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Powers of Pacification: State and Empire in Gabriel Tarde
Economy and Society, 36 (4): 597--613 (ноября 2007)
Аннотация
The thought of Gabriel Tarde has recently been presented as a radical alternative to a modernist tradition in social theory that continues to rely on supposedly moribund concepts of class, action, statehood, and the like. Focussing on Tarde's political writings, this article seeks to counter this prevalent vision of Tarde as a thinker of molecular social processes who provides us with the tools to think beyond the parameters of sovereignty and to embrace a transnational understanding of social change. Tarde's thinking of politics is analysed in terms of its reliance on a political anthropology of obedience, its ambivalent attitude towards the democratization of the political sphere, its image of the state as an enabler and filter of inventions, and its attempts to articulate the relation between the social and the political. By means of the notion of 'empowering pacification', the article concludes that the significance of Tarde for the present lies in his contradictory and symptomatic conceptualization of the persistence of political power and institutional centralization in the midst of a tendency towards the global expansion of the field of social interactions, as well as in his strategic attempt to imagine forms of power that would neutralize the possibility of social turmoil and class conflict.
