West Bengal Political Science Review | Vol. XXVIII, 2026 | ISSN: 2230-8296

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For a moment, the title of the seminar left me not a little intimidated. For I could not immediately think up what are the issues exclusively concerning the State with a Hegelian ‘S’ in capital or in a Comtean small letter ‘s’ that are different from issues emanating in ‘society’ with a Comtean capital ‘S’ which defies its Hegelian counterpart, if we put it in the manner and parlance of W.G. Runciman or Giovanni Sartori. Or, for that matter, what are the issues in politics that are different from those concerning the State, unless it concerns the politics of stateless peoples? For the state impinges on politics in every possible way, and in each of its aspects. My confusion regarding this second point springs from a deeper theoretical source. In a seminar organised by political scientists, I know that they would legitimately view socio-economic and even cultural issues from the vantage point of the main organising idea and chief conceptual unit of Political Science, namely power and the State, just as economists would look at these from the lenses of scarcity and market, or just as sociologists would assess them from the viewpoints of social solidarity and social system. This is because, regarding reality, which is essentially indivisible, social sciences represent an intellectual division of labour. Since in this indivisible reality, which they seek to analytically decompose, what is a constant for one is a parameter for another, and a variable for still another, their main organising ideas as also their chief conceptual units differ. The social sciences cannot help it. For, as David Easton puts it, while ‘the social sciences are analytic’, ‘social problems are totalistic’, not amenable to discipline-defined packaging.So, a sectarian analytical decomposition of reality is the only thing possible for individual social sciences.   

But while practitioners of the different, sectarian social sciences such as Economics, Sociology, and of course Political Science, might be adjusting their lenses and refurbishing their main organising ideas and chief conceptual units, to grapple with the issues that are confronting the twenty-first-century homo sapiens, aspiring to be homo deus but continuously failing because of unforeseen obstacles, these issues, which are totalistic and mind-boggling, continue to proliferate. The tedious litany can be stated briefly or at length.  A short list could start with six major issues related to the sustainability of life’s existence, and naturally humans’ existence on Mother Earth, which would otherwise be threatened. These include (i) food security; (ii) human health; (iii) land management, coupled with land restoration; (iv) water security (since a Third World War may well be about water access); (v) climate change; and (vi) biodiversity preservation, at the global level, and local level too in appropriate cases. 

If one wants a longer list, arranged according to the divides in social sciences, contemporary society faces a multitude of interconnected challenges. Key issues include: climate change with rising global temperatures, extreme weather events, and rising sea levels, air-water-and land pollution, biodiversity loss, etc., posing significant threats to ecosystems and human populations   (domains of Environmental Science); glaring economic inequality and poverty with jobless growth worldwide and the phenomenal rise in the number of precariats, or a new social class characterised by unstable employment, economic insecurity, and a lack of predictable or secure living conditions theorised by Guy Standing; (domains of Economics and Political Science); unequal access to education, healthcare, and housing; persistent problems like corruption, gender inequality, and social injustice, including discrimination on grounds of race, gender (domains of Sociology and Political Science), and declining mental health of the world’s population (domain of Social Psychology).  One could add pandemics (in a post-COVID world), cybersecurity threats, and the spread of misinformation in a post-truth society inside disaffected democracies (domains of IT and again Political Science). These issues are often exacerbated by factors like population growth, urbanisation, technological advancements, and unresponsive or complicit states and disaffected democracies, and they require multifaceted, radical solutions, away from bureaucratic bungling or technological tinkering.   

  Regarding all the environmental and socio-cultural ills or ‘bads’, stated above, which are mere symptoms of a greater syndrome, no technological isolationism or ‘technological fix’ (or ‘techno-fix’) would work.  Alvin Weinberg, technologist, administrator, and government consultant who coined the term, used it to describe the idea of using engineering innovation to solve problems, particularly those traditionally seen as social, political, or cultural. It was later theorised more and applied by others. Against many of them, I want to emphasise that grappling with these issues will involve managing the new technologies and suppressing, if not replacing, the modernist ‘linear economy’ (LE) and the culture of risk engendered by it. By linear economy, I mean an  economy following a “take-make-dispose” model, extracting resources, manufacturing products, and then discarding them as waste, as opposed to a ‘circular economy’ (CE),  aiming to minimise waste and pollution by reusing, repairing, refurbishing, and recycling materials and products, keeping them in use for as long as possible. 

