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The  ‘philosophical  premises’  of  uneven  and  combined  development

JUSTIN  ROSENBERG

Review  of  International  Studies  /  FirstView  Article  /  February  2013,  pp  1  -­  29DOI:  10.1017/S0260210512000381,  Published  online:  11  December  2012

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Review of International Studies page 1 of 29 6 2012 British International Studies Associationdoi:10.1017/S0260210512000381

The ‘philosophical premises’ of uneven andcombined development

JUSTIN ROSENBERG*

Abstract. Recent debates over Leon Trotsky’s idea of ‘uneven and combined development’(U&CD) have focused on its potential in the field of International Relations, but they havenot established the source of this potential. Does it derive from the philosophical premises ofdialectics? The present article argues that the idea of U&CD in fact involves an innovation asfundamental for Marxist dialectics as for other branches of social theory. And it also arguesthat in formulating this innovation, Trotsky provided a general solution to some of the mostbasic problems in social and international thought. The argument is set out in three parts. Thefirst part reconstructs Trotsky’s own account of dialectical premises and their implications forsocial explanation. The second shows how the concept of U&CD departs from this, in waysthat presuppose the tacit addition of a further ontological premise. Finally, part three analysesthe locus classicus of the concept – the opening chapter of Trotsky’s History of the RussianRevolution – showing how it is this additional premise which underpins the central achieve-ment of the idea: its incorporation of ‘the international’ into a theory of history.

Justin Rosenberg is Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex. He is Co-Convenor of the BISA Working Group on Historical Sociology and International Relations{www.historical-sociology.org}, and author of The Empire of Civil Society (1994); The Folliesof Globalisation Theory (2001); and numerous articles on ‘uneven and combined development’.See {www.unevenandcombined.com}.

A major problem across the social sciences, increasingly recognised in recent years,has been the predominance of ‘internalism’: the explanation of social phenomena byreference to the inner characteristics alone of a given society or type of society.1

Inherited from the tradition of classical social theory, internalism (which is some-times also called ‘methodological nationalism’) has prevented theorisation of the

1

* Earlier versions of this article were presented at the LSE, the Open University, and the Universities ofSussex, and Cornell. For helpful comments and criticisms I am grateful to all the participants, andespecially to Kirsten Ainley, Chris Boyle, Simon Bromley, William Brown, Andrew Davenport, BeateJahn, Jonathan Joseph, George Lawson, Fouad Makki, Kamran Matin and the members of the SussexWorking Group on Uneven and Combined Development. I would also like to thank the Editors andanonymous reviewers of the Review of International Studies: I have been unable to address all theircriticisms, but I have benefitted enormously from trying.

1 The classic critique was provided by Robert Nisbet, Social Change and History: Aspects of the WesternTheory of Development (London: Oxford University Press 1969). Subsequent discussions have included:N. Smelser, ‘External and internal factors in theories of social change’, in H. Haferkamp andN. Smelser (eds), Social change and modernity (Berkeley, California: University of California Press(1992); F. Tenbruck, ‘Internal history of society or universal history’, Theory, Culture & Society, 11:1(1994), pp. 75–93; Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1992); EricWolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Andreas

space of inter-societal relations; and it has thereby deprived the social sciences of aproper understanding of the international dimension of their subject matter.

Paradoxically, the discipline of IR, which ought to provide an antidote to thisproblem, has itself been partly misshaped by it. Over the years the neglect of theinternational in other disciplines has promoted a realist self-definition of IR in explicitcontrast to Sociology, with the implication that its subject matter, lying beyond thereach of social theoretical categories, is somehow ‘supra-sociological’ in nature.2 Thiscertainly avoids the immediate problem of methodological nationalism; but it alsoproduces an anomalous conception of ‘the international’ as a dimension of the socialworld which subsists without sociological foundations, mirroring Sociology’s tendencyto reductionism with its own, equal and opposite, tendency towards the reification of‘the international’.

Realism’s essentialising of the international has of course been heavily contestedwithin the discipline. Indeed the debate between realism and its critics remains today‘the most enduring ‘‘great debate’’ among students and practitioners of internationalrelations’.3 And yet this debate has always had a curiously lop-sided and non-progressive character which may be seen if we recall the manner in which it hasgenerally proceeded.

Critiques of realism have tended to operate by applying to international questionsforms of thought developed elsewhere in the social sciences: liberalism, Marxism,feminism, constructivism, post-structuralism, postcolonialism, and so on. And thefield of IR has surely been enriched as a result. Such are the peculiar (non-historicaland non-sociological) limits of realist analysis, these borrowings can almost alwaysadd a significant sociological dimension, (related typically to class, gender, identity,or discourse), to the analysis. At the same time, however, such is the continuing holdof internalist thinking over the social sciences in general that these imported resourcesnever bring with them the conceptual tools for formulating the significance of theinternational itself (as opposed to its changing social and historical forms). Evenpostcolonial theory, centred though it is on an irreducibly international phenomenon –the experience and aftermath of Western imperialism – does not provide an excep-tion to this rule. After all, an analysis of how modern international relations havebeen shaped and disfigured by racial and cultural oppression cannot by itself delivera general formula of the international – whose subject matter must also embrace

Wimmer and Nina Schiller, ‘Methodological nationalism and beyond: nation-state building, migrationand the social sciences’, Global Networks, 2:4 (2002), pp. 301–34. Ulrich Beck, ‘The CosmopolitanCondition. Why Methodological Nationalism Fails’, Theory, Culture and Society, 24:7–8 (2007),pp. 286–90; Charles Gore, ‘Methodological Nationalism and the Misunderstanding of East AsianIndustrialisation’, The European Journal of Development Research, 8 (1996), pp. 77–122. For a moresceptical view, see Daniel Chernilo, ‘Methodological nationalism and the domestic analogy: classicalresources for their critique’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 23:1 (2010), pp. 87–106.

2 Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State and War. A Theoretical Analysis (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1959); Theory of International Politics, (New York: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 1979);Hedley Bull, ‘Society and Anarchy in International Relations’, in H. Butterfield and M. Wight (eds),Diplomatic Investigations (London: Allen and Unwin, 1966).

3 Ole Holsti, ‘Theories of International Relations’, in Michael J. Hogan and Thomas G. Paterson (eds),Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004),p. 52. See also Steven Walt, ‘One World, Many Theories’, Foreign Policy, 110 (1998), pp. 32, 34–46;Ole Wæver, ‘Figures of International Thought: Introducing Persons Instead of Paradigms’, in, I. B.Neumann and O. Wæver (eds), The Future of International Relations: Masters in the Making?, (London:Routledge, 1997); Jennifer Sterling-Folker (ed.), Making Sense of International Theory, (Boulder andLondon: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2006).

2 Justin Rosenberg

both relations among Western (imperialist) societies and the vast bulk of humaninter-societal history which preceded ‘the rise of the West’ entirely.4

Thus it remains the case, as Ole Wæver has recently argued in a survey of thediscipline that ‘[t]oday, articles use lots of theory, and apply or test it – only it is notIR theory!’5 And this situation is not new: half a century earlier, Stanley Hoffmannalready complained about the fruitless application of ‘concepts torn from sociology,economics, cybernetics, biology and astronomy’ to a field whose core problematicthey were ill-suited to grasp.6

Here then is the lop-sidedness of the debate: non-realist approaches in IR, react-ing against the essentialising of ‘anarchy’, grant little or no theoretical significanceto the multiplicity of societies itself which composes the international. Instead ofproviding an alternative non-realist account of it, they have argued, (with varyingdegrees of explicitness), that the consequences of anarchy are either increasinglymitigated or even directly configured by social and cultural developments whichoriginate outside the international domain. Geopolitical anarchy, they argue, is qualifiedby, and may even one day be dissolved by the effects of liberal society and govern-ment; or it reflects the social structures and competitive imperatives of capitalism, orthe racialised identities of colonial domination; or it is itself indeterminate and can besocially constructed in a variety of ways; or it is increasingly the vehicle of processesof governmentality and biopolitics, etc.7 What the obverse implications might be –the implications of the international for liberal, Marxist, postcolonial, constructivist,or post-structuralist thought – is much less often broached.8

Of course, this would not matter if the international really were just a stage onwhich dynamics arising elsewhere are played out, vacant of any profound causaldeterminations of its own. Yet it is just this assumption which the numerous critiques

4 For an argument that postcolonialism remains in this respect unable to overcome the problem of inter-nalism, see K. Matin, ‘Redeeming the Universal: Postcolonialism and the Inner Life of Eurocentrism’,European Journal of International Relations, published online before print 24 January 2012, doi:10.1177/1354066111425263.

