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A critical-sympathetic introduction to Linklater’s odyssey: Bridge over troubled (Eurocentric?) water

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 September 2017

John M. Hobson
John M. Hobson*
Affiliation:
Professor, Politics and International Relations, University of Sheffield
*
* Correspondence to: John M. Hobson, Department of Politics, University of Sheffield, Elmfield, Northumberland Road, Sheffield, S. Yorkshire, S10 2TN, UK. Author’s email: J.M.Hobson@sheffield.ac.uk
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Abstract

This article provides an ‘engaged’ introduction to this forum on Andrew Linklater’s recently published book, Violence and Civilization in the Western States-Systems. I call this ‘engaged’ because I seek to adjudicate between the critics and Linklater’s book in the hope of building a bridge over troubled water. Given that the key word that underpins many of this forum’s contributions is Eurocentrism, I explore whether, and if so to what extent, Linklater’s book is Eurocentric. While I too identify various Eurocentric cues, I also provide various defences for Linklater. In particular, the final section advances two definitions of Eurocentrism and anti-Eurocentrism. Although I identify elements of ‘Eurocentrism I’ (the elision of non-Western agency and reification of the West) in his book, Linklater might respond to the principal forum complaint that he accords little or no role to non-Western actors and processes in the Western or global civilizing process by appealing to an alternative anti-Eurocentric approach: ‘anti-Eurocentrism II’ (which focuses squarely on Western imperial power and ignores or heavily downplays non-Western agency). I close by critiquing his left-liberal cosmopolitan politics, arguing that his Eurocentric-universalist normative posture cannot create the kind of peaceful and harmonious world that he (and Kant) so desires.

Keywords

EurocentrismEliasian Historical SociologyEnglish SchoolCosmopolitanismCivilizing ProcessCivilization/Barbarism
Type
Forum: Linklater’s Violence and Civilization in the Western States-Systems
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 43 , Issue 4 , October 2017 , pp. 581 - 601
Copyright
© British International Studies Association 2017 

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References

1 Linklater, Andrew, Violence and Civilization in the Western States-Systems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)Google Scholar.

2 The first volume being: Linklater, Andrew, The Problem of Harm in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 On this see Linklater, The Problem of Harm, p. 178.

4 See Buzan, Barry and Lawson, George, The Global Transformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.

5 See Berlin, Isaiah, The Hedgehog and the Fox (London: Orion Books, 1992)Google Scholar.

6 See, for example, Lawson, George, ‘The promise of historical sociology in International Relations’, International Studies Review, 8:3 (2006), pp. 397–424 Google Scholar; Hobson, J. M., ‘Reconfiguring Elias: Historical sociology, the English School, and the challenge of International Relations’, Human Figurations, 1:2 (2012), available at: {http://quod.lib.umich.edu/h/humfig/11217607.0001.206/--reconfiguring-elias-historical-sociology-the-english-school?rgn=main;view=fulltext Google Scholar}.

7 Mann, Michael, The Sources of Social Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

8 Said, Edward W., Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1978)Google Scholar.

9 See, for example, Anghie, Antony, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Bowden, Brett, The Empire of Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

10 de Sousa Santos, Boaventura, ‘Beyond abyssal thinking: From global lines to ecologies of knowledges’, Review, 30:1 (2007), pp. 45–89 Google Scholar.

11 Hobson, J. M., The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics: Western International Theory 1760–2010 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)Google Scholar, chs 1, 13.

12 But see fn. 13.

13 Nevertheless, there is also an anti-imperialist Eurocentrism that grants, albeit a highly qualified, notion of developmental agency to non-Western societies (to which I return in the Conclusion); see Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics, ch. 3. And herein lies a potential anti-Eurocentric cue for those Eliasians who want to argue that the civilizing process also occurred in non-Western states-systems/societies on the condition that local contexts and cultural-specificities are taken into account – as Chong and Mennell argue in this forum (see also Linklater, Violence and Civilization, p. 14) – and that these also impact the Western- and global-civilizing processes.

14 Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics, pp. 319–25.

15 Linklater, Violence and Civilization, p. 93.

16 Elias, Norbert, The Court Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983 [orig. pub. 1969])Google Scholar; Elias, Norbert, The Civilizing Process (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994 [orig. pub. 1939])Google Scholar.

17 Elias, The Civilizing Process, pp. 1–256. Of the countless examples that Elias discusses, here are two excerpts from Middle Age treatises on table manners: ‘[i]t is unseemly to blow your nose on the tablecloth’; and ‘[d]o not spit over or on the table’; cited on pp. 118, 125.

18 Carr, E. H., Nationalism and After (London: Macmillan, 1945); Carr, E. H., The New Society (London: Macmillan, 1951)Google Scholar; Morgenthau, Hans J., Politics Among Nations (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1978 [orig. pub. 1948])Google Scholar.

19 Linklater, Violence and Civilization, p. 8, fn. 1.

20 Ibid., p. 3.

21 Ibid., pp. 137–47.

22 Ibid., pp. 226–51.

23 Ibid., ch. 6.

24 See Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics, pp. 222–33.

25 Linklater, Violence and Civilization, p. 233.

26 Ibid., p. 434.

27 Ibid., pp. 245–61.

28 Ibid., p. 257.

29 Interestingly, Craig Murphy tells me (in private correspondence) that the Quakers and Wilberforcians who pushed for the abolition of the slave trade were following the intellectual leadership of African men and women.