The effects of the CE-based contemporary technoscience amid a culture of risk, ‘in part indirectly, as a consequence of the neglect of research to ameliorate the social and environmental impacts of technoscientific developments’, are already apparent.  First, there have been nuclear power and weapons plant accidents, such as the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine (1986), the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster (2011) in Japan, the Three Mile Island accident (1979) in Pennsylvania, the Kyshtym Disaster (1957) in Russia, the Windscale fire (1957) in the UK, etc. Then there have been chemical industry accidents ranging from manufacturing, as in the Bhopal disaster (India, 1984), the Texas City refinery explosion (US, 1947 & 2005), Oppau Explosion (Germany, 1921), the Seveso disaster in Milan (Italy, 1976), Flixborough Disaster in North Lincolnshire (UK, 1974), Thiokol-Woodbine Explosion in Woodbine, Georgia (US, 1971), Henderson Rocket Fuel Plant Explosion in Henderson (US, 1988), Phillips Disaster in Pasadena (US, 1989), Sterlington Explosion, in Sterlington, Louisiana (US, 1991), the  Jilin Chemical Plant Explosion in Jilin City (China, 2005), Chevron Oil Explosion, in Richmond, California (US, 2012), West Fertilizer Plant Explosion, in West, Texas (US, 2013), Tianjin Explosions in Tianjin (Northern China, 2015), Williams Olefins Plant Explosion, in Geismar, Louisiana (US, 2013), TPC Group Plant Fire, in Texas (US, 2019), etc. These involved human casualties on a big or smaller scale and/or contamination and pollution of landmasses or water bodies. This list excludes almost daily transportation incidents in the chemical industry all across the world. 

Apart from these, there have been ‘the accumulation of toxic wastes without safe means of disposing of them; the deterioration of climate change by increasing atmospheric temperature; starvation, poverty, and permanent social crisis in the so-called third world, which is actually inhabited by the majority of the Earth’s population, which continues to squeeze into ever larger, ever more crowded, megalopolises.’ 

In Manuel Medina’s view, all these form part of a range of natural and social crises emanating from the ‘culture of risk’. Its reasons are many. But this article will focus on the interaction between technology and society as a major reason. In the societies constructed by modern European culture, there is an evident abdication of control of technoscientific research, development, and innovation in favour of the technoscientific community itself, and more ominously, of its industrial wing. The social and political institutions of these societies no more regulate technoscientific production to ensure that the latter abide by the values enshrined in the former. Rather, the expectation is that the social institutions will become amenable and pliable to the necessities of the new production schemes, even if they jeopardise prevailing values. There are examples of this in India too.   What makes matters more hazardous is that for coping with the alarming risks engendered by ‘new technologies’, only ‘outdated sociopolitical assessment mechanisms incorporating dangerously inadequate conceptions of nature, technology, science, society, and their interrelationships’ are available.

The situation is pitiable. We already know that though ‘modernism is indeed declining’, the role of technology remains as vital as ever.  This necessitates that we understand better, with greater clarity, ‘the decline of modernism, the character of technology, and the interaction of these two phenomena’. For, modernism being ‘a principled assault on the material environment to disburden and enrich humanity’, and the environment being ‘finite’, this kind of extractive enterprise was bound to run up against limits, as it did. The limits were constituted by: i) ‘environmental constraints’, ii) ‘goods saturation’, and iii) ‘economic crowding’.   

