Crisis, Contestation and Social Order in Europe: A Sympoietic Analysis

Europe is facing multiple existential crises at once. I argue that these crises are rooted in larger, older patterns of structural contestation that have always animated the EU. Drawing from these patterns, I contend that there are at least two conceptions of social order at work within the EU – an autopoietic model based on bounded hierarchy and a sympoietic model based on decentralization and compromise. I argue that the autopoietic aspects of the Union, and neo-liberal representative democracy in particular, continually produce systemic crises. At the same time, sympoietic practices of inter-institutional adjustment allow us to weather such challenges, albeit imperfectly. Ultimately, I conclude that escaping the cycle of structural crisis requires moving more definitively towards sympoiesis by radically decentralizing and democratizing political and economic power in Europe. 
 
 Full text available at: https://doi.org/10.22215/rera.v12i1.1231

This dissertation is concerned with the relationship between the experience of total war and early twentieth century Australian aspirations for social renewal and change. Its focus is close rather than broad and sweeping. Specifically, it explores the hopes and illusions of prominent individuals and organisations in Melbourne as they were affected by the first two years of the Great War and as they in turn affected the way the war was experienced and understood in the community at large. The two broad themes into which the analysis and argument are divided are: concepts of political liberty and economic justice on the one hand, and concepts of social order and justice on the other. Melbourne, as both the capital of Victoria and the national capital, is particularly well suited to this close examination since the headquarters for the major employer organisations as well as much labour and pacifist activity were to be found there. The first seventeen months of the war period did not produce the violent clashes of the later years but the parameters of conflict and the terms of the discourse about war and social change were formulated during 1914 and 1915 and changed but little thereafter. The principal argument of this thesis is that the impact of total war on social ideals was destructive and that the optimism evident in many circles before the war broke out had disappeared by the end of 1915, to be replaced, in most cases, by a bleak pessimism about the nation's future. War brought about retrenchment, restrictions on civil liberty and, of course, loss of life. Where hopes were sustained, they frequently assumed a millenarian and extremist character as the political middle-ground disappeared. Where reform continued, it was of a morally coercive and regulatory kind directed towards discipline and an instrumental efficiency rather than individual freedom and expansion of opportunity. Only the most conservative members of the comnunity could draw any solace from the experience of war on the hotnefront in Melbourne and that was because their vision of the possible was a consciously limited one.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the relationship between the key categories of modern social and legal reality, in general, and constitutional law, in particular - social order, legal order and constitutional order. The last category, despite the fact that it is represented in the legal literature by a wide range of views, does not have a clear explanation. This is due, among other things, to its scientific and practical distance from the concept of social order. Overcoming this obstacle is associated with the growing need to expand the sphere of manifestation of constitutional law to the entire social order, exceeding the sphere of legal relations. Social order, legal order and constitutional order are in a dialectical unity, where each subsequent element is a condition for the existence of the previous ones in their ideal axiological and ontological perception. At the same time, constitutional order is not a mandatory attribute of the constitution, since the constitution itself may not meet the criteria for having a constitutional order. On the contrary, the orderliness of social relations built on the principles of constitutionalism, general principles of law, values of law and legal values indicates the presence of a constitutional order even in the absence of a formal constitutional act. The constitutional order fixes the social and value basis to which the formed legal order must comply. The presented concept of interaction between social order, legal order and constitutional order leads to the need to introduce into scientific circulation a concept, a category that ensures the connection between these phenomena. It is proposed to call it “the constitutional order of society (constitutional social order).”

