ing the historical sociology of 'the international', marx, trotsky and the idea of u&cd, 25-02-11
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8/3/2019 ing the Historical Sociology of 'the International', Marx, Trotsky and the Idea of U&CD, 25-02-11
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Luke Cooper, University of Sussex
Theorising the historical sociology of the international Marx, Trotsky and the
idea of uneven and combined development
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Theorising the historical sociology
of the international Marx,
Trotsky and the idea of uneven
and combined developmentLuke Cooper, University of Sussex
The recent upsurge of interest in Leon Trotskys novel idea of uneven and combined
development within International Relations (IR) has not simply found a new way to
challenge mainstream realist thinking with a social theory of the international. It has also
posed critical questions on the extent to which classical social theory provides us with the
intellectual tools we need for such a theory. Is Trotskys idea a breakthrough concept or didit share many of its methodological assumptions with Marxs original theory? This article
argues that Trotskys approach shared Marxs special form of multilinear historicism and
was premised on the idea of a philosophy of internal relations: the treatment of social and
natural life as differential but inter-connected totality. But Trotsky took these methodological
presuppositions and used them to make claims about the necessary properties of human
social development per se.
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Luke Cooper, University of Sussex
Theorising the historical sociology of the international Marx, Trotsky and the
idea of uneven and combined development
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How to theorise the international: Marxism and IR
How to account for that plane of social reality formed out of the interaction between national
units with its special properties of war, diplomacy, trade etc. which is the subject matter
of International Relations (IR): the international? In recent years IR theorists have
increasingly turned to the twin pillars of history and sociology to reach for an answer to this
long-pondered question (Hobden and Hobson 2002; Hobson 2004; Lawson 2006; Rosenberg
2006). On the one hand this has been driven forward by a now well-trodden critique of IR as
an impoverished discipline, necessarily restricted by the limits of its purview (Lawson and
Shilliam 2010: 70). But on the other hand there has even amongst historical sociologists
that are looking within the social for an explanatory account of the phenomenon of
international relations been a degree of introspection over the intellectual resources
classical social theory may or may not provide for such an endeavour.
One of the most profound challenges laid down in the course of these digressions, has come
from Justin Rosenberg, who fired a shot across the bows of the tradition of classical social
theory by arguing that it failed to incorporate the multilinear dimensions of social change so
important to theorising the international (Rosenberg 2006). This led him to invoke the idea
of an international historical sociology as a new idiom encompassing three methodological
predicates for social theory in IR that have hitherto remained occluded:
... A conceptual framework which, proceeding from the relational structure of societies as
explanans (sociology), systematically incorporates the causal significance of their asynchronous
interaction (international) into an explanation of their individual and collective development and
change over time (historical) (Rosenberg 2006: 335).
Identifying the potential of historical sociology for IR is not new, but can be traced to
observations made by Stanley Hoffman in the late 1950s (Hoffman 1959: 346-7). Yet,
distinctively, Rosenberg claimed the failure to fully realise the original aspirations in the
course of what is now a well-established engagement could not just be put down to thehegemony of realism in IR with its reification of the geopolitical as an independent object
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Luke Cooper, University of Sussex
Theorising the historical sociology of the international Marx, Trotsky and the
idea of uneven and combined development
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of analysis separated from individual and social realms , but also reflected the failure of
classical social theory to establish a social ontology for the intersocietal aspects of human
life (Rosenberg 2006: 307-313). Only once we get to this base level of social theorisation
will we, Rosenberg argues, be able to unpack the causal impact of the social interaction
among many societies for their individual, collective and historical development across
space and time (ibid: 335). Rosenbergs argument was not uncontroversial (for example see
Chernilo 2010) for it attempted to reverse the direction of inter-disciplinary energies away
from a tendency amongst historical sociologists to look to sociological concepts to form the
basis for non-reified conceptions of the international within IR (see Lawson and Shilliam
2010). Instead it developed a critique, albeit one also derived from a set of sociological
assumptions, of the theoretical lacuna of the international in social theory.
The answer to this absence the failure to develop a theoretical set of propositions about the
dispersed but interactive nature of social development itself is identified by Rosenberg as
the idea of uneven and combined development (U&CD) (Rosenberg 2006; 2007), which
was first formulated by Leon Trotsky in the opening decades of the 20th century (Trotsky
1962; 1967). According to Rosenberg, U&CD offers a powerful theorisation of the
irreducible dimension of social reality formed out of the co-existence of multiple societies;
this level, the international, is intrinsically uneven and combined, because multiple political
units and social forms co-exist (unevenness) and co-determine (combination) one anothers
development. Once the international is reconceptualised along these lines the idea is that,
problems like the domestic analogy fallacy i.e., failing to recognise the distinctiveness of
the international by making simple analogies to domestic properties , the treatment of the
impact of the international as simply externally related factors added in to a specifichistorical account, and dichotomous conceptualisations of the internal-external, can all be
overcome. Moreover, it also focuses social-theoretical attention on developmental
particularity without abandoning the causal impact of the wider social totality, because, the
unique specificities of each unit within the system are seen as partially determined by
system-level interaction between the units. In his most recent work, Rosenberg (2010) has
shown how U&CD is not constitutional of the international as such, but refers to anterior,
more fundamental, dimensions of social development, its interactive multiplicity, which
explains the emergence of the international as an historical phenomenon.
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Luke Cooper, University of Sussex
Theorising the historical sociology of the international Marx, Trotsky and the
idea of uneven and combined development
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This reaching back to classical social theory to resolve a problem that Rosenberg argued was
pervasive and general across the entire tradition itself, arguably reveals a certain tension in
the critique itself is it global or partial in its pretensions? And if the lacuna does indeed
have a global character then how does the apparent answer to it in the idea of U&CD fit
theoretically with the assumptions we find in the competing intellectual paradigms of
classical social theory? Trotsky himself, though his remarks on its status and impact on
historical materialism were fragmentary, would have certainly argued U&CD was a
distinctively Marxist concept, thereby locating it within the tradition of historical, materialist
and dialectical accounts of the social process Marx had pioneered. But Rosenberg has been
more circumspect, suggesting on occasion that there was nothing necessarily historical
materialist about the concept of U&CD, even though he insisted it had to be operationalised
within a general social theory to reach down to the level of concrete historical explanation
(Callinicos and Rosenberg 2008: 86). What is posed here is not simply the lineage of the
concept within social theory, but the meanings we attach to the uneven but combined
nature of the social process U&CD highlights that is, the mechanisms and actions which
give rise to the differential interaction among units within the system.