 The first limit is easily visible globally in the irreparable degradation of the environment and the grave depletion of energy resources, which we have already talked about in some length above. The second is yet to become a global issue because a large number of countries, especially those in the Third World, are grievously suffering from a crippling lack of goods, as indicated in the third paragraph above. But in the advanced industrial First World, goods glut is a reality since available space for material goods is nearly exhausted. There is scarcely any room left for more furniture, appliances, cars, roads, buildings, or anything new. The flow of goods can be kept up only by brisker replacement of goods, either through what Immanuel Wallerstein calls ‘innovation’ and ‘transmogrification’ of products,⁹ by the introduction of what William G. Martin calls ‘luxury goods or preciosities’,¹⁰ or by what is today so felicitously called non-sustainable ‘fast fashion’ and ‘luxury brand consumption’.¹¹ But the aggressive replacement programme that ensues from this has a limit too. The third limit, ‘economic crowding’, starts when markets get fully laden and glutted, and businesses can no longer spread out into new resources or to new consumers, in what Wallerstein terms ‘core’, ‘peripheral’ or ‘semi-peripheral’ TimeSpaces of spatio-temporal systems, but must push and jostle with each other in largely fruitless and destructive competition. Such economic crowding can be somewhat temporarily alleviated by ‘removing all remaining barriers of space, time, and culture.’ This is what the present-day globalisation-based hypercapitalism is engaged in attempting. But already, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, when the process is quite advanced, production is shifting around the globe in quest of more and more efficient sites; merchandise is chasing every last possible buyer or consumer even if they are hiding in bunkers; and trading is going on round the clock. And in the process, all local traditions are being flushed away by a flood of cosmopolitan consumption marked by brand exclusivity. This is not, however, succeeding in stopping economic crowding turning into ‘economic overcrowding’ and imperilling economic growth, sought to be achieved by what Klaus Schwab describes as the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’. 

To put this revolution into perspective, we make a little digression to point out that the first crucial shift in our lifestyle, representing a critical transition from foraging to farming that happened around 10,000 years ago, was an agricultural revolution. The second series of industrial revolutions began in the second half of the eighteenth century. The first of them, spanning the period 1760 to 1860, and encompassing both what Adam Smith called ‘manufacture’ and Karl Marx called ‘machinofacture’, changed the face of the Earth. Seemingly, technology was then a liberating influence, realising the Baconian dream of freeing humanity from the travails of subsistence existence, and commencing, with ‘the Cartesian commitment, to achieve liberty and prosperity in a methodical, scientific way’. Along with the ‘rationalisation of manufacturing’ and the ‘systematic exploitation of the conventional energy sources—wind and water—and of the traditional materials—stone, wood, and, within limits, iron’ that it started, this technology also ran up against obstacles, but tided over them. Although waterflows and waterways were confined to specific locations, and wind power was limited to certain times, coal, steam, and iron shattered these barriers in the late eighteenth century, and made the globe open and available for human domination. The massiveness and brutality of nineteenth-century technology reshaped the material environment, by bridging the heretofore ‘unbridgeable by trusses and cantilevers’, reaching the remote via railroads, subduing the watery wastes by steamships, and piercing the skies and defying the taboo on the Tower of Babel by skyscrapers.¹³ It is in this sense that Karl Marx said in his Communist Manifesto that the bourgeoisie ‘has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.’¹⁴ 

The second industrial revolution started, according to Schwab, in the late nineteenth century and continued up to the early twentieth century. Assisted by the advent of electricity and the arrival of the assembly line, it made mass production on a large scale possible.  

The third in the line began in the 1960s. It was termed the computer or the digital revolution because its catalytic agents were the semiconductors, mainframe computers (1960s), personal computers (1970s and 1980s), and the Internet (1990s). Even before it, technology in the twentieth century had brought about a radical transformation of the second industrial revolution by roping in ‘new energy sources: oil, hydroelectric and nuclear power; new materials, alloys and plastics’; and new ways of ‘overpowering time and space through radio, air transportation, and television’. Huge modern corporations had arrived to manage the extreme density and complexity of parts of modern technology that were working at cross-purposes to threaten the vitality of its whole.¹⁵

  In the fourth industrial revolution, digital technologies aided by computer hardware, software and networks at their core are being more sophisticated and integrated to transform societies and the global economy, and earning thereby the epithet of the ‘second machine age’. It is not only about connected machines and systems, but has a wider scope.  ‘Occurring simultaneously are waves of further breakthroughs in areas ranging from gene sequencing to nanotechnology, from renewables to quantum computing. It is the fusion of these technologies and their interactions across the physical, digital and biological domains’ that are making the fourth industrial revolution qualitatively and basically different from the earlier revolutions.¹⁶ David Gelernter rightly said that ‘What iron, steel and reinforced concrete were in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, software is now: the preeminent medium for building new and visionary structures’.¹⁷ 