In 2014, the Korean Government passed the Gender Equality Act, which was accompanied by policies to increase women's participation in the labour force and representation in positions of power in the public and private sectors. While Korea has witnessed modest progress in macro-level gender equality, little is known about the effects of these changes on mental health outcomes. Our study investigated the relationship between regional-level gender equality (as measured by women's economic and political power) and women's depressive symptoms from 2013-18, and whether the effects differed across women from different socioeconomic positions. To examine how change over time in political and economic power influences the severity of depressive symptoms, we applied a fixed-effect regression, using a nationally representative sample for women aged 19-64 (n = 9,589) from the Korean Longitudinal Survey of Women and Families (2013-2018, wave 4 to 6) residing across the 16 regions of South Korea. Our study found that increases in women's political and economic power led to moderate reductions in depressive symptoms (-0.25 and -0.23 points in CESD respectively). Sensitivity analyses indicate that economic power is more consistently associated with subsequent reductions in CESD. The effect of economic and political power on depressive symptoms did not differ by women's socioeconomic positions. Our findings suggest that even modest improvements in gender equality were associated with increases in women's mental health. Further progress to ensure gender equality, such as the anti-discrimination legislation, may lead to greater improvements in public mental health.

The issue of social order, how and why it is that social orders exists at all, is historically central to sociology. In this paper the focus is on the comparison between Parsons' and Garfinkel's point of view. Parsons regards social order as the outcome of value consensus in society, which ensures that behavior conforms to generally accepted norms. Garfinkel starts out with the assumption that social order is illusory. They believe that social life merely appears to be orderly; in reality it is potentially chaotic. Social order is constructed in the minds of social actors as society confronts the individual as a series of sense impressions and experiences which she or he must somehow organize into a coherent pattern. The differences seem to be less looking at the concept of social order and trust together as a common theoretical outcome.

It is shown that the joint distribution of economic and political power plays a key role in determining regulatory and tax policies of national and subnational governments. If both economic and political power are evenly distributed across individuals, then regulatory and tax policies are efficient, but if they are unevenly distributed and positively correlated, then regulatory policy is used by subnational governments to redistribute income in favor of individuals with higher economic and political power at the expense of productivity and output. Consequently, the national government has to raise the tax rate to finance public expenditure. Moreover, if there exists a positive correlation between economic and political power, then the higher the fiscal gap, the larger the gap between equilibrium and efficient policies because subnational governments underestimate more the fall of public revenues caused by inefficient policies.

Although always an integral part of sociology, the study of social control has waxed and waned. Originally, the concept was defined broadly as any structure, process, relationship, or act that contributes to the social order; indeed, the concepts of social order and control were indistinguishable. A consensus is now emerging that distinguishes social control from the social order it is meant to explain and that distinguishes among social control processes. One basic distinction is between processes of internal control or socialization and processes of external control. Recently, the study of social control is equated more with the latter than the former.

People who work in health care facilities participate in a shared set of tacit agreements, attitudes, habits, and behaviors that contribute to the functioning of those institutions, but that can also cause conflict. This phenomenon has been addressed tangentially in the study of bureaucratic practices in governmental agencies, but it has not been carefully explored in the specific context of public health care centers. To this end, we analyzed a series of encounters among staff and patients, as well as the situations surrounding the services offered, in public primary care health centers in Mexico City, based on Erving Goffman's concepts of social order, encounter, and situation, and on the concepts of formal and informal logic. In a descriptive study over the course of 2 years, we carried out systematic observations in 19 health centers and conducted interviews with medical, technical, and administrative staff, and psychologists, social workers, and patients. We recorded these observations in field notes and performed reflexive analysis with readings on three different levels. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed through identification of thematic categories and subcategories. Information related to encounters and situations from field notes and interviews was selected to triangulate the materials. We found the social order prevailing among staff to be based on a combination of status markers, such as educational level, seniority, and employee versus contractor status, which define the distribution of workloads, material resources, and space. Although this system generates conflicts, it also contributes to the smooth functioning of the health centers. The daily encounters and situations in all of these health centers allow for a set of informal practices that provide a temporary resolution of the contradictions posed by the institution for its workers.

