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Computational and Data-Driven Gellnerian Social Theory: From the Transition to Modernity to a Disenchanted Future
Abstract
Computational and data-driven approaches in social science have become increasingly popular in recent years, in tandem with the rise of artificial intelligence. Gellner’s social theory may seem far removed from these approaches, but in fact the clarity of his analytical and comparative-historical account of social change lends itself to formalization and data-driven testing, thus allowing evaluation in relation to rival social theories. Gellner’s social thought also embraced empiricism and mechanism, which aid causal explanations and so contribute to cumulative social scientific knowledge. This chapter examines Gellner’s social theory with a view to how it fares when put to the test of recent computational social science approaches, which include visualizing causal pathways. A starting point here is Gellner’s conception of the transition to modernity, which has been much discussed, where he aims to pinpoint the main explanations. And one example of how his thought can inform analysis of the future of modernity is climate change, where current trends will, without major course corrections, inexorably lead to greater coercion. Gellner did not anticipate data-driven computational approaches, but his thought provides important guideposts for cumulation in keeping with this new turn in the social sciences.KeywordsGellnerSocial theoryComputational social scienceModernityClimate change
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In this paper, we sketch a programme for AI-driven social theory. We begin by defining what we mean by artificial intelligence (AI) in this context. We then lay out our specification for how AI-based models can draw on the growing availability of digital data to help test the validity of different social theories based on their predictive power. In doing so, we use the work of Randall Collins and his state breakdown model to exemplify that, already today, AI-based models can help synthesise knowledge from a variety of sources, reason about the world, and apply what is known across a wide range of problems in a systematic way. However, we also find that AI-driven social theory remains subject to a range of practical, technical, and epistemological limitations. Most critically, existing AI-systems lack three essential capabilities needed to advance social theory in ways that are cumulative, holistic, open-ended, and purposeful. These are (1) semanticisation, i.e., the ability to develop and operationalize verbal concepts to represent machine-manipulable knowledge; (2) transferability, i.e., the ability to transfer what has been learned in one context to another; and (3) generativity, i.e., the ability to independently create and improve on concepts and models. We argue that if the gaps identified here are addressed by further research, there is no reason why, in the future, the most advanced programme in social theory should not be led by AI-driven cumulative advances.
The planetary boundary framework presents a ‘planetary dashboard’ of humanity’s globally aggregated performance on a set of environmental issues that endanger the Earth system’s capacity to support humanity. While this framework has been highly influential, a critical shortcoming for its application in sustainability governance is that it currently fails to represent how impacts related to one of the planetary boundaries affect the status of other planetary boundaries. Here, we surveyed and provisionally quantified interactions between the Earth system processes represented by the planetary boundaries and investigated their consequences for sustainability governance. We identified a dense network of interactions between the planetary boundaries. The resulting cascades and feedbacks predominantly amplify human impacts on the Earth system and thereby shrink the safe operating space for future human impacts on the Earth system. Our results show that an integrated understanding of Earth system dynamics is critical to navigating towards a sustainable future. The cascading effects and feedbacks of interactions between planetary boundaries shrink the safe operating space originally identified by analysing each boundary separately.
The histories of all modern scientific and intellectual fields are marked by dynamism. Yet, despite a welter of case study data, sociologists of ideas have been slow to develop general theories for explaining why and how disciplines, subfields, theory groups, bandwagons, actor networks, and other kindred formations arise to alter the intellectual landscape. To fill this lacuna, this article presents a general theory of scientific/intellectual movements (SIMs). The theory synthesizes work in the sociology of ideas, social studies of science, and the literature on social movements to explain the dynamics of SIMs, which the authors take to be central mechanisms for change in the world of knowledge and ideas. Illustrating their arguments with a diverse sampling of positive and negative cases, they define SIMs, identify a set of theoretical presuppositions, and offer four general propositions for explaining the social conditions under which SIMs are most likely to emerge, gain prestige, and achieve some level of institutional stability.