It was during the third and fourth revolutions that technology became fraught with risks, as the list above of accidents, explosions, and disasters shows. In the meantime, to ward off criticisms against it, technology had been changing itself organisationally and structurally. ‘The methodological universalism of giant corporations’ and the Fordist production system had already been changing itself into a flexible specialisation of post-Fordist production mechanisms. Presently, the ‘paradigmatic unit of the postmodern economy is not the gigantic corporation but the small, expert, and adaptable firm that is able to recognise a market niche and fill it quickly with specialised services or customised goods.’ But even after this transformation of technology towards extreme personalisation, the modernist project of aggressive realism and methodological universalism of modern technology is nowhere near reaching its fulfilment or collapsing, simply because ‘it does not contain its goal’. Its underlying truth is technology itself qua technology, and its goal has shifted from the path of Baconian-Cartesian path of liberating individuals from the burdens of nature and community and making them unencumbered individuals, to showering them with freely available goods as abstract sovereign consumers, subject to multiple discriminations and surveillance outside the marketplace. ¹⁸ 

It was during the third and fourth industrial revolutions that the element of risk associated with technology became pervasive, proving Ulrich Beck’s theory of ‘risk society’, delineated in his books Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (1992), World Risk Society (1999), and World at Risk (2007/2009). Beck’s theory of risk society argues that modern society is increasingly preoccupied with future risks generated by technology and industrialisation. Beck defines a risk society as one that deals systematically with hazards introduced by modernisation itself. He defines a ‘risk society’ as a societal concept focusing on the shift from industrial society to a new era characterised by technological hazards, where the distribution of “bads” such as pollution and contamination is a key concern. It emphasises the social construction of environmental health risks and the increasing uncertainties and competing knowledge claims related to managing technological environmental hazards. 

  The risks are becoming ever more threatening. In the foreword of an edited book revisiting his first book Risk Society, Beck said:

 Modern societies — Western and non-Western alike — are confronted with qualitatively new problems, which create the “cosmopolitan imperative”: cooperate or fail. This cosmopolitan imperative arises because of the spread and scale of global risks: nuclear risks, ecological risks, technological risks, economic risks, informational risks created by radicalised modernity and insufficiently regulated financial markets, and so on. These global risks have at least two consequences. First, they mix the “native” with the “foreign” and create an everyday global awareness.

 The second, in Beck’s view, is the creation of global Andersonian ‘imagined communities’. For, 

… the result of global interconnectedness is not a “pure” normative cosmopolitanism of a world without borders. Instead, these risks produce a hybrid cosmopolitisation … What emerges is the universal possibility of “risk communities” that spring up, establish themselves, and become aware of their cosmopolitan composition — “imagined political communities” that might come into existence in the awareness that dangers or risks can no longer be socially delimited in space or time.²⁰  

 I, a Yeatsian ‘battered kettle’, incapacitated by age, am in search of such imagined politico-economic communities, among you, dear young teachers of Political Science. I want to remind you that unless the social sciences squarely face the facts of risk, they are in danger of being anachronistic. Beck points out regarding Sociology, that its ‘self-understanding is [too] rooted in the experiences of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to become receptive to the new realities at the beginning of the twenty-first century’. And he adds that

 Today one observes a general avoidance reflex among social scientists in the face of a global risk situation whose upheavals overtax the familiar instruments of theory, of established expectations of social change, and of the classical means of politics. Moreover, this avoidance reflex ensures that the social sciences are [becoming] irrelevant for contemporary public debates.²¹   

  In the face of such prognostication, I remind you of an important axis of Immanuel Wallerstein’s huge research programme, namely, ‘critical epistemological reflection’ on the conventional modes of thinking about these chaotic social realities involving a major restructuring or ‘unthinking’ of the social sciences, ‘structured at its inception in the middle of the 19th century’, around ‘a set of often unquestioned a priori assumptions’.²² ‘Unthinking’ involved, first, understanding the ‘turmoil’ that the social sciences experienced in the ‘last quarter of the 20th century’ and, then, exploring the transformations that caused the reopening of many of their settled questions, thereby buttressing ‘the view that 19th-century paradigms have reached their limits’.²³ Towards this, an international commission chaired by Wallerstein submitted a report where the disciplinary institutionalisation and sectarianisation of the social sciences were questioned with suggestions of tentative steps towards a holistic integration of them to address their myopic limitedness. These included fundamental reforms of universities, including their institutions, research programmes within university structures and the university structure itself.²⁴ Wallerstein led the way in rejecting ‘an indefensibly state-centric epistemological framework’ in which ‘significant strands of 20th-century social science have been locked’, and ‘national states are viewed as self-enclosed containers of social, economic, political and cultural relations’, by focusing on ‘the world scale of capitalist development’. In subsequent decades, a host of globalisation researchers followed it in ‘attempting to construct methodologies that are attuned to the worldwide scale of political and economic relations’.25 I appeal to you to join them.

