Introduction

To read Law, Society, and Industrial Justice today is to step back into a world of apparently limitless optimism: the world of New Deal America, Wagner Act collectivism, and corporations with a conscience. Selznick's main theme is law and social progress, observed in the particular context of organizations that are in the process, we are told, of becoming civilized. In both the public and the private sectors, organizations are tending of themselves toward bureaucratic, rule-bound forms of management that will leave them ripe for development into sites of industrial democracy and industrial citizenship, provided only that trade unions give them a final push in the right direction. While there are strong echoes of structural functionalism in the mode of analysis, there is consideration, too, of questions of agency and of politics. This is postwar American sociology at its best.

Viewed in the light of what has happened since— the shareholder value revolution of the 1980s and the subsequent fissuring and fracturing of postwar systems of labor law and industrial relations— Selznick's optimism may appear not only limitless but also misplaced. Working relations today are increasingly casualized and precarious; trade unions have been side-lined; new methods of production can obviate the need for employers to treat their workforces well in order to ensure their loyalty and committed engagement with the tasks assigned to them. Especially in the wake of Covid-19 and the mass move to working from home that it has occasioned, there are, for a growing number of workers, no employing organizations in the physical sense assumed by Selznick: places where workers meet with coworkers and managers on a daily basis. In such circumstances, the prospects for a reconstruction of industrial justice, of dignity for workers and postindustrial democracy, appear bleak indeed. Can anything be learned or retained from Selznick's study, or is it by now a work of historical curiosity only?

In the first part of this chapter, we offer an extended discussion of Law, Society, and Industrial Justice, focusing on Selznick's vision of industrial justice and industrial citizenship and on his discussion of social and legal change.

Reflecting on the future of the Left we are too easily drawn into debates on what needs to be done to “solve our problems” – end exploitation, establish global peace, reverse the rise of inequality, restore the balance between nature and society. This begs the question of who wants those problems solved and is willing to do something, the right thing, to this end. Who is The Left, or can become it, apart from those of “us” who want to see it recreated and re-empowered because without it our reflections will never be more than idle chatter? Who are our constituents, our popular base waiting to be mobilized and organized, our class an sich whose interests, and indeed whose practicable interests, we can hope to define so as to coincide with the general interests of mankind?

VANISHING CONSTITUENCIES

Surveying the social landscape of the advanced capitalist societies from which we hail and which we know best, many of us have sympathy with and still feel somehow indebted to the old working class, the generation of trade union and left party members under postwar democratic, state-administered capitalism. Many of them are now retired, or about to retire. Their industries, the factories where they have toiled, have shrunk or disappeared, leaving them behind in their now depressed and decaying local communities. Their labour is no longer die quelle allen reichtums, they now depend for their livelihood on a society more-or-less willing to pay for their pensions and healthcare. In a neoliberal, turbo-capitalist society, such dependence is a stigma. Even where governments and the public treat them respectfully, the legitimacy of the social entitlements their generation has instituted is fragile, as indicated by recurring discussions on pension reform and healthcare costs. “Grandfather clauses” freezing benefits for current recipients that the next generation will not receive further de-legitimate the welfare state in its present form. They also reinforce perceptions of the old working class as an unproductive surplus population that, fortunately, will wither away with time.

When we were young, we sometimes found solace in the belief that “the revolution advances on the mortality tables”.

According to Mahoney and Rueschemeyer (2003), comparative-historical analysis looks for “historically grounded explanations of large-scale and substantively important outcomes” (4). It aims at the “identification of causal configurations that produce major outcomes of interest” (11), paying explicit attention to “historical sequences” while “take[ing] seriously the unfolding of processes over time” (12) and relying on “systematic and contextualized comparison of similar and contrasting cases” (13). In the same vein, Thelen and Mahoney, in their introductory chapter to the present volume, characterize comparative-historical analysis by “its focus on macro configurational explanation” and on “problem-driven case-based research” as well as “its commitment to temporally oriented analysis.”

In this essay I undertake to place comparative-historical analysis in the context of the history of the social sciences, to show where it comes from and where not, what if anything is new or unique about it, and in what respects it differs from or resembles classical traditions of inquiry. My objective is to clarify some of the foundational assumptions underlying present-day comparative- historical analysis through comparison with similar but different approaches, historical and contemporary. My central claim is that comparative-historical analysis rests on a particular ontology of the social world that is historically new and characteristically unlike the ontologies underlying other, related modes of social science research and theory.

To begin with, comparative-historical analysis assumes that there are large (“macro”) social structures in the real world (“societies”) that can be classified into categories, or families, of “cases” similar in some respects while differing in others. Examples of families of cases for comparative-historical analysis are nation-states, supranational or subnational regions, local communities, sectoral or international regimes, local or national economies, and institutionalized religions, cultures, and value systems. Cases are seen as subject to a historical dynamic; rather than being fixed once and for all, they are changing over time. Furthermore, some of the differences between cases, cross-sectional as well as diachronic, are considered fundamental: they are assumed to matter in ways important enough to justify systematic efforts at understanding not just their present consequences but also their origins.

