Red Flag Unfurled - Ronald Grigor Suny

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actors calculate what is rational. Laitin attempts to solve this problem outside the theory by turning to Geertzian ethnography: “Only with a keen understanding of the meanings embedded in shared symbols—the first face of culture—can one adduce cultural preferences without tautologically claiming that preferences can be derived from the behavior of actors who are assumed to be rational.”68 It is here that cultural interpretivists might make the greatest contribution. People act on the basis of preferences and toward desired goals, but the preferences, goals, and strategies are provided and given meaning within a cultural system. Culturalists contend that a large part of politics is the struggle over meaning and the right to be authorized to speak. For culturalists, language not only expresses but also constitutes the political world. Derived from neither social position nor ideology, language itself helps to shape perception of position, interests, ideologies, and the meanings attached to the social and political world.69 Interests and identities, even what might constitute strategic choices, are themselves part of a political process of constructing meanings. The process of constructing meaning, agents, and even the very notion of rationality, something central to cultural interpretivist explorations, is largely left out in normal rational choice work.

      Cultural interpretivists can certainly admit that, in certain circumstances, people operate strategically to maximize their interests, as they conceive them, and even that material or power incentives influence human action in many contexts. But that is only part of the story. Interpretivists are suspicious of any strict separation of culture and politics, identities and interests. In an exemplary essay on early-modern familial states, Julia Adams generously accepts the contributions of rational-choice analysts, who have demonstrated the transhistorical structural factors compelling rulers to pursue economic resources, but goes on to show how a culturalist approach opens the issues of who the rulers were, what their values consisted of, and how the identities, values, and emotional commitments of rulers shaped their preferences and actions. Her argument “insists on the socially malleable boundaries of self, originally formed in the family, the cultural component of identity, and the historically specific role of affect for early modern elite political actors.”70 Among her patrimonial rulers it is familial concerns, their identities and discourses, that structured choices. Identities and emotional attachments take on causal weight, as Adams argues that they led to resistance to change, even when change might have been economically advantageous.

      Adams employs the useful distinction between “thin” and “thick” versions of rational choice theory: thin versions “are agnostic about actors’ goals and values, whereas ‘thicker’ versions try to specify actors’ desired ends, at least as exogenously given constraints.” In either case, however, the ultimate ends or goals are “exogenously determined, and random with respect to the general theory, at the same time that they are held to be contingent on a universal means to an end [in this case]—revenue—that must itself be a goal if any higher-order ends are to be realized.”71 Although rational choice is agent-centered, actors, for all their importance, are conceived in fundamental ways as being independent of their historical and cultural context.

      Rational choice has made significant contributions within political science (not to mention within economics), but in a whole range of political behavior, such as ethnic politics and nationalist movements, its value is limited. If we think about ethnic violence, a theory of instrumental rationality works best under two conditions. When there is total breakdown of the state, a “security dilemma” is created in which groups defined as ethnic or national may perceive a threat from neighbors and take preemptive action. In a second case, there may be a “bandwagon” story in which individuals will join a nationalist movement or follow a leader when they perceive the real possibility of victory. But instrumental rationality fails to explain why such movements get started in the first place, or why people are ready to die or kill for such symbolic goods as the site of a defeat 500 or 1000 years ago. Rationality makes sense as a means to reach a goal, but both means and goals are very often constituted by religious, historical, or cultural values that have little to do with material or status improvement. Cost-benefit analyses do not help much with the kinds of ends set by cultures, which can require self-sacrifice, pain, and even death.72 Both preference formation and strategic choices, then, must be considered within cultures and historic time. Rational choicers are ready to concede that culture and history, reason and emotion, help determine first order preferences. I am suggesting that they also determine second order preferences—institutions and structures—and the very strategies that actors adopt.

      The added value offered by the cultural turn is exceptionally apparent in the study of nations and nationalism. Senses of mortality and desire for immortality, of the ethnic group or nation as kinship or the family writ large, of the conviction unquestioned that this group above all others is a part of nature rather than of choice, are fundamental to the bonds of solidarity that people forge in ethnic and national communities. These affective ties—the promise of redemption from oblivion, the remedy for anonymity and meaningless mortality—must be taken seriously if we are to understand why, in the very process of constructing and imagining certain communities, the effort of construction is so emphatically denied.73 A critical question is why constructed identities and fabricated histories are held sacred as sources of primordial allegiances.74

      Finally, the cultural turn strongly warns against seeing cultural units, nations or classes, as unitary and internally homogeneous. Treating them as unitary actors with coherent identities and interests leads to essentialist conclusions about group behavior. Here there may be an unrecognized affinity between rational individualism and cultural constructivism: many practitioners of both these approaches are suspicious of relying on the idea of the group and seek to disaggregate the seeming solidarity of the collective.75 And all across political science, sociology, history, and anthropology scholars recognize that it is through culture that we apprehend the world and construct the imaginative concepts with which to understand our place within it. Culture both limits and empowers; it gives agency and constrains it. Culture defines goals, guides us toward achieving them, and misguides us often as to what might be in our “interest.”

       Roads Less Traveled

      Many of the insights and stances of the cultural turn—the inherently unstable nature of categories, the problem of reflexivity, the preference for deep texture and thick description over parsimony, and the Foucauldian extension of power out from the state into the realm of disciplinary discourses and onto the body itself—provide fascinating openings for research by social scientists interested in politics. The very sphere of politics has been widened. (Just think of the job opportunities this offers!) Not only does Foucault’s micropolitics become a locus for investigation, not only is the personal political and the body a site for politics, but fundamental assumptions about interests, the state, and the power and limits of political language now have to be interrogated.

      Rather than flee from Foucault’s imprecisions and obscurities, political scientists should borrow what they can from his difficult but fecund mind. The concept of discourse as a field of knowledge with its own practices and rules contributes a powerful new frame for thinking about politics, but at the same time discursive analysis would benefit from more precise critical examination and empirical grounding. There is much here for political science to do in understanding the state, the less institutionalized forms of politics, and the languages and representations of power.76 The insights from the cultural turn give us some purchase on the web of disciplinary and power relations that make up a political regime, the web in which subjects and citizens are caught, of which they may or may not be aware, and against which they may or may not be able to resist. At the same time the state can be brought back in along with culture. In an exciting departure, the authors of the essays in State/Culture: State-Formation after the Cultural Turn, edited by sociologist George Steinmetz, seek to reverse the idea of culture as a product of the state and elaborate culture’s constitutive role in state formation—not only in the Weberian application exclusively to non-Western states but in the core countries of northwestern Europe.77 Without deciding beforehand the power of discursive or cultural “constraints” on actors’ abilities, or accepting what interests or identities are out there, political scientists might expand the range of possible preferences and motivations, rationally calculated and emotional, that

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