Conceptual History and Global Translations: The Social in a Global Comparative Perspective of Conceptual History

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1 Conceptual History and Global Translations: The Social in a Global Comparative Perspective of Conceptual History A Workshop at the Renvall Institute, University of Helsinki 3-4 October, 2008 The Framework This workshop is the first tentative meeting in a series of four on global translations of the conceptualisations of the social. The aim of the first meeting is two explore the possibilities to compare the semantic fields around the term social in a number of Asian and European language cultures. The further meetings will narrow down the agenda towards a publication. Later on a few representatives of African languages will be added on. The work on the concept of the social will be closely connected to a parallel work on the conceptualisation of the economic beginning in the autumn of This work will also be undertaken through a series of three or four meetings. Overlapping membership in the two working groups is preferred. Later on work on the concept of development will be initiated. The series of workshops is organised by the universities of Helsinki and Århus in cooperation. The project is connected to a larger consortium which on the European side so far has participation from the universities of Berlin (FU), Bielefeld, Bochum, oxford and Oslo. The research agenda the political, the religious and civilisation/culture. The Aim The more precise aim of this workshop l is to take the first step in a more general development of a world historical perspective with a central place for the social dimension in its entanglement with the economic and with imaginations of development and progress. The social dimension went by and large lost since the 1980s in the cultural and post-modern turn, and in the master narrative on globalisation. We want to supplement and confront the economic globalisation narrative by bringing the social dimension back in again, which means a focus on the intersections and the tensions between the political, the social and the economic, in a long historical perspective. A crucial target of the world history we envisage would be a global map of the emergence of the social questions and its conceptualisation. The global map would have a spatial as well as a temporal dimension, a global map in space and time. What kind of social strains and protests, tensions between social integration and disintegration were there, when and how did they emerge, and how were they conceptualised? How did they relate to the

2 concept of economy and development? Can we discern a global pattern? What did colonialism and the deployment of industrial capitalism mean? Our long-term goal is to map an entangled global history of economic and social policies and politics. Entanglement should thereby not be mistaken for equal power relationships as is so often the case in the methodological use of the network metaphor. Entanglement does not only mean smooth market exchange but should also be analysed in terms of social hierarchies and inequalities and in terms of differences as to political power. Entanglements of social differences emerge within as well as between societies. Our conceptual perspective is developed under demarcation to teleological and evolutionary approaches in conventional economic history and history of international relations, for instance, with pretensions to take a global view. The role of language is crucial and there is no social reality that can be described and conceptualised beyond the limits set by language. The openness and uncertainties of future in historical processes must be underlined. Contingency in the sense of not necessary, not impossible is a better analytical term than cause. Cultures should not be understood in homogeneous terms but as space of interpretation and reflection, communication and social contention, social bargaining and work on problem resolutions, with fluid and contested borders. The conceptualisation of the social, the political and the economic has occurred in a semantic field of Western provenience. Religion, civilisation and culture are Western terms, too. The argument can against the backdrop of this bias be brought forward that this is a problem of communication in an ever more global world. The crucial question is to what extent the European or Western view can be relativised. Dipesh Chakrabarty in his postcolonial critique seems to argue that this is a rather impossible undertaking. Although he recognises the Enlightenment values as a European achievement for the world, and that no Indian history can be written without integrating the colonial experience, his prescription for provincialising Europe is to reject such a history and write an alternative story independent of Europe which would mean a communicational rupture. It is easy to agree with Chakrabarty s view that colonialism produced a world image where it became normal to think of England as a rich country and India as a poor country. His argument that he and other historians of Asia (and one could add Africa) must pay attention to the academic production of their European colleagues, who must not consider the scholarly production in Asia and Africa is a serious critique. The challenging question that Chakrabarty s argument provokes is whether the Western bias can be transgressed and whether global communication across cultures and civilisations can be established.

3 The Substance of Workshop 1: The Conceptualisation of the Social The term social and the semantic field around it, with terms such as socialism and socialist, belong to the category of what Reinhard Koselleck labelled future-oriented movement concepts. 1 The content is from the beginning determined by theoretical outlines with a direction into the future rather than by historical realities. The concept has on principle not been changed in its history but has only been interpreted in various ways. The question of the social is closely connected to the development of the labour movement in the nineteenth century, but the concept went also beyond the labour movement, in particular in the twentieth century. Socialism as social science, as Kathedersozialismus, as state socialism, as religious or Christian socialism, as a liberal or anti-liberal national socialism are all concepts that demonstrate the attraction of and the contention around the concept. The conceptualisation of the social is very much connected to a specific Western history and philosophical reflection. The aim of the workshop is to investigate the relevance outside Europe of this conceptualisation. How has the social been conceptualised in other languages and cultures like Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and Arabic? Another target is the European diversity in this respect. Socialism and socialist came in several European languages from the enlightenment philosophy as neologism of the Latin term socialis which was closely connected to two other Latin words: socius and societas. After Seneca had translated the Aristotelian with animal sociale the semantic field around socialis described the social and the political conditions of human beings. Thomas of Aquin and the Medieval scholastic line of thought derived these conditions from divine reason. Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf in the seventeenth century developed the origin towards natural law at least by Pufendorf under demarcation to the Christian connection. Under impression by the sceptical objections of Thomas Hobbes to Hugo Grotius social theory Pufendorf connected socialites to individual interests in a utilitarian direction. Not the predetermined universal framing of human beings into societas civilis by God or nature but the constitution of societas civilis by individual interest orientations was the point that Pufendorf made. Until the nineteenth century and the deployment of industrial capitalism, which, in turn, provoked a growing debate on the social question from the 1820s and 1830s onwards, the conceptualisation of the social remained mainly a legal philosophical issue. With the 1 Wolfgang Schieder, Sozialismus in: Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhard Koselleck (Hg), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland. Vol 5. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta 1984.

