A major problem across the social sciences, increasingly recognised in recent years, has been the predominance of ‘internalism’: the explanation of social phenomena by reference to the inner characteristics alone of a given society or type of society.Footnote 1 Inherited from the tradition of classical social theory, internalism (which is sometimes also called ‘methodological nationalism’) has prevented theorisation of the space of inter-societal relations; and it has thereby deprived the social sciences of a proper understanding of the international dimension of their subject matter.
Paradoxically, the discipline of IR, which ought to provide an antidote to this problem, has itself been partly misshaped by it. Over the years the neglect of the international in other disciplines has promoted a realist self-definition of IR in explicit contrast to Sociology, with the implication that its subject matter, lying beyond the reach of social theoretical categories, is somehow ‘supra-sociological’ in nature.Footnote 2 This certainly avoids the immediate problem of methodological nationalism; but it also produces an anomalous conception of ‘the international’ as a dimension of the social world which subsists without sociological foundations, mirroring Sociology's tendency to reductionism with its own, equal and opposite, tendency towards the reification of ‘the international’.
Realism's essentialising of the international has of course been heavily contested within the discipline. Indeed the debate between realism and its critics remains today ‘the most enduring “great debate” among students and practitioners of international relations’.Footnote 3 And yet this debate has always had a curiously lop-sided and non-progressive character which may be seen if we recall the manner in which it has generally proceeded.
Critiques of realism have tended to operate by applying to international questions forms of thought developed elsewhere in the social sciences: liberalism, Marxism, feminism, constructivism, post-structuralism, postcolonialism, and so on. And the field of IR has surely been enriched as a result. Such are the peculiar (non-historical and non-sociological) limits of realist analysis, these borrowings can almost always add a significant sociological dimension, (related typically to class, gender, identity, or discourse), to the analysis. At the same time, however, such is the continuing hold of internalist thinking over the social sciences in general that these imported resources never bring with them the conceptual tools for formulating the significance of the international itself (as opposed to its changing social and historical forms). Even postcolonial theory, centred though it is on an irreducibly international phenomenon – the experience and aftermath of Western imperialism – does not provide an exception to this rule. After all, an analysis of how modern international relations have been shaped and disfigured by racial and cultural oppression cannot by itself deliver a general formula of the international – whose subject matter must also embrace both relations among Western (imperialist) societies and the vast bulk of human inter-societal history which preceded ‘the rise of the West’ entirely.Footnote 4
Thus it remains the case, as Ole Wæver has recently argued in a survey of the discipline that ‘[t]oday, articles use lots of theory, and apply or test it – only it is not IR theory!’Footnote 5 And this situation is not new: half a century earlier, Stanley Hoffmann already complained about the fruitless application of ‘concepts torn from sociology, economics, cybernetics, biology and astronomy’ to a field whose core problematic they were ill-suited to grasp.Footnote 6
Here then is the lop-sidedness of the debate: non-realist approaches in IR, reacting against the essentialising of ‘anarchy’, grant little or no theoretical significance to the multiplicity of societies itself which composes the international. Instead of providing an alternative non-realist account of it, they have argued, (with varying degrees of explicitness), that the consequences of anarchy are either increasingly mitigated or even directly configured by social and cultural developments which originate outside the international domain. Geopolitical anarchy, they argue, is qualified by, and may even one day be dissolved by the effects of liberal society and government; or it reflects the social structures and competitive imperatives of capitalism, or the racialised identities of colonial domination; or it is itself indeterminate and can be socially constructed in a variety of ways; or it is increasingly the vehicle of processes of governmentality and biopolitics, etc.Footnote 7 What the obverse implications might be – the implications of the international for liberal, Marxist, postcolonial, constructivist, or post-structuralist thought – is much less often broached.Footnote 8
Of course, this would not matter if the international really were just a stage on which dynamics arising elsewhere are played out, vacant of any profound causal determinations of its own. Yet it is just this assumption which the numerous critiques of unilinearity, internalism, and methodological nationalism have thrown into question. And within IR too, it has always made critiques of realism easy prey to charges of reductionism and the ‘fallacy of the domestic analogy’.Footnote 9 This founding and continuing ‘great debate’ is thus not only lop-sided, (with realism being allowed to monopolise the definition of the international), but also non-progressive. A false reification of geopolitics holds the field because its challengers offer no alternative conceptualisation of that feature of the social world which has been reified. Yet this lack of an alternative, non-realist understanding of the international itself persists due to the internalist orientation of the wider social sciences (regularly re-imported into IR) which provoked the reification in the first place. Thus, perhaps unexpectedly, the problems of methodological nationalism, domestic analogy, and realist reification share a common source in the deep-laid internalism of the wider social sciences.
What kind of resource do we need in order to overcome this problem? And how would we know if we had found it? We need an approach that neither reifies nor downplays the international but instead grasps it as a sociologically intelligible dimension of the human world. Without such an approach, we shall be in permanent danger of attributing to capitalism, colonialism, liberalism, and so on, causal phenomena which may in fact derive from a quite different aspect of social reality. Moreover, until we have such an approach, the realist reification of the international remains unchallenged at the deepest level. Finally, the distinguishing mark of such an approach – in contrast to all the non-realist approaches mentioned above – must be its ability to identify aspects of social causality deriving specifically from the fact of societal multiplicity.
The present article argues that such an approach can be found in Leon Trotsky's idea of ‘uneven and combined development’ (U&CD). The provenance of this idea has been vigorously debated in recent years.Footnote 10 For many writers, its remit is confined to the context of its original formulation: the inter-societal pressure (unevenness) which it emphasises, together with the resultant societal fusions of the modern with the archaic (combination), are specific to the experience of late industrialisation. They result from a universalising and accelerating of social change that are unique to capitalism. Indeed, rejecting any wider usage, Neil Smith has long argued that ‘it is important that we dismiss the so-called “law of uneven development”, with its universal overtones’.Footnote 11 More recently, however, others have argued that because historical development has always been both plural and interactive, Trotsky's idea may be applied much more widely in historical analysis.Footnote 12 In fact, for these writers it provides the non-realist sociological definition of the international whose absence has for so long impeded the development of international theory.
Robert Heilbroner once observed that ‘[a]ll views of the world express philosophical premises, tacitly if not explicitly.’ And, he added, ‘it is often at this half-exposed level that their ultimate strengths or weaknesses are located’.Footnote 13 If the ‘ultimate strengths’ of U&CD are of the order more recently claimed for it, then it should be possible to show, by examination of its ‘philosophical premises’, how and why this might be. It is therefore incumbent upon proponents of this second view to round out their advocacy of the idea with an account of its epistemological and ontological foundations. And that is the purpose of this article.
Trotsky himself nowhere explicitly drew out the philosophical premises of his idea. Had he done so, he would almost certainly have insisted that they lay in the philosophy of dialectics, a philosophy which he did, albeit fragmentarily, attempt to expound. As we shall see below, however, the intellectual potential of his idea derives not so much from dialectical thought per se, but rather from a fundamental revision that Trotsky, apparently unwittingly, introduced into it. In formulating his idea, I shall argue, Trotsky tacitly inserted an extra philosophical premise into the inherited dialectical conception of motion and change. It is this that accounts for the distinctiveness of the idea, and for its ability to provide a solution to the general problem of methodological nationalism in the social sciences. But it also means that any attempt to realise the full potential of the idea must include an element of critique which liberates it from the limited form imposed by the conscious self-understanding of its originator.
The argument will be set out in three parts. First we must summarise Trotsky's own understanding of dialectical thought, an understanding that is based, quite conventionally, on a three-fold premise of ‘non-identity’. This summary is necessary for understanding the context of his innovation. As we shall argue in the second part, however, it does not reveal the innovation itself. It is here that we must initiate our critique. For without some further addition, U&CD could not have the radical implications that have been claimed for it. This addition is found in the tacit presupposition of a fourth element to the premise of non-identity – an element of numerical multiplicity. Finally, we shall turn to the opening chapter of the History of the Russian Revolution where Trotsky most explicitly formulates the idea of U&CD. Though widely quoted, this locus classicus of the idea remains an enigma: there exist no properly symptomatic readings of the text which reconcile its imaginative power as a work of literature with its analytical significance as a contribution to social science. As a result, U&CD has remained for many a concept which belongs ‘to a class of Marxist notions whose suggestiveness is equalled only by their elusiveness’.Footnote 14 The third part of our argument therefore provides a detailed analysis of Trotsky's text, exposing the central role within it of the fourth element of non-identity. This, it turns out, is the additional philosophical premise that ruptures the internalism of pre-existing conceptions of ‘development’. In doing so, I shall argue, it directly overcomes the problems of domestic analogy, methodological nationalism, and the realist reification of the international. And it thereby begins to justify what must otherwise appear as the unnecessarily extreme claim that has been made for Trotsky's concept: that alone among the non-realist approaches to the field, U&CD provides a genuinely social theorisation of the international.
