What is a Social Structure? Please, anyone!!

Over the years I've become convinced that this is one of the central questions in all social sciences. If I didn't know it would be a counterproductive strategy, I would simply stop everything else to work on it. I think this is the heart of the distinction between "Continental" and "Anglo-Saxon" social theory and of many other crucial questions. Problem is, I don't think I'm getting any closer to a satisfactory solution. This is really the first of a bunch of posts that are little else than a cry of despair.

Human life (and, for that matter, non-human life as well) flows through structures. In my University, we just changed President, recently in our school we changed Dean and we will soon have a new Department Chair. No one believes that these new individuals will remake the University, the School or the Department in ways that will make the current ones unrecognizable. We experience our surroundings, the institutions around us, the organizations to which we belong, even our familiar life as structures where individuals are replaceable at least to some degree. 

This is nothing new. Phenomenologists have made a living out of this (at least since Berger and Luckmann if not since Husserl himself), this is Sociology 101. 

The problem is that, to my knowledge, we don't have:

a. A good definition of what IS a structure.

b. A good account of how structures emerge, change and collapse.

I'm enough of a rational-choice theorist to try a crack at b. In that capacity, I could try to show that structures are necessary for social life because they, for instance, reduce our cognitive demands. In a world of bounded rationality, it is easier to navigate our social milieu if we are surrounded by structures so that we don't have to start from scratch everything each time the teller at a bank calls in sick. But this may explain why we need structures, not how they emerge. Similarly, Searle has argued that institutional facts (a topic akin to what I have in mind) operate on the basis of our Background abilities. (Here "Background" is capitalized because it is a technical term for Searle.) But, again, this doesn't tell us why we have this structure or that one, and not the other one out there. 

Continental social theorists may say that the very question is unintelligible. After all, they point out that these things exist, in the elegant phrase, "always already." In other words, it may seem futile to try to DERIVE a structure from something else because everything exists within a structure. There is nothing prior to a structure. For people who believe this, and, to be sure, it is a good point, the exercises we do in economics of imagining exchanges between two agents, economies with one or two goods, two or three traders and so on, are pointless because they will never be able to generate a structure; those traders, agents, citizens, voters, what have you, always already exist against a structure that makes them traders, agents, citizens, voters and what have you.

Granted. But if we take this to its logical conclusion, it means that we can never offer an account for the emergence of structures. I can offer a "genetic account" that is, I can tell how one specific structure in history developed out of another one. But notice what we are giving up if this is all there is to it: we are giving up the possibility of knowing the roads not taken. A full understanding of a structure should tell us what other possible forms it might take and why it doesn't take them.

Let me illustrate with a nagging question I've been pondering about. Bourdieu convinced me that power is the central social phenomenon. And, sure enough, power always exist within a structure. There is no power outside of a structure, except perhaps for the power of brute force. So, as far as I can follow it, the literature influenced by Bourdieu has taken up the task of describing how power is transformed from one type of capital to the next, from one field to the next. I like the way Bourdieu makes power fungible so that you can transform physical capital into symbolic capital and into political capital and so on. He does it much better than what I just said, of course. 

But the question that, as far as I can tell he cannot answer is: what determines the total amount of power/capital? Is power like matter-energy that it can only be transformed? That seems unlikely. More likely is that different structures generate different amounts of power. I surmise that modern bureaucracies have enormous levels of power that were undreamed of in previous eras. But if we want to know how this happens, we need to know how is power generated, how is capital generated. But this is not a historical question. It is an analytical one. We need an analytical account of how structures come into being to answer this.

It's getting late and I'm not coming across as lucid as I thought I would. Anyway, I'm sure I'll keep wrestling with this for a long time so there's no harm in stopping now.

A Philosophical Take on "Liberal Condescension"

Oh well, I though I would just sit this one out because it involves a colleague I admire and like but, since no one reads this, then what the heck. I can make some other philosophical point in the process. Gerard Alexander recently published a high-visibility piece in the Washington Post which you can find here. If you ask me, I think it is an appalling piece of nonsense and many other liberals and progressives are saying that. Now, before I go on, I should add that I have mixed feelings about the whole affair. At some level, I'm glad that Gerard is getting notoriety. I honestly like him. On the other hand, I don't think this is the notoriety he deserves. Probably I'm not in the best position to evaluate his work, but I've interacted with him in several professional settings and, believe me, he is one very smart and articulate scholar. It somehow pains me that he is coming under fire as if he were a regular party hack. (Well, the piece definitely reads as if it was written by a party hack, there's nothing I can do about it.) 