Introduction
Pierre Bourdieu developed his theory of social fields through his analyses of religion, art and social class in European societies. But how might this theory address the larger theme of the present volume? In other words, how might Bourdieusian field theory account for the ‘emergence and transformation’ of international orders – as Albert and Werron (Chapter 1 in this volume) put it? And how might this field-theoretic account differ from other theoretical approaches? This chapter offers some preliminary thoughts on these questions by reference to three transformative processes (or macrohistorical turning points) during past two centuries that conventional historiographies recognize as crucial for the current political order: the expansion of colonial empires during the phase of ‘high imperialism’ (roughly late nineteenth to early twentieth century), the two world wars (1914–45) and the post-war end of formal colonial empires heralding the rise to dominance of the modern nation state (1946–present).
These three macrohistorical turning points might readily be narrated in terms of an array of other theoretical approaches. Of particular interest here might be differentiation and social evolution theory as discussed in other chapters of this volume (Holzer, Chapter 4; Stetter, Chapter 8). For instance, the first process under scrutiny – the period of ‘high imperialism’ starting in the nineteenth century – might be thought of as the creation of a system of ‘stratified differentiation’ (Albert et al, 2013a). Through the imperial expansion of Western states to encompass nearly the entire world, a stratified order of imperial states and their colonies was created. Similarly, the postwar end of empires and the creation of a global order of nation states in the twentieth century might be thought of as ‘segmented differentiation’: the hierarchical empires collapsed, yielding a system of nominally sovereign and equal nation states (Albert et al, 2013a; see also Luhmann, 1997a: 72). Or the process might be thought of as an intensified period of ‘internal differentiation’ by which new international organizations proliferated alongside nation states and the development of new ‘practices, rules, and organizations’ associated with new primary institutions (Stetter, Chapter 8 in this volume). Relatedly, drawing upon Holzer (Chapter 4 in this volume), the end of empires and the creation of the interstate order might be theorized as concomitant with the universalization of communication and thus the creation of a new global consensus around human rights and principles of national self-determination.
This chapter explores how the Bourdieusian field theory can be deployed to make sense of global dynamics. It mentions international relations (IR) scholars that have enlisted Bourdieu in their analyses, applied his work to international issues, and taken certain concepts, such as habitus and practice, from his larger theoretical conceptual apparatus. It also focuses on three transformative processes or macro-historical turning points: the expansion of colonial empires during the phase of 'high imperialism', the two world wars, and the post-war end of formal colonial empires that heralded the rise to dominance of the modern nation state. The chapter maps the points of differentiation between field theory approaches and other approaches. It recognizes other key elements of Bourdieusian field theory, such as fields that consist of objective relations between actors and the subjective and cultural forms of those relations.
The Future of the World is devoted to the intriguing field of study which emerged after World War Two, futurism or futurology. Jenny Andersson explains how futurist scholars and researchers imagined the Cold War and post Cold War world and the tools and methods they would use to influence and change that world. Futurists were a motley crew of Cold War warriors, nuclear scientists, journalists, and peace activists. Some argued it should be a closed sphere of science defined by delimited probabilities. They were challenged by alternative notions of the future as a potentially open realm. Futurism also drew on an eclectic range of repertoires, some of which were deduced from positivist social science, mathematics, and nuclear physics, and some of which sprung from alternative forms of knowledge in science fiction, journalism, or religion. These different forms of prediction laid very different claims to how accurately futures could be known, and what kind of control could be exerted over what was yet to come. The Future of the World carefully examines these different engagements with the future, and inscribes them in the intellectual history of the post war period. Using unexplored archival collections, The Future of the World reconstructs the Cold War networks of futurologists and futurists. [Publisher's abstract]
This book is a critical interpretation of a seminal and protracted debate in comparative global economic history. Since its emergence, in now classic publications in economic history between 1997-2000, debate on the divergent economic development that has marked the long-term economic growth of China and Western Europe has generated a vast collection of books and articles, conferences, networks, and new journals as well as intense interest from the media and educated public.
