| Back and Beyond: Reversing the Cultural Turn? | The American Historical Review, 107.5

Review Essays

Back and Beyond: Reversing the Cultural Turn?

RONALD GRIGOR SUNY

In social science, if you are not "bringing (something) back"—class, the state, whatever—you are probably already moving "beyond"—beyond Orientalism, beyond identity, and now beyond the cultural turn.¹ For those of us who made the cultural or linguistic or historical turn not so long ago, it is dismaying that all our efforts to catch up and bring back are still leaving us behind. Or are they? Back and beyond are metaphors for movement through space and time, in this case an intellectual journey from one practice of social analysis to another, abandoning certain ways of thinking and including, often reintroducing, others. The presumption is that travel is indeed broadening, not to mention deepening, and that experienced analysts will want to enrich their investigations with whatever insights, tools, and data can be gathered along the way. 1

     From the heights of political history, the move in the late 1960s and 1970s was to step down into society and include new constituencies in the narrative (or get rid of narrative altogether!). From social history, with its often functionalist or mechanistic forms of explanation, the shift was to plunge even deeper into the thick webs of significance that make up culture. In the narrative proposed by Beyond the Cultural Turn, "the new cultural history took shape in the 1980s as an upstart critique of the established social-economic and demographic histories."² The turn began, many would argue, with E. P. Thompson's introduction of a notion of culture into labor history, the bastion of Marxist social history, and Clifford Geertz's redefinition of culture in anthropology, a move that proved particularly seductive to historians.³ Although all this moving was going on among historians and anthropologists, and to a lesser extent among historical sociologists, it found little resonance among political scientists, as the self-proclaimed "core" of the discipline moved closer to economics, formal modeling, game theory, and rational choice. Old fault lines hardened between disciplines, and within disciplines, even as appeals to interdisciplinarity sounded. Yet, at the same time, social science could not go back, for the various turns had created heightened awareness of and sensitivity to matters of agency and subjectivity, contingency, the constructedness of social "reality," textuality, and the need for self-reflexivity by the investigator. 2

     In this essay, I would like, first, to trace some of the genealogy of the cultural turn, particularly in Marxist social history and in the aftermath of Geertz's essays; second, to outline what I believe are the principal approaches and insights of the cultural interpretivists; and, finally, to explore the relative absence of this kind of work within political science, with the exception of a few political theorists and constructivist international relations theorists. 3

For many of my generation, the coming of age in the 1960s was both politically and professionally connected with an initiation into the new forms of Marxism (often unacknowledged as such) that were disrupting the academy. The momentary revival of an intellectual Marxism, particularly among historians, was connected, on the one hand, with the hot wars into which the Cold War establishment had taken young Americans and, on the other, with the exciting achievements of British social historians—E. J. Hobsbawm, George Rudé, and E. P. Thompson were the most important—that expanded the focus of historians of the modern era in both topics and methods. Given the realities of American academic life, at a moment when the market for scholars was shrinking, social history in this country was never as openly socialist history as it was in Britain, but the research agenda that celebrated revolution, the working class, pre-capitalist forms of community, and alternatives to the dominant and seemingly immovable social order was closely allied and deeply indebted to the British Marxists. What made this alliance possible was that both historiography and intellectual Marxism were undergoing transformations that permitted divergent and open-ended explorations. What made it necessary was that Marxism as it existed failed to answer the most important questions it itself posed: How does class formation take place? What are the sources of consciousness? What makes a revolutionary situation? Why nation and not class? Thompson called these "the real silences of Marx."⁴ 4

     Today, at a new millennium's beginning, Marxism appears to have lost both its inspirational power and the confidence with which its loyalists were able to defend the most vile acts as political necessities. Still, for many in the generation of the Sixties, a particular form of humanist and critical Marxism, along with a variety of forms of liberalism, defined the principal lines of political choice. Western Marxism, primarily outside the circles of Communist parties (but also sometimes within, as in Britain and Italy), was in a constant struggle with the looming presence of the Soviet Union and was unable to ignore the often perverse influence of actually existing socialisms. More concerned with the defeats of socialism in its more democratic form in the West than with the successes of Soviet socialism, Western Marxism, in spite of the plurality of different theoretical positions and practices, was in some sense a Marxism of despair.⁵ 5

     In the late 1950s and 1960s, the significant intellectual defection from Soviet-style Communist parties in the West (such as E. P. Thompson and the "New Left" from the Communist Party of Great Britain) and an appeal by some to the socialist humanism of the Young Marx turned attention to Marx's early "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts" and the newly translated Grundrisse. With the appearance of the New Left, Western Marxists—Georg Lukacs, Karl Korsch, the Frankfurt School, various strains of Trotskyism, and, most notably, Antonio Gramsci—were able to renew and refine earlier discussions of critical Marxism. Among Communist parties, Nikita Khrushchev's liberalization permitted national roads to socialism, and a healthy pluralism and lively discussion reentered the petrified official Marxism of the Stalinist era. On one side of the discussion were those influenced by the structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser, which was highly critical of socialist humanism and attempted to return the discussion to the great economic works, Capital and Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations.⁶ 6

     Althusser interrogated the relation between structure and subject in history and society—a theoretical conundrum central to the problem of class formation. Already in Marx there was an unsteadiness, an oscillation between structural causality and human agency, between the contradiction of the forces of production and the relations of production in Capital, on the one hand, and his more political analyses of class on the other, particularly in his historical works, like The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. V. I. Lenin's later attempt to deal with this problem on the practical level, through the agency of the party, combating at one and the same time the passivity of Second International reformism and revisionism and the multifaceted spontaneity of the "masses" themselves, left the New Left unimpressed as they searched for more communitarian and less elitist forms of organization. For much of the short twentieth century, Marxists divided between those who emphasized the primacy of structure (for example, Nikolai Bukharin, and later Althusser) and those who emphasized human agency (many Trotskyists and Marxist humanists). With the triumph among French intellectuals of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Structuralism in the 1960s, Marxists like Althusser eliminated the subject, "save as the illusory effects of ideological structures," radically rejecting any volition of the individual or collective. "History," Althusser claimed, "is a process without a subject." Men and women are simply the "supports of the means of production."⁷ Althusser's former student Michel Foucault carried the flag into poststructuralism and described Marxism itself as an involuntary effect of an old-fashioned Victorian episteme. His erasure of the subject and elevation of discourse contributed powerfully to what would be termed the "cultural turn." 7

     Although there are many ways to tell the story of structure and agency and the revival of culture, the discussion that took place with the appearance of the influential work of E. P. Thompson offers a bridge from the moment of social history to the fascination with cultural studies. For Thompson, Althusser's structuralism represented an outmoded kind of Marxism, one in which "process is fate," and he and his comrades sought to revive an alternative tradition in which men and women are the "ever-baffled and ever-resurgent agents of an unmastered history." Rather than a process without a subject, Thompson argued, history is the arena in which humans transmute structure into process. Through experience (Thompson's key term), individuals make themselves into social classes, groups conscious of differences and antagonisms and conflicting interests. In his famous formulation—"Classes arise because men and women, in determinative productive relations, identify their antagonistic interests, and come to struggle, to think and to value in class ways: thus the process of class formation is a process of self-making, although under conditions which are 'given'"⁸ —Thompson presented human beings as part subjects, part objects in history, voluntary agents of involuntary determinations. What seemed so transparently to have been resolved by Marx—either in the version of the "bottom line," that in the final instance it is the economy, stupid, or in the formula of "man making history but not under conditions chosen by himself"—were now seen to contain theoretical and methodological ambiguities. 8

     Thompson's introduction of the concept of experience as the mediation through which "structure is transformed into process and the subject re-enters into history" implied a further "necessary middle term"—culture. ⁹ "For people do not experience their own experience as ideas, within thought and its procedures . . . They also experience their own experience as feeling, and they handle their own feelings within their culture, as norms, familial and kinship obligations and reciprocities, as values or (through more elaborated forms) within art or religious beliefs." ¹⁰ Thompson's beautifully crafted account of working-class experience in England up to 1832 presented class formation as the product both of the objective advent of the factory system and of the self-constitution of class by workers themselves. Agency took the form of a collective experience that was converted into broad social consciousness by workers themselves. In an often-quoted introductory paragraph, he tells us,

