The Social Science of the Citizen Society

BEYOND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

The social sciences, what do they let us know about the world's social, a place of war, of poverty, and of wealth? Certainly, one cannot make them responsible for what is going on in the world. Is there any spot on the globe that is not somehow involved in a war? Is there any place in the world, where the growth of wealth does not exist next to the growth of poverty? Certainly, war, wealth, and poverty are the major essentials of "modernity" and they have been in the forefront of social concern for more than 200 years. The social sciences have been researching the social world with a multitude of professional thinkers also for over two centuries. Has the knowledge they gained helped to make anything better, or at least helped to reduce wars and poverty? Obviously not. Or is even the opposite is the case? Again, one cannot accuse the social sciences for this, knowledge is knowledge, but what is their impact upon the world? Not much, one must conclude, considering the fact that we still live in a world of war, wealth, and poverty. Hence, we have to raise the question what social thought under the regime of the social sciences is all about then.

The book series "Beyond the Social Sciences" publishes social thought and invites readers and writers to reflect on the social sciences and their approach to social thought, the theories they contribute to understand the social world, and how to go beyond the social sciences’ way of thinking about the world.

It particularly invites contributions that critically reflect upon:

 the disciplinary structure of social sciences

 key theories founding global social science theorizing

 epistemological and methodological issues of global social sciences

 institutional aspects of global social sciences

 international collaboration practices

 the global social science structure

 international discourse practices

 international science policies

 alternative approaches to social thought

Series editors are:

Michael Kuhn, World Social Sciences and Humanities Network (World SSHNet), Achim

Shujiro Yazawa, Seijo University, Tokyo

Introduction: The “Globalization” and “De-colonization” of the Social Sciences1

Around 50 years after end of World War II, the social sciences next to creating their theories began another round to reflect on themselves. The discourses that the social sciences then conducted around the end of the 20th century across all disciplines and equally worldwide under the title of a “globalization” of the social sciences, countered by a discourse on their “de-colonization” that was as worldwide as it was across disciplines, could not be more paradoxical, if one considers alone the fact that it takes 50 years after the end of the war to discover that the world had become a world of nation states after the colonized part of the world had adapted the very society model of capitalism of the old colonialists and then the alternative society model, called real socialism, had declared to be finished in a very unspectacular way and had also put their societies back to the regime of capitalism.

With these discourses about “globalization” and “de-colonization”, discourses on what their essential tasks and challenges are in a world of capitalist societies, especially when these discourses are discussed in the social sciences around the world and across all social science disciplines, these sciences, thanks to all the paradoxes of these discourses and their theories, provide insights into what makes social science thinking around the world today concerned.

Globalization

Social sciences call this world of states and market economies “globalization” and at the latest at the beginning of the new century, this discovery of a “globalization” leads to a comprehensive self-critique and social science thinking makes, if one follows the worldwide debates of the social sciences, a discovery and accuses itself of having so far been a “zombie science” in its previous history, because it has closed itself to thinking about the “globalized” social and as a consequence of this self-critique propagates, as social sciences would call it, a “paradigm shift” of its thinking, so to speak a complete revolution of its theory creation. Globalization’ is the keyword that signals the overthrow also in the social science theory production and this ‘globalization’ is—according to the view of the social sciences—not only the hitherto wrongly ignored, all-shaping characteristic of the social, but also the reason for the necessity to fundamentally transform social science thinking itself and to ‘globalize’ the social sciences themselves in order to finally produce theories about the world instead of their previous “Zombi-science.”2

This self-critical judgment of the social sciences and the “paradigmatic” transformation it heralds raises a few questions about this program of transformation, even before one takes a closer look at this project of a globalized science, because it contains at least two errors of thought and a meaningful confession—bought with a discreet lie—a confession that allows a few insights into the nature of thinking in the social sciences.

