The Social Science of Empire

Abstract

This essay both advocates and presents the research agenda for an interdisciplinary approach to a social science of empire, using, as its springboard, the review of four new books offered by three US publishers, linked in an endeavor called the “American Empire Project.” It begins with a historic look at gaps and politicization in the study of empire. The piece then presents a research agenda that would comprise the social science study of empire, with review of work to date that remains in its infancy in largely unconnected research across several disciplines. The review also examines the approach of the four works, noting their contributions within limited confines of historical time frame, case study methodology, author ideologies, and disciplinary focus.

Keywords

empire imperialism colonialism civilization convergence social science development history collapse sustainability cultural survival peace and conflict studies nationality studies

Introduction

More than 20 years ago, I landed in what was then the Soviet Union as the first US social anthropologist to study the urban Russians and their empire from the inside. My research agenda was to model that empire’s long-term continuity and its transition through the window of natural and human-made “law”; one measure that some believe can be used to define “progress.” I published a three-book (two-volume) work describing the rise and fall of Russia’s Empire and its partial absorption into the New World Order, with comparisons to the US and predictions for the US that are now largely coming true (Lempert, 1993, Lempert, 1995). Nevertheless, that work, with its promise to help reopen a major branch of social science, largely disappeared immediately thereafter. Though data on the US and other European Empires have always been available, and data are now more easily available on Russia, it may be impossible to find a department, course, or professional journal in any academic field today that focuses on the comparative study of historic and contemporary empires, their rise, inner workings, fall, and transitions. One can find almost every other aspect of “development studies” and history or case studies of past societies, of “peace and conflict studies,” of “ethnic” and “nationality studies,” but one is hard pressed to find the study of empire, of civilization, or overall measures of human progress in anything but technological change and selected categories of individual rights in urban or urbanizing societies.

Recently, over the past few months, a number of works have begun to appear from various publishers and disciplines around the theme of “empire.” It is hard to determine whether this phenomenon reflects the glorification of the US as the victorious superpower after the end of the Cold War (studies like Hendt & Negri, 2000; Fukiyama, 1992) or is being driven by an opposite phenomenon that shortly followed; the now increasingly recognized impending collapse of the US Empire (Diamond, 2005; Ferguson, 2004) coupled with a rise in fear and uncertainty throughout the industrial world. Following the collapse of their empire, some Russian scholars have also begun to revise earlier theories of historic cycles to revive neo-Malthusian analysis (Turchin, 2003) following similar modeling on developing societies 25 years ago (Lempert, 1987) and for modeling violence and collapse in different periods of twentieth-century Russian history (Lempert, 1995). Some historians and anthropologists have also revived what they call “imperial studies,” mostly offering parables while avoiding a closer look at contemporary empires or predictive social science modeling.

It may still be too early for scholars to feel they can freely explore the similarities between the US and Soviet Russian Empires, and whether the US has increasingly become like the Russians (a revival of what was known in the 1960s as “convergence theory” – a theory that has also now largely disappeared from academic discussion), without personal repercussions. At the same time, it seems that scholars are now seeking to grapple with the issues of empire as a way to understand and ease the collapse and transition of the US Empire.

If academic works in the study of empire and on the US are going to be helpful for predictions and for normative choices, they are going to need to meet the demands of academic rigor and review rather than the economic and political decisions of “the market.” But given that the field has been non-existent or politicized, how are new works going to do that?

More than a dozen books have now appeared in a series called the “American Empire Project,” under the Metropolitan Books imprint of Henry Holt and Company, and authors published under this series are publishing similar titles under other presses. This review essay takes two of the most recent books of the series (Bacevich, 2010; Johnson, 2010) and combines them with titles by two authors who are part of the series, including Tom Engelhardt, one of the two series editors, published under two other presses (Engelhardt, 2010; McCoy, 2009). It uses their work as a springboard to examine and to help build a social science of the study of empire, including a focus on the US Empire.

The title of the series itself, and of many of the books within it, focusing on what they call “the American Empire” [sic] immediately offers a clue that something is amiss, and that highlights the larger problem. In publishing enough works to establish a subdiscipline, these books are incorporating a number of the same biases they are claiming to dispel, while politicizing, in a new way, what should be a comparative social science of empires. Using “American” in place of “the United States” itself suggests a form of cultural imperialism and a blinder in the title of the series. It, indeed, reflects a view shared by all four authors that the US should be an empire, but simply with a few changes. The US (arguably only an empire/colonial state in a new Anglo-American culture) is only one of several historical empires in the Americas and possibly one among several today depending on how one classifies Canada, Mexico, Brazil, and other multiethnic states dominated by a single group. None of the four books even mentions the native peoples of the Americas or these other empires and relations.

All four authors also descry what has been termed “American exceptionalism”; a euphemism to describe the US’ version of “might makes right,” though they may be guilty of it in other forms. “American exceptionalism” is the belief that international law and its moral principles do not apply to the US and that when it comes to holding the US and its leaders to their own laws, “it’s all relative.” In their focus on the US alone, without putting the US Empire in context of social science laws and comparisons with other empires, the authors are also saying that the US is an exception that can be studied in and of itself, without the need for social science.