30 Tinker, Hugh, A New System of Slavery (London: Hansib, 1993)Google Scholar.

31 Linklater, Violence and Civilization, p. 260.

32 Ibid., p. 259.

33 Ibid., p. 445, emphasis added.

34 Ibid., p. 445, emphasis added.

35 Ibid., p. 442.

36 Hobson, J. M., ‘The “R-word” and “E-word” controversies: a dialogue with my five interlocutors’, Postcolonial Studies, 19:2 (2016), pp. 210–226 Google Scholar.

37 Wallerstein, Immanuel, ‘Eurocentrism and its avatars: the dilemmas of social science’, New Left Review, I:226 (1997), pp. 93–108 Google Scholar; Sajed, Alina and Inayatullah, Naeem, ‘On the perils of lifting the weight of structures: an engagement with Hobson’s critique of the discipline of IR’, Postcolonial Studies, 19:2 (2016), pp. 201–209 Google Scholar.

38 Cf. Michael Mann’s response to the Eurocentric charge; see Lawson, George, ‘A conversation with Michael Mann’, Millennium, 34:2 (2005), p. 483 Google Scholar.

39 Wallerstein, ‘Eurocentrism and its avatars’, p. 102.

40 For a fuller response to ‘anti-Eurocentrism II’, see Hobson, ‘The “R-word” and “E-word” controversies’, pp. 211–17. And for a fascinating, related discussion, see Kuru, Deniz, ‘Historicizing Eurocentrism and Anti-Eurocentrism in IR: a revisionist account of disciplinary self-reflexivity’, Review of International Studies, 42:2 (2016), pp. 351–376 Google Scholar.

41 I thank one of the reviewers for pushing me on this point.

42 Said, Orientalism.

43 Elias, The Civilizing Process.

44 For a full discussion see Hobson, J. M., The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), chs 5–9 Google Scholar, 11.

45 Watson, Adam, The Evolution of International Society (London: Routledge, 2009 [orig. pub. 1992]), pp. 177–181 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 216; see also Anievas, Alexander and Nişancioğlu, Kerem, How the West Came to Rule (London: Pluto, 2015), ch. 4 Google Scholar.

46 Watson, The Evolution of International Society, p. 218.

47 Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation, pp. 173–83; Al-Hassani, Salim T. S., Woodcock, Elizabeth, and Saoud, Rabah (eds), 1001 Inventions (Manchester: FSTC, 2007)Google Scholar.

48 Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation, ch. 2.

49 Linklater, Violence and Civilization, pp. 201–7.

50 Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation, pp. 59, 186–9.

51 J. M. Hobson, ‘Desegregating IPE’ (unpublished manuscript).

52 Linklater, Violence and Civilization, ch. 7.

53 For Smith’s and Kant’s propensity for anti-imperialism and ‘tolerance of the other’ see respectively, Pitts, Jennifer, A Turn to Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005)Google Scholar and Muthu, Sankar, Enlightenment Against Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

54 Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics, pp. 62–6, 74–8. However, there were other ‘radical Enlightenment’ thinkers who were pro-imperialist, Bishop Abbé Raynal being one whom Linklater locates within this tradition; Linklater, Violence and Civilization, pp. 293–303. As was Norman Angell despite Linklater’s claim that he was ‘heir to the radical Enlightenment’, ibid., pp. 239–40. See Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics, pp. 40–5. My point being that Linklater is in danger of painting the ‘radical’ strand of the Enlightenment as too monolithic and anti-imperialist as well as too progressive and ‘tolerant’ of the Other.

55 Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics, pp. 66–74, 78–83; Hall, Martin and Hobson, J. M., ‘Liberal international theory: Eurocentric but not always Imperialist’, International Theory, 2:2 (2010), pp. 210–245 Google Scholar.

56 For his Eurocentric political writings, see Kant, Immanuel, Kant’s Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970)Google Scholar. For three of Kant’s scientific racist tracts, see Immanuel Kant, in Chukwudi Eze, Emmanuel (ed.), Race and the Enlightenment (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 38–64 Google Scholar. Interestingly, although Linklater concedes that Kant held scientific racist views, nevertheless he reiterates Muthu’s claim that these preceded Kant’s later political writings on liberal cosmopolitanism; see Linklater, Violence and Civilization, p. 278; Muthu, Enlightenment Against Empire, pp. 181–4. But both these sets of writings were penned in the latter part of Kant’s life.

57 See also fn. 55; Muthu, Enlightenment Against Empire, pp. 187–8, 192; Brown, Garrett W., Grounding Cosmopolitanism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), pp. 59–66 Google Scholar. But see Bowden, The Empire of Civilization, pp. 147–8.

58 Kant, Kant’s Political Writings, pp. 106–7.

59 Ibid., pp. 108, 172, 173.

60 Ibid., pp. 219–20; also p. 45.

61 Ibid., p. 102.

62 Tully, James, ‘The Kantian idea of Europe: Critical and cosmopolitan perspectives’, in Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Idea of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 344 Google Scholar.

63 Ibid.

64 This is complemented by ‘worldism’ (derived from Daoism) and the Indian-Dharmic notion of Sapekshata; see respectively Ling, L. H. M., The Dao of World Politics (New York: Routledge, 2014)Google Scholar; Malhotra, Rajiv, Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2011)Google Scholar.