I. Trotsky and dialectics
In the text quoted above, Robert Heilbroner summarises the dialectical worldview by enumerating four ‘philosophical premises’: praxis, motion, contradiction, and method. ‘Praxis’ refers to a view of thought not as passive contemplation of the world, but rather as an active (and interactive) engagement with reality – an unending back and forth between concepts and their objects, a fundamentally creative process of interrogation. ‘Motion’ refers to the principle that all of reality – physical, social, and ideational – is in endless movement. Nothing stays the same. Everything changes. Third, partly as a result of endless change, and partly driving that change forward, ‘contradiction’ is viewed as innate to reality. Contradiction in this sense derived from Hegel does not mean the logical error of embracing two or more propositions which cannot simultaneously be true. It means rather the ontological claim that in reality, opposing (but internally related) tendencies co-exist, pulling things in different ways, their tension playing into the movement of change.
And finally, says Heilbroner, dialectics supposedly also refers to a distinctive intellectual method of analysis, a method which somehow corresponds to those characteristics of thought and reality described in the first three points. This method comes in several forms. As we shall see, Trotsky associated it above all with the (Fichtean) formula of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, which he referred to as ‘the triad’.Footnote 15 For Trotsky, this formula reproduced abstractly the particular kind of movement involved in contradiction and change. In doing so, he believed, it enabled thought to replicate the moving shape of change itself, and thereby to expose its inner workings to analysis.
Trotsky's own writings on dialectics rehearse all four of these ‘premises’. But they appear in a different order. For his starting point lies in his identification of what it is about non-dialectical thought which necessitates an additional kind of cognition. This exercise takes the form of a critical engagement with Aristotelian logic. And he uses it to unfold a threefold premise of non-identity which becomes the basis for his advocacy of a dialectical method. If the ‘philosophical premises’ of U&CD lie in Trotsky's conscious understanding of dialectics, therefore, it is here that we shall find them.Footnote 16
Aristotelian formal logic, argues Trotsky, relies on the assumption that the attributes of things can be abstracted in the mind as fixed quantities and qualities for purposes of comparison and classification. Object ‘A’ is different from object ‘B’ which has contrasting properties (comparison); but it is identical to a second object ‘A’ insofar as they share the properties singled out in the abstraction (classification). Both forms of statement – ‘A≠B’ and ‘A=A’ – are necessary tools by which the mind orders the phenomena it seeks to understand. Indeed, such statements, and others like them, provide the building blocks for the structures of syllogistic reasoning by which valid arguments are built.Footnote 17 Thus ‘the axiom “A” is equal to “A” appears… to be the point of departure for all our knowledge’. And yet this same axiom, Trotsky claims, appears simultaneously to be ‘the point of departure for all the errors in our knowledge’.Footnote 18 Indeed, some forms of knowledge can be approached only by setting out instead from the opposite axiom, the axiom which provides, by contrast, the starting point of dialectical logic: ‘A≠A’. Why?
Here the premises of ‘motion’ and ‘praxis’ begin their work. For Trotsky's answer is that in reality the proposition ‘A=A’ is never fully valid. The caveat applies in three dimensions: it applies to the equation of real world objects with each other (classification); it applies even to their equation with themselves (their identity over time); and finally it also applies to their correspondence to the concepts by which these objects are figured in the mind. Let us examine these three elements of non-identity in turn.
No two physical or social objects are ever exactly identical with each other. A stronger microscope, more sensitive scales, or a closer analysis will always reveal a difference, however small. Furthermore, all material and social reality is subject to continuous change over time; thus the principle of non-identity (A≠A) enters even into the being of individual objects themselves: the same object differs, however infinitesimally, at one point in time from what it was, or will be, at another.
Finally, what applies to the relations between things in the world applies also to the relations between these things and the concepts by which they are apprehended in the human mind. No concept corresponds fully with the empirical reality which it seeks to grasp – and of which it is itself a simplified abstraction:
Historically humanity forms its ‘conceptions’ – the basic elements of its thinking – on the foundation of experience, which is always incomplete, partial, one-sided. It includes in ‘the concept’ those features of a living, forever changing process, which are important and significant for it at a given moment.Footnote 19
The partiality is temporal – mapping the properties of an object as they appear at (or at best, up to) a given moment in time; and it is ‘spatial’ – abstracting a particular quality which in fact characterises different objects in varying degrees.
Of course, for the most part, infinitesimal change and minute variation are not significant. In a famous example, Trotsky points out that no two cone bearings in a production batch will ever be exactly identical; but so long as their variation remains within a given margin of ‘tolerance’, they may safely be treated as if they were so.Footnote 20 And something similar, he suggests, applies to concepts: they too have a margin of tolerance, within which their non-correspondence to their objects can in practice be disregarded. For many purposes, therefore, the assumption that A=A is unproblematic. Over time, however, (or across the ‘space’ of variation), tiny quantitative differences accumulate. At key points, by dint of this accumulation, ‘tolerance’ is finally exceeded. At these points, incremental quantitative difference passes over into categorical qualitative change. And then the first premise of dialectical logic – A≠A – comes into its own.
This temporal and ‘spatial’ partiality of concepts is also intrinsic to their rootedness in praxis: the activity of thought always occurs at a given point in time, for the purpose of understanding particular objects which in turn have been singled out by particular interests (cognitive, moral, or practical). And this renders these concepts, by their nature, vulnerable to two sources of change. First, immanent change is written into the processual nature of social and physical reality: the growth and decline of social formations, the transmutations of the biological species, the cosmic processes which compose the ongoing history of the universe itself. Thus concepts which are unable to track the dynamic non-identity of the object-in-itself over time will gradually or suddenly become irrelevant. ‘The fundamental flaw of vulgar thought lies in the fact that it wishes to content itself with motionless imprints of a reality which consists of eternal motion.’Footnote 21
But second, change can and does also flow unpredictably from the growing impact (upon the process being theorised) of determinations originating in the marginal (‘spatial’) non-correspondence of ‘A’ with ‘A’.
Sociological problems would certainly be simpler if social phenomena had always a finished character. There is nothing more dangerous, however, than to throw out of reality, for the sake of logical completeness, elements which today violate your scheme and tomorrow may wholly overturn it.Footnote 22
Motion and variation entail the ‘contradictory’ nature of reality (Heilbroner's third premise) which therefore violates intellectual schemes built on fixed categories. But they simultaneously provide dialectical logic with its raw materials:
Some objects (phenomena) are confined easily within boundaries according to logical classification, others present [us with] difficulties: they can be put here or there, but within a stricter relationship – nowhere. While provoking the indignation of systematizers, such transitional forms are exceptionally interesting to dialecticians, for they smash the limited boundaries of classification, revealing the real connections and consecutiveness of a living process.Footnote 23
What then are the implications of all this for socio-historical analysis? For Trotsky, the triple non-identity of things, (with themselves, with each other, and with their concepts), points to three requirements. First, the concepts deployed must be dynamic ones (which thereby include the inner sources of change within the processes to which they refer):
Dialectics is the logic of development. Logic (formal) is the dialectic of motionlessness. Logic is a particular case of the dialectic, when motion and change enter into the formula as ‘0’.Footnote 24
Or, as he puts it elsewhere in his notebooks: ‘a=a is only a particular case of the law a≠a’.Footnote 25
Second, these concepts must somehow also register within themselves what one might call a principle of externality: their necessary incompleteness must be a reflexive one, inviting continued adjustment and correction according to whatever additional determinations come unpredictably to supervene in the process they are being deployed to conceptualise. In this way,
[d]ialectical thinking gives to concepts, by means of closer approximations, corrections, concretizations, a richness of content and flexibility; I would even say a succulence which to a certain extent brings them close to living phenomena.Footnote 26
But third, the moment of a dialectical method (Heilbroner's fourth premise) lies not in the ‘closer approximations’ themselves, the succession of categories by which thought updates its correspondence to an ever-changing reality. It lies rather in the deployment of that method across the gaps which separate these successive categories, in order to model the process of mutation itself by which the sequence of categories has been necessitated. In doing this, its operation takes – and must take – the form of syllogistic reasoning constrained by the normal rules of inference and non-contradiction, rules shared with (Aristotelian) formal logic: ‘The fundamental “cell” of dialectical thinking is the syllogism.’Footnote 27 But this syllogistic reasoning is now regrouped around the process of change (by which ‘A’ has become ‘not-A’), in order to bring the relation of concept and object back within the margin of tolerance. For Trotsky, the significance of the ‘triadic equation’ (thesis-antithesis-synthesis) was not that it revealed anything about the concrete content of historical reality. It was rather that at key moments it released the mind from the rigid assumptions of formal classification and comparison (A=A, etc.), and allowed it instead to model the processes of change in continuity whose effects repeatedly ‘smash the limited boundaries of classification’.