The outpouring of theoretical reflections on Rosenbergs claims in the contemporary debate
focused in the first instance on the proper meaning of Trotskys somewhat elusive concept
in particular, its temporal remit, as a general property of development or an historically
specific dimension of modernity (Ashman 2006; Callinicos 2007; Callinicos and Rosenberg
2008; Rosenberg 2006; 2007). But they quickly found more methodological excavation was
needed about the role of abstraction in historical materialism and how we can advance
concepts with a general explanatory power without losing sight of the intricacies in the
concrete historical process (Anievas and Allinson 2009; Ashman 2009; Callinicos and
Rosenberg 2008; Davidson 2009; Rosenberg 2010).
The recent discussion on U&CD indicates the vitality of historical materialist scholarship
within IR which has formed one component within the general rise of critical alternatives to
the realist mainstream in the last two decades. Indeed John Macleans complaint of the
strange case of mutual neglect between Marxism and IR, and his corresponding appeal for
greater intervention by Marxists into IR theory (Maclean 1988), has now largely been
answered. And indeed this has occurred not simply with recourse to the idea of U&CD, but
has embraced engagements with Marxs foundational social critique as a basis for a new
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Luke Cooper, University of Sussex
Theorising the historical sociology of the international Marx, Trotsky and the
idea of uneven and combined development
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international theory (Rosenberg 1994), the school of Political Marxism (Teschke 2003),
among a range of other intellectual sub-trajectories (see Anievas 2010).
This emergence of Marxist approaches has meant the traditional critique of Marxism made in
mainstream IR , for its failure to theorise inter-state relations, has come under challenge. For
Berki, Waltz et al, Marxism was a fundamentally hierarchical theory, whose concepts were
largely derived from the domestic and this meant that accounts of horizontal interactions,
such as those we see in the geopolitical relations between states, were basically omitted from
the explanatory categories. They were therefore inevitably treated as mere epiphenomenal
expressions of more fundamental (economic, etc) dimensions of social life (Berki 1971;
Cruickshank and Kublkov 1980; 1985; Waltz 1954; 1979). Central to this critique was the
assumption that Marxism failed to see history as a multi-faceted process with many
interactive but shifting pathways in the process of change. For the Marxian doctrine, wrote
Berki in a comment that epitomised the wider critique, the unilinear development of human
history is a fundamental truth (Berki 1971:101). Waltz and Berki saw the repeated
arguments on the national question amongst Marxists as an attempt to make a theory that
advanced a global egalitarian community as its goal, fit with a reality in which nation-states,
and not classes, were the fundamental actors in international relations (Berki 1971: Waltz
1954).
There was thus a twofold aspect to the traditional critique. Firstly, there was a conception of
Marxism as unilinear in its account of social change. Secondly, there was an alternative
vision in which the nationally defined community was seen as the fundamental actor in
international history. The first of these points reveals a basic misunderstanding. Marxism was
misconceived as a unilinear theory of history that was basically reductionist as its conceptscould either not account for non-economic phenomena or saw them as mere epiphenomenal
expressions of the more fundamental categories of the theory. But the second aspect to this
critique reveals a real irony. An equally totalising set of assumptions just as one-sided as
the conception of Marxism put forward about nationally-defined communities as
fundamental, transhistorical actors (the reification typical of realism) stood as the theoretical
counter-position to the supposed Marxist dogma. But until relatively recently (Rosenberg
1994) this critique and one-sided alternatives went unchallenged, while as Maclean once put
it, Marxist interventions often provided grounds for these criticisms:
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Luke Cooper, University of Sussex
Theorising the historical sociology of the international Marx, Trotsky and the
idea of uneven and combined development
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Marxists writers have themselves contributed... to the relative lack of consideration of their
approach within international relations... The way they have done so is... [by failing] to
distinguish... between Marxs long development of an innovative and distinctive epistemology
and methodology of social change on the one hand, and Marxs particular theory of the capitalist
mode of production... on the other. Thus, on the one hand, non-Marxists have argued that the
concepts... developed in Marxs analysis of capitalist production... are not relevant to the study of
international relations, because here, the basic unit of analysis is the state, and the purpose of
studying international relations is understanding relations between the states, or other discrete
entities that act internationally. On the other hand, Marxists have either abstracted these concepts
from the domestic level and applied them in doctrinaire fashion to international relations (and this
is an attempt to make Marxs historically relative concepts ahistorical) or they have simply
continued to concentrate upon theories of the state and class (and this is to reduce the
international system to claims about the state and/or classes) (Maclean 1988:298).
What is interesting about these remarks from Maclean, made now well over two decades
ago, is that they hint at the kind of theorisation of international relations Marxism may
provide if it takes as its starting point not simply the historically specific system of capitalist
property relations, but the distinctive epistemology and methodology of social change
(ibid) Marx outlined. The implication then is that concerns for security, territorial possession,trans-community relations, and the collective psychology present in notions of the inside
and outside within historical communities (in short, the subject matter of IR) indicate
features of social development that transcend modernity, despite all its radical economic and
political specificities, and thereby establish the need for a transhistorical theorisation of the
international. It could well be argued, that only with Rosenbergs recent work on U&CD
(2006; 2007; 2010) have Marxists sought to cross this bridgehead onto a wider plain that
reaches for a social and developmental explanation for international relations, because
previously the tendency had been to insist trenchantly, and indeed not incorrectly as such, on
the radical specificity of capitalist modernity and therefore of the international relations that
form part of it (Rosenberg 1994; Teschke 2003). And, indeed, this more traditional position
has often been vigorously defended by critics of Rosenbergs extension of U&CD in the
recent debate (in particular, Ashman 2009, Davidson 2009 and, less categorically, Avienas
and Allinson 2009). Macleans intuition here also opens up an interesting problem for those
who have taken up the idea of U&CD as a social ontology and theorisation of the
international: namely, how exactly it connects with the wider methodological ballasts of
historical materialism. We need to draw some conclusions about what the notions of the
historical and the material, as theoretical presuppositions about the kind of social theory
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Luke Cooper, University of Sussex
Theorising the historical sociology of the international Marx, Trotsky and the
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we undertake, bring to bear on the type of theorisation of the social process we get when we
operationalise U&CD.
