22 Ideas to Fix the World: Conversations with the World's Foremost Thinkers

14. CRAIG CALHOUN: “People want and need solidarity and social reproduction”

◆ ◆ ◆ 247 14 “People want and need solidarity and social reproduction” CRAIG CALHOUN in conversation with Monika Krause Craig Calhoun is director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is a former president of the Social Science Research Council and Global Distinguished Visiting Professor at New York University. In this unique take on the nature of modern political economy, Craig Calhoun argues that the ongoing crisis is not simply a crisis of capitalism but is instead a crisis of the modern “package” that linked politics , economics, and social relations in a specific way. Bringing a sociologist ’s sensibility to the issue, he claims that the most worrisome aspect of the crisis is the fact that it poses a grave threat to what he terms social reproduction, namely the institutions and systems that support education , health care, and other goods underpinning social welfare and solidarity. He points out that different forms of democracy and social welfare provision are contextual, so simply calling for more democracy or more social welfare is an inadequate response to the current problem . While he champions some specific solutions to obvious causes of Photo courtesy of the London School of Economics and Political Science. 248 ◆ ◆ ◆ Question the Role of Democracy the crisis, like controls on massive speculative financialization, he urges greater thought about how we approach our next social and political steps. Democracy, in this conception, should be judged on whether or not it brings about desired ends, not simply based on vague ideological criteria. (There are, after all, Calhoun points out, civil society actors in modern democracies who actively champion social inequality and the dysfunctional status quo.) Lasting solutions, Calhoun suggests, lie both in broader-based social solidarity and large-scale institutional implementation and in a recognition of the variety of forms in which social services are provided. MK: In recent years we have lived with this sense of crisis—and we’ve been repeatedly told we are in crisis. Yet no one seems quite sure what kind of crisis it is; it is a situation that is hard to read. How would you characterize the present moment? CC: I think that we’re in a period of disorganization and destabilization . The combination of capitalism—with its intensification of economic production, its new technologies, its global expansion—with nation-states and structures of political power is in turmoil. And the relationships between the economy and politics, between legal systems and corporations and state economic policies, and structures of social solidarity and cohesion, are in flux. My sense is that we have had a sort of package that linked these different dimensions of life relatively stably (only relatively) and organized directions of change for the past three hundred and something years. Various theories and ways of thinking about this focus on one or another of these dimensions. They say, “It’s really capitalism; it’s the capitalists, period.” But I think it’s really the package—capitalism, the nation-state, and a way of organizing social cohesion and social reproduction —that has come apart. And it’s pointless to argue about whether it’s really capitalism or the state that is more primary. It’s the way they are connected that has shaped the conflicts of the era and the ways in which democracy has been achieved. Democracy has been achieved Craig Calhoun ◆ ◆ ◆ 249 within nation-state frameworks with close relations to capitalism and the sort of possessive individualism that capitalism engenders. The era has seen internal patterns, to be sure, but it’s shaped by this package as a whole. And it is this package that has become unstable. It’s not that there is necessarily any immanent end to capitalist expansion—that there couldn’t be further expansion, that there couldn’t be new technologies. There are some trends, such as the dynamism of some of the emerging powers (China and Brazil and so forth), that are consistent with a reorganization of capitalism, its continued expansion, continued intensification, continued production of new technologies, continued intensification of exploitation of labor, but with shifting hegemonic power or shifting centers of innovation. However, the way this has been linked to political power and social reproduction seems to me at issue. The era of the past 350 years—“modernity,” if you want to call it that—has been shaped both by the development of a world system of nation-states and by some of the...