Marx's historical thinking

Marx's theories are deeply historical, in that he wants to explain the dynamics of change of large historical formations such as capitalism or feudalism, and he insists on putting social events into historical context. And, of course, Marx is most celebrated for developing a general approach to historical explanation, the theory of historical materialism. But how does Marx do when he treats concrete historical events? How is Marx as an historian?

There are surprisingly few extended examples of detailed historical analysis in Marx's writings. There is Marx's account of "primitive accumulation" in English agrarian history in the 17th and 18th centuries in Capital. There are occasional references to the Roman Empire and classical slavery throughout his work. And there are his important writings about the French urban uprisings during 1848 and its aftermath (The Eighteenth Brumaire and The Civil War in France). These essays include quite a bit of historical detail -- personalities, events, parties, speeches. But they are closer to political journalism than to careful historical analysis. They are based primarily upon Marx's personal contemporary observations -- not on the usual historian's studies in archives and secondary sources. They come closer to personal recollections and observations than to a typical historical research product.

If there is a unifying theme of interpretation in these articles, it is the idea that the parties and factions pursue programs that are based on class interests. The party of order defends property and privilege, and the party of progress expresses and defends the interests of the underclasses -- urban workers and artisans. Theorists such as Nicos Poulantzas have used these texts as a basis for propounding theories of political consciousness and action and the "relative autonomy" of politics. The essays illustrate Marxist theories of politics. But considered solely from the point of view of historiography and historical knowledge, the articles aren't particularly distinguished.

Let's make an unfair but informative contrast: a comparison between Marx's writings and those of some of the great twentieth-century historians whom his ideas inspired. I'm thinking of scholars like Albert Soboul, Eric Hobsbawm, E. P. Thompson, Maurice Dobb, or Gene Genovese. Each of these scholars borrowed deeply from Marx's social theories -- class, power, consciousness, resistance, economic structure, property systems, labor. But each of these historians does something else as well: he digs deeply into the gnarly, special, and resistant reality of historical events and groups -- peasant movements, churches and manifestoes, parties and conspiracies, slave quarters. These historians try to discover the particular and peculiar graininess of history; they allow theory to rest lightly on their narratives.

So what does Marx have to teach us about the craft of historical writing and reasoning? I'm inclined to say that Marx uses history but doesn't really write history. His writings are historically oriented, but they are almost never works of primary historical discovery and explanation. Marx is a theorist of historical processes; but he is not really a working historian, and his writings don't really offer much by way of innovative historical reasoning. It remained for Marxist historians of the twentieth century to bring together Marx's theoretical insights with rigorous methods of historical research and discovery.

What holds a country together?

When you consider the enormous differences that exist across regions and traditions in the United States, it raises an interesting question: what factors serve to knit this population together into a single polity? We don't share a single set of cultural values, a single religion, or a single political tradition. So what helps this population of some 300 million achieve some degree of civic or national identity?

One possible answer is a skeptical one: there is no such common strand of civic identity in the United States. Instead, we are a nation of overlapping identities and traditions, with the remarkable good fortune that these differences have only rarely developed into serious inter-group conflict. On this approach, the general history of harmony among groups and regions is only a happy accident.

Another possible approach goes a bit further than this one, in noticing that in fact there is quite a bit of social dis-harmony in the history of the United States. Racism and the violent oppression of African-Americans and Latinos during various periods, the hostile reception offered to internal migrants during the Great Depression, the violence and hostility offered to gay and lesbian Americans at various junctures, and the harsh words Sarah Palin directs against Easterners all point in that direction. We might say that it is the generally effective reach of the state rather than a shared civic or national identity that usually maintains a large degree of inter-group peace in the United States.

There is also, of course, the identity that derives from patriotism and the flag. This is a political psychology of nationalism, and it doesn't have much to do with reflective values. It is a constructed identity, aimed at making an identity group out of a mixed population. And if this is the best we can do, then the performances of patriotic songs and speeches are obvious mechanisms through which leaders attempt to instill the appropriate emotions. And the act of dissent may seem deeply disruptive, if this is all that holds us together.

It may be that there are other mechanisms of political identity formation that work in the direction of forging a national identity. Film and television are candidates here, and large events of shared history may play a role too. I particularly admire Lincoln's phrase, "the mystic chords of memory." But shared memories don't always create a shared identity -- for example, we can validly ask whether the remembered experience of the Vietnam War contributes more to identity or division.