5 Wæver, ‘Still a Discipline’, p. 302. Wæver’s judgment is often positively embraced by those importingideas from outside. Thus David Campbell avers that ‘poststructuralism is not a model or theory ofinternational relations’, but rather ‘a critical attitude . . . [deriving from] an awareness of . . . otherbranches of the social sciences and humanities’. Similarly, Nicholas Onuf suggests that ‘constructivismis not an IR theory but a meta-theory’; and ‘IR scholars have borrowed very deliberately from otherdisciplines in order to develop the central tenets of constructivism’. See Campbell, ‘Poststructuralism’,in Tim Dunne et al. (eds), International Relations Theories. Discipline and Diversity (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2007), p. 206; and Nicholas Onuf, cited in Ole Wæver, ‘Still a Discipline After AllThese Debates?’, International Relations Theories, p. 303.

6 Stanley Hoffmann, ‘International Relations: The Long Road to Theory’, World Politics, 11:3 (1959),pp. 346–77, p. 368.

7 Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, Power and Interdependence (3rd edn, Boston: Little-Brown, 1989);Helen Milner, ‘The Assumption of Anarchy in International Relations Theory: a Critique’, Review ofInternational Studies, 17 (1991), pp. 67–85; Alex Callinicos and Justin Rosenberg, ‘Uneven andcombined development: the social-relational substratum of ‘‘the international’’? An exchange of letters’,Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 21:1 (2008), pp. 77–112; Andrew Moravcsik, ‘TakingPreferences Seriously: A Liberal Theory of International Politics, International Organization, 51:4(1997), pp. 512–53; Alexander Wendt, ‘Anarchy is what states make of it: the social construction ofpower politics’, International Organization, 46:2 (1992), pp. 391–425.

8 For recent critiques of Marxist, postcolonial, and governmentality approaches along these lines, see:Andrew Davenport, ‘Marxism in IR: Condemned to a Realist Fate?’, European Journal of InternationalRelations (2011), published online before print 27 October 2011, doi: 10.1177/1354066111416021;Matin, ‘Redeeming the Universal’; Jonathon Joseph, ‘The limits of governmentality: social theory andthe international’, European Journal of International Relations, 16 (2010), pp. 223–46.

The ‘philosophical premises’ 3

of unilinearity, internalism, and methodological nationalism have thrown into ques-tion. And within IR too, it has always made critiques of realism easy prey to chargesof reductionism and the ‘fallacy of the domestic analogy’.9 This founding andcontinuing ‘great debate’ is thus not only lop-sided, (with realism being allowed tomonopolise the definition of the international), but also non-progressive. A falsereification of geopolitics holds the field because its challengers offer no alternativeconceptualisation of that feature of the social world which has been reified. Yet thislack of an alternative, non-realist understanding of the international itself persistsdue to the internalist orientation of the wider social sciences (regularly re-importedinto IR) which provoked the reification in the first place. Thus, perhaps unexpectedly,the problems of methodological nationalism, domestic analogy, and realist reificationshare a common source in the deep-laid internalism of the wider social sciences.

What kind of resource do we need in order to overcome this problem? And howwould we know if we had found it? We need an approach that neither reifies nordownplays the international but instead grasps it as a sociologically intelligible dimen-sion of the human world. Without such an approach, we shall be in permanent dangerof attributing to capitalism, colonialism, liberalism, and so on, causal phenomenawhich may in fact derive from a quite different aspect of social reality. Moreover,until we have such an approach, the realist reification of the international remainsunchallenged at the deepest level. Finally, the distinguishing mark of such anapproach – in contrast to all the non-realist approaches mentioned above – must beits ability to identify aspects of social causality deriving specifically from the fact ofsocietal multiplicity.

The present article argues that such an approach can be found in Leon Trotsky’sidea of ‘uneven and combined development’ (U&CD). The provenance of this ideahas been vigorously debated in recent years.10 For many writers, its remit is confinedto the context of its original formulation: the inter-societal pressure (unevenness)which it emphasises, together with the resultant societal fusions of the modern withthe archaic (combination), are specific to the experience of late industrialisation.They result from a universalising and accelerating of social change that are uniqueto capitalism. Indeed, rejecting any wider usage, Neil Smith has long argued that‘it is important that we dismiss the so-called ‘‘law of uneven development’’, withits universal overtones’.11 More recently, however, others have argued that becausehistorical development has always been both plural and interactive, Trotsky’s ideamay be applied much more widely in historical analysis.12 In fact, for these writersit provides the non-realist sociological definition of the international whose absencehas for so long impeded the development of international theory.

9 Bull, ‘Society and Anarchy’.10 See, in particular, the forum in Cambridge Review of International Affairs: ‘Debating uneven and com-

bined development: towards a Marxist theory of ‘‘the international’’? 22:1 (2009), pp. 7–110.11 Neil Smith, ‘On the necessity of uneven development’, International Journal of Urban and Regional

Research, 10:1 (1986), pp. 87–104, p. 91, emphasis added. See also Uneven Development. Nature, Capitaland the Production of Space, (3rd edn, London: Verso, 2010); ‘The Geography of Uneven Develop-ment’, in Bill Dunn and Hugo Radice (eds), 100 Years of Permanent Revolution. Results and Prospects(London: Pluto, 2006), pp. 180–95.

12 J. Rosenberg, ‘Why is there no international historical sociology?’, European Journal of InternationalRelations, 12:3 (2006), pp. 307–40; Kamran Matin, ‘Uneven and combined development in worldhistory: the international relations of state-formation in premodern Iran’, European Journal of Inter-national Relations, 13:3 (2007), pp. 419–447.

4 Justin Rosenberg

Robert Heilbroner once observed that ‘[a]ll views of the world express philosophicalpremises, tacitly if not explicitly.’ And, he added, ‘it is often at this half-exposed levelthat their ultimate strengths or weaknesses are located’.13 If the ‘ultimate strengths’of U&CD are of the order more recently claimed for it, then it should be possibleto show, by examination of its ‘philosophical premises’, how and why this mightbe. It is therefore incumbent upon proponents of this second view to round out theiradvocacy of the idea with an account of its epistemological and ontological founda-tions. And that is the purpose of this article.

Trotsky himself nowhere explicitly drew out the philosophical premises of hisidea. Had he done so, he would almost certainly have insisted that they lay in thephilosophy of dialectics, a philosophy which he did, albeit fragmentarily, attempt toexpound. As we shall see below, however, the intellectual potential of his idea derivesnot so much from dialectical thought per se, but rather from a fundamental revisionthat Trotsky, apparently unwittingly, introduced into it. In formulating his idea, Ishall argue, Trotsky tacitly inserted an extra philosophical premise into the inheriteddialectical conception of motion and change. It is this that accounts for the distinc-tiveness of the idea, and for its ability to provide a solution to the general problem ofmethodological nationalism in the social sciences. But it also means that any attemptto realise the full potential of the idea must include an element of critique whichliberates it from the limited form imposed by the conscious self-understanding of itsoriginator.

