International Politics, 2005, 42, (381–389)

r 2005 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 1384-5748/05 $30.00

www.palgrave-journals.com/ip

Rosenberg’s Ode to Bauer, Kinkel and Willich

George Lawson
Department of International Relations, London School of Economics and Political Science,
Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK.
E-mail: g.r.lawson@lse.ac.uk

Justin Rosenberg is one of the finest social theorists currently working in

International Relations. His long article on globalization lives up to this billing — it
is a stellar example of what a finely tuned historical sociology can add to the
discipline. However, in three crucial ways, Rosenberg’s critique misses its target.
First, by focusing on the structural dimensions of world historical development,
Rosenberg’s analysis is infused with a reductionism that loses touch with the
uncertainty, indeterminacy and, most crucially, the agency that lies at the heart of
processes of large-scale change. Second, by, at least in part, concentrating on easy
targets — particularly liberal globalization theory — Rosenberg misses elements of
the study of globalization that are both empirically insightful and theoretically
noteworthy. Third, for all its theoretical prowess and force, Rosenberg’s post-
mortem of globalization theory is premature. The age of globalization — as theory,
practice and normative discourse — is far from dead. In fact, Rosenberg is
performing the last rites on a term, concept and approach that remains in robust
health.
International Politics (2005) 42, 381–389. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ip.8800121

Keywords: globalization; historical sociology; social theory; modernity

Introduction
In the course of his long and voluminous career, Karl Marx wrote on a vast
range of subjects. Beyond his oeuvre on political economy, his political
pamphlets and his historical exegesis on the likes of the Paris Communes,
Marx wrote countless columns, letters and even, on occasion, poetry. Marx
also spent a substantial amount of time pursuing internecine squabbles and
vendettas against representatives of splinter socialist, anarchist and communist
groups. Thus, the likes of Bruno Bauer, Gottfried Kinkel and August Willich
assumed an importance for Marx well beyond their apparent intellectual
qualities or their political clout. Perhaps, the great man needed these diversions
in order to retune his mind and refresh his spirit. If so, then they can be said
to have served their purpose. As throat clearing exercises which allowed
Marx to get on with the substance of his work, such departures may have
been invaluable.
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And so it is with Justin Rosenberg’s long article on globalization theory.

Rosenberg may well be the deepest thinker currently working on the social
theory of international politics. His first book, The Empire of Civil Society
(1994) is described by one colleague as the best International Relations (IR)
book of the past 20 years. I see no reason to dispute that claim. Rosenberg’s
dismantling of realism has been devastating and his commitment to
reinvigorating the study of historical sociology in IR has been substantial.
However, in comparison with Rosenberg’s work to date, and with his current
research project on world history as uneven and combined development,
Globalization: A Post-Mortem feels like a diversion, a kind of theoretical ode
comparable to Marx’s philippics on Bauer, Kinkel and Willich.
In this short rejoinder to Rosenberg’s article, I want to focus on three main
points. First, by focusing on the structural dimensions of world historical
development, Rosenberg’s analysis is infused with a reductionism that loses
touch with the uncertainty, indeterminacy and, most crucially, the agency that
lies at the heart of processes of large-scale change. Second, by, at least in part,
concentrating on easy targets — particularly liberal globalization theory —
Rosenberg misses elements of the study of globalization that are both
empirically insightful and theoretically noteworthy. Third, for all its theoretical
prowess and force, Rosenberg’s post-mortem of globalization theory is
premature. The age of globalization — as theory, practice and normative
discourse — is far from dead. In fact, Rosenberg is performing the last rites on
a term, concept and approach that remain in robust health.

Of Theory and Practice

The first thing to say about Globalization: A Post-Mortem is that it is
phenomenally interesting — a fertile blend of rigorous social theory and
insightful empirical analysis. The argument is sustained by a compelling logic
and it is superbly written. As such, the article is a pleasure to read, if less easy
to critique. Rosenberg is surely right that globalization as outcome cannot be
explained by globalization as process, and that we must therefore differentiate
between globalization theory and theories of globalization. Rosenberg must
also be right that a central misconception of globalization theory is its
swallowing of the Westphalian myth. Given such a starting point, as
Rosenberg points out, the erosion of state sovereignty by the market and
other transnational forces, as well as the apparent deterritorialization of
political space, take on an appearance of novelty, when in fact they are rooted
in the social relations of modernity itself. This naturalism, along with the 20th
century penchant for separating states and markets, and capitalism from
geopolitics, are flaws that eat at the heart of liberal globalization theory.
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Rosenberg’s article picks up from where his previous book, Follies of

Globalization Theory (2000), leaves off. In fact, at times the article reads like an
extra chapter to Follies, a final word on the puerility of globalization theory.
In Follies, Rosenberg assails three ‘leading’ figures in the field of globalization
studies — Jan Aart Scholte, Rob Walker and Anthony Giddens. Leaving aside
the issue that of these three, only Giddens can really be judged worthy of such
attention; Rosenberg does a fluent and effective job of demonstrating their
theoretical shortcomings. The subtitle of the book is Polemical Essays, lest
we forget that this is denunciation rather than a vehicle for the construction
of social theory. At no time in Follies is an alternative schema sustained, or
even offered. As such, perhaps Rosenberg’s demand of globalization theory,
that it should produce ‘substance, soon’ (2000, 165) might be turned back on
the author.