9

Class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs. The class experience is largely determined by the productive relations in which men are born—or enter involuntarily. Class consciousness is the way in which the experiences are handled in cultural terms: embodied in traditions, value-systems, ideas and institutional forms. If the experience appears as determined, class consciousness does not . . . [C]lass is defined by men as they live their own history, and, in the end, this is its only definition.¹¹

     Here, Thompson held on to a notion of interest as latent, given by the structure of social relations, and to be realized fully through experience. Thompson, of course, never abandoned the materialism that had always been part of Marxism. In his later studies of the eighteenth century, he proposed that class in the sense he used it in earlier works is a nineteenth-century phenomenon and that the more universal category is class struggle. "People find themselves in a society structured in determined ways (crucially, but not exclusively, in productive relations), they experience exploitation (or the need to maintain power over whom they exploit), they identify points of antagonistic interest, they commence to struggle around these issues, and in the process of struggling they discover themselves as classes, they come to know this discovery as class consciousness."¹² Here very clearly, Thompson exposes his own objectivist side. Class exists immanently as a template into which experiences arrange people. Not so much a construction, as it will be later with poststructuralism, class (like nation for nationalists) is a discovery. 10

     For Thompson, experience as well was sometimes something external to the subject, something that "walks in without knocking at the door and announces deaths, crises of subsistence, trench warfare, unemployment, inflation, genocide. People starve: their survivors think in new ways about the market. People are imprisoned: in prison they meditate in new ways about the law."¹³ Historical events, actualities, teach lessons that are true about the real world. As Perry Anderson points out (critically), for Thompson, experience was many different things: the actual living through events by participants and the effects they have on people; "the mental and emotional response, of an individual or of a social group, to inter-related events or the many repetitions of the same kind of event"; and the process of learning from such events, "a subjective alteration capable of modifying ensuing objective actions."¹⁴ Thompson conflated these different aspects (or kinds) of experience, maintaining what he calls a dialogue between social being and social consciousness. But he was particularly interested in how experience as lived life was processed, understood, and represented. Foreign to his thinking was any notion of an ahistorical, acultural idea of a rational interest somehow independent of affect, values, and cultural norms. 11

     Although Thompson's turn toward culture and consciousness, in many ways like Geertz's emphasis on signification, would lead successive scholars to play down or ignore altogether the material, structural, "objective" side of social determination, both of these authors retained a focus on the material. In his essay "The Peculiarities of the English," a polemic against Perry Anderson and fellow Marxist Tom Nairn, Thompson argued that the growing moderation of English workers in mid-century was the product of their progressive imbrication into the fabric of English society. Their very successful entry and the improvement of their well-being made them less revolutionary. Here, structure, rather than agency, is paramount. Thompson wrote: "[L]et us look at history as history—men placed in actual contexts which they have not chosen, and confronted by indivertible forces, with an overwhelming immediacy of relations and duties and with only a scanty opportunity for inserting their own agency."¹⁵ Thompson suggested that the relative determinative power of agency and structure shift though history, so one or the other may take on greater power at different conjunctures. In the period of The Making of the English Working Class, that is, up to 1832, workers faced an unconsolidated capitalism, an embryonic industrial society, with the ideological structures of liberalism and political economy not yet securely in place. Here, the political opening was available and certain lessons had not yet been learned, whereas later, workers had already undergone certain experiences, successes, and failures; structures had become consolidated; the ideological hegemony of the middle class was gaining strength; and the very successes of workers in ending the earlier social apartheid and integrating within the new social order entangled them in unanticipated ways and reduced their aspirations toward revolutionary destructuring. 12

     Along with his elevation of consciousness and culture—what Marxists often dismissively referred to as "superstructure"—and his repositioning of agency, Thompson embraced Marxism, not as an all-encompassing explanatory theory but as a tradition of historical materialist, empirical inquiry. What was most exciting was the sense that the seemingly one-dimensional "natural" world of capitalist economics was itself a product of specific histories, and people who would become its victims stood up against it with values and passions that survived from an older form of social organization. Rejecting the reductionism of earlier Marxists, Thompson and other theorists, such as Raymond Williams, reminded us of the radical historicism in Marxism. 13

     While some Marxist sociologists, such as Eric Olin Wright, took the objectivist road, and materialist understandings of interest found their way into political science through economics, many historians and historical sociologists took the implications of Thompson's work further to explore the origins and evolution of consciousness, culture, and historical contextualization. The important interventions by Gareth Stedman Jones, William H. Sewell, Jr., and Joan Wallach Scott, among others, in the late 1970s and early 1980s shifted the analytical focus from the material to the linguistic and marked a turning away from the sociology of earlier social history toward a greater association with anthropology.¹⁶ Borrowing from the work of feminist historians, Scott faulted Thompson for taking experience for granted, as simply existing out there busily determining consciousness, and insisted that experience itself is being constituted, contested, and given meaning all the time. Interests themselves, like identities, must be understood to be discursively articulated and constituted. Experience should not be "seen as the objective circumstances that condition identity; identity is not an objectively defined sense of self defined by needs and interests. Politics is not the collective coming to consciousness of similarly situated individual subjects. Rather politics is the process by which plays of power and knowledge constitute identity and experience."¹⁷ Moving on from Thompson, historians became increasingly interested not in the "facts" of experience itself but in how "experience" was experienced by historical actors. 14

     The very questions Marxism raised about consciousness and ideology, the inexplicable power of nationalism, and the particular kinds of oppression visited on women and experienced in the family led to new ways of answering that moved beyond anything conventionally included within Marxism. For some, the limits of Marxism encouraged expanding the boundaries of the tradition; for others, Marxism provoked rejection and defection. First, the influence of Foucault and the growing interest in language that flowed from Ferdinand de Saussure through structuralism into poststructuralism, the new emphasis on meaning and discourse, fundamentally changed the direction of much research by Marxist (now perhaps post-Marxist) historians and social scientists. The direction of the arrow of determination shifted from the material to the realm of discourse, culture, and language. Second, Marxism as a potent, totalizing grand narrative was undermined by the postmodernist suspicion of all such master narratives with their ideas of progress, their teleological certainty, and their resistance to anomalies and ambiguities.¹⁸ Third, at a moment of confusion and doubt among Marxists, even before the disappearance of European state socialisms, scholars replaced the focus on class (at least for a time) with a concern for other social collectivities. The most important were nation and gender. Feminist historians and theorists rapidly moved from an inclusivist women's history driven by a commitment to recover and include women in the existing narratives, to questioning those narratives themselves, and ultimately to a deep interrogation of the category "woman." Once the earlier confidence of Marxist and social historians in the primacy of the social was shattered, culture and discourse appeared to offer possibly richer forms of explanation. 15

The cultural turn is neither the same as the linguistic or historical turn nor coterminous with poststructuralism or postmodernism, but it has overlapped temporally and intellectually with a number of concerns shared by all of them. The attention to language and its deep structures preceded the renewed interest in history within American social science in the 1980s and 1990s, a profound reversal of the post-1945 rejection of history from political science and sociology particularly.¹⁹ The cultural turn, it should be noted, was neither the same as "bringing culture back in" (though it certainly entailed that as well) nor the belief that "culture matters," a stance that would lead in a quite different direction (and a different implied politics) from the cultural turn.²⁰ 16

     One might tell the story of the evolving, revolving "cultural turn" from a number of key texts—Hayden White's Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973), Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (translated into English, 1977), or from the seminal works of Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, Thomas Kuhn, Richard Rorty, Marshall Sahlins, or Raymond Williams.²¹ But—again from both generational and personal experience—the most influential text was probably Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (1973). Few come away from this book indifferent to its challenge or unaffected by its lapidary language. The program of Geertz (and others, like White) was to reject positivist approaches to understanding human experience and to insist on the centrality of meaning, the historically and culturally specific constructions of understanding and feeling. As Sherry Ortner puts it, "Geertz's battle against various forms of functionalist and mechanistic perspectives (regardless of their theorists of origin—Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and so on) was important . . . because it challenges a view of society as a machine, or as an organism, a view in which complex human intentions and complex cultural formations are reduced to their effects on that social machine or social organism."²² Or in Geertz's own description of his research program: "Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning."²³ To be opposed were all forms of "objectivism" and "reductionism"—something against which Marxists and social historians were then struggling. 17