The argument will be set out in three parts. First we must summarise Trotsky’sown understanding of dialectical thought, an understanding that is based, quite con-ventionally, on a three-fold premise of ‘non-identity’. This summary is necessary forunderstanding the context of his innovation. As we shall argue in the second part,however, it does not reveal the innovation itself. It is here that we must initiate ourcritique. For without some further addition, U&CD could not have the radical impli-cations that have been claimed for it. This addition is found in the tacit presupposi-tion of a fourth element to the premise of non-identity – an element of numericalmultiplicity. Finally, we shall turn to the opening chapter of the History of the RussianRevolution where Trotsky most explicitly formulates the idea of U&CD. Thoughwidely quoted, this locus classicus of the idea remains an enigma: there exist no properlysymptomatic readings of the text which reconcile its imaginative power as a workof literature with its analytical significance as a contribution to social science. As aresult, U&CD has remained for many a concept which belongs ‘to a class of Marxistnotions whose suggestiveness is equalled only by their elusiveness’.14 The third partof our argument therefore provides a detailed analysis of Trotsky’s text, exposingthe central role within it of the fourth element of non-identity. This, it turns out, isthe additional philosophical premise that ruptures the internalism of pre-existingconceptions of ‘development’. In doing so, I shall argue, it directly overcomes theproblems of domestic analogy, methodological nationalism, and the realist reificationof the international. And it thereby begins to justify what must otherwise appear asthe unnecessarily extreme claim that has been made for Trotsky’s concept: that alone

13 Robert Heilbroner, Marxism: For and Against (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980), p. 29.14 John Elster, ‘The theory of combined and uneven development: a critique’, in J. Roemer (ed.), Analytical

Marxism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 55, 56.

The ‘philosophical premises’ 5

among the non-realist approaches to the field, U&CD provides a genuinely socialtheorisation of the international.

I. Trotsky and dialectics

In the text quoted above, Robert Heilbroner summarises the dialectical worldviewby enumerating four ‘philosophical premises’: praxis, motion, contradiction, andmethod. ‘Praxis’ refers to a view of thought not as passive contemplation of theworld, but rather as an active (and interactive) engagement with reality – an un-ending back and forth between concepts and their objects, a fundamentally creativeprocess of interrogation. ‘Motion’ refers to the principle that all of reality – physical,social, and ideational – is in endless movement. Nothing stays the same. Everythingchanges. Third, partly as a result of endless change, and partly driving that changeforward, ‘contradiction’ is viewed as innate to reality. Contradiction in this sensederived from Hegel does not mean the logical error of embracing two or morepropositions which cannot simultaneously be true. It means rather the ontologicalclaim that in reality, opposing (but internally related) tendencies co-exist, pullingthings in different ways, their tension playing into the movement of change.

And finally, says Heilbroner, dialectics supposedly also refers to a distinctiveintellectual method of analysis, a method which somehow corresponds to thosecharacteristics of thought and reality described in the first three points. This methodcomes in several forms. As we shall see, Trotsky associated it above all with the(Fichtean) formula of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, which he referred to as ‘the triad’.15

For Trotsky, this formula reproduced abstractly the particular kind of movementinvolved in contradiction and change. In doing so, he believed, it enabled thoughtto replicate the moving shape of change itself, and thereby to expose its inner work-ings to analysis.

Trotsky’s own writings on dialectics rehearse all four of these ‘premises’. But theyappear in a different order. For his starting point lies in his identification of what it isabout non-dialectical thought which necessitates an additional kind of cognition.This exercise takes the form of a critical engagement with Aristotelian logic. And heuses it to unfold a threefold premise of non-identity which becomes the basis for hisadvocacy of a dialectical method. If the ‘philosophical premises’ of U&CD lie inTrotsky’s conscious understanding of dialectics, therefore, it is here that we shallfind them.16

Aristotelian formal logic, argues Trotsky, relies on the assumption that theattributes of things can be abstracted in the mind as fixed quantities and qualitiesfor purposes of comparison and classification. Object ‘A’ is different from object ‘B’which has contrasting properties (comparison); but it is identical to a second object‘A’ insofar as they share the properties singled out in the abstraction (classification).Both forms of statement – ‘AAB’ and ‘A ! A’ – are necessary tools by which themind orders the phenomena it seeks to understand. Indeed, such statements, and

15 Leon Trotsky, Trotsky’s Notebooks, 1933–1935. Writings on Lenin, Dialectics and Evolutionism, ed.Philip Pomper (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 101.

16 The following paragraphs are based primarily two texts: Trotsky, Notebooks; and Leon Trotsky, InDefense of Marxism. (Against the Petty-Bourgeois Opposition) (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1942).

6 Justin Rosenberg

others like them, provide the building blocks for the structures of syllogistic reason-ing by which valid arguments are built.17 Thus ‘the axiom ‘‘A’’ is equal to ‘‘A’’appears. . . to be the point of departure for all our knowledge’. And yet this sameaxiom, Trotsky claims, appears simultaneously to be ‘the point of departure for allthe errors in our knowledge’.18 Indeed, some forms of knowledge can be approachedonly by setting out instead from the opposite axiom, the axiom which provides, bycontrast, the starting point of dialectical logic: ‘AAA’. Why?

Here the premises of ‘motion’ and ‘praxis’ begin their work. For Trotsky’s answeris that in reality the proposition ‘A ! A’ is never fully valid. The caveat applies inthree dimensions: it applies to the equation of real world objects with each other(classification); it applies even to their equation with themselves (their identity overtime); and finally it also applies to their correspondence to the concepts by whichthese objects are figured in the mind. Let us examine these three elements of non-identity in turn.

No two physical or social objects are ever exactly identical with each other. Astronger microscope, more sensitive scales, or a closer analysis will always reveal adifference, however small. Furthermore, all material and social reality is subjectto continuous change over time; thus the principle of non-identity (AAA) enterseven into the being of individual objects themselves: the same object differs, howeverinfinitesimally, at one point in time from what it was, or will be, at another.

Finally, what applies to the relations between things in the world applies also tothe relations between these things and the concepts by which they are apprehended inthe human mind. No concept corresponds fully with the empirical reality which itseeks to grasp – and of which it is itself a simplified abstraction:

Historically humanity forms its ‘conceptions’ – the basic elements of its thinking – onthe foundation of experience, which is always incomplete, partial, one-sided. It includes in‘the concept’ those features of a living, forever changing process, which are important andsignificant for it at a given moment.19

The partiality is temporal – mapping the properties of an object as they appear at (orat best, up to) a given moment in time; and it is ‘spatial’ – abstracting a particularquality which in fact characterises different objects in varying degrees.

Of course, for the most part, infinitesimal change and minute variation are notsignificant. In a famous example, Trotsky points out that no two cone bearings in aproduction batch will ever be exactly identical; but so long as their variation remainswithin a given margin of ‘tolerance’, they may safely be treated as if they were so.20

And something similar, he suggests, applies to concepts: they too have a marginof tolerance, within which their non-correspondence to their objects can in practicebe disregarded. For many purposes, therefore, the assumption that A ! A is un-problematic. Over time, however, (or across the ‘space’ of variation), tiny quantita-tive differences accumulate. At key points, by dint of this accumulation, ‘tolerance’

17 Aristotle defines the syllogism as a ‘discourse in which, certain things being stated, something other thanwhat is stated follows of necessity from their being so’ (Anthony Flew, A Dictionary of Philosophy(London: Pan Books, 1979), p. 322). In its simplest form, it comprises three ‘terms’, of which the lastis held to ‘follow from’ the conjunction of the prior two, as in: ‘All men are mortal. Socrates is a man.Therefore, Socrates is mortal.’

18 Trotsky, Defense, p. 49, emphasis added.19 Trotsky, Notebooks, pp. 99–101.20 Trotsky, Defense, p. 50. A cone bearing is an engineered machine part which connects other parts

together, usually involving the use of ‘ball bearings’.

The ‘philosophical premises’ 7

is finally exceeded. At these points, incremental quantitative difference passes overinto categorical qualitative change. And then the first premise of dialectical logic –AAA – comes into its own.

This temporal and ‘spatial’ partiality of concepts is also intrinsic to their rooted-ness in praxis: the activity of thought always occurs at a given point in time, for thepurpose of understanding particular objects which in turn have been singled out byparticular interests (cognitive, moral, or practical). And this renders these concepts,by their nature, vulnerable to two sources of change. First, immanent change iswritten into the processual nature of social and physical reality: the growth anddecline of social formations, the transmutations of the biological species, the cosmicprocesses which compose the ongoing history of the universe itself. Thus conceptswhich are unable to track the dynamic non-identity of the object-in-itself over timewill gradually or suddenly become irrelevant. ‘The fundamental flaw of vulgar thoughtlies in the fact that it wishes to content itself with motionless imprints of a realitywhich consists of eternal motion.’21

But second, change can and does also flow unpredictably from the growing im-pact (upon the process being theorised) of determinations originating in the marginal(‘spatial’) non-correspondence of ‘A’ with ‘A’.