To start with the latter: The fact that the social sciences are currently highly busy arguing about the necessity of a “globalization” of thinking is as strange as it is informative, because it confesses that thinking about everything social beyond state-constructed societies does not constitute for social scientific thinking an object of social scientific thinking, i.e., for social scientific thinking all state-constructed societies and the social are identical. For this self-critical confession cannot be without the mistake that today’s discovery of a “globalization” claims that the social was not globally, i.e., worldwide, constructed before the observed “globalization”. Just as if there had not been a “global” social in the period preceding “globalization”—colonialism—the discovery of a “globalized” social only makes sense from the point of view of a thinking, if this thinking equates all state-constructed societies with the nature of society, a discovery because it is beyond state-constructed societies, with which the social sciences obviously deal quasi naturally, for this thinking obviously only with the de-colonization, i.e. only with the worldwide establishment of state-constituted societies, a worldwide social exists, with which to have to deal theoretically social scientific thinking as a new task of the social sciences only discovers when the world is a world of state societies.

Obviously, therefore, the model of state societies had to be implemented worldwide in order for social science thinking to discover the existence of a social world at all. A social world that is not a world of nation-state societies, one must conclude from the current discovery of societies alongside one’s own national society, is not a “global” world for the social sciences. As strange as it may sound, it is only the postcolonial transformation of the world into a world of nation-states that allows social science thinking to discover that there is a world beyond its own national society, so for social science thinking, everything social begins with state societies.

And this, the abstruse insight that sociality should only exist after the world has become a world of nation states, contains on top of it a small, equally paradoxical lie of the social sciences about itself: the social sciences knew and know very well a social world beyond nation-state societies before the de-colonization, i.e., before the transformation of the colonies into the very state societies of the colonizers. Social science thinking had even created a special social science discipline, anthropology, a discipline that was responsible for thinking about the “uncivilized social”, that is, for thinking about everything social that is not nation-state societies, and which, now that the world consists of state societies, has found a new disciplinary task with the establishment of cultural studies. And it is as paradoxical as it is telling that, with the exception of anthropology, which was reserved for thinking about the non-state social and which today, after the worldwide “civilization” of the world as state-constructed societies, puzzles over what its object might be, for the social science thinking of all other social science disciplines a social world was non-existent until it was transformed into a world consisting of nation-state constructed societies, only to then demand the “globalization” of their thinking.

This concept of a “globalization” characterizes this picture of a strange discovery of worldwide existing societies by the social sciences after the creation of a world of nation-state societies, just as if there had not been a world until now, i.e. the discovery of a world consisting of state societies, just as if this, the world as a world of states, was the final completion of the social nature of the world, and offers to social scientific thinking only with this world of states its object of thinking, frees the world so to say from its untheorizable non-social spots. “Globalization”, this worldwide spatial spread of something that neither knows a subject that operates this global spread nor wants to name an object, a something that is spread globally, and a concept that does not reveal which subjects are responsible for the mysterious global spread of this subject—an objectless something, nor for what reasons and for what purposes it spreads, is therefore the appropriate synonym of social science thinking for the discovery of a world, under the condition that it is a world of nation states, because for this thinking the world has finally become, quasi by itself, for this thinking, what it has always had to be as its very nature: Everything social in the world has thus matured quasi naturally towards its nature as citizen societies, has somehow come to itself. That is why the idea of a “globalization” of the social needs neither a subject that pursues this globalization, nor an object that this subject wants to bring about. It is to be imagined with this monstrous concept of a “globalization” that the social as a state constructed social develops quasi naturally into what it has always wanted to be as its very nature.

One must therefore conclude from the fact that the social sciences today proclaim the necessity of globalization that it took 200 years of social science thinking in the imperial world before, with the decolonization and transformation of colonized societies into state-constructed societies, a social world beyond the imperial world of states was discovered.