The ultimate conclusion of my book, Coordination, Cooperation, and Control, is that when the same people hold both economic and political power, the result is stagnation. When the people who hold economic power do not also hold political power, the result is progress. The first four chapters of the book examine the concept of power and define different types of power to explain why progress requires economic power to be separated from political power. The next four chapters chronicle the historical evolution of power relationships to explain why, for most of human history, economic and political power were held by the same people, preventing economic progress. The development of commerce allowed people to gain economic power without having political power, and the mobility of capital created institutional competition that enabled the Industrial Revolution. That separation of economic from political power remains threatened, however, by the potential for those with political power to confiscate economic resources, and by cooperation between the economic and political elite through cronyism and corruption. The book closes with five chapters that examine the threats to progress and factors that can mitigate those threats.

In 1934, Reinhold Niebuhr delivered the annual "Rauschenbusch Lectures" at Colgate Rochester Divinity School. These lectures would form the basis for his 1935 work, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics. In the preface to the 1956 edition of that book, Niebuhr noted that this volume "was meant to express both the author's general adhesion to the purposes of the 'Social Gospel' of which Rauschenbusch was the most celebrated exponent, and to spell out some of the growing differences between the original social gospel and the newer form of social Christianity" ([1935] 1956, 8). When one reads this book, however, it is far easier to see the gap between Niebuhr and the early twentieth-century social gospel than the continuity between the two.Important studies by scholars like Harlan Beckley and Gary Dorrien point to the continuities and distinctions between the social gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) and the Christian realism of Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971).1 As Dorrien notes in the second volume of his work The Making of American Liberal Theology, Niebuhr had far more in common with social gospelers like Rauschenbusch than with continental neoorthodox theologians like Karl Barth. While many of Niebuhr's disciples strayed into neoconservatism, which repudiated the liberalism of the social gospel, Niebuhr did not "and he never doubted the social gospel assumption that Christians have a social mission to secure the just ordering of the world" (Dorrien 2003, 435).By the same token, despite Niebuhr's assertion of his "general adhesion" to the heritage of the social gospel, one is hard-pressed to find an organic connection between his thought and Rauschenbusch's. There is little evidence to suggest that Niebuhr, unlike his brother H. Richard, ever engaged in a thorough examination of Rauschenbusch's writings, even though at several points he did exempt Rauschenbusch from his most vitriolic critiques of liberalism.2It has been the verdict of many scholars that Niebuhr's version of Christian realism eclipsed Rauschenbusch's social gospel, a verdict given credence by the very different trajectories of their careers. Yet there are aspects of their lives that make a comparison between the two difficult. For one thing, Niebuhr enjoyed an advantage of historical longevity. From his first publications in the mid-1910s until his final missives in the late 1960s, Niebuhr covered a broader range of issues and produced a wider corpus of writing, as opposed to Rauschenbusch, who was less prolific and whose major writings appeared during the final ten years of his life. While one can see a clear theological progression in Rauschenbusch, we can only speculate how his thought might have developed if he had lived into the 1920s or 1930s (and how he would have responded to the ascending theological star, Niebuhr). Further, in analyzing Niebuhr the question always arises: Which Niebuhr? Does one focus primarily on Niebuhr's Marxist turn during the 1930s, the World War II interventionism of the early 1940s, or the Cold War and liberal democratic phase of Niebuhr's career in the late 1940s and 1950s?However, one of the biggest problems in interpreting Rauschenbusch and Niebuhr is the simple fact that one is talking about individuals whose theologies engaged radically different historical contexts. When Rauschenbusch was forty years old in 1901, he was a few years into his teaching career at Rochester Theological Seminary, having completed an eleven-year pastorate of a German Baptist Church in the Hell's Kitchen section of New York. At the turn of the twentieth century, Rauschenbusch was grappling with the realities of late nineteenth-century industrialization, immigration, and unregulated capitalism in a nation on the cusp of becoming a global economic and military power. Although theological liberalism was starting to gain traction within American Protestantism, those who adhered to what later became known as "the social gospel" were a small minority who, in Rauschenbusch's words, "shouted in the wilderness" ([1912] 2010, 9). When Niebuhr was forty in 1932, he too had completed a long-term pastorate of a German immigrant church in an urban context (Detroit), and was a few years into his teaching career at Union Theological Seminary, New York. However, he was dealing with the political fallout from a world war, the specter of the worst economic depression in American history, and an international context that revealed signs of what a later generation would call "globalization." Unlike Rauschenbusch, Niebuhr found himself surrounded by many like-minded colleagues who in various ways were deeply committed to carrying forward the legacy of the social gospel.3 While Rauschenbusch's context evokes images of an Old Testament prophet crying in the wilderness, Niebuhr was surrounded by "a cloud of witnesses" actively committed to building on this earlier legacy of social Christianity.Despite their differences, I believe the task of bringing these two men into conversation with each other in the early twenty-first century is vital. As perhaps the two most important figures to come out of the American tradition of Christian social ethics in the first half of the twentieth century, Rauschenbusch and Niebuhr were