Debating Making Global Society

What is the place of grand narratives in the social sciences? Or, more pressingly, is there a place for grand narratives in the contemporary academy?

This is the central question posed by the symposium on Barry Buzan’s Making Global Society. Buzan’s book is self-consciously grand in ambition – it seeks to map 50,000 years of human history, arguing that, as the title of the book suggests, we have moved from an era of hunter-gathering to one associated primarily with empires to modernity. Modernity represents our first fully ‘global society’, albeit one increasingly marked by a ‘deep pluralism’ of both material and symbolic power. Buzan organizes this periodization through the planetary conditions, material technologies and social structures, understood as ‘primary institutions’, which are generative of surface-level practices.

Making Global Society is unabashedly big picture. Buzan is aware that there are two main tensions that are hard-wired into any such account. The first rests around what is omitted from the grand narrative: are these omissions deliberate or unintended, significant or trivial, a welcome decluttering of historical mess or a means of glossing over important, if submerged, plotlines and experiences? The second tension concerns the extent of any errors contained within the big picture, whether these emerge from not being fully invested in the intricacies of particular debates and issue-areas, or the result of operating at an altitude of 60,000 feet – or higher.

Each of the three essays on the book, by Manjeet Pardesi, Maïa Pal and Hannah Forsyth pick up elements of these critiques. Forsyth is concerned with what she sees as the residual place of gender analysis in the book, as well as the relative lack of attention paid by Buzan to cultural history. More than this, though, Forsyth is concerned by the lack of attention to a range of historiographical debates in the book’s scaffolding – is this a difference of style and genre, or something that speaks to more fundamental problems with Buzan’s grand narrative? Pardesi also worries about elements of the book’s historical narrative, particularly its assumptions of regional, or civilizational, homogeneity. In her contribution, Pal takes up what she sees as the need to disentangle key dynamics, particularly capitalism, in order to ascertain both their relative autonomy from, and also interaction with, others: law, race, geopolitics, and more. Buzan’s response defends his choice of ‘pace’ over ‘spin’, argues that grand narratives remain crucial to establishing the parameters of scholarly and public debates, and makes the case for a ‘complementarity’ to specialist and generalist enquiry.

At the end of the day, readers can decide for themselves which side of the fence they fall on: pace or spin, lumper or splitter, structural or granular thinker. Either way, this symposium – and the book it draws on – engage issues that are central to historical sociology and the international imagination.