But here is another and more positive possibility. We might hope that the United States has painfully and haltingly created a shared civic culture that stands above the more visceral strands of religious, ethnic, or nationalistic identity. It is a moral value system that stands deliberately above more specific value commitments that derive from our particular philosophies or traditions. This culture is the value system of liberal democracy. It valorizes the idea of the equal worth of all persons; the moral importance of mutual respect; the idea that everyone has the same rights to freedom of action and legal protection; the recognition that disagreements about values and policies are normal parts of a democracy; and the conviction that this system of equal citizenship and dignity is a morally worthwhile achievement in American history and politics.

This approach says that we do have the makings of a civic identity. But how does this approach avoid amounting to an amalgam of bromides from high school civics courses or the political theories of Locke and Rousseau?

It avoids this unhappy fate by being so hard. This political identity of equality, respect, and liberty has to be constructed rather than assumed. This requires the best efforts of leaders and citizens. And it runs into conflict with some very powerful currents in American culture -- xenophobia, racism, mistrust, and the politics of division, for example. Some of our national leaders have been articulate in nurturing these values -- Johnson amd Clinton, for example. Others have chosen a language of division -- Richard Nixon comes to mind ("the silent majority") along with Spiro Agnew and his "nattering nabobs of negativism". Unity around the values of justice, equality, and democracy is more difficult to achieve than division across group identities and interests. But it is a much more admirable basis for a human polity, and a better guide for a pluralistic America.

Policy, treatment, and mechanism

Policies are selected in order to bring about some desired social outcome or to prevent an undesired one. Medical treatments are applied in order to cure a disease or to ameliorate its effects. In each case an intervention is performed in the belief that this intervention will causally interact with a larger system in such a way as to bring about the desired state. On the basis of a body of beliefs and theories, we judge that T in circumstances C will bring about O with some degree of likelihood. If we did not have such a belief, then there would be no rational basis for choosing to apply the treatment. "Try something, try anything" isn't exactly a rational basis for policy choice.

In other words, policies and treatments depend on the availability of bodies of knowledge about the causal structure of the domain we're interested in -- what sorts of factors cause or inhibit what sorts of outcomes. This means we need to have some knowledge of the mechanisms that are at work in this domain. And it also means that we need to have some degree of ability to predict some future states -- "If you give the patient an aspirin her fever will come down" or "If we inject $700 billion into the financial system the stock market will recover."

Predictions of this sort could be grounded in two different sorts of reasoning. They might be purely inductive: "Clinical studies demonstrate that administration of an aspirin has a 90% probability of reducing fever." Or they could be based on hypotheses about the mechanisms that are operative: "Fever is caused by C; aspirin reduces C in the bloodstream; therefore we should expect that aspirin reduces fever by reducing C." And ideally we would hope that both forms of reasoning are available -- causal expectations are born out by clinical evidence.

Implicitly this story assumes that the relevant causal systems are pretty simple -- that there are only a few causal pathways and that it is possible to isolate them through experimental studies. We can then insert our proposed interventions into the causal diagram and have reasonable confidence that we can anticipate their effects. The logic of clinical trials as a way of establishing efficacy depends on this assumption of causal simplicity and isolation.

But what if the domain we're concerned with isn't like that? Suppose instead that there are many causal factors and a high degree of causal interdependence among the factors. And suppose that we have only limited knowledge of the strength and form of these interdependencies. Is it possible to make rationally justified interventions within such a system?

This description comes pretty close to what are referred to as complex systems. And the most basic finding in the study of complex systems is the extreme difficulty of anticipating future system states. Small interventions or variations in boundary conditions produce massive variations in later system states. But this is bad news for policy makers who are hoping to "steer" a complex system towards a more desirable state. There are good analytical reasons for thinking that they will not be able to anticipate the nature or magnitude or even direction of the effects of the intervention.

The study of complex systems is a collection of areas of research in mathematics, economics, and biology that attempt to arrive at better ways of modeling and projecting the behavior of systems with these complex causal interdependencies. This is an exciting field of research at places like the Santa Fe Institute and the University of Michigan. One important tool that had been extensively developed is the theory of agent-based modeling -- essentially, the effort to derive system properties as the aggregate result of the activities of independent agents at the micro-level. And a fairly durable result has emerged: run a model of a complex system a thousand times and you will get a wide distribution of outcomes. This means that we need to think of complex systems as being highly contingent and path-dependent in their behavior. The effect of an intervention may be a wide distribution of future states.