Thus, although couched repeatedly in the opposition between ‘Aristotelian syllogism’ and ‘Hegelian Dialectic’, Trotsky's argument does not call for the replacement of the one by the other. Classification and comparison remain elemental to cognition. And in any case, dialectical thought needs the tension between ‘fixed abstractions’ and ‘transitional forms’ in order to spotlight those processes of qualitative change – the transmutation of ‘A’ into ‘not-A’ – whose analysis it makes its own. The overall complex relation is summed up in a characteristically striking simile:
Dialectical thinking is related to vulgar thinking in the same way that a motion picture is related to a still photograph. The motion picture does not outlaw the still photograph but combines a series of them according to the laws of motion. Dialectics does not deny the syllogism, but teaches us to combine syllogisms in such a way as to bring our understanding closer to the eternally changing reality.Footnote 28
To summarise: for Trotsky, dialectics was a branch of logical reasoning which addressed a gap left by the limiting assumptions of Aristotelian formal logic. It was a necessary completion of the overall system of logic because ceaseless motion and inevitable variation, coupled with the praxis-defined partiality of cognition, entails a three-fold premise of non-identity. This premise explains the generic tendency over time for all concepts and phenomena to exceed their tolerance, a tendency arising from the intrinsically contradictory nature of reality and its relation to thought. Dialectical logic, he believed, models the kind of movement generated by this contradiction. It does so by combining syllogisms in the distinctive pattern of thesis-antithesis-synthesis – a pattern designed to track the phenomenon of change in continuity. For Trotsky, this procedure comprised its method.
II. U&CD as an innovation in dialectical thought
Does this account of dialectics reveal the philosophical premises of ‘uneven and combined development’? On a first look, it certainly appears to. The first two elements of non-identity – change over time and variation across instances – look like ontological precursors to the categories of ‘development’ and ‘unevenness’ respectively. Moreover, there is an apparent ‘fit’ between the inner elements of U&CD, (development – unevenness – combination), and those of the triadic equation itself (thesis – antithesis – synthesis). Thus it might appear that U&CD is nothing other than the operationalising of dialectical premises in a sociological hypothesis about the nature of historical change. And one might indeed conclude that the ‘philosophical premises’ of the idea which accounted for its ‘ultimate strengths’ – its ability to integrate ‘the international’ into social theory – have already been revealed.
Closer inspection, however, soon reveals that the relationship between dialectics and U&CD is not so straightforward. Not for nothing has one commentator lamented that the search for ‘Trotsky's underlying philosophical method [ends in] a maze of possible confusions.’Footnote 29 Three problems arise in particular.
First, Trotsky's rehearsal of dialectics, despite its radical appearance, does not add significantly to insights already available within the tradition of classical social theory. Thus if, as asserted in the Introduction, U&CD marks an advance on that tradition, the source of the advance cannot be derived from his understanding of dialectics alone. Second, when we specify that advance itself and ask where it comes from, we discover that it presupposes what amounts, in effect, to a fourth principle of non-identity, one which cannot be derived from the other three. And third, when we then look again at the content of U&CD as a concept, we find that it involves a quite fundamental reworking of the triadic equation itself – a reworking produced above all by the (unannounced) interpolation of this fourth principle.
As a result of all this, the significance of dialectics for our overall argument needs careful recalibration at this point. Because it was the intellectual idiom in which U&CD was originally formulated, Trotsky's understanding of dialectics remains helpful for interpreting his argumentation. Indeed, we shall initially frame the distinctiveness of U&CD by extending Trotsky's own argument about dialectics. Nonetheless, this extension simultaneously reveals the scale of the intellectual revision involved in Trotsky's idea. It arguably also explains, by comparison, why other dialectical approaches (which do not contain the extra ingredient) have failed to make original contributions to the field of international theory.Footnote 30 And it suggests, therefore, that the critical implications of U&CD may even be as great for dialectics as for more conventional approaches to social theory.
a. Dialectics and classical social theory
How distinctive then is the three-fold principle of non-identity which forms the basis of Trotsky's philosophical argument? On reflection, neither the ontological premise of motion, nor the radical epistemological consequences attributed to it, is unique to dialectics. Max Weber, to take one example, deployed a metaphor of running water to describe the nature of social reality, and argued that ‘[t]he eternally onward flowing stream of culture [dictates] not only the transiency of all ideal types but also at the same time the inevitability of new ones.’Footnote 31
More generally of course, an analytical focus on change is the defining element of the concept of development itself, which in turn was the central, explicit theme of all classical social theories, from St Simon and Comte onwards.Footnote 32 All these theories sought to map the process by which, over historical time, traditional society had evolved into modern society, ‘A’ becoming ‘not-A’. Nor can it be said that non-dialectical writers ignored the significance of empirical variations within classes of objects. On the contrary, Weber's method of ideal typical concept formation is premised on a reflexive awareness of exactly this. And the explanatory moment of this method too is ultimately concentrated in filling the ‘gap’ – that is, in accounting for the deviation of empirical cases from the ideal-typical concept. ‘Historical research faces the task of determining in each individual case the extent to which this ideal-construct approximates to or diverges from reality…’, and hence ‘… we comprehend reality only through a chain of intellectual modifications’.Footnote 33 Similarly, empirical variation within the universal abstraction of ‘society’ was hardly neglected in classical social theory, where it provided the foundation of comparative historical analysis itself: ‘all the great theorists, in all branches of the social sciences, have had an extensive awareness and familiarity with the immense variety of forms that societies and cultures have taken’.Footnote 34 Finally, the praxis-defined partiality of concepts, was also a theme familiar to classical sociology. ‘There is’, wrote Weber, ‘no absolutely “objective” scientific analysis of … “social phenomena” independent of special and “one-sided” viewpoints according to which … they are selected, analyzed and organized for expository purposes’.Footnote 35
Thus all three principles of non-identity which Trotsky takes to define dialectical thought – change over time, variation across instances, non-correspondence of concept and object – are already available within the tradition of classical social theory. And yet we have also said that this tradition remained overwhelmingly shaped by an internalist definition of development, unable to focus theoretically its international dimension. It follows that if U&CD is to overcome this limit, it cannot be by virtue of the premises of dialectics as Trotsky has rehearsed them. We appear to have met a dead end.
b. A fourth principle of non-identity
To find a way forward at this point, let us recall what many writers agree is not available in classical Sociology: recognition of a specifically interactive dimension of development.Footnote 36 This, as we shall see below, is the fundamental innovation of the idea of uneven and combined development. But where does it come from? If it cannot be anticipated at the level of ‘philosophical premises’, then it will turn out to be a purely mid-range, eclectic solution to the problem of the international in social theory, one which leaves unmodified the ‘internalist’ foundations of the problem itself. To avoid this outcome, we must extend Trotsky's argument; and to do so we must reach back beyond interaction, and beyond even variation, to the ontological presupposition on which both of these subtend: multiplicity itself.
As we saw above, Trotsky argued that the process of abstraction entails a triple partiality of the concept: in time, in ‘space’ and hence also in its correspondence to its object. This certainly means that in reality, the objects called ‘A’ will always have more going on in them than is grasped in the concept of ‘A’. Thus far, however, he has done no more than identify a marginal space, beyond what any ‘fixed abstraction’ can capture, in which ‘external’ sources of mutation may germinate. In the nature of the case, this space cannot be mapped by any cognitive process, dialectical or otherwise, since it is produced as an externality by what is involved in cognition itself. It cannot be theorised. The best that dialectics can offer here is a reflexive awareness (not unique to dialectics)Footnote 37 of this space, and a (controversial)Footnote 38 claim that retrospective application of a triadic equation (after real-world change has exceeded the ‘tolerance’ of a given conception) will allow for a modelling in thought of the real mutation which has occurred. By contrast, the theory of uneven and combined development, as we shall see in detail below, offers itself as an enhancement of cognition, not a qualification of it. It identifies and explains an entire class of international causes and effects which had escaped existing sociological theory. The question therefore becomes: what further ingredient could it include which might account for such an outcome? And this question, convoluted as it might seem, is not unanswerable.
