From Bismarck to Petraeus: The question of the social and the Social Question in counterinsurgency

Introduction

One of the most wide-ranging and commented-upon features of the United States’ counterinsurgency policy in Afghanistan has been the attempted integration of military strategy with political and economic engineering, a self-conscious attempt to rewrite the perceived boundaries between war, politics, economy and anthropology (Brown, 2008; Gentile, 2009; Kalyvas, 2008). Counterinsurgency is now ‘war among the people’ (Smith, 2006) with combatants claiming to take direct responsibility for the well-being of entire populations and then passing this responsibility onto friendly indigenous institutions. Armed forces are to be involved not only in killing insurgents and training national armies, but providing security from violence and basic economic needs. Combatants are tasked with maintaining infrastructure, such as roads, electricity and housing, and supporting religious and cultural institutions. Although classic counterinsurgency operations are still required, much has been made of the need to manage populations, partly through local leaders, in addition to the waging of war. Hearts and minds has been joined with — even superseded by — the discourse of ‘security and development’ and ‘population-centric warfare’ (Galula, 2006 [1964]; Kilcullen, 2007a).

In what terms should we conceive of this development? The technical ‘lessons- learned’ literature suggests that the apparently greater emphasis on economic reconstruction and development programmes was the result of learning from mistakes in the past (Nagl, 2005). Realists tend to be sceptical of great expenditures on small wars, seeing them as a distraction from great power politics and wasteful because such efforts rarely succeed. Host governments are usually corrupt and unpopular; the struggle for power between factions will not disappear with the building of new roads (Bacevich, 2009). Rational choice economists argue that successful reconstruction is possible if enough incentives can be created which ‘make people prefer continuing with a liberal democratic order as compared with any available alternatives’ (Coyne, 2008: 9). Liberal institutionalism focuses on the ability of the United States to mobilize and coordinate a multiplicity of public and private actors in a convergence of global liberal governance and military rationality (Ikenberry and Slaughter, 2006: 71). The United States’ Counterinsurgency Field Manual itself could be presented as a social constructivist text in conceiving the contest between insurgents and counterinsurgents as a struggle over identity as well as military force (Kalyvas, 2008). More critical and Marxist theorists present US-led reconstruction as an exercise in social engineering guided by liberal and neoliberal ideology, a new imperialism (Dodge, 2009). Feminists see counterinsurgency, like all wars, as a field of gender contestation in which systems of patriarchy are more likely to be reinforced rather than undermined (Riley et al., 2008). Others, drawing on Michel Foucault, conceive the merging of security and development as a form of biopolitics in which the biological ‘life itself’ of global populations has become the subject of intervention, regulation and dangerous control (Duffield, 2007).

Overlapping with but irreducible to any of these approaches and in direct contrast to some of them, this article situates the discourse and practice of ‘population-centric warfare’ in the context of the modern rise of the social realm as a distinct form of space and mode of governance. The United States’ counterinsurgency doctrine seeks to constitute governable national ‘societies’ with distinct ‘social realms’ in which populations are managed by ‘social policy’ intervention and the expansion of ‘social’ forms of control. Contemporary realists are rightly sceptical of the scale of population-centric warfare and exaggerated claims about what it can achieve. However, ‘social work’ is not beyond the scope of realist practice and political thought. One of the most heralded practitioners of realpolitik, Otto von Bismarck, founded the first comprehensive Sozialstaat in the 1880s for reasons of state. After becoming first Chancellor of the German Empire, Bismarck provided a structure through which a dangerous population could be integrated into a new ‘nation’, conceiving the German ‘social realm’ as an entity to be monitored and regulated through social policy and studied by the newly invented field of sociology. The earliest and most important concern of this field was formulated as a question — the Social Question — how to bridge the contradiction between the ideals of the democratic revolutions and the reality of life under capitalism, the gap between social cohesion and economic development, the antagonism between capital and labour (Moggach and Browne, 2000; Procacci, 1995). In addition to repressive anti-socialist laws, the working poor were marked as direct targets of intervention most notably through comprehensive social insurance programmes. These actions were a response to what was perhaps the dominant intellectual and political question of the 19th century: was it possible, and if so how, to successfully manage the welfare of increasingly radicalized industrial workers such that capitalism was not overthrown in favour of collective management of production?

The specific form of the social realm and articulation of the Social Question changes shape and form depending on the economic, political and military context. A new variation on the Social Question animates the minds of a more recent but certainly no less ambitious generation of military and political strategists: is it possible, and if so how, to govern populations in the global South by providing for their human needs and thus avert their potential threat to US-led political and economic order? Is it possible to create a social realm in Afghanistan that may be intervened in and regulated as part of a strategy of pacification? To make this claim is not to assume that the ‘population-centric’ element of the strategy — though billed as central to the ‘surge’ under President Obama — has been the primary focus of the overall campaign, or one that will necessarily endure in the face of setbacks. To be sure, it continues as one of the publicly stated priorities, and journalists embedded with US forces continue to publicize US-funded development projects (Chivers, 2011). Approximately $1.7 billion of aid was delivered by the US military between 2001 and 2009; the figure was $1 billion in 2010 alone (Curtis, 2011: 12). However, by the end of 2010, after failures in Marjah and Kandahar, there has been far greater emphasis on air strikes, search and seizure operations, and night raids. The level of force used by General David Petreaus is greater than General Stanley McChrystal, his predecessor as commander of US forces. Nonetheless, the population-centric component of the strategy warrants close scrutiny, not least because it is intended to appeal to a broad political constituency and is widely assumed to be a dominant feature of the campaign. In the words of Mary Kaldor, ‘the population security approach offer[s] a possible model for global security operations’ (2010: 122).

In fact, the way population-centric counterinsurgency has recently been conceived across many Western capitals looks remarkably similar to how the Social Question was first posed in Europe over a century ago. The economic, political and military context in which the Social Question is now put is different from the 19th century, but a number of the ‘social’ techniques and strategies evident in the conceptualization and practice of population-centric warfare would have been recognized and perhaps even admired by Bismarck and political realist Max Weber. Weber, recall, developed his ‘sociological’ understanding of the requirements of political order in the context of the emerging German Sozialstaat, which Bismarck had founded. To the degree that counterinsurgency is not a purely military activity it is about constructing an object that can be manipulated for politico-military ends. This object is the ‘social’.