Globalization
A Post-Mortem, up to a point, rectifies this lacuna — the rather abrupt closure
of Follies is replaced by the beginning of an alternative exegeses about the
historical conjuncture of the 1990s. However, this alternative — uneven and
combined development — is more sketched out than coloured in.1 Thus, the
principal novelty of Rosenberg’s article lies in its methodological claims.
Rosenberg derides what he calls ‘directionless indeterminacy’ (p. 34), preferring
a conjunctural analysis that characterizes an epoch by its dominant causal
constellations. Conjunctural analysis looks both inwards at the historical
details of a particular era and outwards at its place within the wider sweep
of global development. The argument provided — for theory that links organic
tendencies with empirical data — is a viable and valuable means of comparing
and assessing paths of social development, and Rosenberg provides the best
defence yet of its theoretical possibilities.
However, it can be questioned whether, in this article at least, Rosenberg
swallows his own prescription, for there is little doubt that Rosenberg’s
primary focus is on the underlying structures that shape social orders. His
approach is infinitely more interesting and richer than other structural
accounts of world politics: history gets a chance to breath and structures get
a chance to move. Nevertheless, there are precious few people, firms, states,
institutions, organizations or ideologies in the article. Rather, where empirical
factors are introduced (as they are during discussion of the ‘vacuum’ of the
1990s, pp. 48–59), one is left with a sense of inevitability, of mice-like actors (or
objects) trying, but failing, to counter the trajectories of much larger and more
powerful social forces. As Rosenberg puts it, the American opportunists who
seized the chance to extend their imperial reach in the 1990s were surfers riding
‘the crest of a wave’ (p. 58), while the policy shifts of the 1990s were little more
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than the ‘temporary side-effects’ of broader organic forces (p. 59). What
makes this particularly problematic is that in times of structural upheaval
(as the 1990s clearly were), agency assumes an exceptional importance.
Mikhail Gorbachev was not a bit part player in the collapse of the Soviet
Empire, nor was Bill Clinton in the construction of the liberal post-Cold War
settlement, and nor is President Bush and his entourage in the extension of
the US imperium today. Agency cannot be merely grafted onto an existing
structural theory: the actions of individuals, groups, organizations and the
like play a formative role in the creation, process and resolution of an
organic crisis. Without bringing in agency as, at least in part, constitutive
of processes of social change, Rosenberg can give us only a partial
picture — one that, albeit unintentionally, can look like an inevitable tale or
a pre-determined narrative.
By focusing on a single underling determinant, Rosenberg omits the range of
factors, long-term and short-term, material and ideational, economic, social
and political, that make up processes of large-scale change in the international
realm. This produces a gap between theoretical assertion and historical
analysis, which threatens to make the former static rather than dynamic, and
the story of human history simple rather than complex. Like his bête-noire,
Kenneth Waltz (1979, 2000), Rosenberg is attempting to provide a single
ontology of the international realm. Behind this attempt lies a potential hazard
for any attempt to sustain a totalizing theory of world historical develop-
ment. As Waltz has noted, such a theory cannot be exhaustive — it must be
restricted to explaining some small, if important, things. However, the
question then becomes — to what extent is this kind of parsimonious
theory delivering internal elegance only at the cost of its analytical punch?
I am doubtful whether uneven and combined development, or any monotheism
for that matter, can fully capture the particularity of world historical
development in all its intricacies, quirks and twists, at least not in the
depth required or with sufficient detail. If world history is messy, complex and
at times, contradictory, then surely a multi-causal analysis that finds common
patterns, trends and trajectories from empirical analysis rather than one
which seeks to impose a monolithic order on historical ambiguities will yield a
richer picture. After all, once they are applied, general abstractions soon
reach their limits.