I welcome the series and works on US imperialism and find useful arguments and data in each of the books. (Given constraints of space, I am only able to present about two-thirds of the review here, but welcome those authors, their publishers, and other readers to write to me for the full draft that offers more praise and constructive criticism.) As a humanist, a minority, a scholar, and a lawyer who upholds the principles of cultural diversity and sovereignty that are enshrined in international law and declarations, I agree with the basic political thrust of these works and their challenge to contemporary US militarism and violation of international law. At the same time, I am alarmed by the lack of standards in definitions, in research hypotheses, in comparisons, and in methodologies that these books represent.

This essay advocates for and presents the research agenda for an interdisciplinary approach to a social science of empire. It begins with a historic look at gaps and politicization in the study of empire. The piece then presents a research agenda that would comprise the social science study of empire, with review of work to date that remains in its infancy in largely unconnected research across several disciplines. It notes the many perspectives missing in the works of authors, thereby reopening this field.

Politics in the History of the Study of Empires: An Interpretive Chronology of the Field

The study of empire is not new, but it has never seemed to exist on its own as a field of study or within a particular discipline.

Early works about empires date back more than 200 years, in a line of research that continues till today and that may have started with Gibbon’s classic work on Rome. These approaches view empires individually through the form of historical case studies of Rome, Egypt, and the “lost” civilizations of the rest of the world that were documented by explorers and archaeologists (Gibbon, 1789). Where there were comparisons, the goal seems to have been to extol the contemporary empires that funded the studies as the legitimate heirs of these early empires; to demonstrate learning from their mistakes that they viewed as “progress.” Generally, the form of comparison was not to see how the French, British, the US, Russian, and other European empires worked, but to herald them as “civilizations” and to place them on evolutionary chains from “savagery and barbarism” to “civilization” (Morgan, 1909), with the modern forms as unique and superior (Durkheim, 1893). Perhaps the one examination of how empires worked and compared was the discussion of colonialism and predictions in Das Kapital, though Marx (1970/1867) did what many scholars do today. He detached a contemporary subgroup from the whole of the field and sought to create a model out of special cases rather than base a more general model on all cases (Marx, 1867).

Much has been written about how anthropology developed as an adjunct to imperial expansion, facilitating documentation about native peoples and their resources that were being brought into the empires of England, France, the US, and Russia as a way to control them. The focus was on controlling native peoples. The stories written of human physical, cultural, and social evolution established modern empires as the inheritors of previous civilizations and as the highest form of development while “studying down” (looking at “primitive” peoples) rather than “up” at Europeans (Lazarsfeld & Thielens, 1958; Nader, 1982). While other social sciences like sociology, economics, and political science focused on industrial societies, there was little study of how these empires worked. Indeed, there has always been an internal paradox in the agendas and implementation of social science research and it comes into focus sharply in the study of empires. In Europe, universities grew out of the church, whose role was to establish ideology and dogma, and then only slowly broadened to allow for hypothesis testing that would protect the social system by allowing small changes (Buckley, 1951; Illich, 1971; Tierney, 1991). Structures and functions within cultural and social systems exist to serve the continuity of those systems and to maintain their basic beliefs rather than to objectively challenge and change them. It was only in times of problems that social science could step in to begin to offer research that could lead to solutions, within acceptable boundaries.

The political and economic uncertainty between World War I and World War II offered a challenge to the earlier linear view of the rise of social systems and led to focus on collapse and disorder. Among the first comparative studies in the 1920s were Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1928), comparing “civilizations” rather than empires, and Lenin’s classic work on “imperialism”(1926). Lenin’s work defined empire but focused mostly on contemporary forms of industrial societies and followed the earlier work by Marx. These studies and the works of Sorokin, who like Spengler also tried to understand cycles, reflected an attempt to try to use the past to understand what was happening in the empires of Europe and how they could change (Sorokin, 1937a, 1937b). Polish anthropologist Malinowski also hoped to develop anthropology into a social science to explain Germany’s new empire (Malinowski, 1944).

The collapse of European and Japan’s Empires following World War II, and the continued rise of the two empires that Alexis de Tocqueville in the nineteenth century predicted would be superpowers in the twentieth century (Russia and the US), offered plenty of opportunity for study. Nevertheless, that study seems to have been mostly limited to histories (Dutt, 1949; Toynbee, 1956), to political comparisons between the US and Russia, and small studies fragmented in the social sciences (described later).

Though anthropologists have studied “state formation” to explain social complexity, if there are works that compare the US, British, French, Russian, and German (Nazi) Empires to derive a model for how modern empires work, they are hard to find. Similarly, if works comparing and macro-modeling Europe’s empires of the past 500 years (adding Sweden, Holland, Spain, Portugal, etc.) exist, they are lost to contemporary scholars. Also seemingly absent are works comparing clusters (China, Vietnam, Thai and Lao, Mongol, and Khmer Empires as one cluster; Russia, Ukraine, Belarus as another) with different roles and hierarchies to subjugate the many more minority peoples within these areas and with some as “copy-cats” in outlying areas (Vietnam of China; Ukraine of Russia) or spin-offs in a theory of dynamics beyond “dependency.” The closest to social modeling may be works of fiction like those of Orwell (1946, 1948) presenting in caricature what probably could not be done in social science.