I don't want to spend a lot of time commenting on the obvious problems of the piece but there are a few that stand out. First, Gerard lumps all "liberals" and all "conservatives" together. So all liberals have the same narrative about all conservatives. Baloney. For instance, Thomas Frank has generated a lot of discussion among liberals. Larry Bartels, who I suspect is a liberal, and has definitely influenced Krugman, has little time for Frank's thesis. Then, whenever a liberal says something rather untoward, even if it refers to one specific conservative, it is presented as the ultimate liberal gospel. But if a conservative says that, I don't know, that liberals are traitors (as Ann Coulter does for a living), that's just an occasional "media gadfly". Gerard cries foul because liberals accuse conservatives (some conservatives, I would hasten to add) of practicing the "paranoid style of politics." But when Jim De Mint says that under Obama the US is in a situation reminiscent of Germany in 1933, isn't that paranoia? When James Inhofe gets waist-deep in conspiracy-theory territory to deny climate change, isn't that paranoia? What is one supposed to do? If Gerard is concerned about the style of debate, he could have told Senator De Mint to S.T.F.U. Gerard is an expert on Western European politics, and I mean it. (Again, he is a serious intellectual.) He could have told De Mint what it really was like in Germany in 1933. 

Then, at the end of the day, Gerard's complaint is that liberals don't listen to conservatives. Let's see. The stimulus package included 30% of tax cuts suggested by conservatives. The health care reform bill is designed to keep intact the employer-provided system and, from the get-go, avoided single-payer. At every turn, the health care reform effort of the Democrats has tried to give as much as possible to the market. The cap-and-trade plan is the mainstream, textbook, market economics solution to an externality problem. You may disagree with the specific contents of these policies, but they have an unmistakeable input from conservative thought. 

I guess the problem Gerard has with liberals is that they are not as conservative as he is. Well, that's hard because most people aren't. I also whine that liberals are not as socialist as I am and, again, most people aren't. But that's my problem. And Gerard's. But then neither he nor me should go on hectoring liberals to stop being... liberals.

Anyway, that stuff has already been picked apart by many commentators. What I'm interested in is something else. There is definitely something to the self-perception of liberals and, in general, the left-of-center as the "party of reason." 

I am a leftist, but also a social scientist, so I don't want to take the facile view that "well, you know, the left is rational because it's rational and so, by exclusion, the right isn't." I want to probe the idea that there are some socio-historical reasons that ground this.

First, the left is over-represented in academia (yours truly being an example) at least in the US but also, I believe, in many other countries. It's not that leftists are smarter. It has to do with well-known facts. For instance, leftists are less likely to go into the private sector. (This was a point made by Hayek and I'm shocked that Gerard didn't mention it.) In many places academia was a relatively free and secure outlet for left-wing political expression. Whatever the causes, yes, a lot of science is done by people a bit to the left of their respective citizenry. 

Second, and here I get more to what I believe is not often remarked, there is a strong tradition in the left that tries to make up for lack of political and economic resources by marshaling intellectual resources as a legitimizing device. The early generations of socialists resembled a bit the early Christians in that they had to burnish their scholarly credentials in front of an establishment that was very hostile and that looked down on them as an unwashed and uneducated rabble. 

Notice what I'm trying to do here: I'm trying NOT to take for granted that appeals to reason are sufficient grounds for legitimation. Precisely that is the interesting question. I'm trying to avoid taking for granted the primacy of reason, something that is hard for me to do because I am, to the bone marrow, a social scientist and rationalist. But the fascinating thing here is that social sciences as a vehicle for legitimation are a relatively recent thing. 

As a matter of fact, sometimes I wonder if the left isn't too secular and too rationalistic. There was a time, not too far back, when Catholicism was a hotbed of socialist mobilization, led by the Liberation theology. As much as I am a secular bourgeois, I have to admit that it was a potent force and the socialist movement is all the poorer for its lost.

This leads me to another consideration. Both the left and the right can try to appeal to rationality to legitimize their views. Both the left and the right can try to appeal to some notion of religion to do the same although, at least in the current Western culture it is more the right that does so. But there is one source of legitimation that is available only to the right: the appeal to tradition and it so happens that that is particularly salient in the US. As a foreigner I'm always amazed at how far you can go in American political discourse simply by saying "here we don't do that." Just stating, without any further argument, that, say, nationalizing banks is "not American" is good enough. The same goes for things such as "class warfare," "socialism," "equality of outcomes" and so on. Unlike Gerard, I'm not claiming that all conservatives appeal to this kind of thing, but some do. And not because of some particular perfidy, but because it works, because it is a respectable way of legitimizing your own discourse in American society. If I was not so intent on playing nice, I would even call this "volkisch" because to some extent it coincides with the old, innocent definition of the word. I know that "volkisch" is now a contaminated term so I'll drop it here. But the point is that, given the way American political culture works, it is no wonder that one side is disproportionately more "rational" than the other one. After all, one side has more choices of legitimizing language than the other for which rationality is almost the only game in town.