Abstract
In the preceding editorial, we referred – broadly approvingly – to the common diagnosis of the present time as a series of major crises with global impact (Wagner, 2023). The current issue can be seen as continuing on this theme, but from a different angle. Rather than looking at a temporal sequence of events that shapes the current global social constellation, it disentangles the key components of this constellation to embark on more detailed analyses of each of them.
Maybe most evocatively, Ernest Gellner (1988) referred to the key dimensions of human social life by terming them ‘plough, sword, and book’. In the social sciences, there has been a strong tendency to assume that ‘societies’ organize these dimensions in the form of separate institutions such as markets, states, and – more vaguely – civil society or culture. More recently, though, these ways of thinking have been recognized as rather being an intellectual reflection of European 19th-century history and the institution-building in nation-states than a generalizable conceptualization of organized social life. The core disciplinary differentiation of the social sciences in economics, political science, and sociology/anthropology provides testimony to these developments (Wallerstein, 1996). Even if it may have had its contextual justification, though, this differentiation is inappropriate in an epoch of vastly increased global connectedness in which economic exchanges, political challenges, and cultural orientations easily trespass state boundaries. Therefore, Anthony Giddens (1984) proposed to maintain the threefold distinction but speak more openly about allocative practices, authoritative practices, and practices of signification and legitimation, which may or may not become sedimented in separate institutions in different socio-historical contexts. Building on this train of thought, I considered the threefold distinction as referring to the core problématiques all human societies have to address: the economic problématique concerns the satisfaction of material needs, the political problématique relates to the setting of the rules for the life in common, and the epistemic problématique – using arguably a too narrow term – addresses the question of the certainty of knowledge that one can rely on (Wagner, 2008).
For an analytically differentiated diagnosis of the present, therefore, the task is to see if and how the way in which these problématiques have been addressed has been transformed in recent decades. The articles in this issue, in their sum, can be read as providing significant contributions to accomplishing this task. Any attempt at identifying the specificities of the present time requires a historical background against which the present is assessed. For the sake of brevity and simplicity, let us assume that this background is the brief period, mostly the 1990s, in which ‘globalization’ appeared to be the dominant tendency of social change in all respects, seen as such both in public and in scholarly debate.
In terms of the economic problématique, that period seemed to witness the global diffusion of liberal-market capitalism. In the process, ‘capitalism’ was considered to have acquired some new features but nevertheless to have remained well understood as a mode of economic organization and as a basis of a social configuration, as was maintained by neoclassical economics and by the neo-Marxist critique of political economy alike. The three articles that focus on economic issues here all tend to disagree. Their authors argue that we have witnessed a major transformation that requires a new effort at conceptualizing prevailing economic practices. Neil Harris and Gerard Delanty recognize a revival of interest in capitalism in recent social theory, which is driven more by urgent concerns, not least in the wake of the financial crisis and the accelerating climate crisis, than by conceptual clarity. They propose to systematically distinguish a number of key characteristics for an economy to be called capitalist to open up systemic comparative empirical analysis. Similarly, Tibor Rutar observes that the term ‘neoliberalism’ has been widely adopted to refer to the new form of capitalism that arose globally from the 1980s onwards. It has been used, though, in a wide and confusing variety of ways, often indeed merely as a rhetorical tool to denounce the new form of capitalism. Tibor Rutar reviews the various definitions and approaches and proposes an understanding of neoliberalism that adequately captures the transformation in the mode of politico-economic regulation. More specifically, ‘financialization’ has been seen as one key feature of the new global capitalism, but again mostly in terms of a continuation of long-lasting trends toward opening new avenues toward business profitability. Barbara Kuchler argues that this process is better understood as a transformation in the relation between the finance system and the monetary system in which the boundaries between the two, which had appeared to be firmly established, are eroding.
By the 1990s, the political problématique widely appeared to have been satisfactorily addressed by the consolidation of existing and the emergence of new democracies, as expressed in the political-science theorem of historical waves of democratization. This conviction, though, has recently given way to a quickly spreading discourse about a profound crisis of democracy and a revived interest in the question of ‘how democracies die’ (Levitsky and Ziblatt, 2018). Grigorii V. Golosov develops a conceptual map with which to distinguish degrees of democracy and authoritarianism and applies this map to the transformation of Russia’s political regime over the past two decades.
Russia is a founding member of the association BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) whose aim is to work toward a multilateral world-order after the apparent rise of the United States to sole global hegemony – a view that can be contested – after the fall of the Soviet Union. While BRICS was already seen as failing, its purpose has arguably been revived due to the varied reactions of countries from the Global South to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It is also noteworthy that at least four of the five BRICS members have shown tendencies toward authoritarian transformations of their democracy during the last decade, which in Brazil have been receding again – not overlooking that similar tendencies have been observed in the United States, Hungary, Türkiye, and other countries.
While the world-political background remains present, Bakthavachalam Elango addresses BRICS countries more from the angle of the epistemic problématique, surveying their record in terms of areas of social-science research. Without this necessarily being explicit, such research is based on the assumption that research widens the knowledge base of a society and/or enhances the degree of certainty of available knowledge. This is an assumption on which many societies have intensified their research efforts ever since the so-called scientific revolution, even though intermittently and unevenly.
Two of the recent crises that have been evoked at the outset, though, have somewhat changed the picture: the pandemic and climate change. Findings of research on COVID-19 and on human-made global warming have been strongly contested in some societies. Such contestation is little, if at all, anchored in scientific debate, even if it sometimes pretends to be. It rather contests the actions – vaccination and lockdown – or required actions – phasing out of fossil-fuel use – that are suggested by scientific findings. In conclusion of this issue, Nicoleta Corbu et al. and Giampietro Gobo et al. analyze in different ways the relation between science and scientists, the media, and the public with a focus on the COVID-19 pandemic in two different settings, Romania and Italy. Corbu et al. explore the fact that the controversies over conspiracy theories, namely the controversy between those who hold these theories and those who try to debunk them, themselves have an impact on trust or distrust in the media – with the paradoxical result that debunking efforts can increase distrust in the media, in particular among those who tend to believe in conspiracy theories. In turn, Gobo, Campo, and Serafini analyze trust or distrust in science in relation to the ways in which scientists present and debate their findings in the media. Rather than assuming, as is often done, that science is external to society, they focus on interactions among scientists and between scientists and the public through media.
It would be too much to claim that this set of analyses, which were created independently of each other, provides a new diagnosis of our present time. Taken together, though, they suggest that our time is marked by parallel transformations of the economy, of democracy, and of ways of dealing with knowledge that are as yet little understood and require concerted efforts at research and debate to better understand our present.