Book review: No Gods, No Masters, No Peripheries: Global Anarchisms

This article examines the historical sociology that informs Andrew Linklater's Violence and Civilization in the Western States-Systems. On the sociological side, it critically assesses Linklater's use of Elias and Wight, arguing that his 'higher level synthesis' is internally incompatible. On the historical side, the article argues that the occlusion of the transnational interactions that, in great measure, drive historical development means that Linklater's analysis is inadequate for its stated purpose: to chart the development of civilising processes within the Western state-systems. When asked by a reporter what he thought of Western civilisation, Mahatma Gandhi is said to have replied that 'it would be a good idea'. Apocryphal or not, Gandhi's remark speaks to the 'dark side' of Western civilisation: its histories of imperialism and colonialism, authoritarianism and racism, genocide and mass warfare. In the contemporary world, these histories are under close scrutiny, both in the academy and the wider world. The former can be seen in the array of texts, from global history to postcolonial scholarship, which examines the interrelationship between the 'rise of the West' and the 'decline of the Rest'. 1 The latter can be seen in the malaise that infuses Western international order, whether this is found in its forums of governance, deepening levels of inequality, or in increasingly polarised debates over immigration, race, and sexuality. A transnational movement of anti-establishment groups, present in much of Europe and North America, is but one barometer of a general atmosphere of discontent that permeates Western international order. It is a brave individual who marches into this landscape arguing that the contemporary Western states-system is a singularly civilised order, the inheritor of advances made over several centuries. Yet this is the path chosen by Andrew Linklater. His trilogy of interventions into the shape and trajectory of modern international order (two books published; one to come) is nothing if not 'untimely' in that it cuts against the grain of trends within contemporary world politics, while simultaneously speaking

Global Discourse, 2010

International Political Anthropology , 2018

1990

Few issues were more central to second-wave historical sociology than revolution. Figures such as Theda Skocpol (1979) and Charles Tilly (1978, 1993 saw revolutions as essential to unraveling processes of state formation. Others, such as Barrington Moore Jr. (1967) and Jack Goldstone (1991), argued that revolutions were fundamental to the emergence of modernity Finally, this chapter is explicitly relational in that it sees revolutions as 'entities-in-motion'. This means shifting enquiry away from a view of revolutions as bundles of properties towards examination of the ways in which trans-boundary interactions are generative of revolutionary struggles. The constitutive role played by these trans-boundary interactions is illustrated in the first part of the chapter through a discussion of the Haitian Revolution. The second section widens this analysis into a general critique of the ways in which second-wave historical sociology and recent revolutionary theory have conceptualized the relationship between revolutions and global dynamics. The third section demonstrates the advantages of an 'intersocial' approach to revolutions. A brief conclusion lays out the promise of this approach.

2010

Since notions like ‘freedom’, ‘autonomy’, or ‘public’ emerged from European history as linchpins of normative theories of politics that claim universal validity, other complex moral and political discourses, like those of pre-modern China or Japan, which historically held equally universal normative appeal, have been scanned for the seeds of concepts for which they lacked even a vocabulary, like ‘civil society’, ‘public sphere’, or ‘free market.’ In order to address this bias inherent in the very tools of our analysis, we might—as a counterfactual exercise—choose to bracket off the contingent fact of the geopolitical imbalance of power that historically caused the process of conceptual translation to go predominantly one way rather than the other, and attempt to deploy the normative vocabularies originating in East Asia to see how that could affect the description and valuation of forms of government. In this effort, we can draw not least on some nineteenth-century Japanese and Chinese authors who enlisted preexisting ‘indigenous’ concepts to account for the new realities generated by an intensified engagement with the West. This allows us to catch a glimpse of an unfamiliar political landscape structured by different conceptual optics. On a particular example of the actual historical deployments of the conceptual pair fengjian/junxian (J: hōken/gunken) this case study supports the general argument by proposing one such alternative snapshot. The purpose of such an exercise is not to offer a challenge to liberal democracy in the name of ‘Asian values,’ but to challenge insufficient methodologies and lack of conceptual imagination in intellectual history of politics and possibly in political science in general.

2007

Qualitative Sociology Review, 2021

A few words about Politics, Anniversary Edition… Back in 1990, with the help of a number of university professors at the University of Manitoba in Canada, I began a personal odyssey to understand and communicate the unique postmodern perspective that I have of this world. This work entails three volumes of postmodern musings in a body of work called The Thoughts of a Peasant Philosopher. Volume I: Politics was released as an Internet book on my personal website in 1999. Volume II: Morality, Ethics & Love: A Dialogue was released as a print-on-demand book with Author House in the United States in 2002. And Volume III: Virtual Philosophy was released in 2007 as a limited edition with my publisher, Your Nickel’s Worth Publishing, located in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. It had always been my intention to centre this body of work outside the modern university philosophy department, due to the analytical paradigm that seems to infuse almost all aspects of philosophy in English-speaking countries. Perhaps ironically, this unique path of investigation and discovery was further encouraged by my friends, Professors Lammers and Turner of the University of Manitoba, who added legitimacy to this chosen path with their personal tutorial direction and input. And with a little luck and hard work, I believe I have managed to convey to my reading audience a postmodern tone, structure and narrative in all three volumes of The Thoughts of a Peasant Philosopher. In 2014, I released a completely reworked version of Volume I: Politics as an anniversary edition with my publisher in Regina, Saskatchewan strictly as an eBook. The purpose of this limited release was to update the work with new postmodern ideas, structures and definitions that had become self-evident in this, the digital age. The work was also created to protect these ground-breaking, postmodern, philosophical political terms with a copyright. And because of this rewrite, Politics has now taken on a more academic tone in terms of narrative construction, structure and content than I am comfortable with. It is my firm opinion that this reworked anniversary edition requires some form of academic review before it is released as a hardcover or paperback edition. So, if you come across the odd spelling mistake, or wonky paragraph or two when reading this eBook - consider yourself fairly warned! It is my hope that those with the appropriate academic training and interest will offer their expert advice and opinion, by way of a detailed critical review or academic critique of Politics, Anniversary Edition, which would afford me the opportunity to correct any errors within the work before it goes to the printers for final binding and publication. If you are interested in providing such a review, or are just interested in commenting on the work in a more general way, please feel free to contact me with a personal message through the academia.edu website. Or you can contact me through my publisher at the following email…Heather (at) ynwp. (ca)