International studies have paid little attention to the historical specificity and relatively recent invention of the social realm as a concrete historical entity, category of political and philosophical thought, and object of military and political strategy. It is generally assumed that distinct ‘societies’ have come into existence (usually through the exigencies of war) and have together created an international ‘society’ (Bull, 1977). In light of the manifest flaws of neo-realism’s rationalism and individualist ontology, the idea of a ‘sociological’ explanation for various international developments is now widely taken for granted. Debate has centred on the degree to which international anarchy can be ‘socialized’ (Wendt, 1999), whether ‘the international’ or ‘the world’ is a particular kind of ‘social system’ (Buzan, 2004), and how social systems can be philosophically understood (Hollis and Smith, 1990). With the exception of some neo-Marxist and neo-Weberian historical sociology and some members of the ‘English School’, the now well-advanced ‘social turn’ has been dominated by social theory and the philosophy of social science. However, even international historical sociologists usually assume what is to be explained and justified: the use of a term derived from late 18th- and 19th-century bourgeois thought. For example, in a Marxist critique of bourgeois concepts in realist international theory, Justin Rosenberg notes that ‘“society” does not present itself as an object of study … before the institutional differentiation of public and private spheres, state and civil society, which characterizes the modern West’ (1994: 156–157). However, in arguing for ‘the structural unity of social forms and geopolitical systems’ (1994: 158, emphasis added), Rosenberg reproduces the terminology he calls into question. This is not surprising since Marx and his followers were important participants in the struggle over the meaning of the historical rise of the social and subsequent conflict over how to respond to the Social Question.

Why and when did ‘the social’ join economy and politics as a domain with specific patterns, norms and logics through which human life could be acted on and transformed? The definition and meaning of the social can only be understood in the context of a specific historical constellation. With the rise and expansion of capitalist markets, a new distinction between state-public administration and privatized economy emerged. Bourgeois civil society was distinguished from the state and market; politics and economy were given new meanings and distinguished from each other in a particular way (Marx, 1972). The market had expanded through government action and formerly private activities needed public regulation and control (Arendt, 1958; Castel, 2003; Donzelot, 1984; Polanyi, 2001 [1944]). The social emerged as a realm that was not wholly political or economic, public or private, but a hybrid; a distinctly capitalist form of public regulation. As distinct from polis and oikos, politics and economy, ‘society’ became conceptualized and acted on as the mass or multitude of households in which ‘social housekeeping’ (Myrdal, 1953) was provided by a bureaucratic state. As Habermas put it, ‘The “social” could be constituted as its own sphere to the degree that on the one hand the reproduction of life took on private forms, while on the other hand the private realm as a whole assumed public relevance’ (1991: 127).

Over time, greater regulation of ‘society’ by the state transformed bourgeois civil society into a social-welfare system. By the beginning of the 19th century, new industrial working classes were subject to the vulnerability of economic convulsions to a degree never before seen. The need to manage the insecurity of those integrated into the system of wage labour gave rise to a more organized social realm to be constituted and then protected by governmental administration (Wagner, 1994). ‘Social’ policies emerged as state (and now increasingly non-state and transnational) interventions to pacify ‘social’ problems in an ameliorative and non-violent manner, although they appear alongside more obviously violent means. Closely associated with liberal ideas, these interventions are often understood as non-repressive, although many influential thinkers have emphasized the extent to which they involve a whole array of disciplinary and other controls (Arendt, 1958; Bourdieu, 1998; Deleuze, 1979; Foucault, 2008). In the intellectual domain, the new field of sociology oriented itself around the problem of managing the consequences of the Industrial Revolution and the capitalist economy of wage labour. Classical political theory was joined — and, for some, superseded — by social theory, a new overarching discourse about the ‘social’ world, eventually purporting to offer ‘social explanations’ for every other state of affairs (Heilbron, 1995).

The scale of thinking through the implications of the rise of the social realm, including shifts in its territorial scale, is enormous and can illuminate many elements of international politics and several schools of international thought. This article addresses only one example and points to its relevance for understanding an important feature of contemporary security policy: counterinsurgency as a response to a reformulated Social Question. The point is not to argue that there are no other significant examples of the Social Question in international politics or counterinsurgency; the ‘Social Question’ also animated US strategy in Vietnam. ¹ It has long been recognized that counterinsurgency incorporates forms of ‘social work’ (Galula, 2006 [1964]: 62). This article more explicitly interrogates the historical and political functions of such work, including its place in the historical rise of the social, and its relationship to the dominant theory of international politics. The focus on political realism is perhaps surprising; liberalism is most closely associated with international social policy. However, modern realism, like liberalism, was forged in response to the rise of the social and attempts to answer the Social Question. It too imagines the creation of social space and social order in a particular way. Hence, the purpose of the analysis is to do more than describe some overlap at the level of discourse between past and present articulations of the Social Question, to yield more than a comparative list of social programmes somehow identical to those implemented by Bismarck. At stake is a proper account of the rise of the social as a distinct and allegedly knowable sphere and of social science, and hence International Relations (IR), as a scholarly and practical field.

The article proceeds in three steps. The first part establishes the historical novelty of the concept of the social in the history of political thought and describes the ontology of the modern social realm as an actual historical formation: a hybrid realm between state administration and capitalist economy. Over time, the need to manage the exigencies of capitalism contributed to a major transformation in political discourse, giving rise to a number of ‘social questions’ involving poverty, hunger and illness, namely those originating in the conditions of the European working classes that by the middle of the 19th century had taken on a new and potentially dangerous significance and self-understanding. The second section discusses one powerful response to the Social Question within modern international theory: the convergence between realpolitik and socialpolitik identified by two founders of modern realism, Bismarck and Weber. We focus on this history of Imperial Germany not to endorse realist conclusions about the ‘national’ requirements of geopolitics, that successful social policy can satisfy the cultural dimensions of the struggle for power between nations. The focus is justified by the continuing relevance of the political realist paradigm of social regulation. The third section brings together the preceding analysis to shed light on counterinsurgency as articulated in the recently updated US Field Manual and in a number of ‘social’ interventions in Afghanistan. The point is not to argue that ‘welfare’ has somehow replaced ‘repression’ in the United States’ military strategy or that the Afghan campaign is merely an exemplification of the Manual. Rather, it is argued that the ‘population-centric’ element of this campaign can be understood through the historical and theoretical lens of the rise and transformation of the social realm. To illustrate, two specific examples of social governance, or socialpolitik, are highlighted: (1) the role of non-state actors, indicating that a victory of the social can mean governance even in the absence of a functioning state with centralized power; and (2) the use of gender-specific interventions, highlighting how social policies reconstitute and reorganize gendered relations of power.

