appears to remain stuck in holistic thinking, as when he accords society as such a “social imaginary” and says that a society’s identity is … “nothing but a system of interpretation” (please note the use of the word system, TP). We see how even the most voluntarist of the French cultural theorists shy away from the individualist ontology that logically corresponds to their almost anarchist position.
Now, on a more generous note, such holistic argument may well be a helpful way of explaining routine behaviour and cumulative developments, but it is likely to be less helpful in accounting for turning points in human history. And, after all, what we are really interested in is non-routine behaviour. Moreover, it can be argued that cumulative change is becoming less and less relevant in social science, as individual choice becomes more consequential and important, in part as a by-product of globalization.
Rational individualism has of course a long pedigree, in part, one suspects, because Rational Choice theory has obvious methodological advantages. Social scientists that make simple assumptions about human behaviour can come up with impressive formalistic models. But what they often do is conduct a banal discussion at a high level of abstraction. Philosophically, Rational Choice thinking stands on the shoulders of liberal theory and not least utilitarian and pragmatic ideas, dating back to the 19th century.
The view that human beings make deliberate choices about fundamental issues, and that therefore prediction is extremely difficult in the social sciences, have in recent decades been combined with the often implicit assumption that Political Man is essentially non-rational. We observe this line of thinking in post-modernism.
Another trend is the growing emphasis upon non-materialist values as being important to affluent and globalized citizens. It is visible in new sociological theorizing about post-materialist values. The influential sociologist Ronald Inglehart detects a tendency for citizens – especially young citizens – in affluent post-modern societies to turn their back on materialist values. However, it would seem that political theory has not drawn the full, logical consequences of these developments in specific areas of scholarly debate, and that the position between the extremes of Rational Choice, on the one hand, and system theory or theories of language and politics on the other, has not been accorded sufficient attention.
Obviously an individualist culturalism, which is what I am advocating, has epistemological consequences. This position pushes the scholar towards understanding, as opposed to explanation; towards phenomenological approaches, grounded theory and a rediscovery of hermeneutical methods. This does not imply a rejection of all quantitative methods, but simply a call for a layered approach, which addresses the question of meaning.
My next point is that so far there has been a tendency to assume – rashly I think – that post-materialist ideas are ephemeral. Now this is far from self-evident. The surge in post-materialist values may reflect changes at a deeper level. If it is true that many citizens are increasingly concerned about post-materialist values including historical issues, and that there is currently a strong tendency for young generations in some globalized societies to opt for post-materialist values, does this not imply a need to reconsider our basic assumptions concerning Political Man? Does it not lend support to the view that a narrow liberalism or a rational choice approach is inadequate as a vehicle for understanding contemporary societies?
There is of course no global convergence around a given set of values, witness the distance between the neo-capitalist and materialist Russia and China and the neo-fundamentalist and neo-Marxist Latin America. All of them subject to globalization. Nor is normative convergence a trend within affluent Europe, witness the distance between neo-fundamentalist Poland and neo-liberal Estonia, or between Dutch liberalism and anti-immigration attitudes and neighbouring German pluri-culturalism and value-conservatism. The cultural consequences of economic globalization seem to be complex and indeterminate, although as we shall see, globalization does tend to build up a certain pressure for change in mass culture.
We are used to conceiving of nations as compact units, the prevalent research questions being whether such nations have been created from the top down or from the bottom up. But perhaps we also ought to ask questions about the nature of national loyalties. Is it perhaps possible to talk about a “personalized” nationality in the sense that, increasingly, citizens – while often loyal to a territory and homeland – define individually the precise nature and depth of that loyalty. In other words, that at least in the globalized Western world – exposed to almost constant media attention – identities become more and more individualized and mixed. Michael Herzfeld rightly points out that … “many theorists of nationalism have fallen prey to a semiotic delusion in which the appearance of a common code has been allowed to suggest the existence of a corresponding commonality of intent”.24
When Benedict Anderson famously talks about “imagined communities”, whose imagination are we discussing? It is somewhat implausible that modern or post-modern citizens should simply be passive absorbers of an elite’s constructed truth regarding their origin and destiny. What Anderson appears to be offering is an essentially context-specific argument overly influenced by his research on third world states influenced by “official nationalism”.
The position that Political Man is both rational and non-rational, and that non-rational political behaviour may have both positive and negative effects and, finally, that at the end of the day human choices are what forms and shapes societies, I shall call integrism. Integrism is related to integrity, the view that every human being is – and should be – a unique and authentic person. It is a position that recognizes the cultural dimension of Political Man as against culture-blind liberalism and Republicanism.25 The polar contrasts to integrism are, on the one hand, utilitarian de-personalization, a position with dangerous affinities to social Darwinism. On the other hand, structural de-personalization, known from the excesses of French Neo-Marxist structuralism under the reign of Althusser and Poulantzas, but also from anthropology and sociology. Integrism has certain affinities with French Republicanism in that it celebrates Man’s ability to free himself from custom. However, as we have seen, Republicanism has a too narrow conception of human nature, neglecting the non-rational needs of individuals. Integrism perceives Man as capable of achieving personal autonomy and of developing a unified identity rooted in duration.
The unhelpful legacy of French structuralism re-appears in Delanty’s and Rumford’s work, as when they insist on a strict separation between personal identities, collective identities and societal identities. The concept of “social identity” is particularly vague and unhelpful. Delanty and Rumford argue that … “a collective identity will not necessarily result from personal identities and can exist without a direct relation to them”.26 And further … “the notions of Irish identity, a Chinese identity … are cultural categories … but are not themselves identities in the SAME SENSE AS MORE CONCRETE COLLECTIVE IDENTITES”. In other words, collective identities are concrete, but can exist without a direct relationship to personal identities.
This is vague to say the least. What we are dealing with here is a reification of collectivities, most likely an unconscious left-over from Marxist determinism. Delanty and Rumford make a distinction between personal, European identities and a European, collective identity. As they put it … “a collective identity derives not from numerous, personal identities, but from A DISTINCTIVE, SOCIAL GROUP OR INSTITUTIONAL FRAMEWORK THAT ARTICULATES A COLLECTIVE IDENTITY … For such an identity to exist there must be a means of expressing an explicit collective self-understanding”.27 This would seem to imply that a European, collective identity can only develop through a vertical, top-down process, in practice most likely through the vehicle of EU institutions. This is a highly problematic and un-substantiated assertion. And significantly, the obscure use of the words “explicit” and “articulates”