As Trotsky argues, in order to formulate a concept of ‘A’, we have to abstract a given quality which all instances of ‘A’ share, irrespective of their variation in other respects. And this must indeed render their variation invisible to the concept itself. But there is a further liability to this process which he does not make explicit. When we thus abstract from variation across the ‘space’ of multiple instances, we simultaneously abstract also from multiplicity itself. We reduce multiplicity to singularity. And with that, we close off the conceptual space of interaction as a dimension of change. This does not matter in the case of cone bearings, whose multiplicity generates no more than a field of external mutual comparison. But it matters enormously in the case of societies – for which, as we shall see, multiplicity gives rise to a wholly additional, interactive, dimension of reproduction and change.
There is therefore a fourth sense in which A≠A: even if two instances of something were completely identical, they would still not actually be each other. And, co-existing therefore, they might potentially affect each other. Thus, over and above any qualitative multiplicity of properties (variation), the quantitative multiplicity of being, (the condition of more-than-one) has a potential significance of its own.
It would be implausible to claim that neglect of this fourth sense of non-identity must occur – that it is written into the nature of cognition. It does nonetheless seem to be the case that it did somehow occur in the tradition of classical Sociology, where one searches in vain for any formalisation of multiplicity per se as an aspect of socio-historical development.Footnote 39 Here is the source of that internalism which still underlies the problem of methodological nationalism today. And it also seems possible that what Trotsky unwittingly presupposed in formulating the idea of U&CD amounts to a hidden premise of quantitative multiplicity.
c. The triadic equation reoriented
At this stage, of course, any such suggestion is purely speculative. It becomes much firmer, however, as soon as we look more closely at the content of Trotsky's idea. For this content quite dramatically reorients the meaning of the ‘triadic equation’ as Trotsky himself has earlier presented it. To see how, let us consider the three parts of the concept – development, unevenness, combination – in turn.
The starting point of Trotsky's idea is ‘development’ – social phenomena conceived not statically but rather in process. In terms of the conceptual elements by which dialectical thought seeks to map change, ‘development’ corresponds to the opening term ‘thesis’. It is the object whose dialectical mutation (of A into not-A) is to be analysed.
But there is already a difference here. When Trotsky earlier gave examples of objects whose being was to be re-interpreted dialectically, these objects, (whether physical, as in the case of cone bearings, or social, as in the case of capitalism at a given stage), gave an appearance of fixed properties which the dialectical interpolation of temporality broke down. That is to say, he presented dialectics primarily as a critique of static conceptions of reality. ‘Development’, however, is anything but a static concept: it already presupposes immanent sources of motion and change. To place ‘development’ at the opening term of a triadic equation therefore means that the focus of critique has shifted. The opposition can no longer be between stasis and motion. And the crucial adjustment here will indeed not be a temporal, but rather a ‘spatial’ one. The opposition which it will focus is that between unilinear (that is, internalist) and multilinear conceptions of development. Behind the scenes, therefore, the presupposition of multiplicity has already altered the content of the triadic equation.
The ‘spatial’ or lateral dimension in which this adjustment occurs is formally posited by the next element of the concept – uneven[ness] – which corresponds to the ‘antithesis’. But once again, there is an important difference here. And this difference too is related to the fourth meaning of A≠A identified above.
The notion of ‘unevenness’ appears at first to do no more than register the non-identity of the object in the first three senses earlier distinguished. But if it did no more than this, it would remain a qualification of theoretical possibility, rather than identifying an additional source of theorisable phenomena. After all, we have already said that the marginal space identified by the (three-fold) principle of non-identity cannot be theorised: it is produced as an externality by the process of cognition itself. Hence, if ‘unevenness’ does open up a further ‘space’ of theorisable phenomena, then it cannot be the same space, and the concept must be identifying something which could have been theorised, but which has been unnecessarily externalised.
Here too, then, the significance of quantitative multiplicity has been tacitly presupposed. For in Trotsky's idea, it is this property (co-existing multiplicity) which turns the descriptive fact of unevenness into a germ of interactive mutation. And this becomes an additional reason why, extended over space and time, the object of any concept of development must move away from its original causal configuration, and consequently into deepening non-correspondence with the categories originally used to conceptualise it. This applies even though those original categories were dynamic developmental ones. They too entail different developmental configurations at different points in time. But, as we shall confirm empirically in Part 3 below, the particular (differentiating) motion being interpolated here is a wholly additional one, arising not internally from a given developmental process, but specifically from its interaction with other such processes. And it turns out that some of the consequences which follow from this interactive moment of development can indeed be generalised and hence theorised. This is the meaning of the third element: combination.
Once again, the result seems at first to proceed quite straightforwardly from the dialectical premises that Trotsky has explicitly identified. Interaction among unevenly developed parts produces a mutation within a given developmental logic, straining the ‘tolerance’ of the concepts originally used to grasp that logic. And this requires a regrouping of syllogistic reasoning around the hybrid outcome (synthesis) of unevenness – both to explain how the mutation has occurred and to derive new developmental tendencies corresponding to the altered configuration of causes. These new tendencies now replace those posited at the start of the three-part exercise. Reality mutates, and the conceptual apparatus must mutate with it.Footnote 40
Yet there is more to the concept of ‘combined development’ than this. As we shall see below, it is unevenness between societies, and never just regional variation within them that produces the full phenomenon of combined development. Why should this be? The reason must lie in the further ingredients which inter-societal co-existence adds to the sociology of development.
In the example which Trotsky uses, Czarist Russia contained all manner of significant internal variations and heterogeneities: ‘from the primeval barbarism of the northern forests, where people eat raw fish and worship blocks of wood, to the modern social relations of the capitalist city’.Footnote 41 Nonetheless, the overall pattern of its development also differed systematically from that of its Western, post-feudal neighbours. Societal multiplicity therefore entails an additional layer to unevenness itself, as different societies follow different paths of development. Furthermore, these different societies co-exist and interact – through trade, diplomacy, conflict, the transmission of ideas, and so on. And this interaction adds ‘external’ causes to the pattern of development which are over and above those given in its ‘internal’ configuration alone. There is therefore a chronic over-determination of internal development arising from the fact of multiplicity. But finally, these external influences differ not only in (socio-spatial) origin but also in kind from their internal political, material, and ideational equivalents. Because they traverse more than one political jurisdiction, they add a strategic, geopolitical dimension to social development. In fact, in Trotsky's example, it is this geopolitical dimension – the ‘whip of external necessity’ expressed in Russia's vulnerability to more powerful, more advanced Western neighbours – which ultimately drives the process of combined development itself.
Thus while all development shares the dialectical properties attributed by Trotsky to reality in general, ‘combined development’ arises specifically from the interactive multiplicity of societies. It is the (unannounced) fourth premise of non-identity – numerical multiplicity – that transforms a generic argument about the dialectical nature of reality into one which is uniquely focussed upon ‘the international’ as a theorisable dimension of historical change.
To see how this extra ‘philosophical premise’ underpins the ‘ultimate strengths’ of the idea of uneven and combined development – enabling it to overcome the problem of internalism – we must now analyse the text where that idea is most explicitly worked out and deployed: the opening chapter of his History of the Russian Revolution.Footnote 42
III. The innovation at work: formulation and historical application
This twelve and a half page text, entitled ‘Peculiarities of Russia's Development’, is the locus classicus of the idea of U&CD. It contains Trotsky's most concentrated and pregnant formulation of the ‘laws’ of unevenness and combination, together with an application of these to the long-term history of Russian development. As we work through the text, we shall certainly find that its method – serial deployments of the triadic equation – is consistent with his understanding of dialectics. We shall also find, however, that the premise of numerical multiplicity has been interpolated, without comment, right at the start, crucially rearticulating the triadic equation itself across the interactive space of multiple societies. If the arguments made abstractly above are sound, we should further find that this revision finally delivers the great desideratum identified in the Introduction: a theory which grasps the international (and enumerates its causal properties) as a sociologically intelligible dimension of the human world.