So far the argument is located at a pretty high level of abstraction. Simple causal systems admit of intelligent policy intervention, whereas complex, chaotic systems may not. But the important question is more concrete: which kind of system are we facing when we consider social policy or disease? Are social systems and diseases examples of complex systems? Can social systems be sufficiently disaggregated into fairly durable subsystems that admit of discrete causal analysis and intelligent intervention? What about diseases such as solid tumors? Can we have confidence in interventions such as chemotherapy? And, in both realms, can the findings of complexity theory be helpful by providing mathematical means for working out the system effects of various possible interventions?

What to do?

Decision makers at every level are perplexed by the turbulence created by the current financial crisis. Everyone is acting under great uncertainty -- business owners, state governors, the Department of the Treasury, the presidential candidates, and university officials. And yet today's actions may have enormous effects on the business, the non-profit organization, the family, or the state tomorrow. Liquidity drought, variations in cash flow, the availability of credit for major capital projects, the possibility of bankruptcy of major and essential business partners such as contractors, the possibility of further major job losses in various regions, abrupt decline in demand for houses and cars, and a plummeting stock market make for an environment of choice in which every action can have seriously bad consequences.

I'm thinking here particularly of decision makers who are responsible for large, complex organizations -- organizations that deliver services or products, that depend on staff and facilities to fulfill their mission, that need to make medium-term plans about investments of resources for future use, and that depend on assumptions about revenues in the future to satisfy the cash-flow needs of the enterprise to stay financially viable. What is noteworthy about this situation of choice is that it necessarily involves plans and projections about the future. And it involves the temporally extended coordination of activities of people and expenditures of resources over a prolonged period of time. This means that it isn't possible to achieve success through a purely opportunistic and moment-by-moment response to events. You can't fly a complex organization by the seat of your pants.

So how do we plan for the best outcomes in the current circumstances of turbulence and uncertainty? The normal assumption of continuity -- assume that most circumstances won't change much between today and tomorrow -- is distinctly inappropriate. Today's economic and financial environment has many moving parts -- and they interact in surprising ways. And unfortunately, it appears that there is no reliable science to guide us here. Experts disagree about the mechanisms and the potential remedies of the current crisis. Navigating this environment is akin to trying to catch a pingpong ball in a crowded wind tunnel.

So what is to be done? I mean to pose this question in the most pragmatic way possible. Given deep uncertainty about the changes that may occur tomorrow, and given a fairly deep ignorance of the fundamental mechanisms that are affecting this storm, how can prudent stewards of institutions and businesses do the best job possible to preserve the fundamental interests of their stakeholders and carry out the missions of their organizations?

There are a couple of rational-choice answers to this question, falling generally under the topic of "decision making under risk and uncertainty." One prescription is the expected utility rule: identify the possible actions and their various outcomes; assign a probability and utility to each outcome; and choose the action with the greatest expected utility (sum of the products of probability and utility for the outcomes). Or we might consider the more risk-averse rule, the minimax principle: choose that action with the least bad worst possible outcome.

Unfortunately, neither of these decision procedures is of much help in current circumstances. We don't know what the range of possible outcomes is for a given action or policy (because we don't understand the mechanisms); we can't assign likelihoods to outcomes; and it's not feasible to measure the utility of a given outcome, all things considered. So expected utility decision-making doesn't seem very helpful in current circumstances.

Another approach depends on what we might call "locally rational decision-making" or heuristic decision-making. We don't know what the consequences of an extended liquidity crisis are, but we may reason that more reserves are always useful; so we may choose to curtail spending today to increase reserves. Or we may observe that an additional debt burden for the business is likely to be a handicap in the future, so we may postpone important capital projects. Or we may defer hiring additional staff in order to preserve more budget flexibility in the future. But notice that there are rules of thumb that point in the opposite direction: "A business should take bold moves in times of crisis, to leave it in a stronger position when recovery begins." This advice would encourage investment rather than curtailing it. So the problem with rules of thumb is that they often come into conflict with each other -- leaving the decision maker in a quandary.

In fact, if the range of uncertainty is great enough, it is impossible to be prudent. Prudence involves taking steps today that are most likely to leave you in a satisfactory position tomorrow. But if we are uncertain about even the most basic truisms -- if we are in a position where the most basic assumptions of continuity are defeated -- then we can't begin to weigh possible outcomes or design prudent strategies. It's hard to see how a pilot could fly "prudently" in the dark and without instruments.