Following World War II, studies seemed to focus either on the “enemy” empire and how it worked (the Russian Empire, but called the “USSR” so as to focus on an ideology and avoid comparisons with the US or other European Empires [Lempert, 1998]) or offered critical studies of the US. Models of the Russian Empire focused on its totalitarian aspects rather than on the full dynamics of its “internal” empire and “external” colonies (Bell, 1969; Hough, 1977; Moore, 1966). Studies of the US Empire generally approached it largely from the perspective of political science, apparently seeking to convince readers that they had the power to change it and should change it (Chomsky, 1991; Fulbright, 1966; Melman, 1974; Mills, 1956), while touching less on economic, social, or cultural dimensions of how empires work and change.

My own experience comparing the Russian and the US Empires in the 1990s seems to be a test of the rules established during the Cold War that sanctioned such comparisons. At that time, only one academic journal would even review my work, but in a way that ignored its theories of comparative empires and models along with the implications for the US. Rather than stress differences and pick favorites, I examined similarities between the US and Soviet Russian Empires (and used the term simultaneously for both), predicting the changes and the collapse that would occur in both. I also stripped away nonsense variables (“communism,” “socialism,” “capitalism,” and “democracy”) in order to describe long-term continuities of how certain cultures expanded and maintained their control over the territories, resources, and social systems of others, with explanations of the hard variables of geography and climate that drove similarities and differences (Lempert, 1995, 1998). By following the principles of social science, I had violated taboos that then existed among academics on both sides of the Cold War.

Even in journals like this one in development studies, that have flourished in the period since the end of the World War II, it is difficult to find works on how empires develop and whether empire is the highest, most desirable, or only possible “advanced” stage of societal “development.” Instead of looking at empire, development studies have focused on technological advances and impacts of social organization of industrialization and urbanization, on the rise of states and the international order, and on economic and political transformations. The focus has been on economic “growth” and stability in the “postcolonial” states and description of “decolonization” or “decolonialization.” There has been little focus on whether the “independent” states have or can really overcome the cultural, economic, and political legacies of colonialism, whether they themselves are now empires, and whether they are just “dependent” parts of a larger global system that is a continuation of the previous form of empire under a new name and slightly different form (Barnet & Mueller, 1974; Gunder Frank, Cockcroft, & Johnson, 1972; Wallerstein, 1979).

When the US President, Ronald Reagan, described the Soviet Union as “the evil empire” in the 1980s, he was implicitly erasing a taboo that had existed in referring to the US as an empire. Many observers now openly describe the US as an empire and many say that it is in a period of collapse. We may now be in a time similar to the pre–World War II period when a small number of comparative works appeared. The two lines of works that seem to have appeared thus far are ideological works either in praise or critique of the US back to the genocide and colonization of Native Americans and Africa (Ferguson, 2004; Hendt & Negri, 2000; Dunbar-Ortiz, 1984; Zinn, 1980) and models applying mathematics to the question of rise and fall of empires (Diamond, 2005; Galtung, 1996; Korotayer, Malkov, & Khaltourina, 2006; Tainter, 1988; Turchin, 2003; Wright, 2005).

New interdisciplinary approaches that could promote a social science of empire, such as “Peace and Conflict Studies” or “Nationality Studies,” have yet to outline the scientific agenda for such research. Other emerging fields such as “Colonial Studies” and “Imperial Studies” also seem to be limited to case studies and micro-histories rather than comparative macro-models. In my field of anthropology, two works that are considered models for study of empire, using study of the export of an agricultural commodity like sugar (Mintz, 1985) or a raw material like tin (Nash, 1993), avoid trying to model the workings of specific empires directly.

Today, the social sciences have largely been replaced with ideologies and stories (D’Andrade, 1995; Gross & Leavitt, 1994; Hymes, 1972). Unless there is a return to actual “social science,” works in the field (like the four books reviewed here) may simply remain as case studies and ideology without any real modeling for prediction and change.

Social Science Modeling and Empires

It is not very difficult to lay out an agenda for a sub-field encompassing the modeling, comparison, and predictions of empires: their formation, evolution, internal workings, composition, competition and interaction, decline, transition and mechanisms for change, prospects, and the normative issues related to this form of human social organization. Overcoming the historic politicization and ideologies of different social sciences disciplines, and social sciences in general, in order to do the work, however, will not be easy. This section lays out the basic definition issues of the subject of study and then presents the subareas of research that would flesh out the discipline, with references to those works that have already taken important steps from various existing fields.

Defining the Subject of Study

One of the reasons it may be difficult to locate the study of the US Empire within a social science discipline is that the disciplines one would expect to define and study empire may not even be comfortable with the units of study, beyond the political taboos. Anthropologists, for example, study “cultures,” but the US does not easily fit the definition of culture (unless perhaps seen as a second England). Political scientists largely describe the existence of certain relational mechanisms between leaders and those who are led, and create definitions of type (an X-st Y-cracy) while avoiding labels for inter-cultural and inter-state relations.

For argument’s sake, a quick working definition of empire is: “a social system in which resources are controlled by one ethnic group with the ability to compel exploitation of the people or resources of another group either within its state borders or across borders.”