Although Rosenberg has engaged in a stretching of the concept of U&CD in the sense of
abstracting it from the wider body of social theory from which it emanated in order to test
the intellectual bounds of the concept in his account of the historical emergence of the
international he was impelled to introduce a foundational premise of Marxism: that social
reproduction depends on the nature of the means of subsistence human beings find in
existence and have to reproduce (Rosenberg 2010: 179-180). If this Marxist conception of
development had been left to one side, then a key component of the explanation of the
transition from Hunter Gather Band (HGBs) to sedentary communities would have been lost.
Without this understanding of the cumulative development of human social technique and
the ability of labour to harness resources provided unevenly by the diverse geographical
conditions faced by early human life, we would not be able to situate the transition between
these social forms within the material realities of this pre-historic period. As Rosenberg
himself conceded, the consequence of this was very clear, without this premise, we would be
left not with the powerful resolution of the problem of the international for social theory,
but with the separation of international and social theory once again reinforced and
perpetuated (Rosenberg 2010: 186). Arguably what this shows is that this third aspect,
development, in the triune conception of U&CD plays a crucial role for the abstraction in
its totality; such that were we to modify it by replacing a Marxist notion of development with
some other alternative we would end up with a very different idea altogether. Moreover, this
poses a general question, about what kind of intellectual content we attach to the notions of
unevenness, combination and development, and how our broader social theoreticassumptions affects the substance of our theorisation.
What this paper will proceed to do is explore further the role played by Marxs notion of
development within the idea of U&CD. My basic argument is that Trotskys articulation of
U&CD made explicitly theoretical claims about the idea of development which were only
implicit in Marxs historical materialism. But Trotsky built upon two key intellectual
assumptions already present in Marxs method. He firstly shared a notion of the historical
that orientated social theoretical research to the multiple pathways taken by human social
development. There was indeed a multilinearism in Marxs understanding of the historical
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Luke Cooper, University of Sussex
Theorising the historical sociology of the international Marx, Trotsky and the
idea of uneven and combined development
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process and this is particularly evident in the Grundrisse. Second of all, Marx and Trotsky
both shared a philosophy of internal relations approach, i.e. the treatment of social life as
an interactive totality of differential parts, in which the whole and the parts, both form
part of one anothers ontology. And this understanding is crucial to excavate if we are to
understand how Marx incorporated concretely the intersocietal aspects into his dynamic
account of the emergence of capitalism as an internal, global process. But neither Marx nor
Trotsky brought these premises either as philosophical presuppositions about the social
process (Marx) or explicitly theoretical claims and the nature of development itself (Trotsky)
to bear on the emergence of the international as an historical phenomenon. Thus, herein
lies Rosenbergs breakthrough, for he has built innovatively on these assumptions
(particularly in Rosenberg 2010) to tackle the problematic of the international within IR
and for social theory at large.
The line of argument below develops across four parts. Part one looks at the suggestive
references to international relations and uneven development in the Grundrisse,before
making a selective reading of Marxs account of the origins of the capital form in the same
textin order to show how the uneven and multilinear aspect of social change was
incorporated into his internal account of the emergence of capitalism. Part two looks at
comments Marx made in a letter to Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov on international relations
and the problem of the social division of labour. Part three draws on Bertell Ollmans
Hegel-inspired reading of Marxs method as a philosophy of internal relations, looks at
how Trotsky consciously shared this method and asks how it affected his idea of U&CD.
And a final section draws some conclusions for the contemporary discussion.
Capturing multilinear development? MarxsGrundrisse
Rosenberg (2007: 479) points out how Marx made a passing theoretical reflection in the
Grundrisse on the status of international relations for his wider social theory. One of several
points to be mentioned here and not to be forgotten, Marx, alas appeared toforget it, as he
never returned to theoretically reflect on the following observation:
Secondary and tertiary matters; in general derivative, inherited and not original relations of
production. Influence here of international relations (Marx 1973: 109).
It is in this extract we also find what may be the first reference to the idea of uneven
development which was to become such an important concept in early 20th century
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Luke Cooper, University of Sussex
Theorising the historical sociology of the international Marx, Trotsky and the
idea of uneven and combined development
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Marxism. And indeed, for whatever reason, it is certainly the case that in the Grundrisse we
find recurring expressions of Marxs non-linear view of social-historical development. But
what exactly could Marxs comments on international relations, as secondary, tertiary,
derivative and inherited mean for his social theory? IR scholars might have a tendency to
be critical of these observations for not asserting some kind of specificity to the
international. Another interpretive option however is to see it as a statement of the centrality
of the social for the international, with the latter deriving its existence from anterior
dimensions ofsocialhistorical development. Similarly, the idea of inherited influences,
perhaps from archaic state institutions that form part of the unit and system levels of the
international, is a formulation which also chimes with remarks Marx would make on the
same page about uneven development. Here we also find observations that are equally
suggestive but equally clipped too.
Marx describes uneven development as the disequilibrium between social and political forms
and material production in space and time (Marx 1973: 109). Forms of social consciousness
and activity such as artistic development exist in disproportion to material production, but
these are not so difficult to grasp as within practical-social relations themselves (ibid). The
contrast between European and American levels of modernisation, to the co-existence of
archaic legal forms (such as Roman private law) with modern social relations of production
(the really difficult point to be discussed), are the diverse examples of practical-social
relations Marx uses as cursory illustrations of unevenness in social change (ibid). The telling
warning he offered implied a sweeping criticism of the classical tradition in social theory.