The question of the social

Despite the effort to construct a coherent tradition of international thought, often harking back to ancient Greece, IR is decidedly modern in adopting the language of society and the social. The Greeks had no separate word for such phenomena. Thucydides may have been a historian of democracy and empire, but for him, like all ancient thinkers, the relevant distinction in human affairs was polis and oikos, the public, political realm of free (male) citizen action and the private household where women and slaves tended to the basic needs of life. There was no mediating social realm or even a separate word for ‘society’. How and why did the idea of ‘society’, distinct from polis and oikos, politics and economy, emerge? Why was a ‘social realm’ within and eventually across supposedly distinct societies created? This section offers a brief account of the emergence of a separate social realm as both a concrete historical formation and in political and economic thought. The development was a product of capitalist modernity, emerging after the idea of the sovereign territorial state. Only with the writings of Hobbes, Locke, Smith, Hegel and later Marx and Weber was the distinction between state and society, the necessary condition for the rise of the social realm, consolidated, justified and critiqued.

The word ‘society’ derives from the Latin term socialis, meaning to be a partner or an ally and from socius meaning companion or friend. The closest usage in Aristotle relates to friendship or human association in general. This has not prevented sociologists from anachronistically rereading Aristotle as an early ‘social’ thinker. For example, Cohen and Arato suggest that the ‘first version of the concept of civil society appears in Aristotle under the heading of politike koinonia, political society/community’ (1992: 84), as if ‘community’ and ‘society’ were synonymous (cf. Tönnies, 1955). Raymond Aron, echoing Marx, suggested that ‘“Social animal” is as good a definition of’ Aristotle’s notion of humans as ‘zoon politicon as “political animal”’ (1968: 8; also see Marx, 1973: 84). Such statements are only plausible if politics is taken to refer to every kind of human association or there is no distinction between the political and the social. To be sociable and political were not the same for Aristotle. When he defined humans as zoon politikon he was suggesting that the distinctly human attribute was to seek forms of association that transcended the fulfilment of biological/material necessity, something we have in common with all living things (see Arendt, 1958: 22–28).

Belief in the theocratic unity of Christendom meant that early Christian thought did not conceive of a distinctive social realm. Augustine distinguished between the civitas Dei and civitas terrena. Aquinas similarly distinguished between the worldly reality of the communitas civilis and divine world of the communitas divina. As Frisby and Sayer note, ‘until the seventeenth century, the notion of society … was still associated with friendship as it had been in Aristotle’s Ethics, with human association as such’ (1986: 16). The beginnings of a general account of ‘society’ and the conceptualization of ‘the social’ as a separate and discrete sphere are rooted in the distinction between state and society, which appeared with the breakdown of feudal arrangements in Europe. Activities and relations of dependency formerly rooted in ancient and feudal households became a matter of state concern and regulation in response to transformations in the economy (Arendt, 1958; Myrdal, 1953; Tönnies, 1955). In Polanyi’s words, ‘no human community had yet been conceived of which was not identical with law and government’ (2001 [1944]: 119). The transformation was reflected in the emergence of liberal thought in the 17th century.

For Hobbes, the state of nature was a competitive market order of naturally uncongenial (‘unsocial’) but rational individuals; the only ‘social’ bond was imposed by sovereign power. The state fostered the conditions in which the pursuit of private interests could appear compatible with the so-called ‘public’ good, a vision of the emerging economic order of competitive markets (Macpherson, 1968). Locke grounded ‘civil society’ on the security of property and ‘life’ as well as the capitalist requirement that labour-power be ‘free’ and separated from the means of production. To live in ‘society’ was a natural condition. Society established legitimate government through consent. At this stage, civil or ‘political society’, as distinct from society in general, was coterminous with the state, a conception also found in 18th-century thinkers Rousseau and Kant. With Scottish Enlightenment scholars Smith and Ferguson, the lingering political dimension of civil society was largely expunged. Civilized society was not a contract binding the individual to the state. It emerged out of individual material interests and communal needs: trade and manufacture, the realm of private ‘freedom’ and collective necessity, not free political agreement. Rational and autonomous individuals interact with each other across a series of self-regulating domains subject to their own rational laws. This was bourgeois civil society: relations of market exchange between legally equal individuals. Contra Hobbes, the emerging economic and ‘social’ system was not a function of the state. Market forces possessed a degree of independence; they were ‘non-political’ (not the domain of government). The role of government was to maintain military and economic order, to provide the secure conditions for the accumulation of wealth.

The shift away from civil society as a community of citizens towards bürgerliche Gesellschaft (bourgeois society) was consolidated by Hegel (1967 [1821]) who conceived civil society as the totality of private individuals connected together into a ‘system of needs’. The arbitrary wills of egoistic economic subjects could now be integrated by the rational, universalizing state that transcended the market, representing for the first time the interests of what was now conceived as society as a whole (Polanyi, 2001 [1944]). Marx and his followers mounted a powerful critique of the bourgeois concept of civil society in which ‘the various forms of social connectedness confront the individual as a mere means toward his private purposes, as external necessity’ (1973: 83). Civil society was, of course, class society and the consolidation of new relationships of dependency and vulnerability. Marx rejected the bourgeois abstractions of both ‘the individual’ and ‘society’ as ideological justifications for particular class interests, but nonetheless pioneered ‘social’ explanations of history. When Marx described humans as social animals he used the term in the broadest possible sense, merging it with all forms of human interaction. ‘By social’, wrote Marx and Engels, ‘we understand the co-operation of several individuals, no matter under what conditions, in what manner and to what end’ (1970: 50). Society was a historical process, the product of the interactions of individuals who were socially determined. Society is ‘species-life itself’ and humans are a ‘species-being’ (Marx, 1972: 41). Every achievement of human existence required the prior satisfaction of the needs of the life process. ‘The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs [food, water, shelter], the production of material life itself’ (Marx and Engels, 1970: 48). ‘Society’ is a set of material relations and ‘social’ relations of production.