This will not solve all the problems but it is a start. It forces a healthy discussion on classifications of groups that have been empires in the past, and how they should be seen today. Is Mongolia still an empire? (Since Mongolia still has minorities within its territory, probably yes.) Sweden? The Khmer? (Though Cambodia may be subservient today to other countries, such as China and Vietnam, Cambodia also controls minorities within its borders.) Japan? Canada? Holland/the Dutch? Israel/Judea? Are nation states really euphemisms for empires? Is the United Nations (UN) really a collection of united empires and breakaway colonies? (It is not a collection of the world’s 6,000 remaining cultures.) Can multi-national corporations meet the definition of empire? (Maybe, if they meet the definition of an ethnic–cultural group or subgroup.) If we can define them, how can we classify them?

Taxonomy: Classifying Empires

When Marx began to study European empires in the nineteenth century, he was already classifying them by types (segregating modern industrializing mercantile empires). Yet, his overly narrow classification becomes even further politicized and narrowed in Cold War social science and has partly set back the field. Instead, we need to identify the full list of historical cases of empire and assure that classifications actually follow from observable patterns that are useful for testing additional hypotheses, rather than classify first and then draw conclusions that just reinforce and repeat the biases introduced in classification.

We already classify cultures (mostly by language, now numbering some 6,000) and states (by borders and existing militaries, roughly 200), but we lack a list for the numbers of current and historical empires (for some groups, more than once at different time periods). Many currently stateless minority peoples actually once had empires or monocultural kingdoms/chieftaincies; between 14 and 40 per cent in one data sample on Vietnam in the author’s current work. To classify empires in a useful typology, we need keys to identifying logic of specific cultures in their environments and would need to establish certain variables linked to their formation and workings that can be used for scientific tests of hypotheses.

We know there are several types of empires, some expanding by population growth and genocide (for example, Vietnamese), some through military conquest or “protection” and demand for tribute, occupation, and extraction, some through enslavement, creation of border “copycat” states, as well as influence over “buffer zones” between competing empires turning areas into neutral trade zones. Part of the taxonomy of empires would also create heuristics that would describe, through a series of linked variables, when one would expect to see these different phenomena. Rather than seek to study genocide or enslavement and look for causes and “solutions,” there is probably more explanatory power in classifying different types of empires and their workings and then looking at the peoples around them.

Formation of Empires

There have been a number of studies describing the formation of complex states and the emergence of technology, but these do not seem to be linked to the study of conditions that lead to the formation and expansion of empires; a special form of complex state organization. Several disciplines treat parts of the problem but these do not yet appear to be linked in a study of empire.

A number of anthropologists and ethologists studying populations of primates have looked at issues of territoriality (Ardrey, 1966; Morris, 1967; Tiger & Fox, 1974; Wilson, 1975), particularly in studies of bonobos and other chimpanzees (van der Waal, 1982), but do not seem to find primate “empires.” Political anthropological study of formation of states to control major resources provides a partial introduction to this phenomenon (Harris, 1977; Kroeber, 1944; Leach, 1977; Service, 1975). Demographers have looked at the interplay of population, territory, and technologies but do not specifically differentiate the technology of imperial organization (Boserup, 1981; Chamberlain, 1970; Childe, 1951; Dummond, 1965; Handwerker, 1980), though there also seems to be a link between technological development and demand for weapons technologies.

Probably the key research question here is: Is empire a good (or necessary) survival strategy (and for what aspects of a culture given that it transforms a culture) and under what conditions? For empires that have fallen, many of the cultures continue to exist as continued empires in some form (China and Vietnam have almost always been empires and one could say that for the Italians, Mongols, British, and Turks), while even as conquered peoples, many former imperial groups retain their integrity (though they are threatened). Almost all of the Middle Eastern cultures mentioned in Biblical stories have disappeared, though they probably survived longer than groups that were in the same area and were never empires.

Some political science theories of power would suggest that empires are inevitable and that the best protection strategy a culture has would be to form an empire given that a power vacuum always invites power (Morganthau, 1978). Computer simulations using Baynesian modeling as well as other kinds of game theory, starting from equality and running competition over repeated iterations, almost always show that equality is an unstable equilibrium and that power naturally concentrates. Empire formation may be inevitable, which then leads to a number of questions about the human future and the roles of morality and law.

There has been some modeling of results of competition and also of internal colonization, including studies of Russia, the US, and the partial absorption of Russia into the New World Order through elite networks between the two empires (Lempert, 1998; Shibutani & Kwan, 1965).

Internal Dynamics and Composition of Empire

Surprisingly absent from the four books reviewed here on the US is the specific economics of the US Empire that made empire a rational choice (and that now leads it to collapse) and how the specific institutions and subsystems that maintain the empire created benefits within the overall deep structure of the system. That requires both an economic analysis of the costs and benefits of empire and a study of the long-term development and transition of the culture that led it to choose a strategy of empire over other possible choices. (My work modeling Vietnamese culture at different points in history and looking at key changes and pivots suggests a methodology to do that [Lempert, unpublished books on Vietnam].)

There has long been an economics literature that tries to look at empire in terms of trade relations, dependency, and “capitalism” (Baran & Sweezy, 1968; Barnet & Mueller, 1974; Gunder Frank et al., 1972; Lenin, 1926; Marx, 1867; Wallerstein, 1979), though not from the perspective of costs and benefits of investment in militarism and on the cultural changes and implications, including the patterning of an imperial culture in everything from childhood toys and education to family relations. Several books, including Engelhardt’s, do this for the US, though in a less structured way than an anthropological approach (Lempert, 1995).