A Brief Historical Sociology of Globalization Theory

A second gripe with Globalization: A Post-Mortem is that it omits some of the
more interesting bits of the globalization literature. In the first instance, much
is missing from the study of globalization by historical sociologists, in

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particular, work done on the periodization of globalization, the relationship

between continuity and disjuncture, and regional asymmetries in the
development of the global order. Scholars working in this vein, among them
Michael Mann (1986, 1993), John Hobson (2004) and Barry Buzan and
Richard Little (2000), use historical sociology as a means of critically assessing
the principal causes and constitutive patterns of international systems over
time and place. This has produced theory that has effectively problematized
taken-for-granted assumptions about the shape of world politics — the
exceptionalism of the West, the multiple connections between peoples,
economies and polities throughout history and, in Rosenberg’s own work,
the social relations that underpin geopolitical systems.
Similarly, more scope needs to be granted to the most interesting IR scholars
and world historians who work in this field.2 For these scholars, globalization
is neither determined by technology (as it is for Castells 1996) nor is it
necessarily coupled with cosmopolitanism (à la Held, 1995; Held et al., 1999).
Rather, globalization can be seen, as it is by many academics and activists like,
as structural inequality (between north and south, the west and the rest, core
and periphery), as empire (American or otherwise) or as the extension of
capitalism around the world, without assuming any necessary affinity with
multi-lateralism, global governance and interdependence — the cornerstones of
liberal globalization theory. These social theorists, historians and IR scholars
are saying something compelling about world historical development and the
place of globalization within this story. Yet, their voices are muted at best in
Rosenberg’s article.
There is an equally striking hush over the roots of globalization theory itself.
Interest in globalization first emerged out of the sociological study of
modernity. In the 1970s, Daniel Bell (1973) and others began to study the
emergence of what was tentatively labelled ‘post-industrial society’. This
project was mirrored by work in economics looking at the shift from Fordism
to service-based economies, by political theorists examining the consequences
of the breakdown of deference, tradition and its accompanying institutions,
and the sociological study of what became known as ‘new social movements’.
Concomitant work on the psychological and aesthetic dimensions of these
changes — later transmogrified into post-modernism — created a cross-
disciplinary fervent in which virtually all the participants seemed to agree on
the quantity and quality of the changes underfoot (Hall and Jacques ed, 1989).
Normative issues varying from the spread of universal human rights to
concerns over global environmental degradation became linked to this
jamboree. Following the old maxim of nomen est numen, academic debate
became oriented around finding a workable label for this range of political,
economic, social and normative processes. After various false starts, many
theorists settled on the mantle of globalization. Thus, the study of globalization
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was bolted on to an extended survey of modernity itself, with roots well beyond
the zeitgeist of the 1990s. If Rosenberg is going to call into question
globalization theory in toto, he needs to pay as much attention to these scholars
as he does to their 1990s interlocutors.
Initially, globalization theory was split into two broad camps: ‘homo-
genizers’ and ‘heterogenizers’. The former, represented by figures such as
Immanuel Wallerstein, focused on the universalizing aspects of globalization.
The latter, with their roots in cultural theory, emphasized the ‘hybridity’ of
globalization, arguing that pull factors at the global level were dialectically
related to push factors at the local level. Thus, the latter approach conjoined
the study of globalization to atavistic concerns over ethnic identity, religious
extremism and movements for political secession. If we see globalization within
this broader panorama, as the latest attempt to grapple with what Zygmunt
Bauman (1991) terms ‘the ambivalences of modernity’, then some of
Rosenberg’s critique loses its sheen. The heterogenizers, for example, seem
able to distinguish several dialectical trends in world politics, not least the
interplay between universalism and particularity that lies at the heart of
contemporary world politics.
Both homogenizers and heterogenizers agree, at least in a descriptive sense,
that globalization represents the intensification, stretching and speeding up of
numerous social forces associated with modernity itself. Rosenberg seems to
consent to at least part of this analysis, writing that the organic tendencies of
modernity are being recast on an ‘historically unprecedented scale’ (p. 48).
Rather, his major gripe is with what could be considered as the secondary issue
of how to theorize these historically unprecedented changes: as epochal or
conjunctural, as quantitative or qualitative, as uneven and combined
development or as globalization. Part of this discussion must revolve around
theoretical coherence and elegance, but so must part of it be based on empirical
value and explanatory purchase. If globalization is to be discarded, then
scholars will need to find alternatives that are both theoretically and
empirically more appealing. Rosenberg has successfully executed the first of
these tasks, performing a form of medieval torture on globalization theory
in which both its head has been decapitated and its legs removed. However,
at least the torso of globalization — its empirical dimension — lives on.
Globalization must be dismantled on this terrain too if its epitaph is to be
completed.3
What needs to be distinguished is the empirical material under discussion,
the concept of globalization, and the theory that surrounds it. Precious few
scholars dispute the global, if uneven, reach of modernity. Similarly,
globalization as a concept may be loose and slippery, but it also retains a
certain punch in describing this extension of homogenizing economic, political
and social forces around the world, particularly when this is conjoined with
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analysis of globalization’s ‘other side’ — the particularizing tendencies that

drive a return to the local. The linking of these vectors of change — where this
be the case — is well worth closer scrutiny. Globalization theorists may have
failed in their task of reworking social theory and the relationship between
space and time. However, historical sociologists, who have as their raison
d’être large-scale processes of social change and who are acutely attuned to
issues of periodization, should be interested in unravelling the relative novelty
(or not) of this global conjuncture. Even if we accept Rosenberg’s argument
that the explanans of globalization theory is empty, the explanandum of
globalization still requires attention. And its roots will need to be examined
from beyond the terrace of the 1990s — a longer historical excavation into the
dominant causal constellations of various epochs over time and place will be
required to perform this task.