A new ‘social’ discourse on human life had thus emerged. But what exactly had arisen with the rise of the new social realm? Clearly, capitalism had inaugurated forms of rule peculiar to that system: the relative depoliticization of ‘economy’ and ‘property’; the rise of ‘civil society’; a new distinction between ‘economy’ and ‘politics’, the ‘state’ and inter-state system. Consider, for example, how the term ‘economy’ was transformed. As Rousseau (1755) noted in an entry in Grande Encylopédie, ‘Economy or oeconomie, a word derived from [the ancient Greek] oikos, meaning a house, and nomos, meaning law, ordinarily signifies merely the wise and legitimate management of a house for the common good of the entire family. The meaning of the term has since been extended to mean the management of the larger family of the state.’ Under feudal arrangements there was no clear distinction between polis and oikos, public and private, politics or ‘economy’. Production, reproduction and so-called ‘politics’ were combined through the institution of lordship, which retained a ‘necessary relation to the land like one individual household’ (Tönnies, 1955: 68). In the new ‘political economy’, the necessities of life previously associated with household activities became a matter of ‘public’ concern. Labour was deemed the source of all wealth; it therefore needed to be properly and rationally organized for the benefit of ‘society’ and the wealth of nations. In Myrdal’s words:

As soon as the idea of the prince as the sole subject of political theory [as in Hobbes] is abandoned, the problem arises how to make the multitude into a unified subject of valuations. The very attempt to study society ‘from the economic point of view’ makes it necessary to assume such a unified subject and to determine it scientifically in order to derive the general interest or the general welfare. (1953: 141)

The general welfare of distinct societies, with distinct social spheres, was to be managed through nationwide housekeeping: the rise of the hybrid ‘political economy’ (Sage, 2009), the necessary correlate of the hybrid ‘social’ realm. ‘Society’, in effect, became ‘the gigantic subject of the accumulation process’ or in Marxist terminology, the ‘“collective subject” of the life process’ (Arendt, 1958: 256, 116). To repeat, the modern social realm emerged as a hybrid space between state and capitalist economy or the merging of activities formally considered distinctively public or private.

The social realm is a distinctly capitalist form of space that eventually enabled specifically ‘social’ forms of governance. Consider how the social realm itself was reorganized during the 19th century. Prior to industrial capitalism, embryonic ‘social’ anxieties centred on the threat posed by paupers and vagabonds, those who did not work, the destitute who needed support from charity (Castel, 2003). This changed with the revolutionary wave of 1848 and more organized workers’ rebellions. Subsequent formulations of the Social Question appeared in a context of deep class schisms, national states, imperialism and the continuing, though declining, influence of religious authority. In the words of James Vernon, ‘no longer just a series of unrelated questions affecting particularly problematic groups in the population, the social was viewed as a totality, a system, with its own logic … waiting to be discovered and acted upon in the name of social progress’ (2007: 13). Governing classes and humanitarian reformers became aware of the need for ‘social’ policy interventions to stabilize working-class unrest (Hobson, 1901; Jacoby, 1870; Peabody, 1909). The populations that were the subject of enquiry of the new human science of sociology were those most vulnerable to industrialization: workers and landless peasants. The functions of the state expanded to include the more active ‘socialization’ of populations, in addition to intervention in the market (Durkheim, 1997 [1893]). The term socialization was introduced in 1840, and asocial appeared in 1883. From the 1880s, ‘socio’ became an increasingly common compound. Across Europe, there was a proliferation of regulations dealing with labour conditions and worker protection, factory regulation, and industrial tribunals. The classical liberal image of the self-regulating individual in civil society producing a coherent and knowable social order gave way to the spectre of a society in need of organization, of continual administration, precisely to ward off incoherence, disorder and uncertainty (Wagner, 1994). Liberalism itself became ‘socialized’ (Bellamy, 1992).

By the middle of the 19th century and across the European political spectrum there was agreement that the social realm existed and needed to be managed; debate centred on the justification, degree and technical method of intervention into it. Ideological conflict over the terms and rationale for social interventions continued. Philosophical debates animated the more practical disagreements over which elements of the social were most in need of intervention: poor relief, child labour, general working conditions, heath, morals or the patriarchal family unit. All were likely to use organic metaphors to describe social ills in need of cure. Different forms of liberal, conservative and socialist ideology debated the appropriate forms of ‘socialization’, the relative weight of repression, moral reform and personal responsibility, social legislation, and outright revolution, that is, each presented a different paradigm for regulating the social realm. For political realists, who could adopt both liberal and conservative methods and were self-consciously anti-socialist, social policy performed a particular function in the context of state power, a power shaped by its foundational violence and role in maintaining capitalist production (Schmitt, 2006 [1950]; Weber, 1946). We now turn to one of the most formative moments in the history of the social realm: the emergence of the Sozialstaat in late 19th-century Imperial Germany as a complement to realpolitik, a paradigm of social regulation with enormous and continuing significance.

Die soziale Frage and Realpolitik

Much of the social theory that has been imported into international studies in recent years finds its origins in late 19th- and early 20th-century German debates over how to respond to the Social Question. There is a clear overlap, for example, between mainstream social constructivism (Wendt, 1999), more historically and philosophically informed branches of realism (Lebow, 2003), and the basic tenets of the German Historical School. This branch of economics was based on a rejection of abstract mathematical modelling in favour of a historical and ethical approach to ‘social’ and economic policy (Shionoya, 2001). The new science of the social was formalized in Germany in 1873 with the founding of the Verein für Socialpolitik (Association for Social and Economic Reform) with the purpose of studying and responding to the conditions of the industrial masses. Gustav von Schmoller, founder of the Association, argued for a civilizing response to the dehumanizing consequences of modern production that would not undermine the basic structure of capitalism (Grimmer-Solem, 2003). Both social peace and economic dynamism might be possible within the framework of a social market economy that was firmly embedded within a wider institutional and cultural order. In the terminology developed in the previous section, the reproduction of the life of ‘society as a whole’ became a ‘public’ affair of state.

What, more specifically, was the German state strategy for regulating the social realm? Imperial Germany was the first state to establish a comprehensive social security system with compulsory sickness, accident and old-age insurance passed in 1883, 1884 and 1889 (van Meerhaeghe, 2006: 284). By the late 1870s, Chancellor Bismarck had developed a form of social policy that has been aptly described as ‘the domestic side of a foreign policy whose foreign policy dimension was economic and colonial expansion’ (Wehler, 1985: 132). The increasingly radicalized German proletariat was to be anaesthetized through a mix of social security and a patriotic romanticism in which its fate was explicitly linked to the success of the imperial nation. Social policy was not a humanitarian gesture to alleviate suffering. Basic needs had to be satisfied in order to pacify workers. The Chancellor had decided to recognize the core (male) industrial proletariat but endeavoured to contain its power by assaulting its organizational and leadership base. From the very beginning, specific gender regimes were embedded in social services, especially through shaping norms around family structure and the sexual division of labour (O’Connor et al., 1999).