4 British and French social reformers at that time, Robert Owens, Charles Fourier and Henri de Saint-Simon socialist and socialism were used to describe their social theories and their adherents. From now on the conceptualisation of the social got a clear future-orientation. Society and the human conditions could be changed by human action. A debate emerged about the right definition of the social field and who was a socialist and who was not. Later on in the wake of the philosophy of Karl Marx this debate was particularly strong in the opinions on the connection between agency and future on the theme revolution or reform. As opposed to the earlier industrialising England and France, the conceptualisation of the social in the German-speaking lands was not linked to social movements but to social science. Karl Marx, for instance, called his version of socialism wissenschaftliche Sozialismus under argumentation that his theoretical utopia was different from the earlier social utopias since it was based on science. Lorenz Stein was in the 1840s active in the work on establishing the link between the social and the scientific. During the reaction after the revolution in 1848 socialism began to connote negative values much more than earlier. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels described with the term class struggle a polarised society. A link and at the same time tension was established to the term communism with a very different provenience. The reference to Marx demonstrates that the social is closely connected to the concepts of society and community. These two concepts, in turn, were in the view of Ferdinand Tönnies seen as dichotomic. Gesellschaft became the problematic substitute of the more archaic and holistic Gemeinschaft in his view. His dichotomy outlines a progressive movement from Gemeinschaft/community towards Gesellschaft/society. The semantic field around the social is a tight and complex web already within the dominating European languages. The complexity does hardly decline if the analysis is extended to other languages in Europe and, in particular, outside Europe. The opposition between socialism and communism, to which also Lorenz Stein contributed, produced political and social dynamics. The terms Christian or religious socialism and democratic socialism as well as national socialism emerged. Marx rejected the term social democratic as being in opposition to his key concept class consciousness. National socialism became a key term in strategies for the integration of social protest. The German Kathedersozialisten developed socialism as an instrument against the economic liberalism as it was propagated in Manchester. In this context state socialism became an important concept. Bismarck used the term when in 1884 in the parliament he stated that a main reason of the success of the social democratic leaders was the lack of a clear state

5 socialism. The state had left a vacuum for the social democratic agitation to exploit. In the same vein the conservative Swedish professor of political science ( statsvetenskap ) argued for a national socialism as opposed to the class struggle socialism. Like all attractive political concepts, the question of the social signified both a general recognition of a problem and, at the same time, a source of controversy over specific solutions and recommendations for courses of action. There was a growing general understanding that, above and beyond the individual level, someone had to take responsibility. Before the 1930s, however, it was difficult to find social organs that would accept this responsibility. The state, local government, employers associations, and trade unions all tried to shift responsibility away from themselves and onto the others. The central question at the heart of these bargaining processes after areas of responsibility had been identified was to determine precisely who was responsible for old-age pensions, for guaranteeing incomes in the case of sickness or disability, or for unemployment insurance, etc. Such issues distinguished different social interest groups and put them into confrontation with one another. The specific outcome of the complex struggles of the nineteenth century varied from country to country according to the proper power relationships and historical heritages of each. However, in more general terms, the answer that emerged out of the turmoil of the 1930s massively assigned social responsibility to the state. In the wake of the collapse of labour markets, governments intervened on an unprecedented scale in most countries to quiet or to exploit social unrest. State intervention took very different forms: it was carried out in the name of National Socialism in Germany, of the Front Populaire in France, of Social Democracy and Red-Green labour-farmer coalitions in Scandinavia, and of The New Deal in the United States. State responsibility was legitimised and confirmed by economic theory during the 1950s and 1960s. Keynes was a leading figure when the idea that the economy, the market, was governable through politics emerged. This insight had gained in importance, not least, by the experience in political planning and the governance of the economy acquired during two world wars. Economic theory explained the connections between employment, investment, and currency value, and argued that the nature of these connections was politically manageable. Political economy, mixed economy, soziale Marktwirtschaft, and economic planning became key concepts, and some thinkers talked about a long-term convergence between socialist and capitalist systems based on a belief in the indispensable political governance of the economy. There was also a general belief in global development and

6 socioeconomic progress. Key concepts in this belief were underdevelopment and development politics. The question is against the backdrop of this very rough outline twofold: 1. How has the corresponding conceptualisation of the social come about in non- European cultures such as China, India, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia (Thai) and the Arab world? Were there any connections to the European debate, and if so, how were the key terms translated? To what extent was there a conceptualisation isolated from the European development and how was the semantic field derived etymologically? Two what extent was the interaction more within Asia, e g between Chinese and Japanese or between Arabic and Indian cultures? 2. What European diversity was there and how well does the outline here fit with other language cultures and polities than the English, the French and the German, which have provided the basis of the outline?