Notes and References

1. See W.G. Runciman, ‘The Emergence of Political Sociology’, in W.G. Runciman, Social Science and Political Theory, Second Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 22-42; and Giovanni Sartori, ‘From the Sociology of Politics to Political Sociology’, Government and Opposition 4: 2 (Spring 1969): 195-214. 
2. Marion J. Levy Jr., ‘Some Aspects of “Structural-Functional” Analysis and Political Science’, in Approaches to the Study of Politics, ed. Roland Young (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1958), 52–65.
3.  David Easton, ‘Commentary on Robert E. Lane’s Paper’, in Integration of the Social Sciences through Policy Analysis, ed. James C. Charlesworth, Monograph 14 (Philadelphia, PA: AAPSS, 1972), 88–89; Easton, Political System, 2nd Indian ed. (Calcutta: Scientific Book Agency, 1971), 346.
4. Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus:  A Brief History of Tomorrow (Vintage, 2017).
5. See Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), pp. vii, 1, passim. 
6. Lisa Rosner (ed.), The Technological Fix: How People Use Technology to Create and Solve Problems (New York, London: Routledge, 2004). 
7. For narrow and wide definitions of CE and case studies of its application, see Mika Sillanpää, Chaker Ncibi, The Circular Economy: Case Studies about the Transition from the Linear Economy (London: Academic Press/Elsevier, 2019); and  Sadhan Kumar Ghosh (ed.), Circular Economy: Global Perspective (Singapore: Springer, 2020). 
8. Manuel Medina, ‘The Culture of Risk: New Technologies and Old Worlds’, in Stephen H. Cutlciffe, Steven L. Goldman, Manuel Medina, and José Samartìn eds.,  New Worlds,  New Technologies, New Issues (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press/ London and Toronto: Associated University Press, 1992), 57-58. 
9. Wallerstein et al., Does Capitalism Have a Future? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 11-16. 
10. Jane Schneider, ‘Was There a Pre-capitalist World System,’ Peasant Studies 6 (1977): 20–29, cited in William G. Martin, ‘The World-systems Perspective in Perspective,’ Review 17 (1994): 145–185. 
11. For the multifarious implications of brands, see Robert Pennington, The Consumer Culture Theory of Brands (UK: Cambridge Scholarship Publishing, 2019). 
12. Albert Borgmann, ‘The Postmodern Economy’, in Stephen H. Cutlciffe et al., 49-50. 
13. Ibid, 43.
14. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Chapter 1, ‘Bourgeois and Proletarians’. 
15. Borgmann, ‘Postmodern Economy’, 43.
16. Klaus Schwab, The Fourth Industrial Revolution (World Economic Forum, 2016/Crown, 2017), p.12. 
17. David Gelernter, ‘The Metamorphosis of Scientific Management’, Scientific American 261 (August 1989): 66. 
18. Borgmann, ‘The Postmodern Economy’, 48-50.
19.  Eugene Rosa, ‎Ortwin Renn, ‎and Aaron McCright (eds.), The Risk Society Revisited: Social Theory and Risk Governance (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013).  
20. Ulrich Beck, ‘Foreword’, in ibid, xiv. 
21. Ibid, xv
22. Immanuel Wallerstein, Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of Nineteenth-century Paradigms, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2001), henceforth USS, 237. 
23. Ibid, vi. 
24. Immanuel Wallerstein, Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 103–105. 
25. Neil Brenner, ‘The Space of the World: Beyond State-centrism,’ in Immanuel Wallerstein and the Problem of the World: System, Scale, Culture, eds. David Palumbo-Liu, Bruce Robbins, and Nirvana Tanoukhi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 101.