united in the belief that central to the social mission of Christianity were issues of economic justice. As was the case in each of their lifetimes, the early twenty-first century still echoes with voices that see questions of economic wealth as fundamentally private matters—questions that Christianity, and religion in general, have no business addressing. However, Rauschenbusch and Niebuhr believed that an engagement with questions of economic justice was an essential component for understanding Christian theology. Here, I concentrate on one formative work for each person: Rauschenbusch's Christianizing the Social Order (1912), a book that provides Rauschenbusch's most detailed analysis of the relationship between Christianity and economic justice, and Niebuhr's An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (1935), a book that offers one of Niebuhr's most penetrating critiques of the social gospel.In my judgment the most critical theme for understanding the differences between Rauschenbusch and Niebuhr revealed in these works, and in their other writings, is not so much their different views toward classical doctrines like original sin or the meaning of justice. Rather, their differences emerge from their distinctive understandings of the use of history in the interpretation of Christian theology and ethics. For Rauschenbusch, discerning the process of God in history was a means to ascertain how Christians could address the problems caused by modern capitalism. For Niebuhr, faith in the redemptive possibilities of history represented one of the central faults of liberal Christianity, even as Christians were called not to give up on the possibilities of economic justice.Previous discussions on the distinctions between Rauschenbusch and Niebuhr revolve around their differing understandings of sin and the ability of humans to approximate a just social order. Yet I believe that the core of their theological differences is their very different views regarding the role of history. It became fashionable in Niebuhrian circles to see the social gospel's greatest failure as its alleged myopic optimism in a coming kingdom of God, expressed chiefly in the belief that God worked directly through morally righteous men and women who would labor to bring about the conditions of a just society. However, seeing Rauschenbusch's thought solely through the kingdom-of-God lens misses what was for him the underlying foundation of his theology and social ethics: his understanding of history. It is impossible to understand Rauschenbusch without recognizing the way that he approached theology and ethics with the methodological tools of an early twentieth-century historian, who took seriously a liberal tradition that stressed the activity of God working in history to transform the world. Rauschenbusch's historiography connects him to a legacy of influential German historians such as Albrecht Ritschl and Adolf von Harnack. Yet Rauschenbusch's view of history was very practical in that he was primarily concerned with how American social institutions, especially churches, were able to approximate in history the theological and ethical ideals of a just society.4 For Rauschenbusch, the chief means to approximate these ends was economic reform.More so than any of his other books, Christianizing the Social Order shows the relationship between Rauschenbusch's theology and a model of economic justice. When this book was published in 1912, the social gospel was nearing its peak of national influence, and the first few chapters of this book read as a hopeful summary of how the social teachings of Christianity were transforming the nation. Christianizing the Social Order reflects the idealism of many Progressive-era reformers who believed they were witnessing a unique historical moment when the rise of social righteousness would create the conditions in which a new economic order might be possible.It was his stress on God's active involvement in history, whereby people of faith labored for a just society, which gave Rauschenbusch's theology much of its power, but this idea also exposed him to later charges that his understanding of social progress was naïve. Building on his analysis in his 1907 book, Christianity and the Social Crisis, Rauschenbusch saw the moral failure of Christianity largely as a result of its radical message having been co-opted by powerful economic interests committed to promoting the church's status and wealth. Not only did this pattern fossilize the church's theological development, but it created a context in which individual greed superseded the need of Christians to see a just economic order as one of the goals of the Christian life. While conceding that self-interest was at times an essential aspect of individual development, Rauschenbusch contended that it was a disaster for the nation's economic future. "We want free, strong, self-reliant men with elbow room for action," he asserted: "But when a theory of so-called economic individualism has resulted in turning the property of a nation over to a limited group; … in pitting the self-interest of the most resourceful men against the public welfare; in giving them power to hold up the progress of humanity by extorting monopoly profits; … then that theory has gone to seed and it is time to plow the ground for a new crop" ([1912] 2010, 290). In many ways, Rauschenbusch's rhetorical fallback was to note that the modern theological iterations of the social gospel provided the means for changing moral behaviors: With unanimous moral judgment mankind has always loved and exalted those who sacrificed their self-interest to the common welfare, and despised those who sold out the common good for private profit. The cross of Christ stands for the one principle of action; the bag of Judas stands for the other…. I submit the proposition that the overgrowth of private interests has institutionalized an unchristian principle, and that we must reverse the line of movement if we want to establish the law of Christ. ([1912] 2010, 290)Rauschenbusch was always clear that the achievement of a just social-political order was never a foregone conclusion; the assertion by some that he believed in the "inevitable progress" of humanity is a clear misreading of his theology.5 Yet the achievement of a just society largely rested on the forces of history that he believed provided opportune moments for social change. In 1914, he noted: "We all realize the immense opportunities for action in the present state of the public mind. But