Sociological problems would certainly be simpler if social phenomena had always a finishedcharacter. There is nothing more dangerous, however, than to throw out of reality, for the sakeof logical completeness, elements which today violate your scheme and tomorrow may whollyoverturn it.22

Motion and variation entail the ‘contradictory’ nature of reality (Heilbroner’s thirdpremise) which therefore violates intellectual schemes built on fixed categories. Butthey simultaneously provide dialectical logic with its raw materials:

Some objects (phenomena) are confined easily within boundaries according to logical classifi-cation, others present [us with] difficulties: they can be put here or there, but within a stricterrelationship – nowhere. While provoking the indignation of systematizers, such transitionalforms are exceptionally interesting to dialecticians, for they smash the limited boundaries ofclassification, revealing the real connections and consecutiveness of a living process.23

What then are the implications of all this for socio-historical analysis? For Trotsky,the triple non-identity of things, (with themselves, with each other, and with their con-cepts), points to three requirements. First, the concepts deployed must be dynamicones (which thereby include the inner sources of change within the processes to whichthey refer):

Dialectics is the logic of development. Logic (formal) is the dialectic of motionlessness. Logicis a particular case of the dialectic, when motion and change enter into the formula as ‘0’.24

Or, as he puts it elsewhere in his notebooks: ‘a ! a is only a particular case of thelaw aA a’.25

Second, these concepts must somehow also register within themselves what onemight call a principle of externality: their necessary incompleteness must be a re-flexive one, inviting continued adjustment and correction according to whatever

21 Trotsky, Defense, p. 50.22 Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed. What is the Soviet Union and Where is it Going? (New York:

Pathfinder, 1972), p. 255.23 Trotsky, Notebooks, p. 77.24 Ibid., p. 111.25 Ibid., p. 86.

8 Justin Rosenberg

additional determinations come unpredictably to supervene in the process they arebeing deployed to conceptualise. In this way,

[d]ialectical thinking gives to concepts, by means of closer approximations, corrections,concretizations, a richness of content and flexibility; I would even say a succulence which toa certain extent brings them close to living phenomena.26

But third, the moment of a dialectical method (Heilbroner’s fourth premise) lies notin the ‘closer approximations’ themselves, the succession of categories by whichthought updates its correspondence to an ever-changing reality. It lies rather in thedeployment of that method across the gaps which separate these successive categories,in order to model the process of mutation itself by which the sequence of categorieshas been necessitated. In doing this, its operation takes – and must take – theform of syllogistic reasoning constrained by the normal rules of inference and non-contradiction, rules shared with (Aristotelian) formal logic: ‘The fundamental ‘‘cell’’of dialectical thinking is the syllogism.’27 But this syllogistic reasoning is now re-grouped around the process of change (by which ‘A’ has become ‘not-A’), in orderto bring the relation of concept and object back within the margin of tolerance. ForTrotsky, the significance of the ‘triadic equation’ (thesis-antithesis-synthesis) was notthat it revealed anything about the concrete content of historical reality. It was ratherthat at key moments it released the mind from the rigid assumptions of formalclassification and comparison (A ! A, etc.), and allowed it instead to model the pro-cesses of change in continuity whose effects repeatedly ‘smash the limited boundariesof classification’.

Thus, although couched repeatedly in the opposition between ‘Aristotelian syllo-gism’ and ‘Hegelian Dialectic’, Trotsky’s argument does not call for the replacementof the one by the other. Classification and comparison remain elemental to cognition.And in any case, dialectical thought needs the tension between ‘fixed abstractions’and ‘transitional forms’ in order to spotlight those processes of qualitative change –the transmutation of ‘A’ into ‘not-A’ – whose analysis it makes its own. The overallcomplex relation is summed up in a characteristically striking simile:

Dialectical thinking is related to vulgar thinking in the same way that a motion picture isrelated to a still photograph. The motion picture does not outlaw the still photograph butcombines a series of them according to the laws of motion. Dialectics does not deny thesyllogism, but teaches us to combine syllogisms in such a way as to bring our understandingcloser to the eternally changing reality.28

To summarise: for Trotsky, dialectics was a branch of logical reasoning whichaddressed a gap left by the limiting assumptions of Aristotelian formal logic. It wasa necessary completion of the overall system of logic because ceaseless motion andinevitable variation, coupled with the praxis-defined partiality of cognition, entails athree-fold premise of non-identity. This premise explains the generic tendency overtime for all concepts and phenomena to exceed their tolerance, a tendency arisingfrom the intrinsically contradictory nature of reality and its relation to thought.Dialectical logic, he believed, models the kind of movement generated by thiscontradiction. It does so by combining syllogisms in the distinctive pattern of

26 Ibid., p. 50.27 Ibid., p. 111.28 Ibid., pp. 50–51.

The ‘philosophical premises’ 9

thesis-antithesis-synthesis – a pattern designed to track the phenomenon of change incontinuity. For Trotsky, this procedure comprised its method.

II. U&CD as an innovation in dialectical thought

Does this account of dialectics reveal the philosophical premises of ‘uneven and com-bined development’? On a first look, it certainly appears to. The first two elements ofnon-identity – change over time and variation across instances – look like ontologicalprecursors to the categories of ‘development’ and ‘unevenness’ respectively. Moreover,there is an apparent ‘fit’ between the inner elements of U&CD, (development –unevenness – combination), and those of the triadic equation itself (thesis – antithesis –synthesis). Thus it might appear that U&CD is nothing other than the operationalisingof dialectical premises in a sociological hypothesis about the nature of historical change.And one might indeed conclude that the ‘philosophical premises’ of the idea whichaccounted for its ‘ultimate strengths’ – its ability to integrate ‘the international’ intosocial theory – have already been revealed.

Closer inspection, however, soon reveals that the relationship between dialecticsand U&CD is not so straightforward. Not for nothing has one commentator lamentedthat the search for ‘Trotsky’s underlying philosophical method [ends in] a maze ofpossible confusions.’29 Three problems arise in particular.

First, Trotsky’s rehearsal of dialectics, despite its radical appearance, does notadd significantly to insights already available within the tradition of classical socialtheory. Thus if, as asserted in the Introduction, U&CD marks an advance on thattradition, the source of the advance cannot be derived from his understanding ofdialectics alone. Second, when we specify that advance itself and ask where it comesfrom, we discover that it presupposes what amounts, in effect, to a fourth principle ofnon-identity, one which cannot be derived from the other three. And third, when wethen look again at the content of U&CD as a concept, we find that it involves a quitefundamental reworking of the triadic equation itself – a reworking produced aboveall by the (unannounced) interpolation of this fourth principle.

As a result of all this, the significance of dialectics for our overall argument needscareful recalibration at this point. Because it was the intellectual idiom in whichU&CD was originally formulated, Trotsky’s understanding of dialectics remainshelpful for interpreting his argumentation. Indeed, we shall initially frame thedistinctiveness of U&CD by extending Trotsky’s own argument about dialectics.Nonetheless, this extension simultaneously reveals the scale of the intellectual revi-sion involved in Trotsky’s idea. It arguably also explains, by comparison, why otherdialectical approaches (which do not contain the extra ingredient) have failed tomake original contributions to the field of international theory.30 And it suggests,

29 Ian Thatcher, ‘Trotsky’s Dialectic’, Studies in Soviet Thought, 41:2 (1991), pp. 127–44, 142.30 Like the other non-realist approaches mentioned in the Introduction, advocacy of dialectics in IR has

not sought to make a distinctive argument about the international in particular. For key examples, see:Hayward Alker, and Thomas Biersteker, ‘The Dialectics of World Order: Notes for a future archaeologistof international savoir faire’, International Studies Quarterly, 28:2 (1984), pp. 121–42; Benno Teschkeand Christian Heine, ‘Sleeping Beauty and the Dialectical Awakening: On the Potential of Dialecticfor International Relations’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 25:2 (1996), pp. 399–423;Millennium: Journal of International Studies, ‘Special Section: On Dialectic and International Theory’,26:2 (1997), pp. 403–70; Shannon Brincat, ‘Towards a Social-Relational Dialectic for World Politics’,European Journal of International Relations, 17 (2011), pp. 679–703.