Ideology has also biased measurements, particularly on the assumption that all cultures “want” to join the New World Order, lose their previous independence in their own resource bases (also difficult to measure), and adopt consumption patterns and measures of “health,” “enjoyment,” and “prosperity” measured in the terms and currency of the major powers (and now the UN system of “Millennium Development Goals”). One way to partly avoid the ideological debate is to simply rely on international treaty agreements for protecting cultural rights and sustainability and using these as an objective basis for measuring sovereignty. One such indicator that can be used to measure sovereignty and independence, consistent with these international legal doctrines, is to rely on objective measures and cross-disciplinary agreements rather than single disciplines like economics that appear to be ideologically tainted (Lempert, 2009, 2010).

Competition and Interaction of Empires

Modeling of war and internal social violence also appears to be in its infancy. The assumptions chosen by social “scientists” have been that these acts are individual and free choice rather than determined by cultural and social processes that would make them predictable using hard variables. Of the four books reviewed here, surprisingly, not a single one seeks to describe the US imperialism as driven by oil, other resource needs, or markets. The books, instead, link empire to “Washington Rules” (Bacevich, 2010), institutional interests of the military industrial complex (Johnson, 2010), leadership and cultural factors (Engelhardt, 2010; McCoy, 2009). In fact, in the past when empires sought land, it is possible to draw the expansion over time on a map, and one can also link violence to factors like density (Lempert, 1995; also, see unpublished books on Vietnam).

Anthropologists have started to model war in primates and primitive societies (Ferguson, 1984; Fried, Harris, & Murphy, 1988; LeBlanc & Register, 2003), and there are now some attempts in political science at modeling with large databases or case studies, including demographic, economic political modeling of ethnic violence (Harf & Gurr, 1988; Lempert, 1987).

Evolution, Decline, Transition, and Mechanisms for Change

Probably the most interesting area in the study of empires is in system collapse, transition, and mechanisms for change, as well as a now lost line of research that perhaps will be resurrected on whether systems converge to certain types of models and how empires mutually influence each other. This research directly tests the theories of social determinism and free choice, and also raises normative questions as to the types of social systems humans would describe as most desirable and whether they are even possible or just fantasy.

In economics and some other social sciences, there is an ideological bias that suggests that even though individual empires like Russia may collapse, other empires are not destined to fail due to limitations on resources and technology because technology and scarcity will create changes that are required. The belief is that the Russians failed because they lacked the essentials for technological growth that would have allowed their empire to survive. One recent test of these assumptions by an environmentalist suggests that the amount of resources spent to induce people to produce new technology is unsustainable and social scientists are promoting myths (Nguyen, 2008).

Biological–ecological thinking has partly entered into the field of social breakdown and collapse of empires and other social systems in a challenge to earlier “religious” explanations that denied deterministic explanations. In anthropology, an early classic on collapse was Turnbull’s (1972) documentation of a human culture going extinct in its habitat.

A number of works have begun to use mathematical models to look at technology, energy, and resource systems to come up with new theories on the rise and collapse of empires in models that could be viewed as those of system dynamics or cybernetics (Diamond, 2005; Galtung, 1996; Korotayer et al., 2006; Tainter, 1988; Turchin, 2003; Wright, 2005). These approaches do not look specifically at the social systems of modern empires and whether or not they can change and evolve.

Defeated empires and empires suffering from cataclysms like World War II, and the emergence of new competitors (European empires facing the rise of the US), appear to evolve though not always easily (Herz, 1982; Lempert, 1993, 1995; Muller, 1991; O’Donnell, Schmitter, & Whitehead, 1986). Moreover, there is no clear theory of how and when empires’ transition to new forms occurs when the economic returns of empires turn negative, as with the US today. Models of social change are not very advanced (Rogers, 1983) and literature on change continues to assume a linear “progress” of human social evolution (Durkheim, 1893; Fukiyama, 1992; Morgan, 1909; Rostow, 1960; Toffler, 1980) probably out of a religious belief.

Sociologists view industrial societies as increasingly mechanistic with institutions assuming increasingly narrow tasks. Though their models allow for change, if the institutions that are supposed to plan for change are undermined or if institutions and ideologies are firmly entrenched, it is hard to imagine how change can actually occur short of collapse (Durkheim, 1893; Milgram, 1974; Weber, 1947; Whyte, 1986). If universities are marginalized and foundations and elites who served a caretaking function are replaced by new groups gaining financial or military power (as some suggest happened in Russia and is now happening in the US), change might not be possible.

In the 1950s and the 1960s, there was one line of work allowing for comparisons between the US and Russian Empires as “industrial states” that may have converged to a similar form on the basis of certain requisites of complex social systems. These works did not address the issues of empire, and not all industrial systems are active empires, but they raised issues of whether technologies themselves drove change and whether competition also prompted a convergence of forms (Dimock, 1951; Duncan, in press; Galbraith, 1967; Granick, 1960; Kerr, 1983; Meyer, 1961).