Given this unevenness in historical development, he said, in general, the concept of progress
not to be conceived in its usual abstractness (ibid). After this critical aside on the existing
social theory of his day, Marx then appears to pass over the issue. No further reference to
uneven development is to be found in the rest of the manuscripts. Nonetheless, a multi-linear
historic process arguably remains an implicit theoretical assumption. This is evident for
instance in his treatment of the emergence of the capital form within conditions inherited
from existing modes of productive relations. If we follow this argument through, we can
illustrate the multilinearity of Marxs historical sociology and draw out its significance for
U&CD.
Marx is asking the recurrent question of European development, why did the capital form
emerge in this part of the world when it did and proceed to achieve such global reach and
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Luke Cooper, University of Sussex
Theorising the historical sociology of the international Marx, Trotsky and the
idea of uneven and combined development
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domination? Part of the argument he develops is theoretical: a claim about the nature of the
capital form itself. But the other aspect to it has to address itself to the contradiction-laden
process which led to the supremacy of the capitalist mode in real historical space and time.
What is interesting about this meandering narrative in the Grundrisse is that these
dimensions are brought together, to present a cursory account of the uneven spatial and
temporal emergence of capitalism. The theoretical aspect offers a claim about the
preconditions for the emergence of the capital form. Marx argues capital emerges when
socially accumulated wealth can be re-invested into labour power and for this to occur then a
material and social condition needs to be met: that there is a class of labourers no longer able
to produce their own subsistence and may be made dependent upon wages for their social
reproduction. For this condition to exist, then, revolutionary social change needs to take
place in the countryside to allow nascent capitalists to exploit the labour power of
impoverished free labourers. Crucially, for debates against the existing political-economic
theories Marx was contesting, this means the conditions for the emergence of capital are not
created by capital, but, rather, they develop through the historic process of dissolution of
the pre-capitalist modes (Marx 1973: 506). The relation of capital and wage labour is not
already commanding and predominant over the whole of production, but has to come into
being historically (Marx 1973: 503). In this way Marxs conception of capital as a social
relation leads to the introduction of social-historical premises, to elaborate the theoretical
argument about the nature of value and the capital form. Once these social and historical
dimensions become interwoven, the difficulty of unevenness immediately arises; for the
transformations in relations between labourers and landed property were spatially
concentrated. Marxs resolution to this problem tells us a lot about his broader understanding
of social development, because he continually emphasises the need for an historicaltreatment of the problem of the specific forms and patterns of development. His
understanding of capital thus recognises it does not emerge as a preformed, external
totality, but rather comes into existence within the confines of the old order (Wainwright
2008: 884). But yet conversely, the apparent paradox is that the capital form posits a
totalising set of social relations from the moment of its inception as the incessant search of
capital for new sources of value production and markets, therefore forces other modes into
submission to exchange relations.
This dialectical appreciation of the contradiction-laden emergence of capital as an uneven
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Luke Cooper, University of Sussex
Theorising the historical sociology of the international Marx, Trotsky and the
idea of uneven and combined development
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social-historical progress repeatedly comes to the surface. A few examples of this clearly
illustrate the kind of historical-sociology Marx is doing here. When Marx speaks of the
dissolution of the old modes of production, he does not mean they disappear in a single
temporal moment. Rather the emergence of monetary wealth and nascent capitalists develop
as a contradictory force within pre-capitalist forms of social property relations. The
capitalist inserts himself Marx writes, as (historic) middle-man between landed property, or
property in general, and labour (Marx 1973: 504). This is part of a subterranean process of
expanding market mediation, leading over time to the subordination of use-value to
exchange value (Marx 1973: 508-509). In this sense, capital appears in its original forms
alongside the old modes of production (Marx 1973: 510). Marx doesnt explicitly couch
this in the terms of uneven let alone combined development, but this view of how the
backward and the modern become interwoven in concrete space and time were to be the
subject of Trotskys U&CD.
There are also several examples of the spatial dimensions to this account of the uneven
emergence of the capitalist mode of production used. He points out how capital appeared
sporadically and locally in the manufacturing sectors of the emporiums like the Italian
cities, Constantinople, [and] in the Flemish Dutch cities, which were orientated to the
external market through over land and maritime commerce (Marx 1973: 510-511). In this
way, the spatial concentration of manufacturing within these more advanced urban centres
gives rise to an inter-societal dimension in the expansion of market-based social forms,
because a surplus in manufactured commodities necessitates striving for an external market.
The introduction of the intersocietal dimension into the account also involves comparatively
addressing the impact of divergent state institutional forms had on the process. Marx writes,
for example, of how governments such as those of Henry VIII play a contradictory role as
conditions of the historic dissolution process and as makers of the conditions for the
existence of capital, by policing the labour market brought into being by English landlords
through enclosures and dismissals of retainers to increase their share of surplus agricultural
product (Marx 1973: 507). Like Trotskys account of Russian Tsarism, Marxs suggestion is
that the reforming, more centralised, coercive, English state embodies and unites wider
social contradictions. The contingencies involved in such political processes, their success or
failure in creating the social and institutional conditions for exchange to subordinate use-
value (a la modern markets), touch at the heart of the uneven development of the social
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Luke Cooper, University of Sussex
Theorising the historical sociology of the international Marx, Trotsky and the
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forces that were pressing towards capitalism.
Clearly playing heavily on Marxs thinking was how his political-economy differentiated
itself from the existing logical-deductive approaches he sought to transcend by way of his
historicism. The nature of his historical method was such that when challenging his
intellectual precursors approaches he would embrace, within a few pages of text, vast
temporalities of development. These historical digressions incorporated the multiple
pathways and intersocietal dimensions within an internal, theory-laden account of the
general process. So, when Marx wished to show the mutations in the form taken by general
economic properties i.e. the historically specific social forms they took in given epochs
he historicised them in order to challenge the reification of concepts that had plagued
classical political-economy. For instance in his discussion of the historical forms of property
(property in general), Marx argues that a materialist understanding of its origins should
start with the appropriation of nature by primitive communities, with the exact form it takes
depending on the social relations operating in any given historical community (Marx 1973:
490-491). But from this materialist base, Marx then introduces the dimension of multiple
societies, pointing out that nature appeared as a limitless resource to primitive communities,
so the barrier they confront to the exploitation of the natural earth is rival communities: thus,
warfare is therefore one of the earliest occupations of each of these naturally arisen
communities, both for the defence of their property and for obtaining new property (Marx
1973: 491). There is also the suggestion that this brutal form of interaction, can result in the
transformation in the form taken by property relations in a given community through
conquest by another (Marx 1973: 490). Marx thus draws attention to the sources of dramatic
social change that can come from outside a society. He assumes, in the outline of the
dynamic process he presents, these aspects of intersocietal causation. Indeed, they are
incorporated at the concrete level and contribute to the multilinear picture which is put
together from these historical lineages.