Trotsky's text has often been accused of substituting literary images and metaphors for proper social scientific analysis and proof.Footnote 43 Yet a clear intellectual argument can be identified, which breaks down into a logical sequence of four steps. First, the triadic equation is mapped onto the interactive location of Russia within the wider unevenness of Eurasian development (pp. 3–4). Next the idea which this mapping concretely illustrates is explicitly formulated to produce the social scientific ‘law’ of U&CD (pp. 4–6). Third, this law is applied in order to track the interactive differentiation of Russian historical development from its Western counterparts (pp. 6–12). And finally that differentiation is itself fed back into the long-term, wider pattern of Eurasian history so as to explain the interactive shape of its movement over time (pp. 12–15).
Step I: the triadic equation
Trotsky begins with ‘development’, in particular its ‘slow tempo’ in the case of Russian society. And the first step of his argument is executed in three deft paragraphs, where this slow Russian development is successively depicted in three registers: first in itself as a hard struggle against natural elements (the wind, the cold, the steppe, the forest); next, by comparison with the quite different process of social development which was occurring simultaneously to the (European) West; and finally in interactive, causal relation to this European West.
Trotsky's use of a motion-picture analogy to capture something of the nature of dialectical thought is especially apposite here. For not only is this a succession of images each of which is in motion; but also the ‘camera’ itself is moving. First it focuses on the bleak social and natural landscape of Russia; then it switches to the richer, colourful throng of European cultural life; and finally it ‘pans out’ to reveal the two patterns as parts of a socially and geographically interconnected whole. The dazzling cinematographic effect, however, has a social scientific purpose: as the full picture is built up, the inter-societal dimension is being progressively brought to the fore. Moreover, via these same three paragraphs, and even before the term itself has been introduced, all three components of U&CD have already arrived on the stage, clothed in concrete historical determinations, but observing the logical sequence of the ‘triad’ itself: (Russian) development, (Eurasian) unevenness, (East-West) combination.
The premise of multiplicity arrives in the course of this sequence. In fact, we can spot the precise moment in the layering of the image at which it carries the analytical framework beyond that inherited from classical social theory – and beyond a traditional conception of dialectics. First, a given (Russian) developmental dynamic is specified in the singular. Then this singular instance is located in a wider conceptual space of multiple instances – within which, however, this multiplicity has comparative but not yet causal significance. Up to this point, the analysis remains within the ambit of classical social thought, deploying two of its most distinctive resources: the principle of historical specificity and the method of comparative historical analysis.Footnote 44 But finally (in the third paragraph) comes the moment we are looking for: the conceptual space of comparison suddenly reappears as the geographical space of inter-societal co-existence, revealing a wholly additional set of causes operating on Russian society. ‘Russia’, says Trotsky, ‘was unable to settle in the forms of the East because she was continually having to adapt herself to military and economic pressure from the West’ (p. 4). These are international causes. Where do they come from? To be sure, they take their force from the developmental gap between Russia and its neighbours. They are effects of the unevenness of Eurasian development. Yet they would not operate if that unevenness were expressed as a qualitative variation alone. It is the quantitative multiplicity of societies which produces the geopolitical dimension of the social world.
Step II: the social scientific ‘law’
The formal elaboration of U&CD now follows. And it is conducted by re-abstracting from the concrete phenomena which have already been painted in. For Russia's situation illustrates a much wider fact about human social existence: ‘the universal law of unevenness’ (p. 5). By this phrase Trotsky means that at any given point in time social development will have reached different levels and taken different forms in different countries. And, as we have just seen, these differences are not simply a latent, descriptive feature of the empirical world. Because the countries making up a given pattern of unevenness co-exist and interact, their internal development is causally affected by their co-existence with each other: ‘[f]rom the universal law of unevenness thus derives another law … the law of combined development’ (pp. 5–6). Refracted through societal multiplicity, the spatio-temporal unevenness of historical development becomes multi-centred and interactive, pushing it beyond comprehension by any ‘pedantic schematism’ (p. 5) (that is, any non-dialectical, unilinear conception).
A fundamental consequence now emerges, one which ‘reveals itself most sharply and complexly in the destiny of the backward countries’ (p. 5): historical development and change are subject to interactive, as well as internal, logics of process. Inequalities of wealth and power among societies give rise to a ‘whip of external necessity’ which compels weaker societies to adapt in order to survive. At the same time, the co-existence of these weaker societies with more advanced neighbours also creates opportunities for imitation and transfer of ideas and resources – opportunities which relieve these societies of the need to independently reinvent the social, material, and ideational resources which now feed into their on-going development.
Of course, not every late-developing society is able to take advantage of this ‘privilege of historic backwardness’. And the transfer of social artefacts from one social setting into another can produce widely varying results. It might free the artefacts from cultural encumbrances which obstructed their further refinement in their original setting, contributing to the kind of developmental leap-frogging by which ‘Germany and the United States have now economically outstripped England’; but the same artefacts might also be ‘debased’ by the transfer, as when ‘the introduction of … Western technique and training … under Peter I, led to a strengthening of serfdom’ in Russia (p. 5).
In both cases, however, the transfer enables what is in effect a developmental ‘leap’ over the stages of the process by which the artefacts were originally produced. Viewed from another angle, this ‘leap’ is also a ‘contraction’, a ‘drawing together of the different stages of the [original] journey’ (p. 6). As a result of it, social phenomena which were elsewhere separated from each other in developmental time (for example, advanced industry and agrarian society, late feudal states, and socialist ideologies) meet and interact. The very sequence of developmental steps is reordered, for ‘[a]lthough compelled to follow after the advanced countries, a backward country does not take things in the same order’ (pp. 4–5). (In Russia, for example, modern industry was emerging before the consolidation of the capitalist class which elsewhere produced it.) In these ways the developmental coordinates of the societies involved are fundamentally redrawn. And this occurs via pressures and mechanisms which are irreducibly inter-societal in nature. Here then we arrive at the heart of Trotsky's innovation: what the ‘law’ of uneven and combined development comprises is the visualising and mapping of the international as a dimension of social causality.
But to repeat the question: what is the ultimate source of these phenomena which so radically inflect the shape of the historical process? Trotsky's own argumentation at this point has generated some confusion. For he appears at first to claim that capitalism alone produces combined development. ‘Capitalism’, he says, ‘prepares and in a certain sense realises the universality and permanence of Man's development’ (p. 4). Premodern world development, he argues, had been episodic, regional, and fragmented, allowing for the non-cumulative repetition of similar developmental cycles in different times and places. Capitalism transforms this age-old picture irreversibly. Its universalising geographical expansion brings the whole world for the first time into an interconnected system in which isolated development no longer occurs. And this imparts a cumulative quality to its technological progress too, enabling follow-on instances of development to begin from ever higher starting points. ‘By this’, writes Trotsky, ‘a repetition of the forms of national development by different nations is ruled out’ (p. 4). It is little wonder, therefore, that many commentators have concluded that the entire phenomenon of uneven and combined development is specifically modern, a side-effect of distinctively capitalist social logics.Footnote 45
Ultimately, however, this would be a misreading of Trotsky's exposition, which operates via a two-step process of abstraction. First, to be sure, Russia's peculiarities are argued to reflect a more general experience of backward countries within the unfolding of capitalist development. But then that unfolding itself is shown to take the non-linear form that it does as a result of the yet more general ‘laws of history’ – unevenness and its corollary of combined development.
By this two-step process of abstraction, the essence of Trotsky's idea, which is ultimately an idea about the ‘laws of history’ in general, is eventually distilled. Nonetheless, during the first step, the general significance of inter-societal interaction for historical development appears to have been momentarily conflated with the specific (dynamic and universalising) properties of capitalism. And the consequences of interaction, which in fact can be observed across human history, have then appeared (quite misleadingly) to derive their very existence from characteristics particular to capitalism. But universality and interaction are not the same thing. The fact that capitalist society has uniquely universalising (and technologically dynamic) properties does not at all entail that precapitalist development was not interactive. On the contrary, it is the fact that all development – even capitalism – includes this interactive dimension arising from unevenness which explains the phenomenology of modern combined development here apparently derived by Trotsky from capitalism alone. And sure enough, Trotsky himself, despite the apparent conflation, proceeds to take the second step by now invoking ‘the laws of history’. Combined development, he goes on to say, is a characteristic of historical process which ‘derives’ from the ‘most general’ feature of that process: ‘the universal law of unevenness’ (p. 5). Modern combined development must therefore be a particular, if particularly intense, instance of a phenomenon (arising from societal multiplicity) which is generic to the historical process per se.