     In his essay "The Concept(s) of Culture," which is all the more brilliant for its transparency, William H. Sewell, Jr., remembers facing the limits of social history and what has been called "the revelation of anthropology." "I experienced the encounter with cultural anthropology as a turn from a hardheaded, utilitarian, and empiricist materialism—which had both liberal and marxisant faces—to a wider appreciation of the range of human possibilities, both in the past and in the present. Convinced that there was more to life than the relentless pursuit of wealth, status, and power, I felt that cultural anthropology could show us how to get at that 'more.'"²⁴ Geertz provided a way to understand meaning as something not buried deep in the mind but visible externally in public practices, rituals, and symbols. "Culture is public because meaning is."²⁵ A culture could be read like a text, and so could past societies. As he wrote in Local Knowledge, "The trick is not to get yourself into some inner correspondence of spirit with your informants. Preferring, like the rest of us, to call their souls their own, they are not going to be altogether keen about such an effort anyhow. The trick is to figure out what the devil they think they are up to . . . [The ethnographer does this by] searching out and analyzing the symbolic forms—words, images, institutions, behaviors—in terms of which, in each place, people actually represented themselves to themselves and to one another."²⁶ 18

     At the same time that he provided a method and direction for new research—"sorting out the structures of signification"—Geertz challenged historians and social scientists to be wary of what passed as "data." "[W]hat we call our data are really our own constructions of other people's constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to."²⁷ And the work of social scientists, in his case anthropological writings, "are themselves interpretations, and second and third order ones to boot . . . They are, thus, fictions; fictions, in the sense that they are 'something made,' 'something fashioned'—the original meaning of fictio—not that they are false, unfactual, or merely 'as if' thought experiments."²⁸ Therefore, social science was to be more interpretative than simply observational, more like the work of literary critics than that of cipher clerks. 19

     With the fallout from Geertz's theoretical essays and the almost simultaneous influence of literary and linguistic studies on history, the principal elements were in place for what would later be recognized as a "cultural turn" in history and social science. We should remember that the turn kept turning, but it might be instructive at this point to ask: What was specific about the cultural turn? What exactly have been its contributions? And what is to be gained precisely by going beyond it? 20

     First and most fundamentally, the cultural turn opposes explanations that follow from social naturalism, or what George Steinmetz has called "foundationalist decontextualization."²⁹ Rather than making some ahistorical and essentialist assumptions about human nature—humans are instrumentally rational, aggressive, or territorial; women are nurturing; Armenians are good merchants—or positing primordial or transhistorical institutions—individuality, the market, the nation—as fundamental to human society, culturalism and historicism argue that there are no timeless, decontextualized, ahistorical "natural" characteristics or institutions. Things that appear to be most natural to human society—market economies, the state, the nation, society itself—are historical constructions made by human actors who in turn are reconstituted by the very products of their making. Culturalists, therefore, deeply suspect hard, fixed, essential social categories (class, nation, gender) and propose considering a more radical understanding of identities as fluid, multiple, fragmented, and constantly in need of hard work to sustain.³⁰ 21

     Second, whereas the linguistic and historical turns share this general proposition, they place the weight of explanation on language and history, while the cultural turn emphasizes the constitutive power of culture broadly understood. Culture is seen as a "category of social life," different from though not unrelated to the economy, society, or politics. Culture is not simply derivative of other spheres, as more objectivist approaches might have it, nor is it reducible to material or other noncultural causes. The ordinary uses of the word "culture" are multiple and contested, but culturalists are intensely interested in the problem of meanings that are not limited to the strictly linguistic and the processes through which they are made. Most fruitfully, culture may be thought of as "a system of symbols possessing a real but thin coherence that is continually put at risk in practice and therefore subject to transformation."³¹ Culturalism proposes the autonomy and power of culture, even while it is deeply committed to historicization. Understanding comes with cultural, spatial, and temporal contextualization. But—here following Thompson—history is never just lived, it is made. Similarly, many accept the constitution of social forms and knowledge by language but are reluctant to limit constitution to language alone. Although the world might be read like a text, it is not the same as a text. 22

     Third, culture itself was, like all other categories and identities, to be "problematized" (a favorite activity of those invested in the turn). From a holistic or unified idea of culture as a self-sustaining system, in which all the parts work toward an integrated whole (something akin to the Marxist notion of totality), anthropologists would shift increasingly toward a notion of culture as a contested area in which meaning was changeable, conflicted, and inflected with politics. Culture as "a coherent system of symbols and meanings" gave way in the work of many scholars to a notion of culture as practice.³² What looked far more coherent, constant, and integrated in the classical ethnographies of Bronisaw Malinowski, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and even Clifford Geertz is now thought of as "worlds of meaning" that are normally "contradictory, loosely integrated, contested, mutable, and highly permeable."³³ Culture, like society, is a field of play with its borders far less clear than in earlier imaginations, its internal harmonies less apparent, in which actors and groups contend for position and power, sometimes in institutions, sometimes over control of meaning. In its full flower, the cultural turn holds that culture "is not an object to be described, neither is it a unified corpus of symbols and meanings that can be definitively interpreted. Culture is contested, temporal, and emergent."³⁴ 23

     Anthropology in the postcolonial globalized world no longer enjoys the imagined luxury of studying isolated, uncontaminated "primitive" societies far from the invading influence of modernity.³⁵ A new generation of ethnographers has turned its attention back to the metropole and investigation of more complex societies in the first and second worlds. Likewise, other categories are no longer seen as fixed, given, and stable: Society, nation, gender, politics, the economy, and identities are reconceived as arenas of contestation, of difference rather than harmony.³⁶ 24

     Fourth, the cultural turn shares with Foucault a suspicion of the stable, rational, sovereign subject. It emphasizes agency, but the nature of the agent is under reconsideration. As Terrence McDonald puts it, "Agency and the agent . . . have taken on critical importance at precisely the same time that the concept of the agent has been evacuated of much of its content. Rather than a colossus bestriding the pages of history, the agent must now emerge from those pages."³⁷ The historical agent can no longer simply be deduced "from a putative map of social structures and accompanying subject positions" but must be understood in the contexts of power and discourse, constituted structures as well as historic conjunctures and events.³⁸ The injunction against reductionisms of any kind has led some cultural interpretivists to suspect the kinds of explanations from "exogenous" factors, such as economics, ideologies, or even psychological drives or human nature. And the emphasis on the self-constituting agent, or the problem of subjectivity and the mutual constitution of actor and structure, leads cultural interpretivists to question the paradigms of positivism and hold back from seeking causal explanations. This reluctance puts them at odds with those social scientists, particularly in political science, whose fundamental reason to do science is the search for causality.³⁹ Even before the cultural turn, but more intensively after it, scholars have turned their attention to the constitution of social phenomena, particularly to those previously so emphatically naturalized: identity, interests, and power. 25

     Fifth, the cultural turn has increasingly moved from the elaboration of systems of meaning, in the Geertzian sense, to an exploration of regimes of domination, of power, reflecting the influence of Foucault and feminism. The cultural turn embeds politics in everyday life, in the ways in which meaning is constructed and actors are either empowered or constrained. "Foucault's concept of the disciplinary society," Geoff Eley writes, "profoundly shifts our understanding of politics, carrying the analysis of power away from the core institutions of the state in the national-centralized sense toward the emergence of new individualizing strategies that function outside, below and alongside the State apparatuses, on a much more minute and everyday level."⁴⁰ This radically alternative conception of power—in Keith Michael Baker's succinct formulation—"included emphases on power as constituted by regimes of truth rather than by the exercise of political will, as polymorphous and pervasive rather than unitary, as productive rather than repressive, as internal rather than external to the subject, as subjectivizing rather than subjecting."⁴¹ Identity, discourse, and affect are all brought into play in explaining political choice, not only in the micropolitics of everyday life but at the level of the state itself. 26

     Sixth, the cultural turn exposed the art and artifice of historical metanarratives, with their usual starting point in the Enlightenment and their grand tours from tradition to modernity. The problem was not so much that the grand narratives were right or wrong but that they had been taken as true, as accurate reflections of an actual past, and as bases of analysis and further elaboration, rather than as highly selective and convenient frames for understanding. The cultural turn saw all social-scientific accounts as constructed narratives, selected from available evidence, akin to other fictions, and told by narrators situated in a specific time and place.⁴² 27