O’Brien provides an historiographical survey and critique of Western views on the long-run economic development of the Imperial Economy of China – a field of commentary that stretches back to the Enlightenment. The book’s structure and core argument is concentrated upon an elaboration of, and critical engagement with, the major themes of recent academic debate on the “Great Divergence” and it will be of enormous interest to academics and students of economic history, political economy, the economics of growth and development, state formation, statistical measurements, environmental history, and the histories of science and globalization.
This book is a study of the causes and the consequences of modern imperialism, with a focus on British and US imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, respectively. It analyzes the dynamics of both formal and informal empires. It shows that, time and again, the pursuit of national economic prosperity led hegemonic powers to expand into peripheral areas of the world. Limiting the sovereignty of states on the periphery was the main method of ensuring that peripheral economies stayed open and accessible to Anglo-American economic interests. Loss of sovereignty, however, greatly hurt the life chances of people living in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. Sovereign states may not be sufficient to facilitate economic progress, but sovereignty is a precondition for the emergence of effective states. Effective states, in turn, are necessary to propel countries toward prosperous industrial societies. Some exceptions notwithstanding, imperialism—both formal and informal—has thus repeatedly undermined the prospects of steady economic progress in the global periphery.
Populism has recently been surging with explanations to date focusing on economic or cultural power. This paper builds on Mann’s work to develop an explanation centered on political power instead. It presents an account of populism’s longer-term trajectories and a process of struggle ‘from below’ for citizenship rights, which should be curtailed for some and expanded for others. This paper compares four countries – Sweden, the United States, India and China – their commonalities but also the differences in terms of how ‘others’, internally and externally, are excluded, and how elites are criticized. The conclusion assesses the prospects for populists in power.
Kevin O'Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson present a coherent picture of trade, migration, and international capital flows in the Atlantic economy in the century prior to 1914—the first great globalization boom, which anticipated the experience of the last fifty years.
Globalization is not a new phenomenon, nor is it irreversible. In Gobalization and History, Kevin O'Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson present a coherent picture of trade, migration, and international capital flows in the Atlantic economy in the century prior to 1914—the first great globalization boom, which anticipated the experience of the last fifty years. The authors estimate the extent of globalization and its impact on the participating countries, and discuss the political reactions that it provoked. The book's originality lies in its application of the tools of open-economy economics to this critical historical period—differentiating it from most previous work, which has been based on closed-economy or single-sector models. The authors also keep a close eye on globalization debates of the 1990s, using history to inform the present and vice versa. The book brings together research conducted by the authors over the past decade—work that has profoundly influenced how economic history is now written and that has found audiences in economics and history, as well as in the popular press.
Many historical processes are dynamic. Populations grow and decline. Empires expand and collapse. Religions spread and wither. Natural scientists have made great strides in understanding dynamical processes in the physical and biological worlds using a synthetic approach that combines mathematical modeling with statistical analyses. Taking up the problem of territorial dynamics--why some polities at certain times expand and at other times contract--this book shows that a similar research program can advance our understanding of dynamical processes in history. Peter Turchin develops hypotheses from a wide range of social, political, economic, and demographic factors: geopolitics, factors affecting collective solidarity, dynamics of ethnic assimilation/religious conversion, and the interaction between population dynamics and sociopolitical stability. He then translates these into a spectrum of mathematical models, investigates the dynamics predicted by the models, and contrasts model predictions with empirical patterns. Turchin's highly instructive empirical tests demonstrate that certain models predict empirical patterns with a very high degree of accuracy. For instance, one model accounts for the recurrent waves of state breakdown in medieval and early modern Europe. And historical data confirm that ethno-nationalist solidarity produces an aggressively expansive state under certain conditions (such as in locations where imperial frontiers coincide with religious divides). The strength of Turchin's results suggests that the synthetic approach he advocates can significantly improve our understanding of historical dynamics.
First Published in 2018. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an Informa company.
