Historical Particularism

Political science approaches the study of politics from a specific angle - politics is taken to be a process common to all human societies, occupying a similar position across societies, and operating by a set of rules which do not vary from society to society. To clarify, I do not mean that politics is everywhere the same, but that apparent diversity arises not from an essential difference in political societies, but in the arrangement of institutions, the balance of interests within the society, the distribution of preferences across a large public and, perhaps, questions of the access to information of political active agents within the society. The basic building blocks for political life everywhere, according to a discipline dominated by rational choice methods and assumptions, are self-interested (either left as a tautology or defined materially), utility-maximizing sovereign individuals. And the crucial variables determing how those blocks stack are the institutions which canalize that self-interest, and the balance of powers that exists between those self-seeking actors. Once these basic variables are determined, outcomes should be mathematically computable.
However, utlitarian accounts of human behavior run into significant empirical problems. The most obvious has to do with the subjective nature of "utility," that elusive holy grail which is supposed to serve as the inerrant lodestar for purposive human behavior. The whole concept of utility and its social science use has become closely associated with economics, and in analysing economic behavior an obvious definition for utility suggests itself - profit. The market operates with a liquid, fungible currency that can be deployed in a vast number of ways to meet the whims of economic agents - the point of the market is profit, so it makes sense that economic utility would concern maximizing financial return. However, political life operates in a different fashion than economic life - though there are those who insist, through a tortured logic and against empirically visible human behavior, that politics represent a mere extension of the market. In political matters, utility cannot be reduced to pure material returns - there are also intangibles, such as security, social solidarity, etc. These are not fungible values, and there is no basic utility principle to which these diverse priorities can be reduced. This brings up one of the great problems in describing and studying politics - if political life is meant to provide some good for those who engage in it, what good is it providing? If government is tolerated as a necessary evil, then what is the benefit that earns it this toleration? If government is not a necessary evil, but a positive benefit, what is the nature of that benefit? Although these are the sorts of questions that positive political scientists and those of an empirical bent would adore to avoid and elide, a way around them (rather than through the quagmire that any attempt to answer them is likely to produce) is not obvious. A fall back position that many find appealing is to attempt to provide provisional, working answers to these problems based on what its advocates believe to be a tough-minded, sober understanding of human nature and what detractors take to be a dangerous fantasy - namely, some materialistic basic notion that the sole considerations that individuals have with respect to political leadership concern material self-interest or pure fear. However, this provisional answer is not as sound as it first appears, because the drive towards material accumulation is a distinct psychological process to the existential anxiety concerning the sufficiency of basic staples to maintain existence at a stable level. Similarly, the power of fear is contextual, and the ability to marshal the credible threat of violence as a means of social control depends on the beliefs of those controlled on the dreadfulness of physical pain compared to other forms of suffering. The materialist assumptions about the basic motivations for obedience - the desire for material benefit and the fear of violence and death - are not intrinsicly absolute, but need to be ideationally cultivated against alternative basic orientations. Among a large number of societies the fear of social exclusion can be deployed to trump material or security considerations - in many places, it is possible to "shame' someone into sucide, or into suicidal bravery. Similarly, the threat of death loses much of its terror when it is met by the promise of paradise, or countered by the greater threat of everlasting damnation. Further, these are not marginal cases that inflect a world which otherwise runs on the clockwork of individual utility - the vast majority of the Earth's population is comprised of believers in one or another religion, with deeply-held beliefs that do not lose their power outside of temple, church or mosque. Even those who subscribe to a rational skepticism about religious teachings cannot be said to represent "natural" man, free from the myths and superstitions of history and thus free to be as he fundamentally is. Skeptics may not believe in much, but they do believe in skepticism, and rely on a set of assumptions - assumptions! - about what distinguishes good from bad, desireable from undesireable, correct from incorrect which are not themselves amenable to rational evaluation. These assumptions are the basic intellectual building blocks out of which other ideas and hypotheses are built - these are the things that one reasons through, not about. That they are inherited from mathematicians, economists and other secular authorities instead of prophets and gurus does not change the basic reality that they are assumptions. Without being yoked to the fables, myths and miracle-accounts that are part and parcel of traditional religion may make them more useful, more robust and less ridiculous, but assumptions they remain. Further, while these assumptions do not have an objective basis in the material constitution of human beings, they make claims about that constitution, and thus condition and create the very human behavior they claim is fundamental and uncreated. They then manifest themselves in the society that they have possessed, in seeming confirmation of the basic assumptions that hold sway. It is only when, peering into neighbor's pastures, a society with a different underlying logic, produced by a differently-derived but similarly-hegemonic set of assumptions about human behavior, comes into focus that an awareness of the relativity of preferences and of social outcomes might emerge. Of course, the preferred reaction is denial or, if that proves impractical, the dogmatic insistance that the foreign society over there is in reality the same as ours, but with funny accents, different hats and universal sufferage.