Bismarck’s innovative use of insurance attracted adherents from across Europe, many of whom travelled to Germany in the years before World War I to learn of its application (Donzelot, 1988: 425). The accompanying discourse of ‘social solidarity’, later influential in some branches of the English School approach to international ‘society’, was explicitly seen as a response to forms of ideological opposition to state intervention. The hearts and minds strategy of inducements and punishments did not wholly succeed since the combination of repression with relatively low pensions lacked wide appeal. In 1890, Bismarck was dismissed, but he established in embryonic fashion a path to be followed by others.

Max Weber was critical of the paternalistic and egocentric elements of Bismarck’s approach to regulating the social, which created a dependency of the individual on the state (Steinmetz, 1993). He nonetheless accepted the existence of the social realm as an integral feature of capitalism, but advocated a more rational and progressive social policy in the overall ‘national’ interest and a direct role for organized labour in negotiations over working conditions. Workers ought to be subjects and not merely objects of state policy. In Weber’s words, ‘we see the comradeliness and class dignity that develops in this way as a positive cultural value’ (in Mommsen, 1984: 120). While accepting Marx’s idea that class struggle was inherent to capitalism, Weber nonetheless rejected socialist pretensions that class antagonism, like political conflict in general, could ever be overcome. Weber famously defined the state by its violent means, the means of physical force, not by any purported ‘social’ ends. The provision of welfare was a means to the end of state power. As he put it:

In the final analysis, in spite of all ‘social welfare policies’, the whole course of the state’s inner political functions, of justice and administration, is repeatedly and unavoidably regulated by the objective pragmatism of ‘reasons of state’. The state’s absolute end is to safeguard (or to change) the external and internal distribution of power. … It is absolutely essential for every political association to appeal to the naked violence of coercive means … in the face of internal enemies. It is only this very appeal to violence that constitutes a political association. (1946: 334)

The social unification of the nation was required to counterbalance the fragmentation and antagonism caused by capitalism. At the same time, a strong Sozialstaat was necessary in the context of the power struggle between nations. The cultural value of social policy was in meeting the national requirements of geopolitics. Looking to England for inspiration, Weber argued that German workers needed to be co-opted, trained and educated into supporting a policy of national greatness (Barkawi, 1998; Shilliam, 2009). An imperial policy in uncivilized lands would create the conditions for the development of a politically mature citizenry.

The emergence of the social realm has an imperial genealogy; and there is, of course, a constitutive role for colonialism in the history of specific forms of social regulation. This is not only in the sense popular with English imperialists such as Joseph Chamberlain, admired by Weber and who, according to Carl Schmitt, viewed imperialism as ‘the solution to the social question’ (2006 [1950]: 330). But, as postcolonial theorists have shown, European ideas about the nature and character of modern ‘society’ itself were conceived in opposition to the barbarism found in the colonies (Bhambra, 2007). The imaginary social contract between citizen and state, the idea of sovereign individuals creating a bourgeois civil society, was obviously absent in colonial contexts. ‘Founded in force’, writes Gyan Prakash of a dominant imperial view:

the colonial state was a Hobbesian colossus that acted upon and constituted a society deemed unable to self-constitute and self-regulate. Because the indigenous society did not resemble the European bourgeois civil society, [many] colonizers concluded that society qua society was absent. … What was acknowledged to exist prior to the colonial state was not society, but something else — races, tribes, castes and clans. Not surprisingly, the colonies became the location for the development of the discipline of anthropology, not sociology, … the classic discipline of European modernity. (2002: 82)

Rather than a timeless and wholly ‘European’ concept, the social and subsequent forms of social regulation rose in a context deeply shaped by the encounter between Europeans and non-Europeans and related ideas about the sovereign individual and civilizing role of capital. Many of the practices associated with the 19th-century transformation of bourgeois civil society to the social welfare state, such as population classification and surveillance, were developed in the colonial context (Kaplan, 1995).

This section has argued that two of the founding practitioners/scholars of realpolitik intervened directly in debates about the meaning of the social, especially the appropriate forms of social intervention to create an autonomous state. The rational bureaucratic state was responsible for protecting workers, now increasingly conceived as the national people, against the worst humiliations of being dependent on the system of wage labour. The European nation-state became not only the possessor of so-called ‘legitimate’ violence, as Weber understood it, but more importantly the expected protector of the life process within specific ‘societies’. To point to the way in which state administrators regulate the social for the consciously conceived ends of realpolitik is not to make a ‘realist’ argument about the nature and character of the social or of counterinsurgency, as we will discuss. Rather it is the basis of the claim that a political realist paradigm of social regulation as a strategy of containment is at work in the United States’ counterinsurgency theory and practice. Paradigms of social regulation matter because, as Steinmetz has put it, they ‘represent different ways of imagining the social realm and its fault lines, or trying to (re)organize it’ (1993: 41). ‘Population-centric’ warfare is an attempt to answer a variation on the ‘Social Question’, to stem the tide of crisis caused by the further rise and expansion of imperial states.

The Social Question in counterinsurgency

The forms of violence that have plagued Afghanistan since the 2001 overthrow of the Taliban government are a complex of diffuse rural insurgency, counterinsurgency and inter-communal and sectarian conflict, all including violence directly targeted at civilians (Jones, 2009). These struggles occur in a context in which coalitions are shaped above all by patronage, patriarchy, personal loyalty and protection. Conquests and invasions for centuries have contributed to the multiplicity of ethnic groups and cultures that constitute the texture of the largely tribal territory, especially in areas populated by Pashtuns. Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world and the reach of the central government has always been politically and geographically limited (Bossin, 2004). Given the absence of a lasting legacy of centralization, the Afghan ‘social realm’ has been limited in depth and scope. Efforts at ‘internal imperialism’ have failed to endure (Dupree, 1980). This is not to say that there have been no previous efforts to centralize state power or implement modern ‘social’ programmes. Abdur Rahman, the ‘Iron Amir’, first consolidated the centralized Afghan state through the imposition of direct rule and taxes during his reign (1880–1901). However, his development of state industries, as Barfield notes, ‘simply equipped his military with modern arms and raised revenues for his government. They had no transformative impact on the Afghan economy because they were located almost exclusively in Kabul and required imported raw materials’ (2010: 161). During the 1950s and 1960s, the United States attempted ‘modernization’ in southern Afghanistan, attempting to create ‘a showcase of nation building with a dazzling project to “reclaim” and modernize a swath of territory comprising roughly half the country’ (Cullather, 2003: 23). Under communist rule during the mid-1970s, there were attempts at land, marriage and education reform. However, in the absence of an enduring centralized power structure and ‘national’ economy, US counterinsurgency has been forced to rely heavily on forms of local social governance.