This clarification is the only way to make Trotsky's observations about different historical periods consistent with each otherFootnote 46 (though it cannot rescue his implied claim that interaction was insignificant for the ancient civilisations). And it has a further implication: it means that the real innovation of Trotsky's idea is partly occluded within his own argumentation. There is, after all, nothing original about the claim that modern society has uniquely universal characteristics and consequences: like the earlier claims about historical change and variation, this was a commonplace of classical social theory. The real innovation – the one which pre-empts any methodologically nationalist formulation of the subject matter – is the insertion of universal unevenness and consequent combination into the ontology of historical materialism. And this innovation has brought with it a further presupposition which is not announced at all: namely that the articulation of unevenness across a multiplicity of societies produces additional causal mechanisms (such as ‘the whip of external necessity’) which are generic to the overall process of historical development, and which impart to it a specifically inter-societal or international dimension. Neither the general innovation nor its tacit presupposition is to be found in other dialectical approaches in IR (or elsewhere). They have crept, part unseen, into Trotsky's method. And the presupposition – interactive multiplicity – corresponds to the fourth premise of non-identity discussed earlier above.
Step III: Russia's historical differentiation
What difference does this make to the logic of historical explanation? This is what we find out in Step III (pp. 5–12). This next (and longest) section of Trotsky's text is taken up with following the process just identified – unevenness generating combined development – across numerous aspects of the history of Russia.
As an intellectual exercise, it embodies the logical form of dialectical reasoning as follows. Russia, like its Westerly neighbours, is a society. It belongs to a class of entities ‘A’, all of which undergo a process of (interconnected but unevenly distributed) development which leads (between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries) from agrarian to industrialising capitalist societies. By virtue of this commonality, certain categories find real-world referents for all principal members of the class – that is, inside all the major societies involved. Thus, broadly speaking, the analysis of all these societies can share a nomenclature of state, nobility, clergy, cities, trade, and periodic uprisings (for the agrarian period), which is gradually (and unevenly) supplemented by one of industry, bourgeoisie, proletariat, and revolution as capitalist development sets in. This overall process of development is of course internally uneven – A≠A (in the first three senses) – differing from one society to another. However, because these societies co-exist concretely as parts of a whole, (sense four), typological variation may enter also into (international) axes of causal interrelation. And, as we have already begun to see, it is these which will explain Russia's combined development. How then is the argument constructed?
The answer is that ten times in the course of Step III – once for each of the categories listed above (state, nobility, clergy, etc.) – the basic dialectical procedure is repeated: a shared category is taken up (thesis); the developmental unevenness between West and East is interpolated into it (antithesis); and the interactive effects of that unevenness, are traced in the historical production of the differentiated Russian form (synthesis). Some of these effects operate due to the absence in Russia of some component present within the Western instance (variation). Others, however, proceed from the over-determining presence of the West itself, the pressure arising from its differential and more advanced development (multiplicity). This latter type of effect must interest us particularly because it signals a specifically international cause; but either way, the composite result of this combined development is later summed up by Trotsky in a striking observation: ‘The belatedness of the Russian [bourgeois] revolution was thus not only a matter of chronology, but also of the social structure of the nation’ (p. 12).Footnote 47 How does this result emerge; and what, specifically, does ‘belatedness’, applied to social structure, mean?
We have already learned in Step I that, by contrast with Europe, (comparative unevenness), Russian development suffered heavy natural and socio-historical disadvantages. Its physical environment of forest and steppe deprived it of the natural boundaries which in Europe had fostered demographic concentration and social differentiation (p. 3). Geography also condemned Russia to a long struggle with nomadic peoples, whose depredations further impeded its development. And unlike Europe, developing in the treasure-strewn ruins of classical Mediterranean civilisation, the cultural prehistory of the Russian lands was all but empty.Footnote 48
This East-West unevenness would be intensified over time, largely because it became itself an international cause, a source, that is, of combined development. Thus in the first instance it issued in a geopolitical ‘pressure from richer Europe’ (p. 6). This pressure, (according to Trotsky), largely explains the exaggerated role of the state in Russian development, a role which in turn pre-empted the emergence of an independent nobility or clergy as checks to autocratic power. Here then is the first mechanism arising from multiplicity – a geopolitical one which contributes to a diverging pattern of state formation. But it is only the first.
The ‘meagreness of Russian development’ was also expressed in ‘the absence of real Medieval cities’ (p. 7), and the resulting failure (compared to Europe) of handicraft to disentangle itself from peasant production. Indeed, instead of developing as centres of production, Russian cities acted as conduits of cross-border trade which ‘from time immemorial [gave] the leadership to foreign commercial capital’ (p. 7), (extending the mechanisms of inter-societal causality from geopolitics to trade). Together with the political subordination of nobility and clergy, this lack of social differentiationFootnote 49 pre-empted both a Russian version of the Reformation and, more generally, the possibility of political development through broad based mobilisation against Czarist autocracy. Thus by dint of its interaction with pre-capitalist Europe, the Russian social structure was already reshaped in a way that ‘ruled out’ repetition of the course of European development. Peasant rebellions there were, of course; and later there were also attempted coups by reformist, Western-influenced, elements of the nobility (adding a third mechanism of combined development: ideological influence and transfer). But rebellions from below and coups from above could not connect to each other due to the absence of a mediating Third Estate (p. 8). And when real change was initiated – the 1861 abolition of serfdom, for example – it was internationally induced (by the dual effects of military defeat and deepening dependence on grain exports). Consequently, it bore a quite different (state-led) social complexion, was enacted by quite different social groups, and had a quite different historical meaning, to its earlier Western equivalents, which it was now, belatedly, imitating. And this leads to the identification of a fourth interactive mechanism of differentiation: ‘The solution of the problems of one class by another’, says Trotsky, (referring to the substitution of state power in the absence of ‘bourgeois liberalism’ as an effective agent of the abolition), ‘is one of those combined methods natural to backward nations’ (p. 9).
Thus for the pre-industrial period, the shared concepts of state, nobility, clergy, cities, trade, and political uprisings are shown to take different concrete forms (not-A) within the East-West unevenness of development. But in each case too, the differentiation of the Russian instance is shown in part to derive from the effects of this same unevenness refracted through multiplicity – effects which include geopolitical pressure, mercantile penetration, ideological influences, and political substitutionism. In other words, those effects themselves derive their being not only from the variation intrinsic to unevenness, but specifically from its articulation across a numerical multiplicity of instances, (in this case, of concretely co-existing societies). They are irreducibly inter-societal effects. And Trotsky's excavation of them can therefore be ascribed to his dialectical method only insofar as that method presupposes the fourth element of non-identity mentioned above.
It was, however, with the arrival of ‘modern industry’ that the paradoxical qualities of Russia reached their highest pitch. Both the sociological differentiation of Russian development from its Westerly neighbours (unevenness) and its inter-societal entanglement with them (the concrete mechanisms of combination) were now dramatically and simultaneously intensified. The need to formulate this high point triggers a quite remarkable syntactical agility in Trotsky's writing, as it twists back and forth to weave together in thought the play of interactive determinations:
Arising late, Russian industry did not repeat the development of the advanced countries, but inserted itself into this development, adapting their latest achievements to its own backwardness. (p. 9)
In this remarkable sentence, Trotsky is once again picturing a specifically international logic of process. It is a logic that radically transforms both the ‘domestic’ and the global pattern of social change over time. Yet this international logic is not external to the sociology of development. Rather it emerges from the latter's intrinsic unevenness. Hence the sociological analysis does not play down the significance of geopolitical anarchy; on the contrary, it traces out further results of that same societal multiplicity which gives rise to the existence of geopolitics itself.
What makes the sentence remarkable is that the single statement which it composes is made up of four phrases, each of which adds a different directionality to the composite orientation of the phenomenon being described. Thus, the linear idea of ‘arising’ points vertically upwards; ‘not repeat’ does not cancel that vertical dimension; but it displaces outwards (or expands) the base of the single idea of industry ‘arising’; in effect it opens out a second, lateral dimension (of variation) within which the erstwhile ‘line’ of development can conceivably move; ‘insert’ is in turn a diagonal movement across this newly opened-out lateral dimension; finally, ‘adapting’ reverses the directionality of that movement. What is being mapped here is the peculiar interactive space generated by the international character of industrialisation. But can the whole still make sense? Let us unpack it a little more.