10 Justin Rosenberg

therefore, that the critical implications of U&CD may even be as great for dialecticsas for more conventional approaches to social theory.

a. Dialectics and classical social theory

How distinctive then is the three-fold principle of non-identity which forms the basisof Trotsky’s philosophical argument? On reflection, neither the ontological premiseof motion, nor the radical epistemological consequences attributed to it, is unique todialectics. Max Weber, to take one example, deployed a metaphor of running waterto describe the nature of social reality, and argued that ‘[t]he eternally onward flow-ing stream of culture [dictates] not only the transiency of all ideal types but also atthe same time the inevitability of new ones.’31

More generally of course, an analytical focus on change is the defining element ofthe concept of development itself, which in turn was the central, explicit theme of allclassical social theories, from St Simon and Comte onwards.32 All these theoriessought to map the process by which, over historical time, traditional society hadevolved into modern society, ‘A’ becoming ‘not-A’. Nor can it be said that non-dialectical writers ignored the significance of empirical variations within classesof objects. On the contrary, Weber’s method of ideal typical concept formation ispremised on a reflexive awareness of exactly this. And the explanatory moment ofthis method too is ultimately concentrated in filling the ‘gap’ – that is, in accountingfor the deviation of empirical cases from the ideal-typical concept. ‘Historicalresearch faces the task of determining in each individual case the extent to whichthis ideal-construct approximates to or diverges from reality . . .’, and hence ‘. . . wecomprehend reality only through a chain of intellectual modifications’.33 Similarly,empirical variation within the universal abstraction of ‘society’ was hardly neglectedin classical social theory, where it provided the foundation of comparative historicalanalysis itself: ‘all the great theorists, in all branches of the social sciences, have hadan extensive awareness and familiarity with the immense variety of forms that societiesand cultures have taken’.34 Finally, the praxis-defined partiality of concepts, wasalso a theme familiar to classical sociology. ‘There is’, wrote Weber, ‘no absolutely‘‘objective’’ scientific analysis of . . . ‘‘social phenomena’’ independent of special and‘‘one-sided’’ viewpoints according to which . . . they are selected, analyzed and organizedfor expository purposes’.35

Thus all three principles of non-identity which Trotsky takes to define dialecticalthought – change over time, variation across instances, non-correspondence of con-cept and object – are already available within the tradition of classical social theory.And yet we have also said that this tradition remained overwhelmingly shaped by aninternalist definition of development, unable to focus theoretically its internationaldimension. It follows that if U&CD is to overcome this limit, it cannot be by virtue

31 Max Weber, On the Methodology of the Social Sciences, trans. and ed. Edward A. Shils and Henry A.Finch (New York: The Free Press, 1949), p. 104.

32 Robert Nisbet, Social Change and History. Aspects of the Western Theory of Development (London:Oxford University Press, 1969).

33 Weber, Methodology, pp. 90, 94.34 Tim Megarry, From the Caves to Capital. Readings in Historical and Comparative Sociology (Dartford:

Greenwich University Press, 1995), p. ix.35 Weber, Methodology, p. 72.

The ‘philosophical premises’ 11

of the premises of dialectics as Trotsky has rehearsed them. We appear to have met adead end.

b. A fourth principle of non-identity

To find a way forward at this point, let us recall what many writers agree is notavailable in classical Sociology: recognition of a specifically interactive dimension ofdevelopment.36 This, as we shall see below, is the fundamental innovation of the ideaof uneven and combined development. But where does it come from? If it cannot beanticipated at the level of ‘philosophical premises’, then it will turn out to be a purelymid-range, eclectic solution to the problem of the international in social theory, onewhich leaves unmodified the ‘internalist’ foundations of the problem itself. To avoidthis outcome, we must extend Trotsky’s argument; and to do so we must reach backbeyond interaction, and beyond even variation, to the ontological presupposition onwhich both of these subtend: multiplicity itself.

As we saw above, Trotsky argued that the process of abstraction entails a triplepartiality of the concept: in time, in ‘space’ and hence also in its correspondence to itsobject. This certainly means that in reality, the objects called ‘A’ will always havemore going on in them than is grasped in the concept of ‘A’. Thus far, however,he has done no more than identify a marginal space, beyond what any ‘fixed abstrac-tion’ can capture, in which ‘external’ sources of mutation may germinate. In thenature of the case, this space cannot be mapped by any cognitive process, dialecticalor otherwise, since it is produced as an externality by what is involved in cognitionitself. It cannot be theorised. The best that dialectics can offer here is a reflexiveawareness (not unique to dialectics)37 of this space, and a (controversial)38 claimthat retrospective application of a triadic equation (after real-world change hasexceeded the ‘tolerance’ of a given conception) will allow for a modelling in thoughtof the real mutation which has occurred. By contrast, the theory of uneven andcombined development, as we shall see in detail below, offers itself as an enhance-ment of cognition, not a qualification of it. It identifies and explains an entire classof international causes and effects which had escaped existing sociological theory.The question therefore becomes: what further ingredient could it include which mightaccount for such an outcome? And this question, convoluted as it might seem, is notunanswerable.

As Trotsky argues, in order to formulate a concept of ‘A’, we have to abstract agiven quality which all instances of ‘A’ share, irrespective of their variation in otherrespects. And this must indeed render their variation invisible to the concept itself.But there is a further liability to this process which he does not make explicit. Whenwe thus abstract from variation across the ‘space’ of multiple instances, we simulta-neously abstract also from multiplicity itself. We reduce multiplicity to singularity.And with that, we close off the conceptual space of interaction as a dimension of

36 For example, Charles Tilly, Big Structures. Large Processes. Huge Comparisons (New York: Russell SageFoundation, 1985); Tenbruck, ‘Internal history’; Wolf, Europe.

37 Friedrich Kratochwil, ‘Awakening or Somnambulation?’ Millennium – Journal of International Studies(June 1997), p. 440.

38 The notion of a necessary correspondence between the structures of thought and reality is intenselycontroversial. Max Eastman (Trotsky’s translator) characterised it as simple fallacy: a step backwardsfrom formal logic into primitive animism. (See Pomper in Trotsky, Notebooks, pp. 41–2.)

12 Justin Rosenberg

change. This does not matter in the case of cone bearings, whose multiplicity generatesno more than a field of external mutual comparison. But it matters enormously inthe case of societies – for which, as we shall see, multiplicity gives rise to a whollyadditional, interactive, dimension of reproduction and change.

There is therefore a fourth sense in which AAA: even if two instances of some-thing were completely identical, they would still not actually be each other. And,co-existing therefore, they might potentially affect each other. Thus, over and aboveany qualitative multiplicity of properties (variation), the quantitative multiplicity ofbeing, (the condition of more-than-one) has a potential significance of its own.

It would be implausible to claim that neglect of this fourth sense of non-identitymust occur – that it is written into the nature of cognition. It does nonetheless seemto be the case that it did somehow occur in the tradition of classical Sociology, whereone searches in vain for any formalisation of multiplicity per se as an aspect of socio-historical development.39 Here is the source of that internalism which still underliesthe problem of methodological nationalism today. And it also seems possible thatwhat Trotsky unwittingly presupposed in formulating the idea of U&CD amountsto a hidden premise of quantitative multiplicity.

c. The triadic equation reoriented

At this stage, of course, any such suggestion is purely speculative. It becomes muchfirmer, however, as soon as we look more closely at the content of Trotsky’s idea.For this content quite dramatically reorients the meaning of the ‘triadic equation’ asTrotsky himself has earlier presented it. To see how, let us consider the three parts ofthe concept – development, unevenness, combination – in turn.

The starting point of Trotsky’s idea is ‘development’ – social phenomena con-ceived not statically but rather in process. In terms of the conceptual elements bywhich dialectical thought seeks to map change, ‘development’ corresponds to theopening term ‘thesis’. It is the object whose dialectical mutation (of A into not-A) isto be analysed.