At the level of stated doctrine, the first principle guiding counterinsurgency is the recognition of the absolute primacy of ‘politics’, especially the aims of insurgents, and the necessity of separating insurgents from their supportive base (Galula, 2006 [1964]). Insurgent tactics call for fighters to meld back into the local population after a raid on occupying or government forces. Against a technologically superior and better-organized military, insurgents are more effective if dispersed, making them more difficult to attack. For counterinsurgents, there is a desperate need to bring the enemy to battle and separate insurgents from any local or cross-border support. However, if insurgency is not primarily a military act, then — short of totally annihilating all insurgents and their supporters — there can be no such thing as a purely military response to even semi-popular armed uprisings against a governing authority. The aim cannot be to achieve a decisive military victory as such, but to pacify and co-opt the population whom insurgents wish to govern. In conjunction with governance reform (the so-called ‘political’) and economic development (the capitalist), this is to be achieved through the provision of a sufficient level of essential social services (social policy). So conceived, the struggle between insurgents and counterinsurgents is in no small measure a struggle over the terms of social governance. Both insurgency and counterinsurgency can be viewed as forms of protracted military struggle over social governance in which the population is the centre of gravity.

The scale of thinking through the historical and theoretical implications of the rise of the social realm is immense. To repeat, the social emerged as the hybrid space between capitalist economy and state institutions. The exchange of labour for a wage occurred in a newly conceived ‘private’ realm. Yet, crucially, the condition of capitalist exchange remained ‘publicly’ relevant, a matter of state concern and intervention. The reproduction of life was no longer a matter primarily left to the household, as in the classical oikos or feudal manor. It required public regulation and protection in the interests of what was presented as ‘society as a whole’. During the 19th century, the social realm was transformed in response to the threat posed by working-class unrest and the creation of a series of devices that culminated in European welfare states. The very first Sozialstaat linked social welfare to the underlying purpose of the state. It is argued here that important elements of US counterinsurgency are in the tradition of applying realpolitik to internal populations, a political realist paradigm for expanding socialpolitik for reasons of state. Military and political strategists implicitly ask whether it is possible, and if so how, to successfully create an Afghan social realm as a form of pacification, an entity that can be intervened in and regulated to counter the military and political authority of the purported enemies of the United States. This is to be achieved through building the legitimacy of the existing client government; strengthening the capacity of national security forces to control the use of force emanating from ‘Afghan’ territory; and, of course, ‘modernizing’/privatizing the economy (Suhrke, 2007). These are the ingredients for the creation of a social realm through which ‘the root causes of societal discontent’ can be addressed through social policy (usually described as ‘reconstruction’), in addition to the central task of military operations against insurgents.

For David Kilcullen (2007a, 2007b), adviser to General Petraeus, the role of national government structures is to penetrate ‘society’; regulate social relationships; extract resources; and apply resources to identified group ends (Migdal, 1988). This variation on Weber’s (1946: 334) understanding of the state’s ‘absolute end’ is also in the United States’ Field Manual. The key functions of the state are ‘to regulate social relationships, extract resources and take actions in the public’s name’ (FM-325: 1-115). The urgent task is to ‘secure’ and ‘develop’ the basic life processes of those conceived as a threat to prevailing order, less to protect than to constitute a ‘national’ people as a governable entity. For political realism, nationalism is the most powerful modern political ideology because it can be harnessed to bolster the territorial integrity of the state and mobilize the resources of ‘national power’ (Morgenthau, 1948). So-called ‘nation-building’ projects are an attempt to create ideological cement to hold together populations in particular territories that are governed primarily through social intervention. The scale of the task is reflected in the extent to which roughly one-quarter of the Field Manual discusses not only the practical ‘social’ policy elements of counterinsurgency, such as integrating civilian and military activities and related linguistic, legal and ethical issues, but also the broader sociological context/‘social network’ within which these activities are believed to occur.

What, according to the strategists, is the nature and character of ‘society’? In common with early theories of the social, the evolutionary language of development and medical/biological metaphors underpin ideas about both ‘society’ and successful counterinsurgency. In the words of the Field Manual, an initial stage of intervention attempts to ‘stop the bleeding’ where ‘operations are characterized by emergency first aid for the patient’ (‘Afghan society’). In a middle stage, ‘in-patient care/recovery’ is ‘characterized by efforts aimed at assisting the patient through long-term recovery or restoration of health’. The last stage is analogous to outpatient care and the movement to ‘self-sufficiency’ (FM-325: 5-4-5), the ideal self-regulating social realm. Indeed, if ‘society’ is a body, the Manual notes, then ‘social structure’ is the skeleton and culture provides ‘the muscle on the bones’. Culture and social structure are mutually constitutive and unable to function and survive without each other; ‘a change in one results in a change in the other’ (FM-325: 3-36). The use of such metaphors in ‘social’ thinking, that social development ‘corresponds to the biological process of the human body’, arises because, as Arendt put it, the ‘life process’ is being channelled into the public realm and ‘life itself’ is imagined to depend on it (1958: 87, 7). The social realm, recall, is a hybrid of polis and oikos, public realm and household, the organization in which the life process of its members is reproduced.

The question of how to integrate diverse populations into a coherent and functioning social body is conceived as a culturally embedded process made possible by intervention to create the required institutional and cultural order. On one level, as rational choice theorists would note, counterinsurgency relies on populations making an instrumental calculation that their social and security needs are more likely to be met by the host government, supported by the United States, than by insurgents or unreliable ‘tribal leaders’ (even though some local ‘strongmen’ are relied on as a short-term expediency) (Coyne, 2008). As populations feel that they have a stake in the stability and success of central power, whether national or provincial, the insurgency will lose its actual or potential support. Crucially, however, the struggle between insurgents and counterinsurgents is not wholly reduced to a rational choice. In common with basic social constructivist and political realist theory, armed conflict is also conceived as a struggle over the manipulation of identity (Berman et al., 2010). In this sense, the Manual adopts a form of ‘cultural realism’ that instrumentalizes culture and identity for military ends (Porter, 2009), the creation of Weber’s ‘positive cultural value’.