This text offers insight into one of the classic questions of history: why did sustained industrial growth begin in Northwest Europe, despite surprising similarities between advanced areas of Europe and East Asia? As the author shows, as recently as 1750, parallels between these two parts of the world were very high in life expectancy, consumption, product and factor markets, and the strategies of households. Perhaps most surprisingly, he demonstrates that the Chinese and Japanese cores were no worse off ecologically than Western Europe. Core areas throughout the eighteenth-century Old World faced comparable local shortages of land-intensive products, shortages that were only partly resolved by trade. The author argues that Europe's nineteenth-century divergence from the Old World owes much to the fortunate location of coal, which substituted for timber. This made Europe's failure to use its land intensively much less of a problem, while allowing growth in energy-intensive industries. Another crucial difference that he notes has to do with trade. Fortuitous global conjunctures made the Americas a greater source of needed primary products for Europe than any Asian periphery. This allowed Northwest Europe to grow dramatically in population, specialize further in manufactures, and remove labor from the land, using increased imports rather than maximizing yields. Together, coal and the New World allowed Europe to grow along resource-intensive, labor-saving paths. Meanwhile, Asia hit a cul-de-sac. Although the East Asian hinterlands boomed after 1750, both in population and in manufacturing, this growth prevented these peripheral regions from exporting vital resources to the cloth-producing Yangzi Delta. As a result, growth in the core of East Asia's economy essentially stopped, and what growth did exist was forced along labor-intensive, resource-saving paths, paths Europe could have been forced down, too, had it not been for favorable resource stocks from underground and overseas.
An Age of Limits outlines a new social theory for understanding contemporary society. Providing an analysis of why political, economic and cultural powers face constraints across the global North and beyond, this bold book argues that forces which address current challenges must confront the limits of the interplay between dominant institutions.
We review concepts, principles, and tools that unify current approaches to causal analysis and attend to new challenges presented by big data. In particular, we address the problem of data fusion-piecing together multiple datasets collected under heterogeneous conditions (i.e., different populations, regimes, and sampling methods) to obtain valid answers to queries of interest. The availability of multiple heterogeneous datasets presents new opportunities to big data analysts, because the knowledge that can be acquired from combined data would not be possible from any individual source alone. However, the biases that emerge in heterogeneous environments require new analytical tools. Some of these biases, including confounding, sampling selection, and cross-population biases, have been addressed in isolation, largely in restricted parametric models. We here present a general, nonparametric framework for handling these biases and, ultimately, a theoretical solution to the problem of data fusion in causal inference tasks.
Introduction: a defence of the European Miracle (and of Ernest Gellner) - in Europe In the first and second volumes of The Sources of Social Power I gave an account of ‘the European Miracle’ which owed a considerable personal debt to Ernest Gellner - and also to John Hall, through our LSE Seminar Series ‘Patterns of History’. There we invited eminent scholars, experts on a great range of societies in time and place, to speak on the major issues of their field. We did this in order to pillage knowledge from them which would be useful in our own budding theories of social development. I greatly admired my two colleagues' abilities to cut to the chase of major issues, especially John through his incisive questioning and Ernest through his theory-rich one-liners. Over the 1980s Ernest, John and I then gave overlapping accounts of the ‘European Miracle’ in which we argued that the essential breakthrough to modernity came in Western Europe, and that its origins and dynamic lay deep-rooted in the continent (Gellner 1988; Hall 1986; Mann 1986). So also did Jean Baechler, with whom we collaborated in a book (Hall et al. 1988), and so have economic historians like Ernest Jones (1987) and David Landes (1998). Since the 1990s this viewpoint has been attacked by economic historians styling themselves as ‘anti-Orientalists’, especially Kenneth Pomerantz (2000), Bin Wong (1997) and Andre Gunder Frank (1998), buttressed by demographers (Lee and Cameron 1997; Lee and Feng, 1999) and sociologists (Goldstone 2002; Hobson 2004). © Cambridge University Press 2007 and Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Why did the nation-state emerge and proliferate across the globe? How is this process related to the wars fought in the modern era? Analyzing datasets that cover the entire world over long stretches of time, Andreas Wimmer focuses on changing configurations of power and legitimacy to answer these questions. The nationalist ideal of self-rule gradually diffused over the world and delegitimized empire after empire. Nationalists created nation-states wherever the power configuration favored them, often at the end of prolonged wars of secession. The elites of many of these new states were institutionally too weak for nation-building and favored their own ethnic communities. Ethnic rebels challenged such exclusionary power structures in violation of the principles of self-rule, and neighboring governments sometimes intervened into these struggles over the state. Waves of War demonstrates why nation-state formation and ethnic politics are crucial to understand the civil and international wars of the past 200 years.