     Stories are necessary to make sense out of the raw material of lived experience. Gone is the omniscient, objective observer, and in his place is a weaver of a new historical or ethnographic web woven with the threads, and according to the conventions, of particular disciplines. The great stories of the past—the rise of the bourgeoisie or the working class, the struggle of nations toward consciousness and freedom, the progressive emancipation of humankind from ignorance and superstition—were now seen precisely to be stories more or less plausible and resonant insofar as they played by the rules of disciplinary games and appealed to disciplinary communities. As Margaret R. Somers puts it, "Within a knowledge culture, narratives . . . not only convey information but serve epistemological purposes. They do so by establishing veracity through the integrity of their storied form. This suggests that in the first instance the success or failure of truth claims embedded in narratives depends less on empirical verification and more on the logic and rhetorical persuasiveness of the narrative."⁴³ 28

     Seventh, by foregrounding the involvement of the investigator in the investigation, the cultural turn accepts the inability to achieve either full objectivity or distance from the object of study for which the historians had longed or the imagined rapport so ardently sought by classical anthropology. The observer/analyst is situated in both time and place, is educated in a particular way, and comes with her own subjectivity. She is involved despite herself, or because of herself, and is now free to reflect on her own position. Self-reflexivity parallels the whole constructivist thrust of the cultural turn, bringing the constitution of both structure and agent back to the observer/analyst. As the introduction to an influential collection explains, the ethnographers represented in the volume "see culture as composed of seriously contested codes and representations; they assume that the poetic and the political are inseparable, that science is in, not above, historical and linguistic processes . . . Their focus on text making and rhetoric serves to highlight the constructed, artificial nature of cultural accounts." The "historical predicament of ethnography" is precisely that "it is always caught up in the invention, not the representation, of cultures."⁴⁴ Any attempt to represent and explain culture must by necessity be historicist and self-reflexive. 29

     The list of stances and preferences of those having turned can be further extended, as can the new fields of inquiry that cultural interpretivists have opened up. The new concern with the body and the self, and the whole question of the production of subjectivities, comes to mind. While some historians and sociologists have returned to the creation of new megahistorical narratives, only very partially informed by insights from cultural studies, others, particularly cultural historians, have explored microhistory, a style of work in which the full context of a historical moment can be grasped.⁴⁵ The image of historians in the mind of some social scientists has been of laborers toiling in the fields of data collection, whereas in fact the cultural turn has granted a general permission to historians to practice their own kind of intellectual imperialism, expanding the range of legitimate topics. If politics is profoundly culturally constructed, and culture is fraught with political meanings and practice, and both are produced in time, then historians can move easily past the disciplinary border guards at the softening edges of anthropology, sociology, economics, and political science. 30

     Discourse and representations, of course, are central to the cultural turn, but in recent years some culturalists have pulled back from the desire to replace older materialist accounts with purely discursive ones. If there is a noticeable trend at the moment, represented unevenly in Beyond the Cultural Turn, it is not so much an abandonment of the ground gained by the turn toward discourse, language, and culture but a reassessment of the place of the material and the structural, or what is often referred to as "the social." An oversimplified materialist or structural determination is not to be replaced by an equally one-sided cultural or discursive determination.⁴⁶ The turn back to the material and social is evident in Sewell's recent writings, notably in an essay on Geertz where he retrieves the materiality of the anthropologist's location of symbolization in the evolution of the human mind. "If Geertz is right as I [Sewell] firmly believe he is, semiotic systems are not unworldly or ghostly or imaginary; they are as integral to the life of our species as respiration, digestion, or reproduction. Materialists, this suggests, should stop worrying and love the symbol."⁴⁷ "Beyond," here, is in part a return, a going back, but even going back or beyond involves the journeys that one has already made and the consequent learning that has taken place. As Dorothy says—and Salman Rushdie reminds us—"There's no place like home."⁴⁸ 31

Where does that leave political science? As a discipline, political science has hardly been touched by the cultural turn. The few influenced by the hermeneutic direction implicit in the linguistic, historical, and cultural turns have found themselves at a "separate table" within comparative politics, one set far from those engaged in rational choice or game theoretic work, a bit closer to those interested in new institutionalist and historical approaches, and closest to political theorists and international relations scholars of a constructivist bent.⁴⁹ The resistance of those who see themselves to be both the core and the future of the discipline to the approaches and preferences of cultural interpretivists begins with a specific view of science and a commitment to a particular politics that has informed much of political science. From its inception, American political science has held "aspirations to be both truly scientific and a servant of democracy, aspirations abetted by deep faith that these two enterprises went hand in hand."⁵⁰ But this basically liberal agenda contains within it an irreconcilable tension between asserting the importance of political agency, so fundamental to democratic citizenship, and providing "full causal accounts of politics, usually on the model of natural sciences that deny any conscious agency to the phenomena they study."⁵¹ 32

     Historically, political science, a field bound more by the object of its study, that is, politics, than by any consensus on the method of study, has engaged with a subject that even the most naturalistic and materialist investigators would agree is, unlike the natural sciences, constituted by the activities and self-understandings of human actors, among them political scientists.⁵² In its initial phase of professionalization between the two world wars, political science stressed objective study, free from ideological preferences and values, and elaborated a naturalistic view of political behavior as determined by specific environments rather than universal laws. Empirical particularistic studies and accurate description and measurement of observable phenomena were seen to be the basis for a truly objective science of politics. Leaders in the field, such as Charles E. Merriam of the University of Chicago, eschewed rationalistic explanations, a priori reasoning, theories dependent on innate drives or instincts, or elaborate system-building. The meaning of political behavior was to be discovered in how politics operated in practice. 33

     Edward Purcell has eloquently told the story of how this objectivism and an appreciation of cultural differences led researchers increasingly toward a moral neutrality and relativism that contradicted their personal commitment to democracy.⁵³ Their empirical findings confirmed that elite groups were able to dominate the majority of the population in democratic polities, and studies of public opinion and voting behavior undermined claims that humans were informed judges of their own interests. Eventually, the shock of the Great Depression, the struggle against Nazism, and the Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union stimulated a reevaluation of democratic theory and encouraged a more positive evaluation of the actual practices of American democracy. 34

     In the years following World War II, the discipline grew enormously and found links to public influence and power. Challenged by McCarthyism, political scientists sought shelter behind their claims to objectivity and neutrality. Yet celebratory theories of pluralism and cultural consensus dominated the analyses of American politics. Elites still ran things, they argued, but no single elite group dominated in the free-for-all of contested politics; all groups could compete. Without examining the barriers of class, race, and gender that gave coherence to this congenial system, the critical edge of political studies diminished. Students of politics joined in the general anticommunist patriotism of the day, developing the theory of totalitarianism that neatly homogenized Stalinism and Hitlerism and contrasted the T-model with Western democracy. Across the social sciences, "Marx was replaced by Freud, the word 'capitalism' dropped out of social theory after the war, and class became stratification."⁵⁴ When Robert A. Dahl and Charles E. Lindblom requested clearance to teach a course on planning in the late 1940s, the Yale economics department asked that they label it "Critique of Planning" instead.⁵⁵ And the group of social scientists at the University of Chicago who chose the term "behavioral sciences" to describe their endeavor did so consciously in order to appear neutral and not confuse congressional funders who "might confound social science with socialism."⁵⁶ 35

     Political science suffered from science envy, and the so-called Behavioral Revolution of the 1950s was an effort to emulate, once again, the certainty, even predictability, of the natural sciences. Rather than a radical new departure, the revolution was a re-emphasis on scientific methods and a turn away from historical, philosophical, or descriptive approaches. Once again, "is" instead of "ought" would be the principal concern of the investigator; the object of study would be observed and observable behavior; the method would be rigorous, empirical, and theoretically informed; and the aim was to generate significant generalizations and empirically testable theories.⁵⁷ Among the dominant approaches to the study of politics and society were sociological theory descended from Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Vilfredo Pareto; culture and personality theory indebted to anthropologists Mead and Benedict; and social psychological theory that led to numerous surveys and small-group experiments. Political scientists took beliefs, ideas, values, and feelings seriously, and by the early 1960s the investigation of political culture was considered by many to be fundamental to an understanding of comparative politics.⁵⁸ 36