It would seem that today's financial crisis doesn't create quite this degree of radical uncertainty, however. It is a fair bet that the world economy and financial system will survive and will recover within a few years. It is likely enough that cash reserves will be very useful for organizations and businesses in the next few years. It is likely that risky decisions have a greater potential for enterprise ruin than in normal times -- "high risk, high reward" is probably a bad rule to follow in current circumstances. And these assumptions add up to a counsel of conservation of resources, flexibility of activities, cost discipline, and preservation of accessible reserves.

Strange parallels

Victor Lieberman uses the phrase, "strange parallels," as the title for his two-volume study of Southeast Asian history (Strange Parallels: Volume 1, Integration on the Mainland: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800-1830). Besides offering a highly expert history of Burma and its many kingdoms between 800 and 1830, Lieberman poses a fascinating and novel question: how can we explain the substantial historical parallels that existed between Burma and various parts of Europe, including especially France and Russia? He writes:

In fact, in mainland Southeast Asia as well as in France, the late 18th and early 19th centuries ended the third and inaugurated the last of four roughly synchronized cycles of political consolidation that together spanned the better part of a millenium. (2)

fig. 1.2. Territorial consolidation (p. 4)

The figure illustrates the kind of synchrony that Lieberman is highlighting -- over a sweep of some thousand years, there is a rough-and-ready correspondence in the patterns of territorial consolidation that existed in Burma and France.

Lieberman poses the crucial historical question in these terms: "Why should distant regions, with no obvious religious or material links, have experienced more or less coordinated cycles? If we discount coincidence, what hitherto invisible ties could have spanned the continents?" (2)

Apriori there appear to be only a small number of logically distinct possibilities that could explain the fact that patterns of variation are synchronized between A and B. (1) It may be that there is a causal linkage from A to B such that A's variations stimulate subsequent variations in B. (2) It may be that there is a common cause C whose variation simultaneously causes variation in both A and B. Global climate variation might be such an example. (3) It may be that both A and B are running through their variations according to the same internal clock, with the result that their variations are synchronized without causal interaction -- like two clocks ringing out the hours in tandem or two adolescent children going through roughly the same developmental stages at roughly the same time. (4) It may be that the observed synchrony is simple coincidence, with no causal explanation whatsoever.

So far as I can see, this exhausts the logical possibilities; there is no fifth possibility.

To further complicate the picture, Lieberman points out that there were other regions of the world where these patterns of consolidation did not occur, or did so on a very different timeline. So we can exclude the idea that there was some common global cause leading to simultaneous pulses of consolidation; rather, Southeast Asia and Western Europe were synchronized, but India was not.

Lieberman's explanation of this observed historical synchrony goes along these lines. He believes that both internalist and externalist approaches have a role to play. The internal historical dynamics of the state systems in Burma and Western Europe were governed by particular local factors. But they each created a tendency towards consolidation of land and power. And external factors provided periodic "pulses" that served to synchronize these internal patterns of development. So the effects of an external factor -- maritime trade -- pushed both Western Europe and Burma into extended periods of state formation and consolidation. This story combines (3) and (2) above: local processes that are developing according to their own imperatives, and occasional system-wide pulses that bring these local processes into synchrony. And the explanation allows Lieberman to place the intellectual frameworks of both Tilly and Wallerstein into the story.

Lieberman's approach is important for the philosophy of history because it leads us to ask different questions about historical causation and historical time. And it provides important new thinking about how to approach the nexus between regional history and global history.

System tendencies?

A central theme of many of the posts here is the contingency, heterogeneity, and path dependency of social processes. I used the metaphor of a "constrained random walk" in an earlier posting to characterize many social processes. This figure is intended to stand in contrast to the idea of an inevitable development towards an optimum or equilibrium point, on the one hand, or the idea of an inevitable system failure, on the other.

The idea here is this: from starting point A, there are numerous possible states of affairs Oi that might be reached over an extended period of time. There is no sense in which the course from A to the actual historical outcome Om is inevitable or unique. (From the starting point of Europe in 1910, including the social, political, and economic realities of the nations of Europe, multiple outcomes were accessible by the time of 1920: exhausting war, emergence of new and effective international organizations that sustained the peace, inspired just-in-time diplomacy bringing hostilities to an early termination, ...). Each of the pathways leading from A to Oi might be individually explicable, in terms of the situations of structure and agency that were present during the period of development. Virtually every point in the "space" of outcomes would be accessible, although some outcomes might be substantially less likely than others. Along the way there are likely to be cul-de-sacs; but in the aggregate, the space of possible outcomes from many historical starting points covers the full sphere of possibilities. Putting the point crudely, you can get anywhere from anywhere.