A panoply of actors are involved in the identification, provision and implementation of the social dimensions of counterinsurgency. That non-state actors are increasingly involved in the implementation of international social policy reflects how the Social Question is structured around the belief that ‘social’ problems cannot be reduced to either the actions of individuals or of states (Durkheim, 1997 [1893]). It is commonplace to note that the building of infrastructure and basic services in counterinsurgency involves new levels of coordination and the use of outside expertise from international organizations, NGOs and private companies (Andrews et al., 2007). The Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs), active in Afghanistan since 2003, are the most developed forms of civil–military cooperation in social governance, although their actual effectiveness certainly varies. The purpose of the PRTs has been to increase the perceived legitimacy of usually local government through ‘social’ work. Teams dig water canals; rehabilitate roads; improve farmers’ access to water; provide greater access to health care and education; create cash-for-work incentives to reduce poppy production; and build power plants allowing some electricity to flow. These ‘integrated missions’, in which war and attempts at ‘post’-conflict reconstruction occur simultaneously, involve ambitious forms of collaboration and networking. That such social work is not provided by unambiguously ‘public’ or ‘private’ actors is not novel in the history of the social realm. As Deleuze observed, the social ‘leads to a new hybrid form of the public and the private, and itself produces a repartition, a novel interlacing of interventions and withdrawals of the state’ (1979: x).

For example, realpolitik and capitalist ends can be achieved through the neoliberal restructuring (or rather invention) of Afghan ‘political economy’. Building on the Washington Consensus model of the standard reform package of privatization, the Land Titling and Economic Restructuring Program was funded by USAID but carried out by a private consultancy firm, Emerging Markets Group. The scheme replaced informal and communal land settlements with a new formal system of property rights, including the creation of 6.5 million legal documents. State-owned entities, public assets and land were liquidated and transferred to the private sector. The 14,500 state employees made redundant were given access to a state-fronted ‘Social Safety Net’. The World Bank-administered Reconstruction Trust Fund for Afghanistan has initiated further reforms in customs and revenue collection, the corporatization of public utilities and the regulation of extractive industries, such as copper, iron and lithium. With the expansion of markets through the actions of both the Afghan government and organizations such as the World Bank, there is a greater need for public (and private) regulation and control of economic activity. These ideologically driven transformations create a new distinction between state-public administration and privatized economy, the necessary condition for the rise of the intermediary and hybrid social realm.

As already indicated, the idea of ‘social construction’ of identity in counterinsurgency theory does not preclude the use of biological metaphors to imagine ‘social development’ and military success. Similarly, if the social realm is a hybrid of public realm and household, then given the traditional gendered division of labour in which women predominantly tend to the basic needs of life, we should expect to find the manipulation of gender roles and norms in more specific forms of social administration. In the cultural reproduction of capitalism, the well-ordered family household was historically the model for the well-ordered society composed of the relations between household heads protected by the masculinized/militarized state (Corrigan and Sayer, 1985). As such, social policies tend to seek to strengthen traditional/patriarchal family units given their ‘social’ function of managing ‘male’ and ‘female’ members. They also rely on reproductive arrangements in household systems in which women provide unpaid or low-wage labour in what is cast as a pre-contractual, pre-capitalist ‘natural’ arrangement (Peterson, 2003).

The Field Manual certainly recognizes the centrality of gender in social regulation, describing families as ‘a core institutional building block of social structure’ (FM-325: 3-36). In practice, there are a number of assumptions about appropriate male and female behaviours built into specific interventions. Indeed, since the beginning of ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’, Afghanistan has been ‘one of the largest gender-focussed aid interventions’ ever conducted (Abirafeh, 2009: 1). According to the Manual:

in traditional societies, women are hugely influential in forming the social networks that insurgents use for support. When the women support COIN efforts, family units support COIN efforts. … Co-opting neutral or friendly women through targeted social and economic programs builds networks of enlightened self-interest that eventually undermine the insurgents. (FM-325: A-35)

Forms of gender-specific intervention in Afghanistan include the provision of opportunities to acquire ‘marketable skills’, such as computer and English literacy to increase employability and ‘financial independence’. Other programmes steer women towards industries in which labour is (made) cheap, for example, traditional forms of embroidery which can earn two to three dollars a day (USAID, 2009). US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promised the UN that ‘All-women teams of Marines will be meeting with Afghan women in their homes to assess their needs’ (Clinton, 2010).

Above all, as indicated by the use of ‘gender-focused’ interventions, social policy is organized around the provision of specific benefits for those having what are imagined to be specific needs. While the scale of these programmes should not be exaggerated, it is a core feature of social policy, recognized in an earlier (June 2006) draft of the Field Manual, that groups of people are identified and differentiated ‘by their various capabilities, needs, and intentions’ (FM-325: B-18). The identification of such needs is carried out by experts — specialist think tanks, policy-planning groups and NGOs — all emphasizing the extent to which social problems are the result of objective conditions amenable to reform. These organizations single out certain scientific domains (such as disease prevention, water supply, electricity) and certain groups of people (such as women, children, refugees) in particular administrative locales (some newly created) and intervene to improve the situation of these domains and groups in measurable ways. As such, non-state organizations are able to ‘socialize’ the Social Question; they expand the possibilities of intervention into more and more areas of life. These are quintessentially ‘social’ distinctions based on ‘what’ (gender, religion, age, etc.) people are and what they endure because of their position in the social division of labour. These forms of ‘sociability’ are not based on the political equality of equals. They are rooted in social discrimination based on ‘sameness’ (Arendt, 1958: 213; for a discussion in relation to human security, see Owens, 2011a).