We start with ‘A’ (Russian industry) which already has one source of ‘not-A’ within it: it is ‘arising’, changing over time (the first element of non-identity). But even considered thus as a process, this ‘arising’ also has, (by virtue of being ‘late’), a ‘not-A’ outside of itself: the original pattern of industrial development marked out by the pioneer countries from which (by not repeating it) Russian industrialisation will differ (the second element: variation). It will differ, however, precisely because the very existence of the external ‘not-A’ now enters interactively into the developmental conditions of ‘A’, adding pressures and opportunities not present in the original cases (the fourth element: interactive multiplicity). The effects of these are reflected in both the greater speed and the different socio-political form of Russian industrialisation (whose initiation is, in addition, forced to occur in the absence of the social conditions which allowed for its spontaneous occurrence elsewhere).
The active response by Russian state and society to these pressures and opportunities generates in turn not one but two further axes of differentiation. The first is captured in the double meaning of the phrase ‘inserted itself’. Most obviously, this phrase means what we have already implied: joining a process not at the start, but at a later point – the point of insertion – after that process has developed to a certain extent. But it also means becoming a part of (and adding its own determinations to) what is, in effect, a new whole. Thus Russia's own mutation away from its erstwhile line of development simultaneously comprises an incremental mutation in the directionality of the overall process which it is joining (that is, the global history of industrialisation). And this latter sense becomes the bridge to the last phrase of the sentence. Here the direction of the thought suddenly makes a further 180° turn in order to capture the second of the two additional sources of differentiation. The transfer of Western innovations and resources into Russian society altered their content and meaning. These products of liberal capitalist development were now in the hands of an anti-liberal state using them to inhibit liberalising political change. And yet, other aspects of the social logic which they had exhibited in their original Western setting now gave the appearance of being dramatically accelerated by the same transfer. The role of the state meant that Russian industrialisation would not retrace the process by which (in the West) intensifying competition among myriad private producers was leading to increasing ‘concentration of capital’. But it nonetheless produced, by a different route, both a financial concentration of capital (in state hands) and a physical concentration of workers (in giant factories) which far outstripped the development of that process (of concentration) even in the Western countries themselves. This is what Trotsky means by saying that the artefacts of Western development were ‘adapted to’ Russian backwardness. (And he is quick to add that the paradox of Russian industry being therefore, in some respects, more advanced than its Western counterpart ‘does not disprove this backwardness, but dialectically completes it’ (p.10).)
Thus we have in one sentence four vectors of linear motion, cross-cutting each other. But these are not just random empirical complications. Each of them can be derived as a theorisable consequence of co-existing multiplicity. Hence, rather than cancelling each other out, they in fact build up to compose a logical template of interactive change characterising multilinear development.
How then is this template applied beyond Russian industry to anatomise the wider social structure of ‘belatedness’? Let us pick up the thread again. As we have already seen, the Russian economy was increasingly a contradictory blend of advanced and archaic elements. Orchestrated by a pre-capitalist state under external pressure, and utilising the ‘privilege of historic backwardness’, the industrial sector showed ‘extraordinary speed’ in its expansion. And yet the economy overall remained much less developed than its Western counterparts. This applied whether measured by the demographic comparison of industry to peasant agriculture, or by the extent of its mastery of its natural environment (expressed in the low spatial density of its railway communications system) (p. 9). Seventeenth-century levels and forms of agricultural production co-existed with a degree of concentration of capital in industry which exceeded that of the advanced countries. This concentration hastened in its turn the dominance of industry by ‘giant industry’, and the dominance of even ‘giant industry’ by the banks – which were themselves subjected to the ‘European money markets’ where they raised their capital.
What was the primary result of this pattern of change for the structure of Russian society? In brief: it had been twisted out of all correspondence with ‘A’ – that is, with the dynamic pattern of Western development which it was compelled to ‘follow after’, which had yielded the original concept of capitalist development – Marx's ‘classic form’ (by which, in turn, the Russian experience could not any longer be understood). Russian development, in other words, had mutated to a point where it exceeded the ‘tolerance’ of the original Marxian conception of capitalism. In the midst of a sea of peasants had emerged a small and very concentrated capitalist class, unusually dependent upon an autocratic state, (of a kind which other capitalist classes elsewhere had already long since overthrown). Furthermore, this capitalist class lacked the stabilising influence of ‘transitional layers’ of smaller-scale industry beneath it, from which its peers elsewhere had organically coalesced. And not only was it hereby held back from playing the liberal revolutionary role of its Western equivalents; it was also (through the same process) confronted by a working class – concentrated in large factories, radicalised by Czarist political oppression and open to the most extreme socialist doctrines reaching it from the West – in which the conditions for insurrectionary mobilisation were more advanced than among its Western peers. Needless to say, this circumstance in turn reinforced further the political inhibitions of Russian liberalism. And in this way, one path to political change (replicating the Western pattern) was closed off, even while another (produced nonetheless by interaction with the very same West) was uniquely opening out. Trotsky's analysis, by presupposing the fourth element of non-identity, was able to track and explain the mutation, and thereby to bring the Russian experience back within the ‘tolerance’ of a Marxist explanatory framework. But in the process, as we earlier saw him suggest, that framework too ‘under[went] transmutation, change[d] like the basic cells in various tissues of an organism change’.Footnote 50
Step IV: totality
In its original application, therefore, the idea of U&CD incorporated the causal significance of inter-societal interactions into the Marxist theory of modern history. However, the significance of this advance becomes fully manifest only in Step IV of Trotsky's argument (pp. 12–15). Considered as causal determinations, unevenness and combination have thus far been viewed mainly at the level of the parts (that is, individual societies and their interrelations). Now, however, they are about to be revisualised as properties of a totality (human development as a historical whole). And these properties turn out to be generic to the interactive shape of the historical process itself, further enlarging the significance of ‘the international’ as a dimension of social reality.
Steps I–III have operated with a series of gradually telescoping timescales. Early references to ‘the ancient civilizations of Egypt, India and China’ (p. 4) invoked the millennia of (post-neolithic) human development as a whole. Over the course of Step III, the discussion of pre-modern Czarist state-formation reduced this scale to that of centuries (pp. 6–9), while the analysis of Russian industry reduced it once again to a matter of decades (pp. 9–12). Step IV now carries this process of zeroing in almost to its conclusion, dropping down first to ‘eleven years’ (p. 13) – in order to narrate the events separating the abortive revolution of 1905 from its successful return in 1917 – and then finally to ‘a few months’ (p. 14) – those separating the February and October revolutions of 1917.
With this last shift the various collective actors already introduced reappear in the concrete setting of a specific political conjuncture. Following military defeat by Japan in 1905, says Trotsky, Czarism tottered (p. 12). The Russian middle-classes and democratic intelligentsia sensed their opportunity, and pressed for political reform. As the campaign developed, however, it became apparent that the uniquely configured Czarist state would have to be overthrown before such reforms could occur. And this would unleash the power of the proletariat and the peasantry alike, a power that, due to combined development, was both out of proportion with middle-class power and also beyond the reach of any liberal ideological hegemony. Faced with this conundrum – that there might well be a revolution, but it could hardly be a bourgeois one – the middle-class fell back on the state. This closed the opportunity of the 1905 uprising, but opened the way for other classes to substitute their own leadership when the crisis returned in 1917.
Thus in Step IV Trotsky begins by showing how the conditions of combined development act as a barrier to bourgeois revolution. And he ends by arguing that a further intensification of this combined development pushed the Russian revolution, when it did come, to jump over key stages of political change, just as Russian industry (by a combination of pressures and opportunities) had leapt over key stages of technological development. In effect, the peculiar combination of class actors thrown up by combined development produced a compression into ‘the course of a few months’ of a historical process (liberal democratic revolution being followed by socialist revolution) which in the West had already been stretched across two centuries without yet reaching its conclusion there.
And yet something else is going on here too. For Step IV takes, so to speak, a ‘running jump’ at this final compression. This section, which completes the telescoping of time-scales, begins (and ends) by reaching right back across several centuries to the English revolution. In this way it absorbs the close-up analysis of the approach to October 1917 into a wider comparative (but also interconnected) analysis of the English, French, and Russian revolutions. Why does it do this?
Perhaps the answer can be found in an underlying narrative of the text, which is present from the start, but which only now becomes fully explicit. This narrative is expressed in recurrent metaphorical references to journeying, advancing, compressing, stepping over, leaping, skipping and so on. It is a narrative about the socio-historical development of human agency. If we examine the distribution of these references across the chapter as a whole, we find that they are tracking a slow but fundamental change in their object: human development begins as a struggle with nature; yet it gradually becomes an increasingly conscious self-overcoming of social limitations. These limitations are now confronted in the enduring class structure of human societies. And that confrontation itself has undergone a process of interactive, dialectical mutation:
Advancing from the sturdy artisans and independent peasants of the army of Cromwell – through the Sansculottes of Paris – to the industrial proletarians of St. Petersburg, the revolution had deeply changed its social mechanism, its methods, and therewith its aims. (p. 12)
The broad shape of this narrative was of course inherited by Trotsky from Marx's own writings. In updating it here, however, Trotsky simultaneously inserts the international into its logic of process. The result is a drastic swerve of historical expectation which clarifies why Trotsky's theory could make sense of the approaching Russian revolution, while Marx's theory on its own could not.