historical opportunities rarely last long. The red iron blackens even as it lies on the anvil. Therefore strike now" (quoted in Evans 2004, 258).Rauschenbusch was typical of a generation of liberals who came of age believing that the study of history was tantamount to a form of scientific inquiry to interpret the development of Christianity. Like other liberals of his generation, he saw Christianity's historical development as an ongoing struggle for humans to discern the essence of their God-given purpose to work for a just world: "All history becomes the unfolding of the purpose of the immanent God who is working in the race toward the commonwealth of spiritual liberty and righteousness. History is the sacred workshop of God" ([1912] 2010, 121).For Reinhold Niebuhr, this view of history was anathema. Niebuhr's theological education at Yale Divinity School exposed him to some of this historical idealism (in particular, from the prominent liberal historian and theologian Douglas Clyde Macintosh; see Fox 1985, esp. chap. 2). For much of the 1920s and through the first half of the 1930s, Niebuhr embraced aspects of the social gospel legacy that advocated for economic reform along socialist lines (and Niebuhr's involvement in the American Socialist Party from the late 1920s to the late 1930s is well documented). By the early 1930s, however, Niebuhr disparaged this progressive view of history. For Niebuhr, optimistic assertions about a coming kingdom of God showed the inability of the social gospelers to face the hard facts of history—namely, that sin could never be overcome by Christian morality, and that justice, while representing a necessary goal of the Christian life, could never be fully actualized. Niebuhr accepted many of the social gospel arguments about the religious and ethical significance of the Hebrew prophets and their calls to change society. Yet unlike Rauschenbusch, who believed that much of the problem with the modern world was that Christians did not properly interpret Christianity, Niebuhr saw the problems of history and theology cutting much deeper.Here is where Niebuhr's Augustinian view of human sinfulness reflects his belief that history can never reveal the full extent of God's purposes for humanity: "Historic Christianity is in the position of having the materials for the foundation and the roof of the structure of an adequate morality. But it is unable to complete the structure" ([1935] 1956, 149). In part, Niebuhr's stature as a social ethicist was rooted in attacking what he saw (and often caricatured) as the social gospel tendency to see socioeconomic reform as something that could be achieved through the power of Christian ideals of love and brotherhood. Yet behind these critiques lay Niebuhr's strong doubt about the redemptive nature of history. "Christianity, in other words, is interpreted as the preaching of a moral ideal, which men do not follow, but which they ought to. The Church must continue to hope for something that has never happened" (158). As he moved into the 1940s, Niebuhr grew more strident in his belief that historical processes only made the task of building a just world even more difficult. "There is indeed progress in history in the sense that it presents us with continually larger responsibilities and tasks," he wrote in 1944. But "modern history is an almost perfect refutation of modern faith in a redemptive history. History is creative but not redemptive" (1944, 132). This pessimism toward historical progressivism became even more pronounced in many of Niebuhr's later works such as The Irony of American History (1952) and Faith and History (1949). Influenced by the emerging context of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, Niebuhr warned that the efforts of modern democratic nations to create the conditions for a just world more often than not led nations to commit greater evils in the name of justice.Both Rauschenbusch and Niebuhr saw a just society as a goal to be approximated but never fully achieved. Yet while Rauschenbusch carried the seeds of an earlier nineteenth-century evangelical faith that Christians could build a morally righteous society (analogous to the same evangelical fervor that led to the passing of the Prohibition Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920), Niebuhr consistently affirmed that moral fortitude alone could not achieve a morally perfected society. Consistent with Augustine, Niebuhr held that the ultimate perfection of humanity lay outside of history: The truth of the Gospel must be preached today to a generation which hoped that historical development would gradually emancipate man from the ambiguity of his position of strength and weakness and would save him from the sin into which he falls by trying to evade or deny the contradiction in which he lives…. But a Gospel which can penetrate through this illusion and save men from the idolatrous confidence in history as a redeemer will also shake the false islands of security which men have sought to establish in history in the name of the Gospel. (1949, 243)This different orientation toward historical processes nuanced the way that both thinkers thought of economic and political reform. For Rauschenbusch, the quest for economic justice was a moral necessity predicated on a need for Christians to both model the precepts of just relationships and push churches to advocate for sweeping socioeconomic reform. Although Niebuhr in the mid-1930s would likely have agreed with many of Rauschenbusch's ideas regarding the pervasive decadence of modern capitalism, and the need for strong government regulation of the private sector, Niebuhr would also have claimed that persons needed more than powerful moral convictions to change a nation's collective economic behavior.One reason why many contemporary scholars, public intellectuals, and politicians revere Niebuhr is that from an early twenty-first century perspective, Niebuhr's language of human tragedy and sin has aged quite well. While parts of Rauschenbusch also sound contemporary, one senses in reading him that he was speaking to an early twentieth-century Progressive-era context. At Rauschenbusch to the United States in a way that the nation at the of God's for the of the reason why many contemporary to Niebuhr is that his Christian realism to both progressive and political Niebuhr's in many have him not only as a prophet who against the of Soviet but as a of capitalism. The of this view is that while much of his later was as an Niebuhr's early came as a