Overall, then, to capture the meaning and implications of this selective reading of the text for
Marxs wider social theory, requires of us that we get a handle on the special role played by
the historical in his method. The repeated use of the term provides a recurring indication of
Marxs break from abstract universalism. In the picture he paints which is a nothing less,
surely, than a textual panorama of uneven development in the emergence of capital we see
how Marx recognised, observed and studied the contradictory role played by the social
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Luke Cooper, University of Sussex
Theorising the historical sociology of the international Marx, Trotsky and the
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forces of the old order in the development of capitalism. His method leads him to ground
the emergence of capital in these old conditions; but, moreover, and crucially, he also told a
story, one involving a great deal of spatial and temporal divergence and interactivity about
the nature of this historical process. The historical examples he cites do often take a
comparative or case study form, but they act as lineages of development within the argument
about the spread of capitalism as a social process. This allows Marx to treat it as a single but
variegated process, as a differentiated and contradictory whole. In this sense, the analysis is
imbued in a very powerful way with Marxs dialectical method, because he is seeking out the
inner-connection between contradictory historical phenomenon and attempting to unite the
general with the particular within his internal account of the process as a whole.
Yet, at the same time, despite the presence of multilinearity is there still a missing
theoretical element in this narrative? Marx is putting together here what is the end a political-
economic argument (albeit one which treats economic categories as social and historical
relations). Although he admits into the whole analysis a multilinear picture of the concrete
plain of development he takes as his theoretical and historical object, he doesnt offer the
conceptual tools that might tell us why exactly social-historical development has given rise
to these multiple pathways of social development. Marx tended to couch his idea of
development in terms of the increasing complexity of the social division of labour
successive transformations in the forms and patterns of social organisation. But did this
conceptualisation incorporate the uneven and combined dimensions? This was a problem
Marx confronted over a decade earlier when reflecting on ProudhonsPhilosophy of Poverty.
Proudhon has so little understood the problem of the division of labour
In 1846 Marx wrote a letter to Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov, in which he made a series ofcritical observations on ProudhonsPhilosophy of Poverty (Marx 1979: 489-503). He would
go on to write The Poverty of Philosophy as a more thorough rejoinder to Proudhon, but in
this earlier piece, which is a quite brilliant polemical sally, Marx reflects more generally on
the issues of method involved without making the detailed interrogation he would in the
published work. It is an interesting document both for the way in which Marxs historicism,
i.e. his view of historical investigation as a primary analytical device for his social theory,
forms the central element of his critique of Proudhon, and for the presence within it of one of
Marxs fragmentary observations on the social ontology of international relations. Part of
Marxs challenge to Proudhon was that his notion of the social division of labour was both
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too abstract and too narrow, as it could not include within its conceptual bounds the diverse
range of phenomena that form part of successive changes in social organisation. Marxs
critique of Proudhon also underlines again his historicism and, more specifically, how it
affects the concepts he elaborates. The broad substance of Marxs attack on Proudhon is
concerned with his non-historical method of abstraction. Proudhon formulated his economic
concepts through a form of universal reason derived from the most idealist parts of German
philosophy, and, so, by seeking to break free of the constraints of space and time in pursuit
of an abstract universalism, he was unable to treat the capitalist social formation as a
transitory social form, the product of an historical evolution:
Mr Proudhon, incapable of following the real movement of history, produces a phantasmagoria
which claims to be dialectical. He does not need to speak of the seventeenth, the eighteenth or the
nineteenth century, for his history proceeds in the misty realm of imagination and is above space
and time (Marx 1979: 492).
Marx comes back to this point the primacy of spatially and temporally specific conditions
to elaborating any theory of social development many times in the letter. History is seen as
key to understanding the present; for the conditions that active human individuals confront
today, are the products of a historically determined process of social co-existence and
interaction among previous generations. In this regard, Proudhon does not understand, says
Marx, that social institutions are historical products of a certain pattern of development.
The primacy of history, should therefore affect the character of the social explanation
developed by determining the meaning and limits of any concepts informing a given
analysis. But for Proudhon the opposite is the case; so Marx writes of how Proudhon argued
that the development of labour, credit and machinery occurred to serve the idea of equality,
only to then note that they turned against the notion of equality and this is for him the
dialectical contradiction (Marx 1979: 496). Yet, of course, only if the idea of equality is
arbitrarily taken as the source of these historical social forms does this contradiction exist; so
as Marx cruelly puts it the contradiction exists solely between... [Proudhons] fixed ideas
and the real movement of history (ibid). Rejecting the whole notion of universal reason as
thought abstracted from the real conditions of space and time, i.e. from the material realities
of human life itself Marx diagnoses the fallacy as a failure to see that economic categories
are only abstract expressions of these existing relations and only remain true while these
relations exist (ibid).
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The historicity of Marxs concepts also means they have an elasticity and relativity
relative, that is, to changing conditions of existence , which was entirely alien to
Proudhons understanding of concepts derived from eternal reason. The social division of
labour is one such category that Proudhon holds to be an eternal universal and in contrast
Marxs use of this concept is very elastic, affording it a relativity which relates to the
penumbra of social-historical forms it takes. It is in this discussion that Marx introduces the
idea of international relations; he does so by criticising Proudhons failure to even discuss
the world market in his outline of the social division of labour:
For Mr Proudhon, the division of labour is something exceedingly simple. But was not the caste
system a specific division of labour? And was not the corporative system another division of
labour? And is not the division of labour in the manufacturing system... likewise entirely distinct
from the division of labour... in modern industry? Mr Proudhon is so far from the truth that he
neglects to do what even profane economists do. In discussing the division of labour, he feels no
need to refer to the world market. Well! Must not the division of labour in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries, when there were as yet no colonies, when America was still non-existent for
Europe, and when Eastern Asia existed only through the mediation of Constantinople, have been
utterly different from the division of labour in the seventeenth century, when colonies were
already developed? And that is not all. Is the whole internal organisation of nations, are their
international relations, anything but the expression of a given division of labour? And must they
not change as the division of labour changes? (Marx 1979:493, emphasis added).