     Although some reviewers believe that mid-century "political science produced almost no general scientific propositions of a high degree of conclusiveness," the intense discussions within the discipline—between historical political theory and "the new science of politics," on questions of values and political culture, for example—prepared the ground for a critical reaction in the late 1960s. The mobilization of the disenfranchised undermined the positive consensus about American politics, questioned assumptions about liberalism and actually existing democracy, and inspired new interest in justice and egalitarianism. While Marxism and critical theory remained on the margins, younger scholars were fascinated by the social structural work of Barrington Moore, the critique of modernization theory presented by dependency theory, new comparative studies of capitalism and labor, and a left turn in political theory.⁵⁹ 37

     Ironically, at the moment when Western Marxists were abandoning economic determinist models of explanation, and historians wrestled with anthropology and literary criticism, many political scientists found new value in a view of human and group choice borrowed from economics. Much of political science had emphasized the predatory activities of elites, the established structures and procedures of modern politics, the determining effects of political culture, or the complexity of political decision-making that makes the agency of citizens difficult if not impossible, whereas new departures toward rational-choice theory centered the individual and his or her choices.⁶⁰ Rational choice theory (closely related to social or public choice) and its associate game theory offered students of politics a theory that claimed to explain politics across time and space as the result of strategic, rational, goal-maximizing behavior within given structures and institutions.⁶¹ This methodological individualism questions the sufficiency of structuralist explanations with their emphasis on constraints and focuses instead on the choice of strategies adopted by actors to achieve their goals.⁶² The model does not account for the formation of goals (first-order preferences) but is interested in the institutions and structures that shape strategies (second-order preferences). The theory assumes only that people hold consistent preferences, that they can order their priorities, and that they choose the means most likely to bring about their desired ends.⁶³ When theorists in this tradition looked at parties, nations, or classes, they treated them as unitary actors capable of rationally calculating their preferences and strategies toward utility maximization like individuals. Although not all political science succumbed to rational-choice theory, methodological individualism proved to be a muscular challenger to both the political culture approach and the post-behavioralist "inclination to stress institutional phenomena."⁶⁴ And in many ways, rational choice appears to be at the opposite pole in the discipline from cultural interpretivist approaches. 38

     The question for political science has not been whether to deal with culture. Political scientists had followed American anthropology into an appreciation of the diversity of cultural forms in the 1920s and had generally adopted its relativist and value-neutral approach, and from the 1950s they carried that interest further into political culture. The question was how to deal with culture. Some political scientists consider political systems to be products of and limited by their cultures, with an elective affinity of one to the other, and still others treat culture as an instrument available for elites to use politically. There is no consensus on whether culture is just a piece of information to be considered or an independent explanatory variable. 39

     Rational choice has taken several different approaches to deal with the inconvenience of culture. At one end, transhistorical and deductive notions of human preferences ignore cultural specificities and determinations. Here, analysts assume that all people want either wealth, status, or power and that other motivations can be reduced to these fundamental preferences. Others within the tradition recognize the importance of culture. Shared symbols, they argue, create a field of communication and trust and solve coordination and collective action problems. Cultural systems are political resources that can be employed by political entrepreneurs to mobilize otherwise divided populations without paying the start-up costs of organization. Yet, critics point out, reducing culture or constructions of identity to instrumental decisions, calculated strategic choices, loses much of the texture, complexity, and richness of actual politics. Such simplifications have led to a stark polarization in the discipline. As Lisa Wedeen argues, "[I]nsofar as individualism presupposes agents who are forward-looking strategists forever calculating costs and benefits, there will be a serious ontological and epistemological divide between most rational choice and interpretivist theorists. Interpretivists, in my view, can rightly claim that individualist assumptions prevent rational choice scholars from asking important questions about politics, not the least of which is how we come to know that people maximize their interests, if they do."⁶⁵ 40

     The reductionist psychology of rational-choice theory has been a source of debate and discussion within political science from its earliest appearance. The early neo-institutionalists were among their most effective critics, raising the point that although self-interest certainly permeates politics, actual human action "is often based more on discovering the normatively appropriate behavior than on calculating the return expected from alternative choices. As a result, political behavior, like other behavior, can be described in terms of duties, obligations, roles, and rules."⁶⁶ Rational choice theorists have responded by introducing culture, values, and morals and then considering their instrumental employment. "To share a culture," David D. Laitin writes, "means to share a language or a religion or a historiography. Very rarely do these cultural systems coincide perfectly within a large society. People must often choose which among their religious group, language group, and so on will be their primary mode of cultural identification. This choice is often guided by instrumental reasoning, based on the potential resources available for identifying yourself . . . Once a cultural group organizes politically, the common symbolic system makes for efficient collective action."⁶⁷ 41

     For Laitin, culture is "Janus-faced," that is, "people are both guided by the symbols of their culture and instrumental in using culture to gain wealth and power." But this claim leads us to ask: How do we know when actions will be guided by values within the terms of a culture or instrumental in terms that transcend time, place, and culture, such as wealth and power? It appears that rational choicers would like to have it both ways: people may be guided by preferences that are historical and cultural, but their ultimate ends and the real nature of human actions—goal maximization—are transhistorical, ultimately the same in all contexts. And one cannot help but notice that the most prevalent preferences posited by rational choice are ones that have come to dominate modern capitalist Western societies. Certainly wealth, material well-being, or power is a powerful motivation for many, but interpretivists propose that such motivations are always culture-bound and historically derived. Status, security, respect, and love also function frequently, but the most interesting questions to ask are precisely about what meanings are attached to such concepts and under what conditions they drive people to act. For historians deeply located in different times and cultures, what may seem the most strategic choice is precisely the one that is most inflected (infected?) by culture or values in a historic setting. 42

     The difficulty, of course, is finding out what preferences are, how they are formed, and how actors calculate what is rational. Laitin attempts to solve this problem outside the theory by turning to Geertzian ethnography: "Only with a keen understanding of the meanings embedded in shared symbols—the first face of culture—can one adduce cultural preferences without tautologically claiming that preferences can be derived from the behavior of actors who are assumed to be rational."⁶⁸ It is here that cultural interpretivists might make the greatest contribution. People act on the basis of preferences and toward desired goals, but the preferences, goals, and strategies are provided and given meaning within a cultural system. Culturalists contend that a large part of politics is the struggle over meaning and the right to be authorized to speak. For culturalists, language not only expresses but also constitutes the political world. Derived from neither social position nor ideology, language itself helps to shape perception of position, interests, ideologies, and the meanings attached to the social and political world.⁶⁹ Interests and identities, even what might constitute strategic choices, are themselves part of a political process of constructing meanings. The process of constructing meaning, agents, and even the very notion of rationality, something central to cultural interpretivist explorations, is largely left out in normal rational-choice work. 43

     Cultural interpretivists can certainly admit that in certain circumstances people operate strategically to maximize their interests, as they conceive them, and even that material or power incentives influence human action in many contexts. But that is only part of the story. Interpretivists are suspicious of any strict separation of culture and politics, identities and interests. In an exemplary essay on early modern familial states, Julia Adams generously accepts the contributions of rational-choice analysts, who have demonstrated the transhistorical structural factors compelling rulers to pursue economic resources, but goes on to show how a culturalist approach opens the issues of who the rulers were, what their values consisted of, and how the identities, values, and emotional commitments of rulers shaped their preferences and actions. Her argument "insists on the socially malleable boundaries of self, originally formed in the family, the cultural component of identity, and the historically specific role of affect for early modern elite political actors."⁷⁰ Among her patrimonial rulers, familial concerns, their identities and discourses, structured choices. Identities and emotional attachments take on causal weight, as Adams argues that they led to resistance to change, even when change might have been economically advantageous. 44

     Adams employs the useful distinction between "thin" and "thick" versions of rational-choice theory: thin versions "are agnostic about actors' goals and values, whereas 'thicker' versions try to specify actors' desired ends, at least as exogenously given constraints." In either case, however, the ultimate ends or goals are "exogenously determined, and random with respect to the general theory, at the same time that they are held to be contingent on a universal means to an end [in this case]—revenue—that must itself be a goal if any higher-order ends are to be realized."⁷¹ Although rational choice is agent-centered, actors, for all their importance, are conceived in fundamental ways as being independent of their historical and cultural context. 45

