Methodological nationalism and the domestic analogy: classical resources for their critique

Abstract

The critique of methodological nationalism arose in the 1970s in sociology, but it only gained salience with the rise of globalization theory in the late 1990s. This article argues that in International Relations the discussion of the so-called ‘domestic analogy’ is closely connected to the one on methodological nationalism as they equally point to the substantive problem of understanding the nation state's position in modernity. The first section of this article revisits the three waves of the debate on methodological nationalism in sociology. The second part connects this with the discussion in IR on the domestic analogy. The last section brings the two disciplinary strands together by suggesting that social theory's claim to universalism is a fundamental resource to theorize current global processes beyond methodological nationalism and the domestic analogy. But for us to do so, we still have to unpack social theory's ambivalent relationship with the natural law tradition.

Notes

This article is part of a wider research project into the relationship between social theory and natural law that receives financial support from the Chilean Council for Science and Technology (Grant 1080213). My gratitude to José Maurício Domingues and Frederic Vandenberghe for inviting me to present this paper at IUPERJ's Theory Forum in Rio de Janeiro in December 2008. My thanks also to William Outhwaite for suggesting my name to the editors of this forum, George Lawson and Robbie Shilliam, whose extraordinary editorial work went well beyond the call of duty. As ever, I am deeply indebted to Robert Fine for comments to an early version of this article and beyond.

¹ The exact quotation in which Martins (1974, 276) came up with the term ‘methodological nationalism’ also bears the mark of a critique of Parsons: ‘[i]n the last three decades or so the principle of immanent change has largely coincided with a general presumption—supported by a great variety of scholars in the entire spectrum of sociological opinion—that the “total” or “inclusive society”, in effect the nation-state, be deemed to be the standard, optimal or even maximal “isolate” for sociological analysis … a kind of methodological nationalism … imposes itself in practice with national community as the terminal unit and boundary condition for the demarcation of problems and phenomena for social science’ (emphasis added).

² These criticisms fall, in my view, short of an adequate understanding of Parsonian sociology. And more importantly when it comes to the question of understanding the nation state, they seem to have prevented the use of Parsons' own contributions to the very issues that got the debate on the critique of methodological nationalism going (Chernilo 2007a, 77–93).

³ In Beck's formulation (2002, 51–52), the ‘national organization as a structuring principle of societal and political action can no longer serve as a premise for the social science observer perspective. In this sense, social science can only react to the challenge of globalization adequately if it manages to overcome methodological nationalism, and if it manages to raise empirically and theoretically fundamental questions within specialized fields of research and thus elaborate the foundations of a cosmopolitan social and political science’. See Chernilo (2006) on the shortcomings of Beck's critique of methodological nationalism.

⁴ It is curious to note, for instance, how Rosenberg (2005) echoes almost to the word the kind of criticisms to classical sociology put forward by the same globalization theorists he has so duly, and vehemently, criticized. The problem lies, in my view, in the methodological way in which he finds the whole canon of social theory at fault—‘Montesquieu, Rousseau, Smith, Condorcet, Malthus, Saint-Simon, Comte, Tocqueville, Marx, Mill, Spencer, Tönnies, Weber, Durkheim, Pareto and Simmel’—only to give later all the credit to a single towering Figure (in his case, Leon Trotsky) (2006, 336–337). There is something troublingly fascinating indeed in this obsession to criticize classical social theory for having had no theory of the national (Smith 1983), the nation state (Wimmer and Schiller 2002), the international (Rosenberg 2006), the global (Shaw 2000; Scholte 2000) or the cosmopolitan (Beck 2006).

⁵ I believe Bull misrepresents Kant's position as if best represented in the notion of a political community of all human beings. Even when Bull (1977, 244, 322) acknowledges that Kant's cosmopolitanism explicitly advocates for a ‘league of “republican states”’, he wrongly treats that league as a ‘substitute goal’ (Bottici 2003; Habermas 2001; Huntley 1996; Fine 2007). More on this below.

⁶ In sociology, such possibility is readily available in Niklas Luhmann's notion of a world society (Luhmann 1977; Stichweh 2000). Luhmann's work has been introduced into IR by Mathias Albert and his colleagues at Bielefeld University. See, for example, Albert and Hilkermeier (2004).

⁷ The natural law tradition is of course highly heterogeneous and any attempt to produce a general definition of it is likely to cause controversy. Apart from its standard connections with Stoicism and Roman Law (D'Entrèves 1970), natural law has been demonstrated compatible with several ancient religious cosmologies (Voegelin 1962), Catholic conservatism (Rommen 1998 [1936]; Gierke 1927), liberalism (Schneewind 1998), different kinds of republicanism (Arendt 1958; Benhabib 2004; Bohman 2004; Skinner 1998), critical legal studies (Douzinas 2000) and even Marxism (Bloch 1996 [1961]). My thesis that a claim to universalism serves to characterize it as a whole may seem to leave out early modern natural law writers that were of critical importance for the establishment of modern conceptions of state sovereignty (that is, Hobbes and Locke). Against this possible objection, I believe that insofar as they were concerned with setting up first principles that would serve to establish any form of modern social order, a claim to universalism does remain in place—although admittedly its universalistic threshold has been lowered.

⁸ In fact, in his later work Bull (1984) increasingly moved towards the more normative wing of the English school. Thanks to George Lawson for having brought this point to my attention.

⁹ The so-called secularization debate was initiated by Hans Blumenberg's (1983 [1966]) response to Löwith, which centred on the question of the legitimacy of modernity's claim to fully secular self-assertion. See Barash (1998) and Wallace (1981) for further discussion.

¹⁰ As he arrives at this formulation, Strauss (1974 [1950], 181–182) himself makes the point that modern natural right thinking is closely associated to liberalism. But it is his own account of natural right's historical evolution that saves Strauss from Robert Nisbet's (1967) mistake of conflating natural law as such with the modern egalitarianism of the Enlightenment. See Chernilo (forthcoming a) for further discussion on Löwith and Strauss' (different) views of the relationships between social theory and natural law.