Once again we see Marxs historicism. The argument here being that the successive
transformations in human social organisation in space and time mean the evolving form of
even the most general properties of human existence like complexity in social organisation
and national and international divisions of labour have to be studied in their developmental
particularity. Otherwise the real movement of social historical change will never be truly
captured or explained. The focus on particularity is a powerful expression of the problem
classical social theory has confronted in applying its concept of social development to a
differential totality of human social relations. Indeed, Marx appears aware of this, because
directly following this passage, he goes onto complain that Proudhon has so little
understood the problem of the division of labour (ibid) but what exactly was the problem
that the French philosopher could not understand? The suggestion is that he does not
understand the difficulties in making its general concepts correspond to and explain
developmental particularity and multiplicity; i.e. the twists and turns in the historicalpathways of human social development. This comes across very clearly in the notion of
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international relations offered here. It is not that Marx is wrong to speak of an historic set of
international relations as a form of the social division of labour as a general statement it is
true enough. But the problem is the general conception (the evolving form of the social
division of labour) does not anticipate so to speak, at a theoretical level, the kind of
developmental particularities, historical specificities, and multiplicity of political and social
forms along with their interaction, which Marx recognises are essential to any historical
explanation of a given process. Marx was not alone in seeing this problem social theorists
of all varieties have often answered it by invoking what Rosenberg calls lower-lying
theorisations to register the empirical particulars of the social process (Rosenberg 2010:
182). It is here then that the issue arises of the need to reconceptualise historical
development in such a way as its multilinear and interactive aspects are incorporated at a
theoretical level; one that reaches a dialectical solution to the problem of differentiation and
totality. Adding the predicates uneven and combined help us to do this, by indicating the
properties of social development per se i.e. co-existence and social interaction among units
creating an irreducible system level that give rise to such evolving historical forms of the
social division of labour. Marxs argument can here be interpreted then as powerfully
reinforcing one of Rosenbergs core claims about the classical legacy; that its notion of
development led to the introduction of multilinearity at a lower-order level of concrete
analysis external and separate to the deeper assumptions of the social theory (Rosenberg
2010: 182).
Marx, Trotsky and the philosophy of internal relations
What is interesting about the way Marx dealt with the problem unevenness posed for the
categories of universal social theory is how, as we have seen, his notion of the historical is
mobilised ceaselessly to tackle the social evolutionist idea of development in its usual
abstractness. But at the same time, Marx stopped a long way short from invoking the kind
of radical historicism of Nietzsche and his followers, because he held onto the idea that an
explanatory account of social processes required the historical narrative was overlain by
theoretical claims. And there is indeed more than a mere reminder of the primacy of history
in his work Marx also helps us to think about historical developments in such a way, as it
draws attention to its contradictions. Although Marx did not revise the classical conception
of development to theoretically incorporate the multilinear by adding a set of predicates
which anticipated multiplicity in social and political forms, he did nonetheless outline a more
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general philosophical position important to this kind of reconceptualisation. Marx was a
grand theoriser in the tradition of German philosophy. A cornerstone of his special system
was the treatment of the processes involved in social change as part of a relational totality or
whole. This is what Bertell Ollman has summarised as the philosophy of internal relations
(Ollman 2003) and it is a key part of Marxs dialectical methodology.
There are two aspect of Ollmans philosophy of internal relations account relevant to our
outline here; one is ontological, the other is conceptual. Marx takes as his object a singular
totality of human relationships and their corresponding interaction with nature; but he sees
this as contradictory and differentiated. From Hegel, Marx holds onto the idea of the totality,
but his materialism means that he does not tend to ascribe qualities and features to this whole
in the manner Hegel did with his notions of Absolute Idea, Spirit, God, and Universal Truth.
Marx offers no such statements about the totality of social relations, because the whole does
not feature as an explanatory device, but as the ontological position about reality its inter-
connectedness that orientates the scientist. As Ollman says, it:
...remains the sum of all relations and that which is expressed in each but offers little help as a
distinct concept, in elucidating any of them. The real world is too complex, diffuse, and unclear in
its detail to serve as an adequate explanation for any of the events that go on inside of it (Ollman
2003: 42).
Once the world is understood as complex, diffuse and unclear, i.e. differentiated or uneven,
the task is posed of understanding the inter-connected set of processes going on within this
reality. The idea of treating this differentiated terrain as a logical whole is that we seek to
discover how each part is formed, in all its distinctiveness, through interactive sets of co-
constitutive relationships within general, relational and inter-connected processes. The
notion of totality plays a role in how the concepts are formed; because it gives them this
relational quality. Indeed, Marx treats all the concepts he elaborates as relational: what they
are and do is determined by the system of social relations they inhabit. So, how things
cohere become essential attributes of what they are (Ollman 2003: 72). Unlike most
contemporary philosophers that see things and relations as logically independent of one
another, Marx understands things as relations to interiorise their interdependence... in the
thing itself (Ollman 2003: 36-37). There is then this double movement: between the
ontological position that treats the social as a differential totality and in turn affects thenature of the conceptual apparatus.