While all of the four books on the US reviewed here are in agreement that the US has become more militaristic, none go so far as to ask whether the US has now “converged” to Soviet Russia. Perhaps a question like this is still a taboo, but the translation of the Kommitet dla Gosudarstvennoe Bezopasnost (KGB), the “Committee for State Security,” is not far from the US Department of Homeland Security, and we can ask whether the US leaders were actually trying to copy Soviet Russia, even subconsciously. The full list of institutions and activities that were characteristic of the “evil empire,” but that did not exist in the US until the fall of the Russian Empire, now includes: summary execution; the death penalty restored; the largest prison system in the world; imprisonment without trial; torture; domestic surveillance; transformation of the Congress into a puppet parliament on military affairs; concentration of the media; ascendancy of institutional power in politics; government censorship of media (Wiki-links); as well as a number of other social changes that are not yet like those of Soviet Russia but could be seen as moving in that direction (in education, media, political parties and candidate selection and information, academic freedom, the legal system). If these changes are something other than cyclical or repeating, is this a result of convergence or some other process, perhaps in empires in decline? And what drives it?

Prospects and the Normative Issues

In the literature on empires, there seems to be little room even for the question of whether human progress is possible without empire. It is as if “empire” is inseparable from the concept of civilization, technology, “progress,” and security. None of the four books reviewed here seem to question whether the US should give up its empire (the territories and resources it has taken), seek to re-establish the security and sustainability of the peoples it has absorbed, or even work toward an alternate future or posit through thought experiment one that might be possible. All of the authors would like to see certain changes that might be more cost-effective uses of imperial power, or more “legal” (if that is not contradictory), or at least that recreate certain domestic conditions that used to exist in the US Empire but have now disappeared. Yet, the US has effectively dismantled the international security system of international law that could have been used to demilitarize empires. The current system of the UN and international law seems designed, contradictorily, to recognize and protect empires in the form of states rather than to primarily protect cultural and group rights and to seek to diminish empire, itself, as a threat to world peace and human survival (Lempert & Nguyen, 2008, 2011).

There are alternative models to empire that have developed naturally among groups of cultures, for example, in the Pacific islands, the Kula ring, driven by environmental and geographic conditions. But they also come without technological advance. That is undesirable given that human survival ultimately depends on technological advance given the natural changes on and vulnerability of our planet and solar system.

Probably the only advanced societies that were not imperial exist only in myth (such as Minoan civilization) and are also described as eco-feminist visions of society. It was common in the 1960s and the 1970s to hear an eco-feminist call for change away from contemporary societies that seemed to clearly link imperialism with male sexual needs; earlier works that may also now be a taboo.

It is difficult to find work today in which authors feel free even to imagine another kind of world and then carry out thought experiments on how to achieve it, as if there is a belief we live in Kafka’s world (Kafka, 1922). Other than in terms of technological change, we rarely measure progress and there are questions as to how or if it occurs, if at all (Lempert, under review). The “new age” works are apparently now dead, though at least the books still exist (Roszak, 1978; Yablonsky, 1972).

Current Approaches and Questions in the Study of the US Empire

All the four books seem to have four common themes: they describe where they think the US Empire went off-track; they describe both how and why what they perceive as a major change occurred; they advocate for changes that would apparently return the US to some previous state of empire that they view as preferable; and they fall short of prediction of what might happen if these changes (brought about by unclear actors and forces) do not occur. This section looks at some of these common issues and analyzes their perspectives.

When Did the US Become an Empire or Go Off-track as an Empire?

If we start with a timeline of the US history and ask whether there was an empire at each stage and how it worked, it becomes clear that the place one decides to start the clock (and ask these questions) drives the model one comes up with of the US Empire and how or whether it “went off the track” and can be changed. We can see clearly how ideology has infected social science study of empire and how different authors’ ideologies color their judgments.

Table 1 runs this timeline in the left column, shows where different authors fit in the far right column, and discusses some theoretical perspectives and implications in the middle column. The more recently one designates the US as an empire in its history, the more limited the author’s theoretical perspective on empire as a rooted cultural phenomenon and the stronger the author’s belief that the earlier forms of empire were justifiable and that it is possible to turn back the clock of some recent events to an earlier state (that may, in fact, have been little different). This table also suggests that some of the disciplinary perspectives that authors use (contemporary political science and economics) may be tainted with ideology in ways that help to promote empire by restricting questions and perspectives, in much the way social sciences were used in the past to promote empire rather than critique it.

Table 1.

Assumptions on When the “US” Became an Empire and the Disciplines and Ideologies Associated with These Determinations

Historical timeline and possible era of the US as empire	Theoretical implications and politics	Authors and discipline
Pre-Columbian Maya, Inca, Aztec, Iroquois, and others: Native Americans were empires and colonial powers had to compete (fifteenth century).	All cultures are empires or potentially empires in a naturally emerging process.	Morganthau (1978) on power; human or primate territoriality.
Colonial period: American culture is an amalgam of mostly European imperial cultures (sixteenth to eighteenth century).	Cultural continuity/deep structure; even those fleeing empire will recreate it.	Chomsky (1991); Dunbar-Ortiz (1984); Zinn (1980).
Post-revolutionary consolidation period: attacks of British and French forced a response (late eighteenth, early nineteenth century).	American federalism and coexisting Indian federalism were pushed into imperial organization; the US corporations and industry power rises.	—
Westward expansion period: internal colonization and external (nineteenth century), with Civil War ending the sovereignty of states and creating a single empire (1865).	American federalism and coexisting Indian federalism were pushed into imperial organization, perhaps reflecting vulnerability of federal systems.	[Few US authors see the Civil War era as one of empire despite the elimination of state rights and replacement with corporate personhood. The US ideology sees it as a defeat of “slavery.”]
Philippines colonization and development of surveillance state apparatus (late nineteenth, early twentieth century).	Mutual influence and diffusion processes/convergence theory; possibly an economic determinism of industrial society.	McCoy (2009); a Weberian/Durkheimian argument; possibly Marx (1867).
World War II and the Cold War (1945–1990).	Institutional politics/political science; strong beats weak.	Bacevich (2010).
Military industrial complex (1945 to present).	Economics (does not question empire, only its economic benefits).	Melman (1974); Chalmers Johnson (2010).
Reagan and Bush capture of political system (1980 to present).	Individual actors and political economy model for power; electoral politics.	Engelhardt (2010).