This conception emphasizes deep contingency in social change. But what about the symmetrical facts of "constraint" and "imperative" -- the limitations imposed by existing institutions and organizations at any specific stage and the positive impulses to change that are often embodied in the incentive structures of existing institutions? Is the contingency of social events to some extent reduced by the relative durability of existing core social institutions? Is there such a thing as a "logic of institutions" that is embodied in a particular configuration of core social institutions, with the result that societies embodying these institutions will be most likely to develop in one way rather than another?

This description lies at the heart of Marx's analysis of social systems as modes of production. Marx believed that the core institutions that defined the property system, the system of labor control, and the distribution of wealth have deep effects on individual agency, leading and constraining agents to behave in ways that lead in the aggregate to certain kinds of social outcomes. Modes of production have system tendencies that can be inferred from their basic institutional features. A particularly clear example is his analysis of the "law" of the falling rate of profit within capitalism: firms are required to maximize profits; they have the opportunity of introducing capital-intensive technologies that lower costs, thereby increasing profits in the short run; competition with other profit-maximizing firms pushes prices down to the new cost of production; the rising capital-labor ratio in industry creates a falling rate of profit. So capitalism embodies a system tendency towards a falling rate of profit over time. Similar reasoning underlies Marx's prediction of financial crises within capitalism. (See an earlier posting on Marx's conception of capitalism.)

And in fact, if we could make two assumptions, then Marx's reasoning about the tendencies of capitalism would be very compelling: the assumption that the core economic institutions are fixed and unchanging, and the assumption that there are no other social-political-economic institutions in play that might serve as resources for policies and actions that would offset the predicted tendencies of capitalism. However, neither of these assumptions is correct. The institutions of any major social order -- feudalism, the Chinese agrarian economy, capitalism, state socialism -- are always the composite of a vast number of lower-level institutions; and these lower-level institutions are usually in a state of flux. So the core institutions are not fixed and unchanging. The traditional Chinese agrarian economy was remarkably resilient in face of a range of deep challenges over centuries; adjustment of basic social institutions permitted Chinese society to cope better with environmental and international circumstances than a modeled Chinese economy would have predicted.

Second, even more fundamentally, a society is not simply a "mode of production," constituted by an economic structure. Rather, there are a range of other, equally fundamental institutions and practices -- cultural, political, legal, community-based and national -- through which resourceful agents attempt to solve personal or social problems at various points in time. So the "logic" of the economic institutions is only one part of the overall social trajectory; instead, we have the strategic interaction and aggregation of political, cultural, social, demographic, and legal institutions that complement and offset the workings of the economic structure. And further, we can correctly say that each of these aspects of social organization has its own "system tendencies." Elected legislatures have a logic that derives from the calculations of political self-interest of the legislators, community-based organizations have their own logic, various demographic regimes have their own tendencies (for example, the favoring of boy children produces skewed sex ratios that have negative political effects), and so forth.

So the tentative conclusion that I draw from these various considerations is, once again, to give the nod to contingency while recognizing the partial imperatives created by the various sets of core institutions that are embodied in a society at a given time. Structures do of course constrain agents. But structures interact with each other, leading to surprising results. And structures change in response to a variety of causes, including the strategic efforts of agents to modify them. So the upshot is, once again, that we should expect a high degree of contingency in outcomes over extended periods of historical time. Historical experience may well support the discovery that "capitalism creates a tendency towards X" or "fascist politics create a tendency towards Y". To that extent, there are "system tendencies". But it is rare for one particular sub-system (property relations, electoral system, demographic regime) to dominate the overall historical trajectory. And so the system tendencies of one partial set of core institutions rarely become the system tendencies of the overall social whole.

Continuity

Throughout much of our social experience we expect continuity: tomorrow will be pretty similar to today, and when changes occur they will be small and gradual. We expect our basic institutions -- economic, social, and political -- to maintain their core characteristics over long periods of time. We expect social attitudes and values to change only slowly, through gradual evolution rather than abrupt transformation. And we expect the same of a range of social conditions -- for example, highway safety, crime rates, teen pregnancy rates, and similar social features.

