Behemoth: Main Currents in the History and Theory of Political Sociology

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Continuing in a path worked on by Horowitz in the 1950s in The Idea of War and Peace in Contemporary Social and Philosophical Thought, expanded upon in the 1970s with Foundations of Political Sociology, this summing up in the late 1990s is an effort to extract and evolve the "canon" of political sociology. The result is a reevaluation of the intellectual sources of the present day divisions between Statists and Socialists, Welfarists and Individualists, advocates of dictatorship and democracy, mandated rules and ...
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Overview

Continuing in a path worked on by Horowitz in the 1950s in The Idea of War and Peace in Contemporary Social and Philosophical Thought, expanded upon in the 1970s with Foundations of Political Sociology, this summing up in the late 1990s is an effort to extract and evolve the "canon" of political sociology. The result is a reevaluation of the intellectual sources of the present day divisions between Statists and Socialists, Welfarists and Individualists, advocates of dictatorship and democracy, mandated rules and voluntary association, hard realists and soft utopians, advocates of a world without States and those desiring a world with a single State. Horowitz does not offer the usual evolutionary notion of doctrines, but a canon embedded within the societies they aimed to serve or overthrow in the present as in the past. The result is a major recasting of the theory and practice of social science and its normative frameworks.
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Editorial Reviews

First Things
Behemoth is in no way a dry academic survey of the history and theory of political sociology. In addition to penetrating discussions of a range of classic theorists, from Montesquieu and Hegel to Durkheim and Weber, it contains lively readings of such contemporary or near-contemporary thinkers as Joseph Schumpeter, the Frankfurt School's Max Horkheimer, Hannah Arendt, and Amitai Etzioni and the so-called "communitarians." No reader will agree with every detail of these interpretations and some are undoubtedly more inspired than others.
From the Publisher
"Horowitz's book could be compared with Raymond Aron's Main Currents in Sociological Thought (1968) and Irving Zeitlin's Ideology and the Development of Sociological Theory (1968) in that it traces the development of attempts, beginning with that of Montesquieu, to relate the institution of the state to the complexity of associations that make up society." —Choice “Reading "Behemoth" is the intellectual equivalent of watching a consummate athlete break the world record. Elegantly written, dispensing with the obligatory academic shibboleths, "Behemoth" is a breathtaking tour de force. Anyone willing to accompany the author on his journey, revisiting the key themes underpinning the major theories of political and social change, will be amply rewarded with insights into the deepest dilemmas of modern life that elude the self-styled professional punditry that nowadays passes for intelligentsia. The book's subtitle, "Main Currents in the History and Theory of Political Sociology," refers to a critical yet generous ("there are no villains in this book") overview of the most important efforts by eminent thinkers starting with Montesquieu, followed by Rousseau, Hegel, Tocqueville, and Marx, among others, alongside the canonical sociologists including Durkheim and Weber, to explain the relationship between state and society. That relationship - the question of how political system and the social order interact - is what this superb book is about.
The word "Behemoth" is roughly synonymous with "Leviathan" - Hobbes's all-powerful state - but Irving Louis Horowitz uses it primarily as a complement to "anarch," which refers to "society," or perhaps the "un-state," which doesn't merely precede the political (as it did for Hobbes) but complements it, opposes it, or, paradoxically, both. How to understand the tension between these two poles of human organization - the state and society? Simple dichotomies such as objective-subjective, private-public, conservative-liberal, will not do. The synthesis to which this narrative leads is the eventual, current merging of state and society, which he calls "the welfare state" (as distinguished from "the welfare society"). The modern "behemoth," a bewildering product of contradictory forces and unintended consequences, though ostensibly, at least initially, benevolent, threatens in the end to smother the individual ( or rather, more comprehensively, if not less vaguely, the "human forces" which encompass the complex factors that "resist the blandishments of the welfare state").
But is the modern behemoth not "democratic" (with all the honorific connotations)? Horowitz observes that "the ease with which the welfare state can be detached from any semblance of democratic moorings is itself a source of deep concern for liberals as well as conservatives. There is an uneasy feeling that the uncontrollable urgings of the welfare state combine the worst features of the State, its repressive potentials, with the worst features of the Society, its unbridled utilitarianism." Sometimes euphemistically described as either the "liberal" state or "open" society, the new Behemoth is "indifferent to ideological labeling, whilst becoming remarkably attuned to the demands of the political elite and the social mass at the same time." Marx would not be alone in finding such a proposition incomprehensible; so would most social "scientists" even (or rather, especially) today.
What then are we left with? On one side is "the oft-discarded and discredited notion of civilization" - sometimes synonymous with "culture" -that transcends any one nation-state, and on the other, various modern utopias such as the idealized "community," whose presumed common interest the State is supposed to fulfill. Neither can save us from what, like it or not, is Behemoth as a force unto itself and, more ominously, "an end unto itself." Progress has always been an illusion; technological advance can plunge humanity into the abyss as easily as its absence, if indeed not more efficiently. Though refusing to indulge in easy solutions, the book ends on a note of hope, if certainly not euphoria. At least we cannot say we have not been warned.” —Juliana Geran Pilon, director of the Center for Culture and Security at the Institute of World Politics
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781560004103
  • Publisher: Transaction Publishers
  • Publication date: 2/24/1999
  • Pages: 474

Meet the Author

Irving Louis Horowitz (1929-2012) was Hannah Arendt Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Political Science at Rutgers University. He was the founder and served as chairman of the board and editorial director of Transaction Publishers. A prolific writer, he authored more than fifty books, as well as hundreds of articles and essays.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction 1
1 Between Anarch and Behemoth: The Spirit of Montesquieu 15
2 Secularizing Society: Helvetius, Rousseau, and Comte 41
3 Romancing the Organic State: Hegel 81
4 The Liberal Compromise with State Power: Alexis de Tocqueville 115
5 Utopianism as Scientific Sociology: Marx 143
6 Social Order without State Power: Durkheim 191
7 State Power without Social Order: Sorel 225
8 Legitimizing the Bureaucratic State: Weber I 267
9 Defining the Boundaries of Law and Order: Weber II 289
10 The Unhappy Alliance of Democracy and Dictatorship: Horkheimer, Benjamin, and Neumann 317
11 Modern Capitalism as a Social Phenomenon: Schumpeter 347
12 State, Military, Business: The Trinity of Power: Mills 365
13 Totalitarian Visions of the Good Society: Arendt 403
14 Beyond the State: Civilization and Community: Etzioni and Huntington 429
15 Between Politics and Economics: Welfare State vs. Global Economy 449
Index 467
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