of who in like and and An Interpretation of Christian Ethics a strong for political find little in Rauschenbusch's theology. However, Rauschenbusch largely took a critical toward seeing Marxist of struggle as to the of other social Rauschenbusch's to the problem of economic was to that the teachings of Christianity provided the basis for a new economic order. believed that historical during the century Christians to new of theology that problems of industrialization, business and the of modern capitalism. The idea that capitalism a of the is one of the most in Rauschenbusch's writings, to his in Hell's by the late nineteenth-century and Rauschenbusch to the idea that much of the nation's economic especially were held by a small of people who these without adequate to those who and developed the The moral problem to be by us is how to the of the individual of the who has its by his labor and and to for the the which the The is and and many of the most and evils of are directly or to this of the Christianity was a means by which the economic could be in ways that a just of the nation's Rauschenbusch, the to address the nation's economic was for to democratic is one of the chief of the coming are not they are but they are were of the mission of Christianity the name of had been God had to up the Church was too or too to realize God's ([1912] 2010, Yet for all of the ways Rauschenbusch preached the need for to an economic predicated on democratic he from the American Socialist This reflects Rauschenbusch's to see Christian ethics as but it also his faith by in the between political and Christianity. Rauschenbusch that has a spiritual hope and a religious It stands for the of moral and for the development of the human in and In present social order it stands for more between man and ([1912] 2010, Like other social Rauschenbusch's to the problems of economic was in the belief that Christianity could as a means to the social perfection of In this he advocated for such as the by and government regulation and of that were to the larger public as public and While Rauschenbusch had faith in a socialist of he never believed that the goal of a political was to create an of in which the same are in their and always will and this of will be in some of While many persons today might see Rauschenbusch's as his was largely by a belief that a needed a of and government regulation to individual Niebuhr published An Interpretation of Christian Ethics in he had the in his Christianity with Marxist of Niebuhr was never a and did not economic and political However, Niebuhr saw in Marxist analysis an of political and economic power that he believed could the economic of capitalism, something liberalism was unable to As he into human nature which has to modern to the of ([1935] 1956, Niebuhr about Marxist theory was that it took seriously to economic Marxist analysis of struggle a of how powerful economic interests would not their wealth for the of to of the of Christ. As Gary Dorrien Christianity at its was both and it had a view of history that was by its hope for the of Yet even as An Interpretation of Christian Ethics a Marxist language of struggle and Niebuhr's with the of the Soviet Union led him to Marxist theory and more of a economic model to democratic to liberal and Niebuhr's understandings of their different theological For Rauschenbusch, the failure of was that it did not understand that the nature of was not the of but the of human and economic came not through the nineteenth-century of Karl but through the democratic by In this Rauschenbusch did not Niebuhr's mid-1930s faith in ability to approximate the conditions of a just society we can only speculate how Rauschenbusch would have responded to the rise of the Soviet Union in the 1920s and as Niebuhr wrote about aspects of one senses in reading An Interpretation of Christian Ethics that his belief in human sinfulness and tragedy took over any faith he have had in any political ability to achieve a just society. as he saw a Marxist model as hope for economic there is also a sense that the mid-1930s Niebuhr had his most of is its assumption that an adequate of social justice will create individuals who will be to to their ability and to their The of social good will and human can be by no political ([1935] 1956, In the like social gospel would each too much faith in human to to a point where the of humanity would the and of human and Niebuhr the time of World War affirmed the of American but from very different theological While it could be that Rauschenbusch too much faith in a of Progressive-era Niebuhr in the too little faith in the possibilities for the reform of as Niebuhr from Marxist there was always the sense that the quest for economic would be by the by human Niebuhr's later of liberal he the optimistic language of This is most in Niebuhr's assertion in of and the of that for justice but to (1944, These the theological that between Rauschenbusch's social gospel idealism and Niebuhr's Christian all of their differences, Walter Rauschenbusch and Reinhold Niebuhr many of their major works on the same a just social order could only be never fully achieved. Yet the way they the of this approximate justice other differences between most of the social gospel made by Christian like Niebuhr was that the social gospel embraced an of love at the of an of justice for There is no doubt that many early of the social gospel, like expressed faith in the of "the of as the to achieve economic and political reform. it was this legacy that Niebuhr had in when he wrote that Christianity the simple of in the of in order to its hope in the of the of love in the world" ([1935] 1956, I the between Niebuhr and Rauschenbusch is not the of an of justice in Rauschenbusch in the social gospel in but how the of justice took on a different nature for the For Rauschenbusch, justice was the of love within social relationships and social For all of the that Niebuhr through as a public he never the idea that the role of justice was often to the of human a social of love of Niebuhr's liberal during the 1930s were of the Christian a prominent New (and a good of and one of the of liberalism (and of and especially were for Niebuhr, especially in of the way they to an of love that the need for political to achieve justice. Niebuhr The of the liberal to the law of love to without is a of and the liberal Church had had less moral idealism and more religious realism its to the political problem would have been less and ([1935] 1956, However, it is