It is evident that this expectation of gradual, continuous change is not always a valid guide to events. Abrupt, unexpected events occur -- revolutions, mass cultural changes like the 1960s, sweeping political and legislative changes along the lines of the Reagan revolution. And of course we have the current example of abrupt declines in financial markets -- see the graph of the Dow Jones Industrial Average for the week of September 23-30, 2008 below. So the expectation of continuity sometimes leads us astray. But continuity is probably among our most basic heuristic assumptions about the future when it comes to our expectations about the social world and our plans for the future.

The deeper question is an ontological one: what features of social causation and processes would either support or undermine the expectation of continuity? We can say quite a bit about the features of continuity and discontinuity in physical systems; famously, "non-linearities" occur in some physical systems that lead to singularities and discontinuities, but many physical systems are safely linear and continuous all the way down. And these mathematical features follow from the fundamental physical mechanisms that underlie physical systems. But what about the social world?

Take first the stability of large social and political institutions. Is there a reason to expect that major social and political institutions will retain their core features in face of disturbing influences? Consider for example the SEC as a financial regulatory institution; the European Union as a multinational legislative body; or a large health maintenance organization. Here institutional sociologists have provided a number of important insights. First, institutions often change through the accumulation of a myriad of small adaptations in different locations within the institution. This is a process that is likely to give rise to slow, continuous, gradual change for the institution as a whole; and this is continuous behavior. Second, though, institutional sociologists have identified important internal forces that work actively to preserve the workings of the institution: the stakeholders who benefit from the current arrangements. Stakeholders are given incentives to actively reinforce and preserve the current institutional arrangements -- the status quo. Both of these factors suggest that institutional change will often be slow, gradual, and continuous.

Consider next the ways in which attitudes and values change in a population. Here it is plausible to observe that individuals change their attitudes and values slowly, through exposure to other individuals and behaviors. And the attitudes and values of a new generation are usually transmitted through processes that are highly decentralized -- again suggesting a slow and gradual process of change. So this suggests that changes in attitudes and values might behave analogously to the spread of a pathogen through a population -- with a slow and continuous spread of "contagion" resulting in a gradual change in population attitudes.

Consider last the example of social measures such as crime rates or teen pregnancy rates. If we take it as a premise that crime and teen pregnancy are influenced by social factors that in turn influence the behavior of individuals, and if we take it that these background social factors change slowly and continuously -- then it is credible to reason that the aggregate measures of the associated behaviors will change slowly and continuously as well. The reasoning here is probabilistic: when large numbers of people with a specified set of background social psychologies are exposed to common environmental circumstances, then it is plausible to predict that the average rate of teen pregnancy will remain fairly steady if the background circumstances remain steady.

These are all reasons for expecting a degree of stability and continuity in social arrangements and social behavior. But before we conclude that the social world is a continuous place, consider this: We also have some pretty clear models of how social phenomena might occur in a dis-continuous fashion. Critical mass phenomena, tipping points, and catastrophic failures are examples of groups of social phenomena where we should expect discontinuities. The behavior of a disease in a population may change dramatically once a certain percentage of the population is infected (critical mass); a new slang expression ("yada yada yada") may abruptly change its frequency of useage once a certain number of celebrities have adopted it (tipping point); a civic organization may be stretched to the breaking point by the addition of new unruly members and may suddenly collapse or mutate. (The hypothesis of punctuated equilibrium brings this sort of discontinuity into Darwinian theory of evolution.)

So there are some good foundational reasons for expecting a degree of continuity in the social environment; but there are also convincing models of social behavior that lead to important instances of discontinuous outcomes. This all seems to lead to the slightly worrisome piece of advice: don't bet on the future when the stakes are high. Stock markets collapse; unexpected wars occur; and previously harmonious social groups fall into fratricidal violence. And there is no fool-proof way of determining whether a singularity is just around the corner.

Equilibrium reasoning

A system is in equilibrium with respect to a given characteristic when there is a system of forces in play that push the system back to the equilibrium state when it is subjected to small disturbances or changes. This is referred to as a homeostatic system.

The temperature in a goldfish bowl is in equilibrium if the bowl is provided with a thermostatically controlled heater and cooler; when the external temperature falls and the water temperature begins to fall as well, the thermostat registers the change of temperature and turns on the heater, and when the external temperature rises, the thermostat turns on the cooler. A population of squirrels in a bounded forest may reach an equilibrium size that is balanced by excess reproductive capacity (pushing the population upwards when it falls below the feeding capacity of the environment) and by excess mortality from poor nutrition (pushing the population downwards when it rises above the feeding capacity of the environment).