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This double movement informs the type of historical sociology undertaken. One way of
thinking about the philosophy of internal relations is that it provides a methodological
recapitulation of the importance of historicism in social scientific investigation. Three points
can be drawn on here, which are relevant to how Marx formulated his notion of
development. Firstly, with concepts conceived as determined by their place within the wider
system of inter-connections, there can be no cause that is logically prior to and independent
of that to which it is said to give rise and no determining factor that is itself not affected by
that which it is said to determine (Ollman 2003: 71). Processes evolve together in space and
time, with the art of abstraction lying in the capacity to isolate and identify the most
important parts of the inter-connection operating in any general process. Secondly, Ollman
distinguishes between logical totality as a philosophical principle that states all processes are
co-determined and interactive, and the idea ofhistorically emergent totalities of social
relations such as capitalism; the latter have to come into being, and can exist more or less
depending on the concrete interrelations of forces (Ollman 2003: 72). Last of all, this
approach provides another angle from which to challenge abstract universalism, because by
recognising the non-external character of concepts, ahistorical variables are rejected, and
instead relational concepts which are historically transient are used: thus, they are,
something that emerged as a result of specific conditions in the lifetime of real people and
that will disappear when these conditions do (Ollman 2003: 69).
Ollmans point on how Marx used and didnt use the idea of totality is of particular
importance in understanding the special character of his critical universalism. Marx
chooses not to ascribe to the totality any moral or political qualities. He doesnt do so,
because his dialectics tell him this is a changing, transient, material world, subject to shifting
pressures, whilst his historicism leads him to explore the specific, differential but connected
processes operating within it. Both of these dimensions of his social theory reinforce the
other: dialectics reinforces historicism, historicism reinforces dialectics. Uniting the general
with the particular was arguably written into the DNA of this dialectical method, because
general processes are expected to elicit particular, unique and divergent outcomes. To
illustrate this recall again, Marxs account of the emergence of capital in the Grundrisse. The
philosophical assumption of totality is given logical priority and means the social processes
are treated as intrinsically inter-connected ones. But, at the historical level the totality is
found to be uneven and differentiated, requiring a move back to theory in order to explain
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what the most important connections and determinations are within this uneven landscape. It
is here that Marxs theoretical claims about the capital form itself, are crucial to the overall
native; for it is totalising in that it pushes ineluctably towards the global supremacy of
market forms of mediation, yet it does so unevenly, due to the mediation of pre-modern
social forms and the contradictory logics of capital itself as simultaneously centrifugal and
centralising. The result of this dialectical method then is an internal account of the general
process which elicits unique and particular developmental lineages. Elsewhere in the
Grundrisse from that part which occupied our attention, Marx famously said the concrete is
concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse
(Marx 1973: 101). Often shorthanded to the unity of many determinations, this second
aspect, diversity and unity, is arguably just as important, because it implies the need for a
reunification between the general (unity) and particular (diversity) in social theory. In this
formulation too, we see what Ollman means when he talks about transcending the
independent force a, causes the logically independent outcome b mode of reasoning in
social scientific investigation. By definition, for Marx, concrete outcomes will be the subject
of many social determinations; this gives history a primacy in explanation, but to uncover the
most important inter-connections in the process will require a wider set of theoretical claims
about the nature of the determinations themselves. The overall conclusion to draw, to my
mind, is that this dialectical method was an essential intellectual foundation to the critical
universalism of Marxs historical sociology because of the reunification of the general and
particular for social theory it pushes us towards. Marxs idea of development was thus
dialectical at its core, and this leads him to form a multinear conception of the process, even
if the multilinearity is only incorporated at an historical, rather than theoretical level of the
analysis.
What then are the implications of this philosophy of internal relations for U&CD? At a
conceptual level we can treat U&CD as a historically specific abstraction, which is premised
on the ontology and philosophical position provided by this form of historical, materialist
dialectics Marx offered. Trotsky himself argued U&CD was a dialectical concept. But he
never outlined what exactly it was that made it so. Arguably the reason is that it shared the
philosophy of internal relations approach Trotsky had taken from Marx. Although not in
reference to U&CD, Trotsky nonetheless says as much in the hisNotebooks on Dialectics:
If we visualise the fabric of life as a complex piece of knitting, then the concept can be equated
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with the separate stitches. Every concept seems to be independent and complete (formal logic
operates with them this way), in reality every stitch has two ends, which connect it with adjacent
stitches. If pulled at the end it unravels the dialectical negation of the concept, in its limitedness,
in its sham independence (Trotsky 1986: 75-77).
Here we have a philosophy of internal relations. The complex fabric of life is a unity of
many connections, with concepts mobilised to explain the form and nature of this
contradictory unity. There is an interesting dynamic here too, between the diachronic (across
time) and synchronic (at a single moment in time) aspects to the method he presents. The
complex fabric of life and its inter-connections is presented synchronically, but once we pull
at the concepts, through the course of historical time, they are negated, and so his dialectic
again reinforces the primacy of history to the conceptual apparatus. It also correspondingly
shows the historicism of the concepts. What we have here, put in explicitly methodological
terms, is a concern with the totality and the particular; the general historic processes, and the
multiplicity of unique, concrete social forms. This point is even more reinforced in the
following comments Trotsky makes on how dialecticians are interested in phenomena which
defy typical conceptual boundaries, smash the limited boundaries of [conceptual]
classifications, to reveal the real connections of the living process:
Some objects (phenomena) are confined easily within boundaries according to logical
classification, others present difficulties: they can be put here or there, but within a stricter
relationship nowhere. While provoking the indignation of systematisers, such transitional forms
are exceptionally interesting to dialecticians for they smash the limited boundaries of
classification, revealing the real connections and consecutiveness of a living process (Trotsky
1986: 77).
Although limited in their scope, these reflections are helpful in giving us an idea of the kind
of method Trotsky thought he was applying when he wrote works such as theHistory of the
Russian Revolution (Trotsky 1967)where he outlines most fully his idea of U&CD. The
suggestion is that dialectics is concerned first and foremost in helping us explain apparent
paradoxes of social development. It was the peculiarities of Russias development that
Trotsky was of course concerned to account for. But in his explanation of this apparently
paradoxical social form, he does not treat it as an exceptional case against a pre-defined
norm of development; say, for example, the bourgeois revolution in France. His dialectical
approach obviously shunned such notions of norm and deviant cases, and instead sets up a
general problematic that frames the analysis: how do particular social forms arise through
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general, inter-connected processes why is the totality so differentiated? Thats why Trotsky
gave the analysis a scope far beyond the bounds of the Russian case alone. Adding a
dialectical set of predicates unevenness and combination to the traditional notion of
social development anticipated the multiplicity of particular forms arising from pervasive
processes of social interaction.