But there is already a difference here. When Trotsky earlier gave examples ofobjects whose being was to be re-interpreted dialectically, these objects, (whetherphysical, as in the case of cone bearings, or social, as in the case of capitalism at agiven stage), gave an appearance of fixed properties which the dialectical interpola-tion of temporality broke down. That is to say, he presented dialectics primarily asa critique of static conceptions of reality. ‘Development’, however, is anything but astatic concept: it already presupposes immanent sources of motion and change. Toplace ‘development’ at the opening term of a triadic equation therefore means thatthe focus of critique has shifted. The opposition can no longer be between stasis andmotion. And the crucial adjustment here will indeed not be a temporal, but rathera ‘spatial’ one. The opposition which it will focus is that between unilinear (that

39 Generally speaking, those who have discussed this neglect explain it by reference to the historicalcontext of the emergence of the modern social sciences: namely the nineteenth-century construction ofmodern centralising states in Europe, and the ideological premium placed on discourses of order andunity at a time when capitalist industrialisation had dissolved the bonds of pre-modern community.See especially Wolf, Europe, p. 9ff, and Tilly, Big Structures, p. 7ff.

The ‘philosophical premises’ 13

is, internalist) and multilinear conceptions of development. Behind the scenes, there-fore, the presupposition of multiplicity has already altered the content of the triadicequation.

The ‘spatial’ or lateral dimension in which this adjustment occurs is formallyposited by the next element of the concept – uneven[ness] – which corresponds tothe ‘antithesis’. But once again, there is an important difference here. And thisdifference too is related to the fourth meaning of AAA identified above.

The notion of ‘unevenness’ appears at first to do no more than register the non-identity of the object in the first three senses earlier distinguished. But if it did nomore than this, it would remain a qualification of theoretical possibility, rather thanidentifying an additional source of theorisable phenomena. After all, we have alreadysaid that the marginal space identified by the (three-fold) principle of non-identitycannot be theorised: it is produced as an externality by the process of cognition itself.Hence, if ‘unevenness’ does open up a further ‘space’ of theorisable phenomena, thenit cannot be the same space, and the concept must be identifying something whichcould have been theorised, but which has been unnecessarily externalised.

Here too, then, the significance of quantitative multiplicity has been tacitly pre-supposed. For in Trotsky’s idea, it is this property (co-existing multiplicity) whichturns the descriptive fact of unevenness into a germ of interactive mutation. Andthis becomes an additional reason why, extended over space and time, the object ofany concept of development must move away from its original causal configuration,and consequently into deepening non-correspondence with the categories originallyused to conceptualise it. This applies even though those original categories weredynamic developmental ones. They too entail different developmental configurationsat different points in time. But, as we shall confirm empirically in Part 3 below, theparticular (differentiating) motion being interpolated here is a wholly additional one,arising not internally from a given developmental process, but specifically from itsinteraction with other such processes. And it turns out that some of the consequenceswhich follow from this interactive moment of development can indeed be generalisedand hence theorised. This is the meaning of the third element: combination.

Once again, the result seems at first to proceed quite straightforwardly from thedialectical premises that Trotsky has explicitly identified. Interaction among unevenlydeveloped parts produces a mutation within a given developmental logic, strainingthe ‘tolerance’ of the concepts originally used to grasp that logic. And this requiresa regrouping of syllogistic reasoning around the hybrid outcome (synthesis) ofunevenness – both to explain how the mutation has occurred and to derive newdevelopmental tendencies corresponding to the altered configuration of causes. Thesenew tendencies now replace those posited at the start of the three-part exercise. Realitymutates, and the conceptual apparatus must mutate with it.40

Yet there is more to the concept of ‘combined development’ than this. As we shallsee below, it is unevenness between societies, and never just regional variation withinthem that produces the full phenomenon of combined development. Why should thisbe? The reason must lie in the further ingredients which inter-societal co-existenceadds to the sociology of development.

40 As Trotsky himself put it: ‘[t]he fundamental ‘‘cell’’ of dialectical thinking is the syllogism. But it[too] undergoes transmutation, changes, like the basic cells in various tissues of an organism change.’(Trotsky, Notebooks, p. 111).

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In the example which Trotsky uses, Czarist Russia contained all manner ofsignificant internal variations and heterogeneities: ‘from the primeval barbarism ofthe northern forests, where people eat raw fish and worship blocks of wood, to themodern social relations of the capitalist city’.41 Nonetheless, the overall pattern ofits development also differed systematically from that of its Western, post-feudalneighbours. Societal multiplicity therefore entails an additional layer to unevennessitself, as different societies follow different paths of development. Furthermore, thesedifferent societies co-exist and interact – through trade, diplomacy, conflict, thetransmission of ideas, and so on. And this interaction adds ‘external’ causes to thepattern of development which are over and above those given in its ‘internal’ con-figuration alone. There is therefore a chronic over-determination of internal develop-ment arising from the fact of multiplicity. But finally, these external influences differnot only in (socio-spatial) origin but also in kind from their internal political,material, and ideational equivalents. Because they traverse more than one politicaljurisdiction, they add a strategic, geopolitical dimension to social development. Infact, in Trotsky’s example, it is this geopolitical dimension – the ‘whip of externalnecessity’ expressed in Russia’s vulnerability to more powerful, more advanced Westernneighbours – which ultimately drives the process of combined development itself.

Thus while all development shares the dialectical properties attributed by Trotskyto reality in general, ‘combined development’ arises specifically from the interactivemultiplicity of societies. It is the (unannounced) fourth premise of non-identity –numerical multiplicity – that transforms a generic argument about the dialecticalnature of reality into one which is uniquely focussed upon ‘the international’ as atheorisable dimension of historical change.

To see how this extra ‘philosophical premise’ underpins the ‘ultimate strengths’of the idea of uneven and combined development – enabling it to overcome theproblem of internalism – we must now analyse the text where that idea is mostexplicitly worked out and deployed: the opening chapter of his History of the RussianRevolution.42

III. The innovation at work: formulation and historical application

This twelve and a half page text, entitled ‘Peculiarities of Russia’s Development’, isthe locus classicus of the idea of U&CD. It contains Trotsky’s most concentrated andpregnant formulation of the ‘laws’ of unevenness and combination, together with anapplication of these to the long-term history of Russian development. As we workthrough the text, we shall certainly find that its method – serial deployments of thetriadic equation – is consistent with his understanding of dialectics. We shall alsofind, however, that the premise of numerical multiplicity has been interpolated, withoutcomment, right at the start, crucially rearticulating the triadic equation itself acrossthe interactive space of multiple societies. If the arguments made abstractly above aresound, we should further find that this revision finally delivers the great desideratum

41 Leon Trotsky, 1905 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 53.42 Leon Trotsky, The history of the Russian revolution, volume 1: the Overthrow of Tsarism (New York:

Pathfinder, 1980). In the pages below, bracketed numbers refer to pages in this text unless otherwiseindicated.

The ‘philosophical premises’ 15

identified in the Introduction: a theory which grasps the international (and enumeratesits causal properties) as a sociologically intelligible dimension of the human world.

Trotsky’s text has often been accused of substituting literary images and meta-phors for proper social scientific analysis and proof.43 Yet a clear intellectual argu-ment can be identified, which breaks down into a logical sequence of four steps.First, the triadic equation is mapped onto the interactive location of Russia withinthe wider unevenness of Eurasian development (pp. 3–4). Next the idea which thismapping concretely illustrates is explicitly formulated to produce the social scientific‘law’ of U&CD (pp. 4–6). Third, this law is applied in order to track the interactivedifferentiation of Russian historical development from its Western counterparts(pp. 6–12). And finally that differentiation is itself fed back into the long-term, widerpattern of Eurasian history so as to explain the interactive shape of its movementover time (pp. 12–15).

Step I: the triadic equation

Trotsky begins with ‘development’, in particular its ‘slow tempo’ in the case ofRussian society. And the first step of his argument is executed in three deftparagraphs, where this slow Russian development is successively depicted in threeregisters: first in itself as a hard struggle against natural elements (the wind, thecold, the steppe, the forest); next, by comparison with the quite different process ofsocial development which was occurring simultaneously to the (European) West;and finally in interactive, causal relation to this European West.