These examples embody very different causal mechanisms; but each represents a case in which the variable in question (temperature or population size) oscillates around the equilibrium value determined by the features of the environment and the features of the adjustment mechanisms.

There are other physical systems where the concept of equilibrium has no role. The trajectory of a fly ball is not an equilibrium outcome, but rather the direct causal consequence of the collision between bat and ball. And if the course of the baseball is disturbed -- by impact with a passing bird or an updraft of wind -- then the terminus of the ball's flight will be different. The number of telephone calls between Phoenix and Albany is not an equilibrium outcome, even if it is fairly stable over time, but simply the aggregate consequence of the contingent telephone behavior of large numbers of people in the two cities. So systems that reach and maintain equilibrium are somewhat special.

It is also interesting to observe that there are other circumstances that produce a stable steady state in a system besides equilibrium processes. We may observe that elevators in a busy office building most frequently have 10 passengers. And the explanation for this may go along these lines: 10 is the maximum number of adults who can be squeezed into the elevator car; there are always many people waiting for an elevator; so virtually every car is at full capacity of 10 persons. This is an example of a pattern that derives from a population of events that demands full utilization, and a limit condition in the location where activity takes place. In this example, 10 passengers is not an equilibrium outcome but rather a forced outcome deriving from excess demand and a logistical constraint on the volume of activity. A large city may show a population history that indicates a trend of population increase from 4 million to 6 million to 10 million -- and then it stops growing. And the explanation of the eventual stable population size of 10 million may depend on the fact that the water supplies available to the city cannot support a population significantly larger than 10 million.

To what extent are social ensembles and processes involved in equilibrium conditions? The paradigm example of equilibrium reasoning in the social sciences arises in microeconomic theory. Supply and demand curves are postulated as being fixed, and the price of a good is the equilibrium position where the quantity produced at this price is equal to the quantity consumed at this price. If the price rises, demand for the good falls and the price falls; if the price falls below the equilibrium position, producers manufacture less of the good and consumers demand more of it, which induces a price rise.

Another important example of equilibrium analysis in social behavior is the application of central place theory to economic geography. The theory is that places (cities, towns, villages) will be positioned across the countryside in a way that embodies a set of urban hierarchies and a set of commercial pathways. The topology of the system and the size of the nodes are postulated to be controlled by social variables such as transport cost and demand density. And individuals' habitation decisions are influenced in a way that reinforces the topology and size hierarchy of the central place system.

However, even in these simple examples there are circumstances that can make the equilibrium condition difficult to attain. If the supply and demand curves shift periodically, then the equilibrium price itself moves around. If the price and production response characteristics are too large in their effects, then the system may keep bouncing around the equilibrium price, from "too high" to "too low" without the capacity of finetuning production and consumption. The resulting behavior would look like a graph of the stock market rather than a stable, regular system returning to its "equilibrium" value. And, in the case of habitation patterns, some places may gain a reputation for fun that offsets their disadvantages from the point of view of transport and demand density -- thereby disrupting the expected equilibrium outcomes.

So if the conditions defining the terms of an equilibrium change too quickly, or if the feedback mechanisms that work to adjust the system value to current equilibrium conditions are too coarse, then we should not expect the system to arrive at an equilibrium state. (The marble rolling on a rotating dinner plate will continue to roll across all parts of the plate rather than arriving at the lowest point on the plate and staying there.)

I'm inclined to think that equilibria are relatively rare in the social world. The reasons for this are several: it is uncommon to be able to discover homeostatic mechanisms that adjust social variables; when quasi-homeostatic mechanisms exist, they are often too coarse to lead to equilibrium; and, most fundamentally, the constraints that constitute the boundary conditions for idealized equilibria among social variables are often themselves changing too rapidly to permit an equilibrium to emerge. Instead, social outcomes more often look like constrained random walks, in which social actions occur in a fairly uncoordinated way at the individual level and aggregate to singular social outcomes that are highly path-dependent and contingent. Social outcomes are more often stochastic than being guided by homeostatic mechanisms.

Turning points

Are there turning points in history? How would we know if we're in the midst of one? Does the current financial crisis represent a turning point in the development of the US economy? Did the election of Ronald Reagan represent a turning point in American politics and government?