A Premature Post-Mortem
There is no doubting the many qualities of Globalization: A Post-Mortem.
Having previously slain the high priest of IR (Kenneth Waltz), Rosenberg has
now done the same for sociology, with his destruction of at least the theoretical
claims posited by Anthony Giddens and his fellow travellers. It should now
be commonly accepted that much of globalization theory is zeitgeist sham. It
seems equally clear that the 1990s represents a conjunctural rather than an
epochal shift, and that globalization theorists misread the relationship between
space and time under conditions of modernity. Too much talk of globalization
is woolly, imprecise and faddish. At times, the concept takes on a borg-like
texture, appearing as structure, institution, assemblage, ideology and, on
occasion, as smokescreen and mirage.
However, in the end, one is left wondering how much of this really
matters. After all, globalization as a field of study, as a political or business
catchphrase, and as a rallying cry for political activism is far from dead. In fact,
it has been normalized, commodified and naturalized — so much part of our
daily diet that we barely notice its ubiquity. Perhaps it has been mythologized
too. That would make it the equal of numerous other concepts in the social
sciences: power, society, the state, nationalism, revolution and empire among
them. The latter have managed to survive claims that they are ‘essentially
contested’, qualms about their imprecision and attempts to forego them
altogether. For my money, this is also likely to be the case with globalization.
Even a zeitgeist or a cliché tends to capture a kernel of truth.
It is also worth noting that at least some aspects of the study of globalization
should be welcomed. As Ulrich Beck (1997) puts it, the study of globalization
is really the study of ‘and’ — how various features of the global landscape

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connect with each other. This necessitates the advent of a joined-up

social scientific venture far removed from the turf-war fragmentation of
the last century. Used well, approaches crossing the often arbitrary or
functional boundaries that divide disciplines have the potential to broaden
and deepen our understanding of world politics. Globalization offers the
possibility of integrating IR more firmly within the broad family that
constitute the social sciences, not as an adjunct to more prominent cousins,
but as a relatively autonomous field with substantive points to make
about key events and processes in world politics. Normatively, too,
globalization can be used as a defence of universalism, solidarity and
shared values at a time of idle, and sometimes dangerous ‘fault-line’ theorizing.
It offers the chance of exposing as sham the lie at the heart of discussion
about eternal clashes between ‘civilizations’, essential or primordial
ethnic differences, and the necessary exceptionalism of the West and its
political practices.
In the longer term, it may be that Globalization: A Post-Mortem serves as a
transitional text from The Empire of Civil Society to Rosenberg’s as yet
unpublished thesis on uneven and combined development. Why this route had
to pass through globalization theory, I am not completely clear. For all
Rosenberg’s body blows, globalization, both as theory and practice, lives on,
as mondialisation in France, as globalisierung in Germany, and as al-aulama in
Arabic. Perhaps now Rosenberg can leave the vacuities to the vacuous, and get
on with the substantive task of explaining the causal chains, trends and
trajectories that lie behind world historical development. Rosenberg’s
theoretical nous, the depth of his empirical reach and the élan of his writing
make him particularly well suited to this task. As such, it is the next stage
in Rosenberg’s development where the promise of this article, and of his
preceding work on globalization, is likely to be fulfilled. The contemporary
equivalents of Bauer, Kinkel and Willich will be consigned to the archives only
by the power of an alternative, not by another shot, however well aimed, across
the bows of the good ship globalization.

Notes
1 The unusual ordering of these words is important (see note 28, pp. 68–69), emphasizing that
Rosenberg, like Trotsky, sees social development as a causal sequence that is uneven in the first
instance, and combined thereafter. Although Rosenberg (2005) has recently begun the task of
colouring in and deepening his theory of uneven and combined development, my focus in this
article is on his use of the concept in Globalization: A Post-Mortem.
2 See, for example, in IR: Rosenau and Czempiel (1992), Ruggie (1993) and Shaw (2000); and in
world history: Gellner (1988), Kennedy (1989) and McNeill (1963).
3 Indeed, the most demanding critiques of globalization theory are made on this basis. See, for
example, Hirst and Thompson (1996).

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