Source: Developed by the author.

Note from the table that Johnson sees the US Empire going off-track when it stopped rationally considering the economic costs and benefits. Bacevich believes in a mythical time before he was born when the US wars were good and the military was professional. Engelhardt as a journalist puts the blame on recent actors and thinks the basic “goodness” of the US citizens needs to be reawakened. McCoy seems to believe that a century of the US rise to global power has led the country internally down the road to that of a police state and seems to be calling for a citizen awakening like those that occurred in Eastern Europe.

Note the perspective of ethnic minorities and women (Chomsky and Zinn, who are Jewish, and Dunbar-Ortiz, a female scholar writing on Native Americans) that the US was already off course during the colonial period when patterns of genocide became embedded in its political culture. They see the system as having always been an empire, long promoting genocide and torture for the benefit of corporate interests. They believe that much deeper fundamental forces are at work that can only be offset by fundamental political and cultural changes.

What Explains Recent Changes in the US Empire?

All four books express an underlying sense that something has fundamentally changed in the US, leading to their feelings of betrayal and lost opportunity. In the authors’ view, no one in the US in the 1960s and the 1970s believed that the end of the Cold War would lead to increased US militarism and undermining of citizen rights, though earlier authors like Orwell, Kafka, and even the convergence theorists did suggest that this was a natural tendency for industrial societies. Orwell and Kafka saw that the State would act to “create” enemies as ways to maintain control, and science fiction stories largely followed these scenarios of negative utopias that would favor destruction of societies before improvement. All four also seem oblivious to the work of sociologists who previously looked at political and economic power in the US and the cultural ethic of the elite (Domhoff, 1983; Mills, 1956; Parenti, 1988).

Johnson and Bacevich’s books represent beliefs among the US establishment that professionalism, institutions, and rational decision making would continue and that these were the new and recognized rules of technological society and global security. The authors grasp at different answers for why it didn’t. But none of these answers explain why behaviors changed. Why did elites in the US suddenly decide to strip away the institutions and agreements of law and progress that could have protected the US and promoted peace? Why did an educated public, largely trained with the same professional ethic as Johnson and Bacevich and seeing the benefit of that ethic, agree to let them? What happened such that US elites and public became short-term oriented, apparently destructive of the country and empire (what Johnson, 2010, p. 7, calls a “suicide option”), and dismantled institutions?

Various anecdotal evidence suggests that the sub-culture of the US’s “power elite” has been replaced by new economic elites: young technocrats striking it rich on new technologies like the “dot.com” billionaires; a new Wall Street financial elite that is also of nouveau riche; along with Asian manufacturing companies and Saudi Arabian oil sheiks, none of whom are bound by the old “rules” or any allegiance either to the future of the US or to preservation of its institutions (rule of law, civil liberties, academic research). But that answer does not explain how Orwell and Kafka could have predicted that any “progress” in the 1960s and the 1970s would have been the aberration that would be reversed.

How can Change and Transition Occur?

All four authors wish that certain aspects of the US Empire would change but none offer a clear theory of how that change would occur, who would or could bring it about, or whether individual action could change what might be a deterministic process. Nor do they model scenarios or offer hypotheses for what might happen. But, in the way they phrase the appeals in their books, combined with their theories of what went wrong, it is possible to look at the different spectrum of these beliefs and also to see how contemporary ideological beliefs also interact with (and handicap) contemporary social science in the study of empire. Indeed, while social science tests multiple hypotheses and works at multiple levels, there are political pressures within social science to limit study to the analysis of one’s discipline and there are political implications of the level of analysis chosen. In a sense, the discipline that one chooses in analyzing empire may actually be functioning as loyalty tests that stymie objective analysis.

Table 2 offers a method of linking contemporary political ideology regarding the US Empire with social science disciplines and with beliefs about change, showing how different levels of social science analysis are linked with ideological beliefs that protect against certain levels of analysis of empire. The middle three columns of the table take three contemporary events that are common reference points in examinations of the US Empire, 40 years apart, and for which there is still incomplete evidence as to their actual cause. The table essentially uses a Rorschach test of individual beliefs to measure how social science analyses of empires are linked with different levels of complexity and depth. The three events chosen for the table are the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963; the plane hijackings and deaths in civilian areas on September 11, 2001; and the decision of the US President, George W. Bush, to invade Iraq as part of a policy of “pre-emptive” war. The first row just gives a non-analytical ideological politicized view that was originally offered by elites. Then, descending rows present deeper, more complex analyses ranging from individual acts to group acts to responsibility of the system itself. Note that the explanations are not mutually exclusive and we cannot say that any explanation is “right” or “better.” What we can say is that social science calls for the testing and use of methods at all levels (to find which levels work best as well as to see how mechanisms working at different levels could be related) and openness to all possibilities to see whether they “fit” a model and the evidence. The final column, on the right, shows how each level of analysis (that is, each discipline) essentially reflects and promotes a certain view of how political change occurs in the US and of what “corrections” are needed to correct what gave rise to these unusual events.