Often what is announced as a turning point eventually seems like a change without a difference -- an example of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, of changing drivers but not direction. Nguyen van Thieu takes office in Vietnam in 1967 and a new era is announced; but then the same old policies persist and Vietnam slides ever further towards Communist victory.

A turning point might be defined as an event, action, or choice, that profoundly alters the direction of a whole series of subsequent events. The New Deal is perhaps a candidate in the development of the political-social culture of the United States -- a new set of policies, laws, and strategies that set the United States on a new direction and that substantially constrained later choices by government. The notion of a turning point conveys the situation of contingency -- up until T things might have continued within the existing pattern P, but after T things shifted to P'. And it conveys the idea of path dependency as well -- now that the turning point has occurred and P' is embodied, it is much more difficult to return to P. So a turning point results from some contingent event that occurs within a system at a particular time and substantially inflects the future dynamics of development of the system. The idea turns on the background assumption that there are mechanisms or forces that sustain the development of the system, and that contingent events can "push" the system onto a different course for a while.

What sorts of things can have turning points? Can an individual have one? What about a family or a marriage? How about a business or a university? And how about a nation or a civilization? We might say that anything that has a recognizable and somewhat stable pattern of development can display a turning point. So each of these orders of human affairs can do so. An individual may be influenced by a traumatic event or a charismatic person and may change his ways; from that point forward he may behave differently -- more honestly, more cautiously, more compassionately. The event was a turning point on his development. A "velvet revolution" may be on a course that gives great importance to non-violent tactics. Then something happens -- a violent repression by the state, the emergence of a new clique of leaders more open to violence. The velvet revolution undergoes a turning point and becomes more violent in its strategies.

Schematically, the idea of a turning point involves an ontology something like this: system properties in a state of persistence > singular event > new system properties in a state of persistence.

So how could we know that we're at a turning point? The answer seems to be: we can't. Only the larger course of history can indicate whether contemporary changes will be large and persistent, or cosmetic and evanescent.

The idea of a "turning point" is perhaps one of the analytical categories that we use to characterize and analyze the sweep of history. It is a narrative device that highlights persistence, contingency, and direction. And, it would appear, we've got to wait until the Owl of Minerva spreads its wings before we can say with confidence when they occur.

What social science can do

Quite a few postings here emphasize the limits of social science knowledge. Prediction of the behavior of large social wholes is difficult to impossible. There are few strong regularities among social phenomena. Social entities and processes are heterogeneous, plastic, and path-dependent. So the question arises: what can the social sciences do that takes them beyond the realm of description and reportage of the blooming, buzzing confusion of social comings and goings, to something that is more explanatory and generalizable?

I think there is an answer to this, and it has to do with identifying mid-level mechanisms and processes that recur in roughly similar ways in a range of different social settings. The social sciences can identify a fairly large number of these sorts of recurring mechanisms. For example --

• public goods problems
• political entrepreneurship
• principal-agent problems
• features of ethnic or religious group mobilization
• market mechanisms and failures
• rent-seeking behavior
• the social psychology associated with small groups
• the moral emotions of family and kinship
• the dynamics of a transport network
• the communications characteristics of medium-size social networks
• the psychology and circumstances of solidarity

Further, the social sciences can attempt to discover the circumstances at the level of individual agents that make these mechanisms robust across social settings. They can model the dynamics and features of aggregation that they possess. And they can attempt to discover the workings of such mechanisms in particular social and historical settings, and work towards explanations of particular features of these events based on their theories of the properties of the mechanisms. Finally, they can attempt to find rigorous ways of attempting to model the effects of aggregating multiple mechanisms in a particular setting.

What this comes down to is the view that the main theoretical and generalizing contribution that the social sciences can make is the discovery and analysis of a wise range of recurring social mechanisms grounded in features of human agency and common institutional and material settings. They can help to constitute a rich tool box for social explanation. And, in a weak and fallible way, they can lay the basis for some limited social generalizations -- for example, "In circumstances where a group of independent individuals make private decisions about their actions, the public goods shared by the group will be under-provided."

This approach affords a degree of explanatory capacity and generalization to the social sciences. What it does not underwrite is the ability to offer general, comprehensive theories about any complex kind of phenomenon -- cities, schools, revolutions. And it does not provide a foundation for confidence about large predictions about the future behavior of complex social wholes.