Page 105 - The ISA Handbook in Contemporary Sociology

9781412934633-Chap-06 1/10/09 8:46 AM Page 76

76 THE ISA HANDBOOK IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY

The discomfort is common to sociologists exchange, the market being the most obvious
from the global North and the global South, one in modern society. Along the same lines,
in both wealthy and poor countries. The gen- we became used to thinking of structures of
eral terms of the new sociological puzzles are solidarity as derived from common interests,
the same everywhere. Yet, there are also be these material or ideal ones. In this
obvious differences among them, pointing to tradition of sociological analysis, we learned
the conclusion that no matter how global the to think of society as clusters of material
world is, nor how fluid modernity is, nation- and ideal interests that count on authority
states still matter, still confer meaning to the and market mechanisms to organize
way problems and their solutions are con- themselves and to attain distinctive goals
ceived in both hemispheres (Axtmann, 2004; (Bendix, 1964).
Reis, 2004). In other words, the way people As Weber (1978, II: 927) put it, a market
perceive the changes in course are deeply situation is not a community, but it is a pos-
influenced by their historical experiences, by sible basis for community action. Even
what they once trusted to be their society and taking into account structural antagonisms,
its prospects. Yet, to the extent that we all solidarity can emerge to the extent that labor
have to take into account our respective con- and capital, buyers and sellers, producers and
texts, this condition makes us fellow cosmo- consumers share a common interest in the
politan explorers, observers bound to one smooth operation of exchange. Interests not
another, and perhaps comparativists. only generate competition, but also interde-
The conceptual change I want to address is pendence. In the same sense, legitimate
certainly not directly relevant to some authority binds together the ruler and the ruled,
branches of sociology. Yet, it is general lords and peasants, government and citizens.
enough to affect several subfields of the dis- In short, as outlined above, state and
cipline. I want to call attention to the changed market resources were thought to constitute
theoretical status of social solidarity that the basic instruments that contemporary
implicitly or explicitly has taken place in society counts on to organize itself. They
both lay and sociological discourses. Until were thought of as the instruments that pro-
recently, we used to think of authority and vide social order, albeit an order that entails
interest mechanisms as ways of organizing oppression and exploitation, as strongly
society and ensuring solidarity. In recent stressed in the Marxist tradition. Taking soci-
times though, solidarity or society itself is ety as a substantive ground, this perspective
increasingly taken as one more instance, views the repertoire of means available to
another logical dimension, and an analytical governments, on the one hand, and firms on
component equivalent to state authority and the other, as instrumental mechanisms to be
market interests. Whose Keeper?, the sugges- used to organize solidarity, to enforce order,
tive title of the book by Wolfe (1989) sum- and to advance interests. In this perspective,
marized well the growing feeling that the national state appears as a successful
authority and market interests are not suffi- historical amalgamation of authority and sol-
cient resources to solve problems of societal idarity. Thanks to a cultural process that
organization. led to a sort of naturalization of the nation-
With the classics of historical sociology, state, society became equivalent to nation,
we had learned that contemporary society and nation the source of state legitimacy
relied mainly on two basic instruments to (Reis, 1998a).
organize itself: authority resources and inter- In other words, the formation and consoli-
est-based exchange mechanisms. In other dation of the nation-state entailed a peculiar
words, we became used to thinking of society fusion: obedience to the state authority on the
as organized into structures of authority, one hand, and spontaneous compliance with
chief among them the state, and structures of it on the other, the latter derived from the