too limited a perspective to their analysis. I suggest that moral regulation should not be seen as a monolithic project, as merely action by and for the State, nor as activity by the ruling elite only. It should be seen as a form of social control based on changing the identity of the regulated. Its object is what Weber calls Lebensführung, which refers to both the ethos and the action constituting a way of life. The means of moral regulation are persuasion, education, and enlightenment, which distinguishes it from other forms of social control. Analyzing the social relations of moral regulation provides a useful perspective on this form of social action.

Core, periphery and (neo)imperialist International Relations

2013 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 627-646 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arlene B. Tickner
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Knowledge Building ◽  
Social Mechanisms ◽  
The Core ◽  
Fields Of Study ◽  
The Social ◽  
Power Differentials ◽  
Specific Factors

This article analyzes the core–periphery dynamics that characterize the International Relations discipline. To this end, it explores general insights offered by both science studies and the social sciences in terms of the intellectual division of labor that characterizes knowledge-building throughout the world, and the social mechanisms that reproduce power differentials within given fields of study. These arguments are then applied to International Relations, where specific factors that explain the global South’s role as a periphery to the discipline’s (mainly US) core and the ways in which peripheral communities place themselves vis-à-vis International Relations’ (neo)imperialist structure are both explored.

scholarly journals Class Struggle in Post-Revolutionary Iran

1991 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 317-343 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mansoor Moaddel
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Controversial Issues ◽  
Revolutionary Movement ◽  
The Social ◽  
Revolutionary Movements ◽  
Underlying Mechanisms ◽  
Revolutionary Period ◽  
Methodological Strategy

Classes are objective positions defined by the social relations of production. These positions broadly determine, among other things, the occupants' political and ideological orientations and their potential to participate in revolutionary movements. The conflict between and the contradictory nature of these positions are the underlying mechanisms for the generation and reproduction of class struggle. Nevertheless, a simple structural analysis is insufficient for analyzing the role of classes in a revolutionary movement. Classes are not static entities fixed once and for all, nor are they completely determined by “objective” economic “facts” such as the social relations of production.1To understand the success of the dominated classes in a revolutionary movement, one must analyze their level of class formation—namely, the capacity of the members of a class to realize their interests. Class capacity is contingent, among other things, on the level of organization and mobilization of the members of the class. Rather than deriving automatically from the structural positions, class capacity is “rooted in traditional culture and communities.”2Class boundaries, interests, and mobilization are always shifting: interests change, coalitions are formed and break up, positions in the economy are created or destroyed, and demobilization occurs.3Classes are continually organized, disorganized, and reorganized.4The methodological strategy adopted in this article to demonstrate the importance of class in shaping the economic policy of the Islamic Republic is based on the analysis of the significant and controversial issues that appeared in the post-revolutionary period. It will be argued that these issues were a manifestation of class struggle and that the way they were finally resolved reflected the balance of class forces.5

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