Re: Prigogine & Co.

While I'm all for not following down the reductionist road one more time"
and completely against "shrinking social [?] phenomena to the dimensions
of natural [?] phenomena", I don't think that the world-systemic interest
in Prigogine necessarily qualifies as a case-in-point.  In fact, the
interest in Prigogine's work derives to a large extent because he himself,
and consciously, employs metaphors from the social sciences (complexity,
historicity of systems) in his work on dissipative structures.  In other
words, it's not just another case of physics envy, but rather the reverse
-an instance of a physical scientist (and a Noble Prize winner at that)
invoking social science models in attacking the previously dominant
mechanistic paradigm that was uncritically aped by social scientists for
150 years. The rise of complexity studies and chaos theory in physics and
chemistry also goes a long way toward collapsing the easy distinction
between the natural sciences (grounded in an equilibrium model) and the
social and historical sciences (which are said to be evolutionary and
complex).  It is the existence of the hard-and-fast distinction that
encouraged the physics envy of the past, so its removal is likely a cause
for celebration rather than worry.

Having said that, I remain agnostic about the the benefit of adopting
particular metaphors from one field to another, until the importation can
be shown to bear fruit in its own right in the new terrain.  I don't know
if the "energy" metaphor works for world-systems analysis or not at this
point.  The last time social scientists tried to borrow the term was, as I
recall, in the mid-1950's.  Marshall Sahlins' early work featured an
attempt to apply the evolutionary model to culture; he argued that
"progress" was an empirically verifiable notion since cultures featured a
demonstrable trend toward the greater organization of energy (as defined
by physicists).  I would hope that new uses of "energy" by
world-systemists have better results.

Lastly, on Derrida, Habermas and Europe:  I have fairly little to add to
what has been said by Steve Sherman on this subject.  Whatever one thinks
of D. and H., they are, rightly or wrongly, widely regarded as the leading
intellectuals of their respective countries, and their attempt to
articulate a universalism in opposition to that of a US ruled by
neoconservatives is bound to be significant.  Of course, Europe is part of
the core, and of course many of its policies are anti-South.  If anything,
EU policy regarding agricultural subsidies is even more anti-3rd world
than that of the US, and agricultural subsidies damage peripheral
economies more than just about anything short of war.  Nevertheless,
European elites realize that the only way to combat the US at a time
when the latter has lost legitimacy worldwide is to appeal to
global democratic sentiment.  Thus, witness Chirac's invitation of leading
semiperipheral leaders to the G8 summit.  Initiatives like Monbiot's
proposal for a global parliament are unlikely to get off the ground unless
leading powers (like the EU) put their weight behind them.  Finally, the
attempt to appropriate anti-imperialist sentiment for Europe can cut both
ways:  it benefits Europe ideologically, but the idea of an expanded,
universalist Europe can benefit others economically.  Right now, the chief
beneficiary is Eastern Europe; but if the definition of what constitutes
Europe expands, one might very well find North Africa, West Asia and
Russia becoming "European" (a move which may be necessary to undercut the
pro-US 'fifth columnists' in Poland, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Spain,
etc.)


On Sun, 15 Jun 2003 wwagar@binghamton.edu wrote:

>
>
>       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
>
>
>

-- 
Boris Stremlin
bstremli@binghamton.edu