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Remaking Power and Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Ann Shola Orloff
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Abstract

I contend that we should remake conceptions of power and politics, taking offfrom the project of remaking “modernity.” Here, I perform asimilar move for “power and politics,” core concepts for historyand the human sciences, building on the foundational work of the 1970s and 1980sand bringing in key elements of institutionalist and culturalist critiques. Thetheories of the early days of social science history were usually materialist,and the character of state policies and political structures was understood toreflect the “balance of class forces,” interests to flow fromclass position, and power to work in a juridical vein, as “powerover.” By the 1980s these common understandings were widely criticized.There were new emphases on the multiplicity of identities and structures ofinequality, new questions about the adequacy of materialist accounts ofpolitics. Dissatisfactions were also stimulated by “real-world”developments. However, we see a parting of the ways when it came to addressingthese new political conditions and analytic challenges. Moves to “bringthe state and other political institutions back in” have been focused onpolitics, while the scholars taking the various cultural turns have focused onpower. The conceptualizations of power and politics have been sundered alongwith the scholarly communities deploying them. I address both communities andargue for new ways of understanding power and politics emerging from renewedencounters between institutionalist and culturalist analyses. Such encountersand the conceptual work that they will produce can help us reforge a productivealliance between history and the social sciences.

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Type
Presidential Address
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Social Science History , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , Spring 2012 , pp. 1 - 21
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 2012 

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