Can being governed by a state that is not fully sovereign be anything other than a crippling disadvantage for a country? In his seminal analysis of post-war West Germany, Peter Katzenstein suggests it can. Indeed he argues that precisely not having command of full state capacities afforded West Germany more effective governance than comparable countries. This was because semisovereignty, according to Katzenstein, protected the West German state from counterproductive illusions of omnipotence other states at the time still held, and forced it to cultivate means of public policy other than direct state control – means much better matched than traditional state intervention to the evolving problems of governance in a changing world.

Successful semisovereign governance, in Katzenstein's sense, rests on two pillars. First, a fragmented, decentralised state whose capacities for direct intervention are limited must learn to make deals with independent actors in civil society which command their own sort of sovereignty which cannot be ignored or circumvented. A state of this sort must, therefore, be a ‘co-operative state’ (Wilke 1983), one that governs more by negotiation and co-optation than by legal command (Scharpf 1993). Where this works – in a political system that has learned to build a culture and develop techniques of indirect control – independent social organisations and institutions with their guaranteed autonomy and power turn into agents of publicly licensed self-government, under the roof of a negotiated public order of which the state is just one element among others, although a pivotal one (Streeck and Schmitter 1984).

The modern territorial state and the capitalist market economy superseded a political–economic order that consisted of a plethora of corporate communities endowed with traditional rights and obligations, such as churches, estates, cities, and guilds. Organized collectivities of all sorts, more or less closely related to the economic division of labor, regulated cooperation and competition among their members and negotiated their relations with each other. While themselves changing under the impact of modernization, they often resisted the rise of territorial bureaucratic rule and the spread of market relations, sometimes well into the twentieth century. But ultimately they proved unable to prevent the victory of the state form of political organization and of the self-regulating market as the dominant site of economic exchange. Modern liberalism, both political and economic, in turn aimed at abolishing all forms of intermediary organization that intervene between the individual and the state or the market. In the end, however, it failed to eliminate collectivism and had to accommodate itself to both political faction and economic cooperation.

Twenty-first-century political communities are all organized by territorial nation-states. But these had to learn to incorporate organized collectivities and elements of a collective–associative order in their different configurations of bureaucratic hierarchy and free markets. Variation among modern types of government, between the utopian extremes of anarchosyndicalism and Rousseauian radical liberalism, rotates around the relationship between territorial and associative rule (Table 22.1).

Economists have succeeded in persuading most people that the performance of an economy improves as social constraints on self-interested rational action are removed. In this essay I wish to argue that, to the contrary, socially institutionalized constraints on the rational voluntarism of interest-maximizing behavior may be economically beneficial, and that systematic recognition of this must have far-reaching implications for both economic theory and the conduct of economic policy.

Note that I am referring not to social but to economic benefits of social constraints, and to constraint rather than choice. In other words, I am not discussing whether or not societies may or should impose constraints on economic behavior for moral reasons; even most economists agree that people should not be allowed to sell and buy babies, regardless of whether this was the free will and perceived rational interest of all parties involved. And I am arguing for the economic benevolence not of individual freedom, but of limitations on individual volition and the pursuit of self-interest. To support high economic performance, I am claiming, a society requires a capacity to prevent advantage-maximizing rational individuals from doing things that they would prefer to do, or to force them to do things that they would prefer not to do.

The suggestion that social institutions constraining the rational voluntarist pursuit of economic advantage, and thereby interfering with the spread and operation of markets, may be economically beneficial directly contests the leading premises of mainstream economics with its laissez-faire conceptual heritage, and strikes right into the heart of darkness of liberal individualism.

The end of the cold war and the disappearance of socialism as a major political-economic force opened the way for important changes in the capitalist world. These changes were of at least two types. On the one hand, the cessation of cold war hostilities between the United States and the Soviet Union downgraded the role of military in favor of economic power. This shift, in turn, increased the international standing of Europe and Japan at the expense of the United States, since the former are much stronger economically than militarily. On the other hand, the disappearance of socialism as an economic system focused attention on the differences among models of capitalism. In the 1990s, much more heed is being paid to variations in the ways of doing business in the United States, Europe, and Japan. While neither of these trends is totally new, the changed international panorama since the fall of the Berlin Wall greatly increased their salience.

For theorists and practitioners alike, a major question concerns the characteristics of the post–cold war international political economy. At the macro structural level, debate centers on whether the emerging system will be a multilateral, interdependent one, with close cooperation among capitalist powers, or a regionalized one consisting of trade and investment “blocs” in North America, Europe, and Asia. Our argument is that both of these processes are happening and will continue to do so. This simultaneity, which we call “nonhegemonic interdependence,” results in an unstable situation.