People who have political power want to maintain the status quo to maintain their positions in the hierarchy. People who have economic power want to disrupt it. When the same people hold both economic and political power, the incentives behind political power dominate. The result is stagnation. When people can gain economic power without having political power, those with economic power use it to create more value for others, resulting in the creative destruction that leads to economic progress. Those with political power will use it to protect economic power as long as they do not perceive that their power is threatened, which can lead to an exchange of protection for tribute that benefits everyone.

Socialism produces distinct forms of humorous ridicule that are relatively rare in capitalist, bourgeois democracies. These forms are arranged in a hierarchy that reflects the distribution of power in this type of social and political order, one which differs markedly from a bourgeois democracy or indeed even a traditional or dictatorial authoritarian society. Merely authoritarian societies lack the kind of over-riding ideology and central control of economic and cultural life that are the defining characteristics of socialism. Socialist humorous ridicule is cruel at the top; then comes an aggressive and admonishing, but in intention humorous, official ridicule employed by the state in pursuit of centrally defined political ends. Finally, there is the ridicule by ordinary people of the elite and the social order they have imposed on the masses who respond by spontaneously and autonomously inventing and circulating innumerable jokes and anecdotes. This pattern is a product of the exercise of a monopoly of political and economic power by the leaders of the Communist Party and the distinctive political inequality that characterises socialism, an inequality based not on ownership but on differential access to the power of the state. The rulers of merely authoritarian societies that were not socialist such as Franco’s Spain, Pinochet’s Chile or Afrikaner South Africa did not and could not attain the same kind of hegemony that was possible under socialism because there existed economic, religious, scientific and even legal institutions that enjoyed a substantial degree of independence from their political rulers. Accordingly, they did not exhibit to anything like the full extent the patterns of humour to be found under socialism. The aggregate patterns of humour in socialist societies must be treated not as interactions between individuals but as ‘social facts’ to be understood in relation to other social facts, notably the nature of political power, with both sets of social facts being contrasted with those to be found in the capitalist democracies that are the antithesis of socialism.

