Thomas C. Patterson - Social Change Theories in Motion

SOCIAL CHANGE THEORIES IN MOTION

This book assesses how theorists explained processes of change set in motion by the rise of capitalism. It situates them in the milieu in which they wrote. They were never neutral observers standing outside the conditions they were trying to explain. Their arguments were responses to those circumstances and to the views of others commentators, living and dead. Some repeated earlier views; others built on those perspectives; a few changed the way we think. While surveying earlier writers, the authors primary concerns are theorists who sought to explain industrialization, imperialism, and the consolidation of nation-states after 1840. Marx, Durkheim, and Weber still shape our understandings of the past, present, and future. Patterson focuses on explanations of the unsettled conditions that crystallized in the 1910s and still persist: the rise of socialist states, anti-colonial movements, prolonged economic crises, and almost continuous war. After 1945, theorists in capitalist countries, influenced by Cold War politics, saw social change in terms of economic growth, progress, and modernization; their contemporaries elsewhere wrote about underdevelopment, dependency, or uneven development. In the 1980s, theorists of postmodernity, neoliberalism, globalization, innovations in communications technologies, and post-socialism argued that they rendered earlier accounts insufficient. Others saw them as manifestations of a new imperialism, capitalist accumulation on a global scale, environmental crises, and nationalist populism.

Thomas C. Patterson is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at the University of California, Riverside, and the author of a number of books, including Karl Marx, Anthropologist, From Acorns to Warehouses: The Historical Political Economy of Southern Californias Inland Empire, and Inventing Western Civilization.

This book is a valuable explanation and critique of explanations of social change in the last three centuries. The theme is how power influences, and is influenced by, theories of social changea fascinating angle for examining the structural changes that have occurred in the modern world-system since the 18th century.

Christopher Chase-Dunn, Institute for Research on World-Systems,
University of California, Riverside

For the past five decades, Tom Patterson has been one of the most stimulating and original thinkers in the field of anthropology. This excellent book reflects such exciting thinking, as it critically examines many of the explanations for global change that have been advanced in the last two centuries. Moreover, it can be profitably read not only by anthropologists but by all social scientists.

Tom Patterson makes todays crises more intelligible by taking a long-term perspective, exploring how social theorists with different ideological orientations diagnosed the changes that capitalism produced in their own eras. Supremely lucid and richly contextualised accounts of ideas and debates provide readers with a truly worldwide vision of modern history, combined with the strongest intellectual incentives to continue thinking not only about how to understand our world but also about how to change it.

In this far-ranging and erudite work, Patterson carries out a dialogue among a wide array of theorists within the Marxian and social science traditions, from Rousseau and Smith to Marx, and from Weber and Luxemburg to Fanon and Foucault. Throughout, he considers not only Western Europe and North America, but also theories and theorists connected to the Global South and to agrarian societies. Far from a history of social thought for its own sake, Social Change Theories in Motion speaks to a twenty-first century world riven by economic, social, and cultural crisis.

This book is a welcome, timely contribution to our collective understandings of what can be learned from by placing key theorists of social change in relationship to the historical conjunctures that they were observing and analyzing. As such the book is a reminder and guide for how to think about and speak to the contemporary crises and efforts to erase historical memories of critique.

First published 2018
by Routledge
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2018 Taylor & Francis

The right of Thomas C. Patterson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN: 978-0-815-35299-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-815-35295-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-351-13766-9 (ebk)

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by codeMantra

I regularly taught a course on theories of social change for fifty-three years before retiring in 2016. It was the first course I ever taught. The content changed steadily over the years, thanks to students. They continually amazed me, taught me, and sparked my curiosity, taking it, and me, in unimaginable directions. They still inspire me. I will not attempt to list all of them for fear of missing a name; there are too many, and besides, they know who they are.

Writing has never been a solitary activity for me. I share drafts with students and friends. I read paragraphs to them over the phone or over cups of coffee. I look forward to their comments and criticisms. I especially want to thank Wendy Ashmoremy colleague, inspiration, and partner, who has high standards and sets a high bar. She has read and commented on every word of the manuscriptoften more than once. I also want to thank Alexandra Andrejevich, Carole Nagengast, Chris ChaseDunn, and Bob Paynter, who improved the clarity of the arguments and text.

Losing it in times of crisis and manufactured ignorance is even more dangerous!

This book looks at how theorists have understood and explained social and political-economic changes and developments that have occurred since the mid-1700s. Economic historian Karl Polanyi (1957[1944]) called these developments the great transformation. This tumultuous period witnessed the rise of The Enlightenment; the appeal to reason and anti-authoritarian sentiments that challenged and eventually eroded the authority of the aristocracy and the Church; the steady implementation of the Scientific Revolution that brought technological innovations and new understandings of nature in its wake; and the crystallization of the Industrial Revolution, entrepreneurial manufacturing, and industrial capitalism. It was the time when imperialist countries established far-flung colonies around the world, when they waged wars with one another and with their colonial subjects, and when political and economic crises begun to erupt with astonishing frequency. These processes, set in motion during the eighteenth century by some accounts and in the 1500s by others, have had profound and long-lasting consequences. Theorists have typically formulated their explanations of these changes in terms of concepts and ideas that were already part of the intellectual baggage they inherited from previous generations. While some analysts recycled earlier accounts, others refined them, and a few came up with novel insights about the processes of change that had been unleashed. The latter usually transform the ways we think, talk, and write about these processes.