Abstract
With the aim to facilitate a debate between social and political theory for a better understanding of the societal totality, this chapter probes the ways to understand power, regulation, and social order. It starts from the morally laden conceptions of political theory in the Antiquity and then proceeds from the political theory of early modernity to the emergence of the three basic social sciences, i.e., sociology, political science, and economics. It turns out that most power conceptions have been negative and centered on influence but there are some rare exceptions of which the chapter discusses on those of Marx, Parsons, Foucault, and Mann. The canon of current social theory, i.e., Habermas, Giddens, and Bourdieu is also discussed from the perspective of positive power. A section with two examples of substantive study of power and regulation in the intersection of political and social theory dealing with the notions of hegemony and governance follows. Finally, the Conclusion lists what has been achieved thus far in the attempt to build a bridge between political and social theory and ends up with a call for continuation of the debate to overcome fragmentation in the study of society.
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Notes
- 1.
For the moment we leave aside the issue of whether Strauss’s usage of notions like “society,” “social,” and “human being” are anachronistic. For the argument that that these notions are specifically modern and lack reference in the Ancient context, see Delanty (2009, p. 20), Foucault (1970), Taylor (1989).
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
There are others, which we do not have space to more than mention here such as the following two coming from the direction of sociology. One is the rector/actor/other model by Isaac Ariail Reed (2017, 2019). What makes this model curios in the sociological literature is that it is explicated with expressions, which follow almost word by word those of Thomas Hobbes’ description of the relationship of “AUTHOR” and “actor” in Chap. 16 of his Leviathan. Reed thus repeats the institutional definition of the ruler or rector and the agent or actor. Yet he does not stop there and stay in the sphere of political theory but steps over to the terrain of social theory by adding to the model the third party of “other”. That makes it possible to commit sociological analyses of the destiny of victims of war and other innocent bystanders of chains of powerful agency. It also makes it possible to contextualize chains of agency by framing the agency in question according to its role in the wider society. Ultimately that kind of a study opens to a wide field of the study of “projects” (Reed and Weinstein 2019). A different example is Risto Heiskala’s hexagon model (presented in Heiskala 2018 as the NACEVP model). It is an attempt to continue Michael Mann’s theorizing with an interest to really take theorizing to the terrain of reconstruction of historical materialism in a new situation. With this reconstructive purpose in mind Heiskala extends the focus of the theory from Mann’s interest to tell narrations on power on state level to all social objects, transforms the IEMP model to a CEVP model where the letters stand for cultural, economic, violence-related and political power, and adds two new forms of causation called natural power (N) and artefactual power (A). The emerging NACEVP or hexagon model is meant to be better suited than the prevailing sociological conceptions for the analysis of such timely problems in which nature, technostructures and social forms of power are intertwined in the cases of the environmental crisis or gender issues, for example.
- 5.
- 6.
In fact, even earlier, see for instance Laclau’s paper “The impossibility of Society,” which was originally published in 1983 and later printed as part of his most influential collection of essays (Laclau 1990).
- 7.
Cf. this to Laclau’s later statement: “A free society is not one where a social order has been established that is better adapted to human nature, but one which is more aware of the contingency and historicity of any order” (Laclau 1990, p. 211).
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Heiskala, R., Selg, P. (2021). Power, Regulation, and Social Order in the Intersection of Political and Social Theory. In: Abrutyn, S., Lizardo, O. (eds) Handbook of Classical Sociological Theory. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78205-4_8
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