Prigogine & Co.

        I wish it were possible to dissuade social scientists from going
down the reductionist road yet one more time.  The interest expressed in
Prigogine by various world-systems scholars is just another example of an
age-old determination to shrink social phenomena to the dimensions
of natural phenomena, which began at least as long ago as the medieval
schoolmen (Aquinas et al.) with their convoluted treatises on natural law.

        From the very earliest origins of social science (once known as
"social physics") the Great Minds have done their best to collapse
the vast gulf between the behavior of atoms and the behavior of human
beings in society.  I am a materialist, in the sense that I believe human
beings are collections of atoms subject to the same vicissitudes as all
other matter, but human beings, especially in their interactions, are
immeasurably more complex, by so many orders of magnitude that even rough
analogies between the two levels of being are almost certain to prove
false.

        Nevertheless, social scientists have always pursued the
will-o-the-wisp of scientific exactitude, imagining that they could
reduce the behavior of human beings in society to a set of laws or
abstractions grounded in mathematics and/or the natural sciences.  So
whether the inspiration is geometry, mechanics, gravity, the felicific
calculus, the law of the three states, entropy, evolution, mutual aid,
relativity, indeterminacy, organic systems theory, Godel's Proof, chaos,
or whatever, and whether the basic science involved certifies the
existence or non-existence of free will, social scientists have time and
again taken the bait and tried to anchor the findings of their research
in the natural sciences.

        This is not to say that human beings in society do not behave in
ways that can be measured, classified, trimmed to generalizations, and
sometimes even predicted.  We are not ants, but we also exhibit
patterns and regularities in our social behavior that deserve careful
observation and analysis, including at the macroscopic level of
world-systems.  But why this urge to turn social science into natural
science or conflate the two?  What strange inferiority complex drives
social scientists to ape "real" scientists?

        As for this unlikely bedding-down of Habermas with Derrida, of a
moralist with an amoralist, I'm with Gert.  Most of the countries of
Europe belong to the core of the modern world-system, the rest are
scrambling to join it, and any hope of a "kinder, gentler" Europe based
on a vote that didn't take place in the Security Council on the issue
of whether or not to pound Iraq into the dust in March as opposed to
October, and with or without a few brigades of Frenchmen, is surely
misplaced.  The E.U. may or may not emerge as the next hegemon, but it's
the demise of the modern world-system, not the next chapter (if any) in
its bloody career, that really matters.

        Warren