     Rational choice has made significant contributions within political science (not to mention within economics), but in a whole range of political behavior, such as ethnic politics and nationalist movements, its value is limited. If we think about ethnic violence, a theory of instrumental rationality works best under two conditions. When there is total breakdown of the state, a "security dilemma" is created in which groups defined as ethnic or national may perceive a threat from neighbors and take preemptive action. In a second case, there may be a "bandwagon" story in which individuals will join a nationalist movement or follow a leader when they perceive the real possibility of victory. But instrumental rationality fails to explain why such movements get started in the first place or why people are ready to die or kill for such symbolic goods as the site of a defeat five hundred or a thousand years ago. Rationality makes sense as a means to reach a goal, but both means and goals are very often constituted by religious, historical, or cultural values that have little to do with material or status improvement. Cost-benefit analyses do not help much with the kinds of ends set by cultures, which can require self-sacrifice, pain, and even death.⁷² Both preference formation and strategic choices, then, must be considered within cultures and historic time. Rational choicers are ready to concede that culture and history, reason and emotion, help determine first-order preferences. I am suggesting that they also determine second-order preferences—institutions and structures—and the very strategies that actors adopt. 46

     The added value offered by the cultural turn is exceptionally apparent in the study of nations and nationalism. Senses of mortality and desire for immortality, of the ethnic group or nation as kinship or the family writ large, of the conviction unquestioned that this group above all others is a part of nature rather than of choice, are fundamental to the bonds of solidarity that people forge in ethnic and national communities. These affective ties—the promise of redemption from oblivion, this remedy for anonymity and meaningless mortality—must be taken seriously if we are to understand why in the very process of constructing and imagining certain communities the effort of construction is so emphatically denied.⁷³ A critical question is why constructed identities and fabricated histories are held sacred as sources of primordial allegiances.⁷⁴ 47

     Finally, the cultural turn strongly warns against seeing cultural units, nations, or classes, as unitary and internally homogeneous. Treating them as unitary actors with coherent identities and interests leads to essentialist conclusions about group behavior. Here, there may be an unrecognized affinity between rational individualism and cultural constructivism: many practitioners of both these approaches are suspicious of relying on the idea of the group and seek to disaggregate the seeming solidarity of the collective.⁷⁵ And all across political science, sociology, history, and anthropology, scholars recognize that it is through culture that we apprehend the world and construct the imaginative concepts with which to understand our place within it. Culture both limits and empowers; it gives agency and constrains it. Culture defines goals, guides us toward achieving them, and misguides us often as to what might be in our "interest." 48

Many of the insights and stances of the cultural turn—the inherently unstable nature of categories, the problem of reflexivity, the preference for deep texture and thick description over parsimony, and the Foucauldian extension of power out from the state into the realm of disciplinary discourses and onto the body itself—provide fascinating openings for research by social scientists interested in politics. The very sphere of politics has been widened. (Just think of the job opportunities this offers!) Not only does Foucault's micropolitics become a locus for investigation, not only is the personal political and the body a site for politics, but fundamental assumptions about interests, the state, and the power and limits of political language now have to be interrogated. 49

     Rather than flee from Foucault's imprecisions and obscurities, political scientists should borrow what they can from his difficult but fecund mind. The concept of discourse as a field of knowledge with its own practices and rules contributes a powerful new frame for thinking about politics, but at the same time discursive analysis would benefit from more precise critical examination and empirical grounding. There is much here for political science to do—in understanding the state, the less institutionalized forms of politics, and the languages and representations of power.⁷⁶ The insights from the cultural turn give us some purchase on the web of disciplinary and power relations that make up a political regime, the web in which subjects and citizens are caught, of which they may or may not be aware, and which they may or may not be able to resist. At the same time, the state can be brought back in along with culture. In an exciting departure, the authors of the essays in State/Culture: State Formation after the Cultural Turn, edited by sociologist George Steinmetz, seek to reverse the idea of culture as a product of the state and elaborate culture's constitutive role in state formation—not only in the Weberian application exclusively to non-Western states but also in the core countries of northwestern Europe.⁷⁷ Without deciding beforehand the power of discursive or cultural "constraints" on actors' abilities, or accepting what interests or identities are out there, political scientists might expand the range of possible preferences and motivations, rationally calculated and emotional, that people may have and explore how particular subjectivities are constituted. 50

     The cultural turn, however, comes with its own politics and political costs. The radical doubting of cultures (and national cultures as the moment of congruence of culture and politics) challenges the dominant discourses of politics in the modern world. If cultures can no longer be assumed to be coherent, bounded entities in the real world, then their claims to self-determination, autonomy, and possibly statehood cannot be said to derive unproblematically from the need to represent a particular culture politically. The claims of nationalists that national cultures run back in time to a primordial originating moment and that culture was, is, or should be isomorphic with a territory (the "homeland") are now subject to critical, subversive historical analysis. Moreover, the very idea of the constructedness of nations, like that of cultures in general, and the central importance of belief, representation, and imagination in making cultures and nations both challenge the more positivist theories of ethnic conflict and open the possibility for new constructions of national identity that could lead less predictably to conflict or cooperation. Here is an opportunity for a reconceptualization of a problem in political science. Indeed, the historicization and cultural formation of nations and nationalism were most significantly taken up by a political scientist, Benedict Anderson, but one who, for all of his influence in broader social science, history, and literary studies, remains marginal to the mainstream of political science.⁷⁸ 51

     The deconstructive thrust of the cultural turn, however, need not lead us into a completely indeterminate world without any coherences or temporal solidarities whatsoever. Even as cultural interpretivists disaggregate the assumed wholeness of societies, cultures, and nations, there is an awareness that a certain "thin coherence" (the term is William Sewell's) remains. ⁷⁹ Sherry Ortner suggests where anthropology may be on this point at the present:

52

[P]eople are spinning what Geertz called "webs of meaning" all the time, with whatever cultural resources happen to be at hand. Thus, even if culture(s) were never as whole and consistent and static as anthropologists portrayed them in the past, and even if, as many thinkers now claim, there are fewer and fewer in the way of distinct and recognizable "cultures" in the contemporary world (though I am less sure about that), the fundamental assumption that people are always trying to make sense of their lives, always weaving fabrics of meaning, however fragile and fragmentary, still holds.⁸⁰

     Thin coherence and weaving fabrics of meaning also imply a (not-so-new) political program of deconstruction that holds that the social reality of any society is only one possibility among many. History and anthropology have often promised us an open world, a world (in Sewell's words) "contingent rather than necessary" in which "there exist forms of life radically different from ours that are nonetheless fully human . . . In the pasts they study, historians find worlds, structured differently from ours, worlds where people's motives, senses of honor, daily tasks, and political calculations are based on unfamiliar assumptions about human society and the cosmic order . . . History, like anthropology, specializes in the discovery and display of human variety, but in time rather than space."⁸¹ 53

     The most potent moment for this act of discovery is probably in the study of origins, the very moment in more essentialist theories used to naturalize present phenomena. Pierre Bourdieu suggests that "[t]here is no more potent tool for rupture than the reconstruction of genesis: by bringing back into view the conflicts and confrontations of the early beginnings and therefore all the discarded possibles, it retrieves the possibility that things could have been (and still could be) otherwise. And, through such a practical utopia, it questions the 'possible' which, among all others, was actualized."⁸² This, of course, was precisely what the projects of Thompson and Geertz were all about—recovery of alternative worlds that held up visions not of why we had arrived at where we were but of where we might have gone. 54

     In a way, we have come back from beyond. For the same idea of possible futures other than the present was what compelled people to turn to Marxism. At the moment, although a deep pessimism remains about the possibility of socialism in the wake of the collapse of Soviet-style systems and the global hegemony of market capitalism, there has been a revival of the kind of radical historicism that marked the best of the Marxist tradition—the view that all social formations (capitalism included) have their own history and evolution, their birth, maturity, and death, and their replacement by other forms. This revival has taken place not on materialist grounds but in the array of approaches loosely labeled poststructuralist and postmodern. In his conclusion to Beyond the Cultural Turn, one of the most influential voices in that turn, Hayden White, proposes, "[A] modernist social science must be directed to the study of those aspects of social reality that attest to human beings' capacities to make and remake that reality, not merely adjust to it. And it seems to me that the significance of the cultural turn in history and the social sciences inheres in its suggestion that in 'culture' we can apprehend a niche within social reality from which any given society can be deconstructed and shown to be less an inevitability than only one possibility among a host of others."⁸³ 55

     This new historicization of capitalism and the dominant social forms, the attempt to be self-reflexive about the very order in which you live and work, is reminiscent of earlier Marxist attempts to become self-conscious about the bourgeois world. The relativization and historicization of capitalism allow for the retention of hope for development beyond. But any optimism must be tempered by the postmodernist sensitivity to the arbitrariness of any progressive master narratives that give easy confidence in a democratic, egalitarian, socially just future.