Cognition, or scientific knowledge, is the fulcrum of Gellner’s philosophy of history. Science, for Gellner, is central to understanding the rise of the West and also to his defence of Enlightenment rationality against postmodernism and other forms of relativism. This way of thinking has recently been challenged, first, by global historians who locate the ‘great divergence’ in the 19th century rather than earlier, and second, by those who assign to the Enlightenment a pernicious role and argue that rationality and scientific knowledge are inextricably bound to particular social contexts, for good or ill. Gellner’s ideas can be defended against these challenges, but this requires, first, distinguishing between rationality and science and, second, tracing the course of science and technology outside of the West. Once this defence is in place, Gellner’s ideas about the relation between cognition on one side and production and coercion can also be re-examined: here, too, his account requires revision since the idea that rationality ‘trumps’ the other two orders needs to be specified on the ground: in everyday life, for example, scientific knowledge is rather remote, and so often does not supersede other social dynamics. This also relates to other tensions in the relation between science, technology and everyday life: as Gellner noted, technology yields rubber as well as iron cages, but consumer technologies are now in some respects on a path towards unsustainable growth. Separating this problem from cognition is a further task. These refinements to Gellner’s ideas provide a basis for rethinking the connection he makes between liberalism and modern cognition.
Analytical table of contents Preface Introduction: rationality Part I. Representing: 1. What is scientific realism? 2. Building and causing 3. Positivism 4. Pragmatism 5. Incommensurability 6. Reference 7. Internal realism 8. A surrogate for truth Part II. Intervening: 9. Experiment 10. Observation 11. Microscopes 12. Speculation, calculation, models, approximations 13. The creation of phenomena 14. Measurement 15. Baconian topics 16. Experimentation and scientific realism Further reading Index.
This is the first part of a three-volume work on the nature of power in human societies. In it, Michael Mann identifies the four principal 'sources' of power as being control over economic, ideological, military, and political resources. He examines the interrelations between these in a narrative history of power from Neolithic times, through ancient Near Eastern civilisations, the classical Mediterranean age, and medieval Europe, up to just before the Industrial Revolution in England. Rejecting the conventional monolithic concept of a 'society', Dr. Mann's model is instead one of a series of overlapping, intersecting power networks. He makes this model operational by focusing on the logistics of power - how the flow of information, manpower, and goods is controlled over social and geographical space-thereby clarifying many of the 'great debates' in sociological theory. The present volume offers explanations of the emergence of the state and social stratification.
Part I. The Growth of Government: A Historical Perspective: 1. The growth of government since 1870 2. The composition of public expenditure 3. Revenue, deficits, and public debt Part II. Gains from the Growth of Public Expenditure: 4. Historical evidence on government performance 5. The size of government and its performance 6. The experience of the newly-industrialized economies Part III. The Role of the State and Government Reform: 7. Rethinking the role of the state 8. Fiscal rules and institutions 9. Blueprint for public expenditure reduction Part IV. Recent Countries' Experiences in Reforming the Government: 10. Recent reform experience 11. Fiscal reform in the public debate 12. The future of public spending.