I argue that there is a deep parallel between problems that John Rawls (1955) argued had developed in moral philosophy as a result of not recognizing the difference between two conceptions of rules, and problems that have developed in sociology as a result of not recognizing that there are two conceptions of social order. That most philosophers and sociologists have not appreciated this problem does not weaken the importance of the argument. In fact, I think that the misunderstandings which have resulted from lack of attention to constitutive practices, with research and policy implications effecting social, legal and justice issues in modern society, strengthen the original argument considerably.

In response to Strydom, Nicoll and Gregg’s queries, I draw out some further implications of my analysis of theory classrooms. I aim to clarify the theoretical basis of my concepts of social order and fetishism. I end by considering the pedagogical implications of my analysis. It seems to me that the contradiction between critical values and the classroom’s forms of authority remain irresolvable.

This chapter analyses disjuncture between various translations of community policing in South Africa, specifically in the Stellenbosch area of the Western Cape. It makes a contribution, through critical discourse analysis and ethnography, to a largely policy-oriented body of scholarly literature on the field. The central question in the chapter is how different conceptions of social order, expressed in the multifaceted notion of 'community', are translated into a set of practices of community policing to produce order. In particular we use the notion of translation to depict how the idea of community policing defined in an abstract model plays out at the local level. Jesilow and Parsons are somewhat idealistic in arguing that community policing has the potential to impact positively on the social health of a polarised nation, as it differs from the usual waging of a war on the poor. Keywords: community policing; ethnography; Jesilow; Parsons; South Africa; Stellenbosch; Western Cape