Trotsky’s use of a motion-picture analogy to capture something of the nature ofdialectical thought is especially apposite here. For not only is this a succession ofimages each of which is in motion; but also the ‘camera’ itself is moving. First itfocuses on the bleak social and natural landscape of Russia; then it switches to thericher, colourful throng of European cultural life; and finally it ‘pans out’ to revealthe two patterns as parts of a socially and geographically interconnected whole. Thedazzling cinematographic effect, however, has a social scientific purpose: as thefull picture is built up, the inter-societal dimension is being progressively broughtto the fore. Moreover, via these same three paragraphs, and even before the termitself has been introduced, all three components of U&CD have already arrivedon the stage, clothed in concrete historical determinations, but observing the logicalsequence of the ‘triad’ itself: (Russian) development, (Eurasian) unevenness, (East-West) combination.

The premise of multiplicity arrives in the course of this sequence. In fact, we canspot the precise moment in the layering of the image at which it carries the analyticalframework beyond that inherited from classical social theory – and beyond a tradi-tional conception of dialectics. First, a given (Russian) developmental dynamic isspecified in the singular. Then this singular instance is located in a wider conceptual

43 Louis Gottschalk, ‘Leon Trotsky and the Natural History of Revolutions’, The American Journal ofSociology, 44:3 (1938), pp. 339–54; James Burnham, ‘Science and Style. A Reply to Comrade Trotsky’,reprinted Trotsky, Defense; Robert Warth, ‘Leon Trotsky: Writer and Historian’, The Journal ofModern History, 20:1 (1948) pp. 27–41; Bertram Wolfe, ‘Leon Trotsky as Historian’, Slavic Review,20:3 (1961), pp. 495–502; Baruch Knei-Paz, The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1978).

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space of multiple instances – within which, however, this multiplicity has compara-tive but not yet causal significance. Up to this point, the analysis remains within theambit of classical social thought, deploying two of its most distinctive resources: theprinciple of historical specificity and the method of comparative historical analysis.44

But finally (in the third paragraph) comes the moment we are looking for: theconceptual space of comparison suddenly reappears as the geographical space ofinter-societal co-existence, revealing a wholly additional set of causes operating onRussian society. ‘Russia’, says Trotsky, ‘was unable to settle in the forms of theEast because she was continually having to adapt herself to military and economicpressure from the West’ (p. 4). These are international causes. Where do they comefrom? To be sure, they take their force from the developmental gap between Russiaand its neighbours. They are effects of the unevenness of Eurasian development. Yetthey would not operate if that unevenness were expressed as a qualitative variationalone. It is the quantitative multiplicity of societies which produces the geopoliticaldimension of the social world.

Step II: the social scientific ‘law’

The formal elaboration of U&CD now follows. And it is conducted by re-abstractingfrom the concrete phenomena which have already been painted in. For Russia’ssituation illustrates a much wider fact about human social existence: ‘the universallaw of unevenness’ (p. 5). By this phrase Trotsky means that at any given point intime social development will have reached different levels and taken different formsin different countries. And, as we have just seen, these differences are not simply alatent, descriptive feature of the empirical world. Because the countries making upa given pattern of unevenness co-exist and interact, their internal development iscausally affected by their co-existence with each other: ‘[f ]rom the universal law ofunevenness thus derives another law . . . the law of combined development’ (pp. 5–6).Refracted through societal multiplicity, the spatio-temporal unevenness of historicaldevelopment becomes multi-centred and interactive, pushing it beyond compre-hension by any ‘pedantic schematism’ (p. 5) (that is, any non-dialectical, unilinearconception).

A fundamental consequence now emerges, one which ‘reveals itself most sharplyand complexly in the destiny of the backward countries’ (p. 5): historical develop-ment and change are subject to interactive, as well as internal, logics of process.Inequalities of wealth and power among societies give rise to a ‘whip of externalnecessity’ which compels weaker societies to adapt in order to survive. At the sametime, the co-existence of these weaker societies with more advanced neighbours alsocreates opportunities for imitation and transfer of ideas and resources – opportunitieswhich relieve these societies of the need to independently reinvent the social, material,and ideational resources which now feed into their on-going development.

Of course, not every late-developing society is able to take advantage of this‘privilege of historic backwardness’. And the transfer of social artefacts from onesocial setting into another can produce widely varying results. It might free the

44 For a characterisation of classical social theory largely in terms of these two analytical principles, seeC. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959).

The ‘philosophical premises’ 17

artefacts from cultural encumbrances which obstructed their further refinement intheir original setting, contributing to the kind of developmental leap-frogging bywhich ‘Germany and the United States have now economically outstripped England’;but the same artefacts might also be ‘debased’ by the transfer, as when ‘the introduc-tion of . . . Western technique and training . . . under Peter I, led to a strengthening ofserfdom’ in Russia (p. 5).

In both cases, however, the transfer enables what is in effect a developmental‘leap’ over the stages of the process by which the artefacts were originally produced.Viewed from another angle, this ‘leap’ is also a ‘contraction’, a ‘drawing together ofthe different stages of the [original] journey’ (p. 6). As a result of it, social phenomenawhich were elsewhere separated from each other in developmental time (for example,advanced industry and agrarian society, late feudal states, and socialist ideologies)meet and interact. The very sequence of developmental steps is reordered, for‘[a]lthough compelled to follow after the advanced countries, a backward countrydoes not take things in the same order’ (pp. 4–5). (In Russia, for example, modernindustry was emerging before the consolidation of the capitalist class which else-where produced it.) In these ways the developmental coordinates of the societiesinvolved are fundamentally redrawn. And this occurs via pressures and mechanismswhich are irreducibly inter-societal in nature. Here then we arrive at the heart ofTrotsky’s innovation: what the ‘law’ of uneven and combined development comprisesis the visualising and mapping of the international as a dimension of social causality.

But to repeat the question: what is the ultimate source of these phenomena whichso radically inflect the shape of the historical process? Trotsky’s own argumentationat this point has generated some confusion. For he appears at first to claim thatcapitalism alone produces combined development. ‘Capitalism’, he says, ‘preparesand in a certain sense realises the universality and permanence of Man’s develop-ment’ (p. 4). Premodern world development, he argues, had been episodic, regional,and fragmented, allowing for the non-cumulative repetition of similar developmentalcycles in different times and places. Capitalism transforms this age-old picture irre-versibly. Its universalising geographical expansion brings the whole world for the firsttime into an interconnected system in which isolated development no longer occurs.And this imparts a cumulative quality to its technological progress too, enablingfollow-on instances of development to begin from ever higher starting points. ‘Bythis’, writes Trotsky, ‘a repetition of the forms of national development by differentnations is ruled out’ (p. 4). It is little wonder, therefore, that many commentatorshave concluded that the entire phenomenon of uneven and combined developmentis specifically modern, a side-effect of distinctively capitalist social logics.45

Ultimately, however, this would be a misreading of Trotsky’s exposition, whichoperates via a two-step process of abstraction. First, to be sure, Russia’s peculiaritiesare argued to reflect a more general experience of backward countries within theunfolding of capitalist development. But then that unfolding itself is shown to takethe non-linear form that it does as a result of the yet more general ‘laws of history’ –unevenness and its corollary of combined development.

45 Samantha Ashman, ‘Capitalism, uneven and combined development and the transhistoric’, CambridgeReview of International Affairs, 22:1 (2009), pp. 29–46; Neil Davidson, ‘Putting the nation back into‘‘the international’’ ’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 22:1 (2009), pp. 9–28. Neil Smith –see fn. 12 above.

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By this two-step process of abstraction, the essence of Trotsky’s idea, which isultimately an idea about the ‘laws of history’ in general, is eventually distilled. None-theless, during the first step, the general significance of inter-societal interaction forhistorical development appears to have been momentarily conflated with the specific(dynamic and universalising) properties of capitalism. And the consequences of inter-action, which in fact can be observed across human history, have then appeared(quite misleadingly) to derive their very existence from characteristics particular tocapitalism. But universality and interaction are not the same thing. The fact thatcapitalist society has uniquely universalising (and technologically dynamic) propertiesdoes not at all entail that precapitalist development was not interactive. On the con-trary, it is the fact that all development – even capitalism – includes this interactivedimension arising from unevenness which explains the phenomenology of moderncombined development here apparently derived by Trotsky from capitalism alone.And sure enough, Trotsky himself, despite the apparent conflation, proceeds to takethe second step by now invoking ‘the laws of history’. Combined development, hegoes on to say, is a characteristic of historical process which ‘derives’ from the ‘mostgeneral’ feature of that process: ‘the universal law of unevenness’ (p. 5). Moderncombined development must therefore be a particular, if particularly intense, instanceof a phenomenon (arising from societal multiplicity) which is generic to the historicalprocess per se.