In a rapidly changing and inter-disciplinary world it is important to understand the nature and generation of knowledge, and its social organization. Increasing attention is paid in the social sciences and management studies to the constitution and claims of different theories, perspectives,and 'paradigms'. This book is one of the most respected and robust analyses of these issues. For this new paperback edition Richard Whitley - a leading figure in European business education - has written a new introduction which addresses the particular epistemological issues presented by management and business studies. He approaches the sciences as differently organized systems for theproduction and validation of knowledge - systems which become established in particular contexts and which generate different sorts of knowledge. He identifies seven major types of scientific field and discusses the establishment and growth of these sciences, including the major consequences of thenineteenth-century expansion of employment opportunities for researchers; the competitive pursuit of public reputations; and the domination of intellectual work by employees. He also examines the divergences in the way research is organized and controlled both in different fields, and in the samefield within different historical circumstances. This book will be of interest to all graduate students concerned with the social study of knowledge, science, technology, and the history and philosophy of science.
This paper analyzes levels and trends in within-country income inequality during the second-half of the 20th century. Two broad general trends were visible: beginning in the 1950s and 1960s inequality declined substantially in most countries, and in the 1980s and 1990s it increased more variably and more slightly. However, we focus here on presenting and explaining the distinct 'macro-regional' regimes of inequality that became evident in this period. We identify six: Anglo, Nordic, Continental West European, Latin American, East Asian and South Asian. We show that intra-regional variations in inequality have been much less than inter-regional variations, and that the six regional regimes did not remain constant but had distinct trajectories through time. The Anglos were at first the most egalitarian, only later developing the greater inequality supposedly characteristic of their 'liberalism'. The Nordics only became the most egalitarian in the middle of our period. The Euro-Continentals began as the most unequal among the Western countries, but then became almost as equal as the Nordics. Latin America began and remained the most unequal region of all. East Asia was rather egalitarian, while South Asia converged towards a middling inequality. Though pressures towards more inequality strengthened from 1980, regional responses remained varied and path-dependent. Then, in more speculative vein, we seek to explain these regional patterns in macro-sociological terms. Beginning from a model of dynamic interactions between economic, ideological, military and political power relations, we trace the political institutionalization of distinct macro-regional ideologies of 'best practices' of socio-economic development.
"I want to get at the blown glass of the early cloud chambers and the oozing noodles of wet nuclear emulsion; to the resounding crack of a high-voltage spark arcing across a high-tension chamber and leaving the lab stinking of ozone; to the silent, darkened room, with row after row of scanners sliding trackballs across projected bubble-chamber images. Pictures and pulsesâI want to know where they came from, how pictures and counts got to be the bottom-line data of physics." (from the preface) Image and Logic is the most detailed engagement to date with the impact of modern technology on what it means to "do" physics and to be a physicist. At the beginning of this century, physics was usually done by a lone researcher who put together experimental apparatus on a benchtop. Now experiments frequently are larger than a city block, and experimental physicists live very different lives: programming computers, working with industry, coordinating vast teams of scientists and engineers, and playing politics. Peter L. Galison probes the material culture of experimental microphysics to reveal how the ever-increasing scale and complexity of apparatus have distanced physicists from the very science that drew them into experimenting, and have fragmented microphysics into different technical traditions much as apparatus have fragmented atoms to get at the fundamental building blocks of matter. At the same time, the necessity for teamwork in operating multimillion-dollar machines has created dynamic "trading zones," where instrument makers, theorists, and experimentalists meet, share knowledge, and coordinate the extraordinarily diverse pieces of the culture of modern microphysics: work, machines, evidence, and argument.
Computer-assisted theory building: Modelling dynamic social systems
- R Hanemann
Comment: Build back Greener? The New Yorker
- E Kolbert
Powers and liberties: The causes and consequences of the rise of the West
- John A Hall
- JA Hall
Climate change and the nation state: The case for nationalism in a warming world
- A Lieven
The book of why: The new science of cause and effect
- J Pearl
- D Mckenzie
The new map: Energy, climate, and the clash of nations
- D Yergin