And this discovery also reveals what social science thinking is coming to terms with the nature of the formation of state societies in the imperial world of states. As if the emergence of imperial states was not the result of their colonial oppression and exploitation of the world, an exploitation of the colonized world which created the economic foundations for the economic wealth and political power of the imperial world in the first place, as if the creation of a world of states and their imperialism subjecting the social world to their domination purposes was not the way to build and live the world of nation-states, the social sciences realize, more precisely, the social sciences in the imperial world, the existence of a social world beyond their own national societies, and this only then and because and only after the science policies of their imperial states have discovered science as a new lever for global competition for economic growth and for global political power and therefore also drive the social sciences to extend their activities to the social world beyond their national societies. The fact that it was indeed the national science policies in the imperial states that, together with science as a whole, had to motivate the social sciences to do more international work tells all about the thinking about the social world in the social sciences of the imperial states of the world. It obviously needed and still needs such political instructions so that after 200 years of the social sciences, social science thinking can discover an era of “globalization”, almost as if the world until then had consisted of national social biotopes sealed off from one another and having nothing to do with one another.3

For the social sciences, especially in the imperial states, their discovery of the existence of a social world beyond their national societies, after their politics have pushed them there, is therefore still a trip to an in this sense categorically exotic elsewhere. Despite all the debates about the necessity of globalizing or internationalizing social science thinking, the essential part of social science theory production continues to produce knowledge that not only continues to cultivate the unworldly notion of theories about nationally isolated societies as the basis of its theorizing, but that also continues to produce social science knowledge that arises from perspectives that interpret everything social through the particular, mostly historical, forms of the construction of nationhood of the imperial world of states and, as will be shown later, bring in these nationally constructed theories from the imperial societies as their contribution to their globalization. Theories which, in their search for explanations for social phenomena of national societies, encounter the necessity of having to study the world of states, or which even recognize the phenomena practically defined by state sovereignty as practices of national politics and in order to do so therefore direct their social-scientific thinking towards the world of states as a whole, elsewhere also called imperialism, remain an exception and enjoy a reputation of scientific exoticism, despite, or rather because of, all the debates about a “globalization” of the social sciences. And that this, the nationalization of social science thinking, that this is what constitutes its “globalization”, will be shown later along the products of its “globalized” theory-building.

Less inspired by their intellectual curiosity about what is happening in the world, not to mention the discovery of theoretical necessities to be able to understand social phenomena only by thinking about them as an imperially made world, social sciences that are challenged and urged by their national political elites, of course not to analyze the social world as a whole beyond the national islands, but to participate in presenting the national knowledge resources as an attractive resource for investment seeking global capital, this rather mundane task, to prepare science as a source for international business investment, to present this as a new challenge of a discrete “globalization” as a virtually purposeless, purely scientific, self-critically presented imperative of a globalization of the social sciences, cleansed of all political and economic calculations, reveals nevertheless that the theoretical preoccupation with a nation-state constructed world beyond the individual nation-state societies is obviously a hitherto unknown phenomenon and field of activity for the social sciences, especially for the social sciences in the imperial world of states beyond the USA.

Consequently, and this is the next paradox of “globalized thinking”, the internationalized or globalized social science knowledge that deals with the newly discovered world of states consists, as before, of always nationally constructed knowledge: The most common way of reflecting on the newly discovered global social, which comes to mind in social science thinking, consists of comparing nationally constructed units of knowledge about social phenomena that are always a priori strictly nationally defined. From this it must be concluded that the social sciences, confronted with the task of dealing with the world beyond their theoretical constructs of a world of social phenomena sealed off by the state, simply cannot think of anything else to reflect on the world other than to multiply what they have always done, that is to theorize about a multiplicity of societies always presented nationally, that this thinking about the world of state societies is thus only able to imagine these comparisons as the mere parallel existence of nationally constructed theories. Just as if it were not the interrelationship of states that makes societies within states what they essentially are, when the social sciences look at the world of states comparatively, nothing else seems to come to their mind but to additively juxtapose theories about individual state phenomena, just as if these state societies of the world of states had nothing to do with each other.

De-colonization

Next to the discourse on the “globalization” of social science, there is another worldwide discourse, again 50 years later than the transformation of the colonized parts of the world into nation states and market economies, the discourse on the “de-colonization” of the social sciences, which is opposed by social scientists from the so-called developing countries to the discourse on “globalization” and in which these scientists insist that social science thinking, which creates its theories about the social world from the perspective of the imperial world, is an image of the world that only social sciences can develop in the imperial world.