From the table, one can see that Johnson and Bacevich, a political scientist and military historian, are limited to simple explanations, and their appeals for change are also limited to calls for elites to restore systemic order in the belief that they can and will. Johnson even calls for the elimination of the CIA, but by whom and how? McCoy and Engelhardt’s analyses are deeper and their appeals are more for larger cultural and systemic change, but they do not offer a cultural vision or solution and do not suggest or offer a vision of change through critical paths, social movements, or other action. This also seems to be a taboo in contemporary social science.

Table 2.

Ideological Litmus Test of the US Empire: How Different Disciplines, Political Beliefs about Causes of Major Events, and Beliefs about What Needs to Be Changed and How are Linked

	Explanations given for what happened
Level of analysis/associated discipline/associated political belief	Event 1: Assassination of the US President, Kennedy	Event 2: Government actions, reactions, and violence of September 11, 2001	Event 3: The US military action in Iraq, 2003	Authors supporting the view and related assumptions about “correction”
Ideological, non-analytical, propaganda-reinforcing empire.	Cuban or Russian attack on the US legitimacy.	Racist attack of Arabs against the US superiority and legitimacy.	Necessary act to protect the US against a deranged dictator with potential nuclear weapons.	Politicians and media view, with decisions controlled by elites.
Psychology	Lone, mentally ill, deranged gunman.	Deranged terrorist act of poor, mentally ill individuals.	Act by President Bush and advisors to demonstrate their masculinity and self-worth and/or by Vice President Cheney for financial motives (promote Halilburton).	Bacevich; more professionalism will solve the problem.
Political science rational actor model of politics; sociological explanation; social psychology/policy can be changed.	Lone gunman or conspiracy, reflecting recurring symptom of a violent society that promotes injustices and encourages retribution in settling disputes or of foreigners retaliating for the US Cold War violence against them.	“Blowback” retaliation by the US-supported groups later abandoned.	Oil interests and military industrial complex seek control over Middle East and maintain inequality in the US through diversion, while promoting their financial interests at the expense of the national interest.	Johnson; informed policy solutions (by elites) to rebalance and control institutions will solve the problem.
Political science institutional interests with economic motives and ideologies model.	Conspiracy of a small group for personal vengeance beyond the normal rules of competition (or rival political elites, possibly a recurring feature of the US political competition).	Attack by suppressed ethnicities under the US Empire, seeing violence and cost to the US as the only way to change their condition; alliance of Arab fanatics and Middle East elite interests who finance them, to signal their power even under the US domination.	Ideological and racial fanaticism of a small group of policy makers preferring military solutions and greater policy role and funding capture government decision making (military) from State Department, Congress, without rational basis capturing government.	McCoy (1972), Moore (2004); fundamental government restructuring by elites and/or mass public.
Cultural forces; competition and game theory, with social change; possibly a natural cultural process that moves human groups toward violence and militarism/determinist process that only can be changed by itself.	Planned attack by elites to promote a military industrial “coup d’etat” to establish the US as a de facto military dictatorship with the façade of public choice.	Attack probably by above, known to the US elites and allowed to occur as a pretext for movement toward martial law, possibly with supplementation to increase deaths, visibility, and public fear and outrage.	The US Empire seeks war as a continued part of its existence, whether or not consequences are logical or beneficial, and expands its role naturally in the absence of competition, and this action was little different from dozens of previous US interventions to protect the US elite interests but was simply more costly and more public.	Engelhardt (2010), Chomsky (1991); only culture change by democratic social movements of an awakened citizenry can solve the problem.
Culture deep structure; routine feature of the US society that is usually hidden sometimes erupts, even if self-destructive; the natural result of empire internal development/determinist process subject to elite politics.	Attack by CIA/the US military to provoke nuclear war and assert its authority as a military dictatorship.	“False Flag” Operation similar to those routinely conducted elsewhere, planned by the US military actors to promote movement toward martial law and maintain controls.	Goal of war is to move toward Armageddon, destroy basis of civilization, create conditions for permanent war, and destruction as the end in itself.	Only culture change can solve the problem and it may not be possible.

Source: Developed by the author.

None of the authors predict what will happen to the US if and when its empire collapses. Will China and Japan dismantle the US infrastructure? What assets will be taken? Will the US elites and other groups become nuclear terrorists? What backlashes will occur in the country? What will the US look like with transition? Is collapse a beneficial path? For whom? Johnson (2010, p. 7) says that the current US culture of permanent war is a “suicide option,” but is it really? Russians are generally worse off now than they were in the 1960s, but are their leaders worse off?

One can offer a scenario for Jews, as a social science thought experiment, based on data from early twentieth-century Germany and Hungary, but this kind of work also seems to be a taboo (Lempert, under review).

In short, to find answers to these questions and to test predictions, we need to start to create a social science of empire. Initial books opening up these questions are still blinded by biases and lack of real methodology.

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