56

My gratitude for advice and suggestions goes to Julia Adams, Geoff Eley, Matthew Evangelista, Elise Giuliano, Gary Herrigel, Erin Jenne, Stathis Kalyvas, Valerie Kivelson, David Laitin, Kathleen Much, Linda Myrsiades, Lucan Way, and to my fellow fellows at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 2001–2002.

Ronald Grigor Suny is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago. Educated at Swarthmore College and Columbia University, he taught Russian/Soviet history at Oberlin College and as the Alex Manoogian Professor of Modern Armenian History at the University of Michigan. Suny is the author of The Baku Commune, 1917–1918: Class and Nationality in the Russian Revolution (1972), The Making of the Georgian Nation (1988, 1994), The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (1993), Looking toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History (1993), and The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States (1998). He is currently writing a biography of Joseph Stalin. As a trained historian now working as a political scientist, he is engaged in the transgression of disciplinary boundaries.

Notes

¹ For "backs" and "beyonds," see Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge, 1985); Scott G. McNall, Rhonda F. Levine, and Rick Fantasia, eds., Bringing Class Back In: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives (Boulder, Colo., 1991); Fred Dallmayr, ed., Beyond Orientalism: Essays on Cross-Cultural Encounters (Binghamton, N.Y., 1996); Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, "Beyond 'Identity,'" Theory and Society 29 (2000): 1–47.
² Richard Biernacki, "Method and Metaphor after the New Cultural History," in Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley, Calif., 1999), 62.
³ E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963; Harmondsworth, 1968); Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture: Selected Essays (New York, 1973).
⁴ E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London, 1978), 362.
⁵ Perry Anderson, Considerations of Western Marxism (London, 1976). Much of what follows is a reconstruction of personal and generational experience remembered through readings of Anderson's works—besides Considerations; Arguments within English Marxism (London, 1980); In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (London, 1983); The Origins of Postmodernity (London, 1998)—and Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (New York, 2002).
⁶ His two major studies—Pour Marx and Lire le Capital—both appeared in 1965.
⁷ Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism, 38; Louis Althusser, Politics and History (London, 1972), 183; Althusser, Reading Capital (London, 1970), 112, 252; Anderson, Arguments within English Marxism, 16.
⁸ Thompson, Poverty of Theory, 297–98.
⁹ Thompson, Poverty of Theory, 362.
¹⁰ Thompson, Poverty of Theory, 363.
¹¹ Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 9–10.
¹² E. P. Thompson, "Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class?" Social History 3, no. 2 (May 1978): 147; Making of the English Working Class, 151.
¹³ Thompson, Poverty of Theory, 201.
¹⁴ Thompson, Poverty of Theory, 199; Anderson, Arguments within English Marxism, 26.
¹⁵ E. P. Thompson, "The Peculiarities of the English" [first published in The Socialist Register (1965)], in Poverty of Theory, 69.
¹⁶ William H. Sewell, Jr., Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge, 1980); Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working-Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge, 1983); Geoff Eley, "Is All the World a Text? From Social History to the History of Society Two Decades Later," in Terrence J. McDonald, ed., The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1996), 195–200.
¹⁷ Joan W. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988), 5.
¹⁸ A powerful critical intervention into the discussion of Marxist totality came from within the fold in the persons of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, Winston Moore and Paul Cammack, trans. (London, 1985).
¹⁹ Terrence J. McDonald, "Introduction," in McDonald, Historic Turn, 2–5.
²⁰ For examples of culture without the cultural turn, see Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York, 1996); Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington, eds., Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress (New York, 2000).
²¹ For an excellent account of the influence of the linguistic and cultural turns on history, see Peter Novick's concluding chapters in That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988).
²² Sherry B. Ortner, "Thick Resistance: Death and the Cultural Construction of Agency in Himalayan Mountaineering," in Ortner, ed., The Fate of Culture: Geertz and Beyond (Berkeley, Calif., 1999), 137.
²³ Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures, 5.
²⁴ William H. Sewell, Jr., "The Concept(s) of Culture," in Bonnell and Hunt, Beyond the Cultural Turn, 35–36. The phrase "revelation of anthropology" comes from Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex," in Toward an Anthropology of Women, Rayna R. Reiter, ed. (New York, 1975), 157, and is quoted by Sewell in "Geertz, Cultural Systems, and History: From Synchrony to Transformation," in Ortner, Fate of Culture, 37.
²⁵ Clifford Geertz, "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture," in Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures, 12.
²⁶ Clifford Geertz, "'From the Native's Point of View': On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding," in Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretative Anthropology (New York, 1983), 58.
²⁷ Geertz, "Thick Description," 9.
²⁸ Geertz, "Thick Description," 15.
²⁹ George Steinmetz, State/Culture: State-Formation after the Cultural Turn (Ithaca, N.Y., 1999), 20–21.
³⁰ The literature on identities is now enormous. My own brief discussion can be found in "Provisional Stabilities: The Politics of Identities in Post-Soviet Eurasia," International Security 24, no. 3 (Winter 1999–2000): 139–78, particularly 144–46.
³¹ Sewell, "Concept(s) of Culture," 52.
³² Sewell, "Concept(s) of Culture," 44–47. Sewell argues that "the presumption that a concept of culture as a system of symbols and meanings is at odds with a concept of culture as practice is perverse. System and practice are complementary concepts: each presupposes the other" (p. 47). But he warns that "the network of semiotic relations that make up culture is not isomorphic with the network of economic, political, geographical, social, or demographic relations that make up what we usually call a 'society'" (p. 49).
³³ Sewell, "Concept(s) of Culture," 53. Besides the stress on coherence of culture, three other critiques of the original Geertzian program are worth noting: his relative lack of emphasis on power and dominance, his tendency to attach a particular culture to a particular group, and his commitment to the notion of the ethnographer's rapport with the "natives" and reluctance to move toward hyper-reflexivity. These critiques are made respectively in the essays by Sherry B. Ortner, Lila Abu-Lughod, and George E. Marcus in Ortner, Fate of Culture.
³⁴ James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley, Calif., 1986), 19.
³⁵ Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley, Calif., 1982).
³⁶ On problematizing and pluralizing politics, see Jodi Dean, "Introduction: The Interface of Political Theory and Cultural Studies," in Dean, ed., Cultural Studies and Political Theory (Ithaca, N.Y., 2000), 3.
³⁷ McDonald, "Introduction," Historic Turn, 6.
³⁸ McDonald, "Introduction," 6.
³⁹ For a thorough discussion of the difference between the two types of social inquiry—causal processes, in which one independent agent, temporally preceding an effect, makes that effect occur; and constitutive processes, in which ideas or social structures "create phenomena . . . that are conceptually or logically dependent on those ideas or structures, that exist only 'in virtue of' them" (p. 88)—see Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge, 1999), esp. 47–138.
⁴⁰ Eley, "Is All the World a Text?" 217.
⁴¹ Keith Michael Baker, "A Foucauldian French Revolution?" in Jan Goldstein, ed., Foucault and the Writing of History (Oxford, 1994), 194.
⁴² Karen Halttunen, "Cultural History and the Challenge of Narrativity," in Bonnell and Hunt, Beyond the Cultural Turn, 166.
⁴³ Margaret R. Somers, "The Privatization of Citizenship: How to Unthink a Knowledge Culture," in Bonnell and Hunt, Beyond the Cultural Turn, 129.
⁴⁴ Clifford and Marcus, Writing Culture, 2.
⁴⁵ For new macrohistories, one might look at Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1986–93); Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: An Analysis of Systems Change (Princeton, N.J., 1994); and Eric Hobsbawm's series of histories: The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (London, 1962); The Age of Capital, 1848–1875 (New York, 1975); The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (New York, 1987); and The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (New York, 1995). Among the most influential microhistories are Carlos Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, John and Anne Tedeschi, trans. (Baltimore, 1980); Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, Mass., 1983); Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, Barbara Bray, trans. (New York, 1978).