As noted in the Introduction, to situate the recent discourse and practice of population-centric warfare in the historical context of the rise of the social is not to say that the strategy’s architects have hit on a successful method of pacification and will somehow succeed in Afghanistan where others have failed. ² Just as earlier European state responses to the Social Question were piecemeal and opportunistic, efforts in Afghanistan have been haphazard, locally oriented and lacking in comprehensiveness. Like Bismarck’s ‘domestic’ application of realpolitik, the United States’ effort to destroy the military and political base of the Taliban network has not been a successful or even a totalizing project. At the time of writing, after nearly a decade of fighting, the US and its subordinate allies have been unable to subdue armed insurgents and create legitimacy for the post-Taliban regime. Moreover, the emphasis on population-centric warfare, the idea that war is fought ‘among the people’, should not detract from the continuing use of conventional forces and more covert special operations, which, in addition to increased use of private and conventional forces, expanded under Obama. From 2009, Special Forces have engaged in a greater number of night raids on homes, targeted assassinations of suspected enemy fighters and unmanned drone attacks, all with the inevitable result of large numbers of civilian dead. Nothing in the argument implies that an increase in social governance necessarily leads to a decrease in violence. In fact, it is possible to situate the so-called ‘counter-terrorism’ strategy (which has been distinguished from more ‘social’ forms of counterinsurgency in US government discourse; Anderson, 2010) within the framework of social regulation as a strategy of pacification. By simultaneously escalating the level of force, the United States is signalling to Afghan populations that the acceptance of social governance is the best way to mitigate the risk of becoming a victim of more violently invasive ‘counter-terrorist’ attacks. ³ Nonetheless, to the extent that populations in Afghanistan are conceived as posing a threat to existing order, we are more likely to see forms of ‘social’ intervention and wider efforts to create a functioning social realm.

Conclusion

In taking for granted the existence of the social, adopting the methods of the new science of ‘society’ to describe the deficiencies of neo-realism, much recent debate in international studies has centred on how rather than whether social theory is the place to begin constructing theories of world politics. International studies has under-theorized ‘the social’ in its historical specificity. In contrast, ‘social’ reformers in the 19th century consciously understood the social as the sphere in which the grievances of the workers could be partially addressed and their revolutionary potential mitigated. They were aware of the structuring facts that led the Social Question to be posed in the first place: the contradiction between democracy and capitalism, political freedom and economic dependence. The way in which the social is conceived and regulated changes, driven by military and economic transformation, and the extent to which those in positions of power are threatened by disorder. In our case study, social forms of counterinsurgency face the intense contradiction between seeking to create and manage a social realm in the context of an imperial civilizing mission, while imposing order through violence and ‘social’ engineering. Perhaps the extent to which the recent ‘social turn’ in international studies has accepted a certain kind of analysis of ‘social’ institutions it is part of the tradition of thought that perpetuates the governance and regulation of populations through social administration. Existing theories of international politics, almost all derived from the ideologies of the 19th century — and hence parasitic on the Social Question — appear ill-equipped to do more than reproduce ‘social’ discourse.

Population-centric warfare has been informed not only by the strategic and tactical mistakes of the past, as suggested by technical ‘lessons-learned’ accounts. It incorporates claims and ambitions touching on much of the tradition of Western political thought. As Wendy Brown has observed, the Field Manual ‘requires — from the US military no less — a degree of political intelligence and foresight worthy of Rousseau’s Lawgiver, a degree of provision for human needs worthy of the farthest reach of the communist imaginary, a degree of stabilization through governance worthy of Thomas Hobbes … an ability to “decipher cultural narratives” … worthy of a trained ethnographer, and an ability to manipulate these narratives worthy of Plato’ (2008: 354). Foreign policy realists are sceptical of the scale of ‘social’ engineering called for by counterinsurgency doctrine. However, the tradition of political realism is deeply implicated in the rise of social administration as a strategy of depoliticization. Neoliberal institutionalism points to the significant role of non-state ‘public’ and ‘private’ actors in transnational governance. But as heirs to the first advocates of bourgeois civil society they are insufficiently critical of the exploitation and domination concealed by social governance and its supporting ideologies. Theorists of biopolitics rightly point to increasing levels of intervention into and management of the biological life of populations. However, this form of power is less the essence of modern relations of domination than one element of the rise of the social. Moreover, the biopolitical framework has not, to date, adequately distinguished between the concrete historical development of the social realm and the nature and character of politics, properly understood.

All visions of the social realm and related answers to the Social Question depend on an underlying conception of the political. For political realists, the fundamentally political character of the regulation of the social is the creation of governable populations where they not did previously exist. For Weber, it was the supreme task of the autonomous state to subordinate ‘domestic’ social problems to the national requirements of geopolitics and the realities of life under capitalism. The otherwise radicalized proletariat was to be anaesthetized by the potent combination of social security, militarism and the externalization of the enemy. For Carl Schmitt, the limited redistribution of wealth demanded by the Social Question was a fundamentally political act in disguise, a quintessentially liberal neutralization and depoliticization of the friend–enemy opposition of class antagonism. Social law, he argued, serves to ‘protect one and disarm the other’ (2006 [1950]: 332, fn. 17). Political realism embraces the social and uses it for strategic ends. Politics itself emerges as little more than a necessary evil in which force and law restrain the violence humans inflict on each other. On this view, the best we can say about the distinct mode of political life is the sorry claim that to be political is, at best, to rule through legitimated domination. Politics is reduced to a means to an end outside of politics and must be judged according to these presumably higher ends. It implies the absence of a fundamental distinction between forms of social governance in counterinsurgency and those in the liberal democracies of the West. The difference is the degree of violence. In both, politics is reduced to a ‘mere function of “society” destined to protect the productive, social side of human nature through governmental administration’ (Arendt, 1958: 159).

From another perspective, the invention and regulation of the social through force is fundamentally anti-political; the notion that politics is little more than a function of ‘society’ is bourgeois ideology that undermines the possibility of properly political relations (for this argument in relation to the modern concept of security, see Owens, 2011b). For if ‘social animal’ is not as good a definition of Aristotle’s ‘zoon politikon’ as an alternative definition, if the social and the political were not conflated, they might somehow be imagined as fundamentally at odds. Aristotle did not believe that to be sociable and political were the same. Of course, Marx was right that every achievement of human community requires the prior satisfaction of the needs of the life process. But humans are not only a ‘species-being’, like every other living thing. If the meaning of politics is the freedom to act in concert with plural equals and involves the creation of a public world in-between people as they debate their common affairs, then politics has its own meaning, distinctions and separate logic that cannot, even in the modern period, be reduced to different strategies for managing capitalism’s and imperialism’s ‘social’ problems (Arendt, 1958; Wolin, 1987). The rise of the social and the triumph of social regulation have obscured what is specifically political about politics. To the extent that international studies is a product of the modern rise of the social and the ideologies that debated the Social Question, there is no international theory that comes close to capturing the meaning of politics as an end in itself and not a means to some other ‘social’ end.