Up until now (throughout Step III, anyway) the analysis has been focused on the production of difference among the parts (separating the Russian experience from the Western one). Now, however, the camera suddenly ‘pans out’, as we saw it do earlier, but this time across both space and time. As a result, the argument now posits a four dimensional process of European history whose inner logic of movement is an interactive process of change.
Key to this logic is the way that these three revolutions are simultaneously linked to and differentiated from each other. We have already seen this process (of linkage and differentiation) operating on the parts, through the lateral (spatial/synchronic) interconnection of developmental processes. Now this formula of unevenness and combination is upended, so to speak, in order to unfurl the vertical (temporal/diachronic) dimension of the whole which is made up of these interconnected developments. And this finally reveals unevenness and combination as the logic of movement and mutation of the whole over time. For the interconnections here are no longer just those between contemporaneous phenomena at different levels of development. They now include transformative interconnections and mutations across time – a sequence of events occurring in different times and places, each of which provides both a condition for its successor and a reason why that successor would be different. In other words, it is not just belated industrialisation which exhibits these properties, but the historical process itself – ‘development’ in its widest sense.
Thus, (in Trotsky's narrative), the seventeenth-century English bourgeois revolution was clothed in the religious language and beliefs of the Reformation, leaving behind the pre-bourgeois worldview of Catholicism which continued to hold sway in France (unevenness). When French society underwent its revolutionary transformation, a century and a half later, it did not repeat the (now outmoded) English cultural formula. Partly under the influence of Anglo-American capitalist development, partly under its pressure, and increasingly as a critique of it, the French revolution instead ‘leap-frogged’ into the language of radical democracy and national citizenship (combined development) – from Puritanism to Jacobinism. A further century on again, and the staggered, interactive process of capitalist industrialisation had produced in Russia an urban proletariat, extremely concentrated by combined development, wedded to the Marxist critique of capitalist democracy and formulating its goals in terms of a materialist language of relations of production.
Just as France stepped over the Reformation, so Russia stepped over the formal democracy. The Russian revolutionary party … sought an expression for the tasks of the revolution neither in the Bible nor in that secularized Christianity called ‘pure’ democracy, but in the material relations of the social classes. (p. 15)
Puritanism; Jacobinism; Bolshevism: these were not just different national names for serial explosions of the same phenomenon – ‘the Revolution’ – in different times. They also recorded the inner mutation of the phenomenon itself as it was differentially but cumulatively produced and reproduced within the uneven and combined movement of capitalist development across historical time and geographical space. In the logic of process at work in this sequence, the international itself can be seen as a driver of social development. Indeed it is what enabled Trotsky to explain what Marx's theory of capitalist development could not: the eruption of socialist-inspired revolution in the ‘backward’ East instead of in the advanced West where it supposedly belonged.
It seems impossible to isolate what is of value in all this without cutting away the surrounding phantasmogorical elements which would otherwise discredit or obscure it. An essentially political judgement is therefore needed at this point: Trotsky was wrong about the Russian revolution; and here, at the end of the chapter, he was also wrong to resolve the multilinearity of the process back into the higher unity of a political teleology. Perhaps, being a political actor, he can be forgiven this. Perhaps not.
Either way, however, Trotsky was surely right about one very big thing. Whether viewed in the long term of world history or at the quotidian level of shifting political conjunctures, social development – meaning causally cumulative change – is shaped by interactive, as well as reproductive, logics of process. This dual character is a reason why historical process is resistant in principle to unilinear analyses – ‘fixed abstractions’ – even though, as conceptualisations of development, these analyses already incorporated an awareness of change over time. Their fixity lay rather in their failure to internalise a quite additional (lateral, interactive) source of change, as a result of which their real-world objects would necessarily mutate even as they unfolded. It lay, that is, in the blindness of classical social theory to the generic significance of the international.
Conclusion
The phenomena of geopolitics, foreign trade, and inter-societal influences of all kinds are of course widely recognised to have played a major role in human history – they are general to the historic process. Quite obviously, these phenomena subtend upon the co-existence of more than one society. And a sociological understanding of them – just as obviously – therefore requires a presupposition of societal multiplicity as part of its basic definition of social reality. As noted in the Introduction, it is the absence of such a presupposition in existing sociological traditions – liberal, Marxist, and others – which accounts for the interlocking problems of internalism, methodological nationalism, and the reification of the international in realism.
Yet these problems cannot be solved by the theoretical fiat of simply declaring that society always exists in the plural. That presupposition of societal multiplicity itself requires a yet deeper premise about historical development from which it can derive as an organic axiom of social theory. Otherwise, it may end instead by importing the reifications of realism into sociological theory – as indeed was widely held to have occurred in the works of Theda Skocpol and Michael Mann.Footnote 51
What all this tells us is just how deep-lying an adjustment to sociological theory is required in order to bring the international within its conceptual reach. In Trotsky's writings, this adjustment is made by placing the ontological assertion of unevenness – ‘the most general law of the historic process’ – beneath the explicitly sociological premises of historical materialism. Some of the implications of this placement he was able to capture in his rehearsals of dialectics – unevenness expressed in change over time, for example, or in variation across instances. But these perceptions, as we have seen, were already available via other routes. The one result which was not available elsewhere, and which in fact operated within his writings to make them so distinctive, eluded his conscious retrieval. The hypothesised fourth element of non-identity – unevenness as multiplicity of number – is the hidden link between the general assertion of unevenness and the subsequent presupposition of more-than-one society as the proper (expanded) optic of social theory. It is the expression at the level of philosophical premises of what it was that enabled Trotsky's social theory to conceptualise the interactive logics that comprise the international.
Perhaps inevitably, Trotsky's version of uneven and combined development includes limitations that reflect its formulation at the high-water mark of the European state in world history. Thus, for all his emphasis on interactive development, his historical narrative of human progress is almost entirely internal to the West, threatening to perpetuate the wider ‘civilizational internalism’ of Eurocentric social science.Footnote 52 There is of course no denying the global pressures created by the fact that European societies industrialised before other parts of the world. But that historical priority itself owed much to a history of borrowings from the non-European world and a global conjuncture in which interconnections with American, African, Middle Eastern, and Indian societies played a key role.Footnote 53 In Trotsky's writings, European capitalism can sometimes appear as the uncreated creator of the modern world, the sole exception to the general rule that socio-historical change has a wider, generative context in the interactive multiplicity of human societies. This is not an exception that either can or should survive the fuller development of his own theory. In this sense, Trotsky's idea needs to undergo its own ‘postcolonial moment’.Footnote 54 And the result might even enhance the existing postcolonial critique of Eurocentrism. For, as Kamran Matin and others have recently argued, that critique has rightly rejected the false universalism of a West-centred, unilinear social evolutionism; but it has yet to find the alternative social scientific language through which to explain the global social processes underlying its subject matter.Footnote 55
It seems then that Robert Heilbroner was right. Searching for the ‘philosophical premises’ of U&CD might have seemed at first an obscure and even pointless exercise. (Why not just get on with using it?) Yet the ‘ultimate strengths’ of the idea do lie here. Indeed all the conclusions to which our investigation now points are, as anticipated in the Introduction, bound up with the extra premise we have uncovered.
These conclusions are of two kinds. On the one hand, rendering the premise explicit has repaired a widely noted disconnection between Trotsky's philosophical writings and his political and sociological analyses;Footnote 56 it has revealed the intellectual distinctiveness of U&CD, suggesting how fundamentally it differs from apparently similar notions of uneven development (whether Lenin's at the time, or Neil Smith's today); and it has shown how Trotsky's idea opens out into a (non-internalist) theory of historical process in general, and not simply an analysis of capitalist development in particular. On the other hand, this same exercise has also explained the otherwise surprising ineffectiveness of other dialectical approaches in international theory; unlike them, it has yielded an alternative, non-realist conception of the international itself (rather than simply an argument about the latter's changing historical forms); and finally, in so doing, it has arguably provided the means to repair the largest disconnection of them all: that between the philosophical premises of social and international theory.