⁴⁶ Insistence on the materiality of symbols and "the cultural" was long ago recognized by the cultural Marxists, such as Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, and can even be found in Gramsci and Althusser, in their discussions of ideology. Here is a telling example of how going beyond looks suspiciously like a bringing back. I am grateful to Geoff Eley both for pointing to the relevant texts of the 1970s and his memory of the reception of Gramsci, Althusser, and Laclau and Mouffe in Britain.
⁴⁷ Sewell, "Geertz, Cultural Systems, and History," 45.
⁴⁸ Salman Rushdie, The Wizard of Oz (London, 1992), 57. Rushdie's concluding on Dorothy's journey is a nice metaphor for some of the points being made in this article: "So Oz finally became home; the imagined world became the actual world, as it does for us all, because the truth is that once we have left our childhood places and started to make up our lives, armed only with what we have and are, we understand that the real secret of the ruby slippers is not that 'there's no place like home,' but rather that there is no longer any such place as home: except, of course, for the home we make, or the homes that are made for us, in Oz: which is anywhere, and everywhere, except the place from which we began."
⁴⁹ The metaphor comes from Gabriel Almond, "Separate Tables: Schools and Sects in Political Science," PS: Political Science and Politics 21 (1988): 828–42. Almond distinguished four schools or separate tables of political science along two dimensions, one methodological, the other ideological, and a large, eclectic "cafeteria" of liberal moderates in the middle. The four tables were: a soft left of critical theorists, inspired by Frankfurt school Marxism and opposed to a positivist, value-free political science and committed to a unity of theory and praxis; a hard right largely associated with rational-choice work; a soft right around the anti-historicist political theory of Leo Strauss and his followers; and a hard left of quantitative dependency and world-system theorists and econometricians. His plea in this essay is for a return to objective social science, while recognizing the need for a multiplicity of methods. What is striking in reading his review is how rapidly in the last decade his tables have been abandoned and occupied by new schools of thought.
⁵⁰ Rogers M. Smith, "Science, Non-Science, and Politics," in McDonald, Historic Turn in the Human Sciences, 127.
⁵¹ Smith, "Science, Non-Science, and Politics," 127.
⁵² John S. Dryzek and Stephen T. Leonard, "History and Discipline in Political Science," American Political Science Review 82, no. 4 (December 1988): 1250. "The very existence of these objects—say a bureaucracy, army, monetary system, political party, monarchy, capitalist economy, socialist state, or democracy—is contingent on the subscription by social agents to some particular beliefs or theories. There is no analog to this in the natural sciences, where the objects—however they may be conceptualized—are not constituted by theories. They exist quite independently of whatever the scientist may say about them." This statement appears to me to be too dichotomous in a post-Kuhnian epoch, not allowing any social constitution of natural science's objects.
⁵³ Edward A. Purcell, Jr., The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value (Lexington, Ky., 1973).
⁵⁴ Thomas Bender, "Politics, Intellect, and the American University, 1945–1995," in Bender and Carl E. Schorske, eds., American Academic Culture in Transformation: Fifty Years, Four Disciplines (Princeton, N.J., 1997), 29.
⁵⁵ Charles E. Lindblom, "Political Science in the 1940s and 1950s," in Bender and Schorske, American Academic Culture, 264.
⁵⁶ John G. Gunnell, The Descent of Political Theory: The Genealogy of an American Vocation (Chicago, 1993), 218.
⁵⁷ This description is a paraphrase of David Truman's characterization of behavioralism, as reported in Gunnell, Descent of Political Theory, 222.
⁵⁸ Gabriel A. Almond, A Discipline Divided: Schools and Sects in Political Science (Newbury Park, Calif., 1990), 122–23.
⁵⁹ Among the key texts were Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston, 1966); David Greenstone, Labor in American Politics (New York, 1969); Theodore J. Lowi, The End of Liberalism: Ideology, Policy, and the Crisis of Public Authority (New York, 1969); Walter Dean Burnham, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (New York, 1970); Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Boston, 1960); and Andre Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil (New York, 1969).
⁶⁰ For reviews of the evolution of professional political science, see Almond, "Separate Tables"; Bernard Crick, The American Science of Politics (Berkeley, Calif., 1959); Robert A. Dahl, "The Behavioral Approach in Political Science: Epitaph for a Monument to a Successful Protest," American Political Science Review 55, no. 4 (December 1961): 763–72; Dryzek and Leonard, "History and Discipline in Political Science," 1245–60; William Mitchell, "Virginia, Rochester, and Bloomington: Twenty-five Years of Public Choice and Political Science," Public Choice 56 (1988): 101–19; David Ricci, The Tragedy of Political Science (New Haven, Conn., 1984); Raymond Seidelman, Disenchanted Realists: Political Science and the American Crisis, 1884–1984 (Albany, N.Y., 1985); and Smith, "Science, Non-Science, and Politics."
⁶¹ A useful distinction is made by Jeffrey Friedman between public-choice theory, usually favored by economists, which argues that political actors, like economic actors, have a propensity to pursue their material interests; and rational-choice theory, which argues that "regardless of what sort of ends people pursue, they do so through strategic, instrumentally rational behavior." The two approaches are often conflated and confused, and this conflation may account for the notion that rational-choice arguments are inherently conservative. Jeffrey Friedman, "Introduction: Economic Approaches to Politics," in Friedman, ed., The Rational Choice Controversy: Economic Models of Politics Reconsidered (New Haven, Conn., 1995), 2. Game theory is the exploration of how actors make decisions if their actions and outcomes depend on the actions of others.
⁶² "Political science finds itself sitting uneasily between economics where choice under constraint is paramount, and sociology and anthropology where constraint by limiting structures or culture is fundamental." Ira Katznelson and Helen V. Milner, "American Political Science: The Discipline's State and the State of the Discipline," in Katznelson and Milner, eds., Political Science: The State of the Discipline (New York, 2002), 16.
⁶³ Barbara Geddes, "Uses and Limitations of Rational Choice," in Peter H. Smith, ed., Latin America in Comparative Perspective: New Approaches to Methods and Analysis (Boulder, Colo., 1995), 83.
⁶⁴ Theodore J. Lowi, in American Political Science Review 82, no. 3 (September 1988): 885.
⁶⁵ Lisa Wedeen, "Conceptualizing Culture: Possibilities for Political Science," unpublished paper, January 2001.
⁶⁶ James March and Johan Olsen, "The New Institutionalism: Organizational Factors in Political Life," American Political Science Review 78, no. 3 (September 1984): 744.
⁶⁷ David D. Laitin, "Political Culture and Political Preferences," American Political Science Review 82, no. 2 (June 1988): 591.
⁶⁸ David D. Laitin, Hegemony and Culture: Politics and Religious Change among the Yoruba (Chicago, 1986), 16.
⁶⁹ For an example of this process of linguistic and symbolic constitution of modern political rhetoric and understandings, see Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley, Calif., 1984).
⁷⁰ Julia Adams, "Culture in Rational-Choice Theories of State-Formation," in Steinmetz, State/Culture, 114.
⁷¹ "Culture in Rational-Choice Theories," 100.
⁷² Ashutosh Varshney, "Cultures and Modes of Rationality," APSA-CP Newsletter 8, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 18–21, available on the World Wide Web at www.shelley.polisci.ucla.edu/apsacp.
⁷³ Yael Tamir, "The Enigma of Nationalism," World Politics 47 (April 1995): 418–40; Margaret Canovan, Nationhood and Political Theory (Cheltenham, 1996), 68–69.
⁷⁴ For a preliminary investigation of this question, see Ronald Grigor Suny, "Constructing Primordialism: Old Histories for New Nations," Journal of Modern History 73, no. 4 (December 2001): 862–96.
⁷⁵ In recent years, a number of rational-choice practitioners have made conciliatory moves toward integrating formal, rationalist methodologies and traditional or cultural interpretivist approaches. See, for example, Barry R. Weingast, "Formal Theory in Comparative Politics," APSA-CP Newsletter 8, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 6–7; Robert H. Bates and Rui J. P. De Figueiredo, Jr., "The Politics of Interpretation: Rationality, Culture, and Transition," Politics and Society 26, no. 4 (December 1998): 603–42; and David D. Laitin, Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Populations in the Near Abroad (Ithaca, N.Y., 1998).
⁷⁶ For examples of political scientists who both borrow from Foucault and other poststructuralists and expand the legitimate space of political science, see Lisa Wedeen, Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (Chicago, 1999); and Anne Norton, Republic of Signs: Liberal Theory and