Marxists often look to the Russian case to find evidence of the impact of this theoretical
approach on Trotskys substantive analysis. But in the same chapter in which Russian
development is his object, Trotsky weaves in comparative dimensions, examples of other
societies in different epochs of development, not just to illustrate difference in experiences,
but to show how these diverse, particular forms have a general significance for the concrete
historical developments which followed, one that impacted on the form taken by the Russian
Revolution itself. He writes, for example, of how the bourgeois revolution in England
developed under the guise of a religious reformation, where the goals for which the new
classes were struggling commingled inseparably in their consciousness with the texts from
the Bible and the forms of church ritual (Trotsky 1967: 31). For the English polity, Trotsky
argues, the experience of the Reformation continues to permeate its consciousness, but it also
opened up internationally to penetrate, irrevocably, on the consciousness of the masses
that brought into being the system of the Reformation (Trotsky 1967: 32). Not only do the
subterranean processes of social change the inter-section of determinations within the
whole process elicit particular and unique pathways of development, but these also act
back on the wider process.
Marxs historicism and the development and U&CD
One conclusion from these investigations is that U&CD should be understood as adistinctively Marxist and dialectical way of conceptualising the processes of social change.
The D in U&CD matters, because it gives it a materialist content and with this amongst
much more besides the importance of mode of production analysis for social theory. But
there is, I have argued, a deeper set of Marxian philosophical assumptions Trotsky brought to
bear on social development: totality and differentiation. Unevenness and combination are
treated as developmental totalities, i.e. part of the differentiated and interactive form taken
by successive transformations in the social division of labour across space and time.
Rosenberg of course comes to exactly this conclusion about U&CD in his re-
conceptualisation and extension of it. He moves it far beyond a statement about the
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contradictory forms thrown up by capitalist modernity, as it largely existed for Trotsky, to a
wider set of claims about social development per se, which can explain the existence of the
international as an historical phenomena (Rosenberg 2010). This kind of temporal extension
of the concept to a wider plain, still keeps it within the theoretical bounds Ive sketched out
above. But were U&CD to be taken up by theorists whose method was located in other
intellectual traditions, we would, I suspect, confront the problem of referential failure, i.e.,
the same term would be mobilised in very different explanatory accounts of the social
process.
The kind of extension Rosenberg makes certainly carries with it dangers. The danger of
excessive generality has been most starkly challenged by Neil Smith who has argued that
making U&CD a law-like property of social development per se will yield no explanatory
value at all: for it creates, he argues, a concept that is simply too general to be operable
(Smith 2006: 182). There are plenty of theoretical, indeed ontological, ripostes to this
position that might be made. But even so, there are enough examples out there of un-
historical Marxism to encourage us to treat Smiths challenge as a cautionary tale. It is one
that surely impels us to keep hold of the distinctive, theory-laden historicism that was the
cornerstone of Marxs own approach. U&CD as a general social historical abstraction can be
conceived at different levels. At the most general level it can refer to interactive multiplicity.
This is so general a term it comes very close to the philosophical positioning concept of
differential unity and could in the same sense, be said to describe intrinsic qualities of human
and natural development. As it moves down several steps in the ladder it can become more
and more concrete; with each step determining the form interactive multiplicity takes
within defined, historical conditions particularly within a given mode of production. There
is no problem in working with these different levels of the analysis so long as we are
conscious of them. Reification of the social process only occurs if we dont integrate more
historically concrete concepts into any given analysis. Keeping in mind the historicism is, in
this sense, essential, because it situates the concepts on a temporal plain, and recognises
them as historically transient, conditional on the continued operation of the social forms to
which they refer in the wider outside world. One conclusion this cautionary approach entails
is that we take care not to formulate U&CD as a general theory, but as a dialectical
foundation to the establishment of a broader range of more concrete, social theoretic
propositions.
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Notwithstanding the pervasive viewpoint that categories of Marxian thought are rigid and
dogmatic, this flexible approach expresses the kind of elasticity in conceptual thought
Trotsky also discussed in hisNotebooks. He conceived of the philosophy of internal
relations as an essential part of finding the inter-connections that break open categorical
boundaries. The multiple social forms thrown up by the processes of uneven and combined
development require an openness and flexibility in concepts precisely because of the
complex fabric of life and they all too often defy rigid categorisation. History then is a bit
a like a testing ground for concepts: we can use them with flexibility, so long as they help
formulate dynamic accounts of social change.Ergo we should treat U&CD as a framework:
a way of thinking about a diverse range of phenomenon. These might be anything from more
typically used examples such as the concentrated forms of industrial urbanisation against a
backdrop of agricultural backwardness, to the social and political physiognomy of pre-
modern China. Framing the analysis within the interactive dialectics of social change, the
role of U&CD with any application, surely, is to help us draw out the real historical
movement. The dialectic does not liberate the investigator from painstaking study of the
facts... it requires it, wrote Trotsky. He added, In return it gives investigative thought
elasticity, helps it cope with ossified prejudices, arms it with invaluable analogies, and
educates it in a spirit of daring, grounded in circumspection (Trotsky 1986: 92).
For the discipline of IR what we have here is a series of building blocks towards an
international theory. From Marx (1973) we have a materialist and dialectical account of the
process of social change in which history is conceived as multilinear and open-ended yet
also a general process, a differential totality. With Trotsky (1967) we get an explicitly
theoretical account that is, an account identifying historical necessities or laws of the social
process of the nature of development as one that must take place in an uneven and
combined manner. And lastly with Rosenberg (2010) we establish from these foundations a
theorisation of the emergence of the international a dimension of inter-unit interaction
with system-level properties such as war and diplomacy between units as an historical
phenomenon. Berki (1971), Waltz (1956, 1979) et alwere thus right to identify the
specificity of the international itself as distinctive form of social interaction but
unlocking the secrets of its emergence requires us to turn back to classical social theory.
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