This clarification is the only way to make Trotsky’s observations about differenthistorical periods consistent with each other46 (though it cannot rescue his impliedclaim that interaction was insignificant for the ancient civilisations). And it has afurther implication: it means that the real innovation of Trotsky’s idea is partlyoccluded within his own argumentation. There is, after all, nothing original about theclaim that modern society has uniquely universal characteristics and consequences:like the earlier claims about historical change and variation, this was a commonplaceof classical social theory. The real innovation – the one which pre-empts any method-ologically nationalist formulation of the subject matter – is the insertion of universalunevenness and consequent combination into the ontology of historical materialism.And this innovation has brought with it a further presupposition which is notannounced at all: namely that the articulation of unevenness across a multiplicityof societies produces additional causal mechanisms (such as ‘the whip of externalnecessity’) which are generic to the overall process of historical development, andwhich impart to it a specifically inter-societal or international dimension. Neitherthe general innovation nor its tacit presupposition is to be found in other dialecticalapproaches in IR (or elsewhere). They have crept, part unseen, into Trotsky’s method.And the presupposition – interactive multiplicity – corresponds to the fourth premiseof non-identity discussed earlier above.

Step III: Russia’s historical differentiation

What difference does this make to the logic of historical explanation? This is whatwe find out in Step III (pp. 5–12). This next (and longest) section of Trotsky’s text

46 After all, Trotsky himself presents Russian development as having been shaped by both a ‘whip ofexternal necessity’ and a ‘privilege of historic backwardness’ long before the emergence of capitalistsociety in the West.

The ‘philosophical premises’ 19

is taken up with following the process just identified – unevenness generating com-bined development – across numerous aspects of the history of Russia.

As an intellectual exercise, it embodies the logical form of dialectical reasoning asfollows. Russia, like its Westerly neighbours, is a society. It belongs to a class ofentities ‘A’, all of which undergo a process of (interconnected but unevenly distributed)development which leads (between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries) from agrarianto industrialising capitalist societies. By virtue of this commonality, certain categoriesfind real-world referents for all principal members of the class – that is, inside all themajor societies involved. Thus, broadly speaking, the analysis of all these societies canshare a nomenclature of state, nobility, clergy, cities, trade, and periodic uprisings(for the agrarian period), which is gradually (and unevenly) supplemented by one ofindustry, bourgeoisie, proletariat, and revolution as capitalist development sets in.This overall process of development is of course internally uneven – AAA (in thefirst three senses) – differing from one society to another. However, because thesesocieties co-exist concretely as parts of a whole, (sense four), typological variationmay enter also into (international) axes of causal interrelation. And, as we havealready begun to see, it is these which will explain Russia’s combined development.How then is the argument constructed?

The answer is that ten times in the course of Step III – once for each of thecategories listed above (state, nobility, clergy, etc.) – the basic dialectical procedureis repeated: a shared category is taken up (thesis); the developmental unevennessbetween West and East is interpolated into it (antithesis); and the interactive effectsof that unevenness, are traced in the historical production of the differentiatedRussian form (synthesis). Some of these effects operate due to the absence in Russiaof some component present within the Western instance (variation). Others, however,proceed from the over-determining presence of the West itself, the pressure arisingfrom its differential and more advanced development (multiplicity). This latter typeof effect must interest us particularly because it signals a specifically internationalcause; but either way, the composite result of this combined development is latersummed up by Trotsky in a striking observation: ‘The belatedness of the Russian[bourgeois] revolution was thus not only a matter of chronology, but also of thesocial structure of the nation’ (p. 12).47 How does this result emerge; and what,specifically, does ‘belatedness’, applied to social structure, mean?

We have already learned in Step I that, by contrast with Europe, (comparativeunevenness), Russian development suffered heavy natural and socio-historical disad-vantages. Its physical environment of forest and steppe deprived it of the naturalboundaries which in Europe had fostered demographic concentration and socialdifferentiation (p. 3). Geography also condemned Russia to a long struggle withnomadic peoples, whose depredations further impeded its development. And unlikeEurope, developing in the treasure-strewn ruins of classical Mediterranean civilisa-tion, the cultural prehistory of the Russian lands was all but empty.48

47 An intellectual conundrum for Marxist writers at the time was the question of how and why capitalistindustrialisation could have proceeded as far as it had in Russia without, however, producing a capitalistruling class. By contrast with its Western counterparts, where absolutist states had been overthrown by‘bourgeois revolutions’ much earlier in the national developmental process, Russia’s ‘bourgeois revolu-tion’ appeared ‘belated’ indeed.

48 Trotsky is referring to the fact that the Russian lands were never territorially absorbed into Graeco-Roman civilisation, and hence could not directly access the latter’s achievements as part of theirown inner heritage. While literally true, this claim ignores the foundational role of interaction with

20 Justin Rosenberg

This East-West unevenness would be intensified over time, largely because itbecame itself an international cause, a source, that is, of combined development.Thus in the first instance it issued in a geopolitical ‘pressure from richer Europe’(p. 6). This pressure, (according to Trotsky), largely explains the exaggerated role ofthe state in Russian development, a role which in turn pre-empted the emergence ofan independent nobility or clergy as checks to autocratic power. Here then is the firstmechanism arising from multiplicity – a geopolitical one which contributes to adiverging pattern of state formation. But it is only the first.

The ‘meagreness of Russian development’ was also expressed in ‘the absence ofreal Medieval cities’ (p. 7), and the resulting failure (compared to Europe) of handi-craft to disentangle itself from peasant production. Indeed, instead of developing ascentres of production, Russian cities acted as conduits of cross-border trade which‘from time immemorial [gave] the leadership to foreign commercial capital’ (p. 7),(extending the mechanisms of inter-societal causality from geopolitics to trade).Together with the political subordination of nobility and clergy, this lack of socialdifferentiation49 pre-empted both a Russian version of the Reformation and, moregenerally, the possibility of political development through broad based mobilisationagainst Czarist autocracy. Thus by dint of its interaction with pre-capitalist Europe,the Russian social structure was already reshaped in a way that ‘ruled out’ repetitionof the course of European development. Peasant rebellions there were, of course; andlater there were also attempted coups by reformist, Western-influenced, elementsof the nobility (adding a third mechanism of combined development: ideologicalinfluence and transfer). But rebellions from below and coups from above could notconnect to each other due to the absence of a mediating Third Estate (p. 8). Andwhen real change was initiated – the 1861 abolition of serfdom, for example – itwas internationally induced (by the dual effects of military defeat and deepeningdependence on grain exports). Consequently, it bore a quite different (state-led)social complexion, was enacted by quite different social groups, and had a quitedifferent historical meaning, to its earlier Western equivalents, which it was now,belatedly, imitating. And this leads to the identification of a fourth interactive mech-anism of differentiation: ‘The solution of the problems of one class by another’, saysTrotsky, (referring to the substitution of state power in the absence of ‘bourgeoisliberalism’ as an effective agent of the abolition), ‘is one of those combined methodsnatural to backward nations’ (p. 9).

Thus for the pre-industrial period, the shared concepts of state, nobility, clergy,cities, trade, and political uprisings are shown to take different concrete forms (not-A) within the East-West unevenness of development. But in each case too, the differ-entiation of the Russian instance is shown in part to derive from the effects of thissame unevenness refracted through multiplicity – effects which include geopoliticalpressure, mercantile penetration, ideological influences, and political substitutionism.In other words, those effects themselves derive their being not only from the variationintrinsic to unevenness, but specifically from its articulation across a numerical

Byzantium in early Russian state-formation. Byzantium was not only the direct politico-cultural contin-uation of Rome, but also a remarkable fusion of European and non-European cultural forms. In thissense, Trotsky’s narrative itself needs to be rescued from its own incipient Eurocentrism. I am gratefulto the Editors and to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.

49 More accurately: this splaying of differentiation across an inter-societal axis which, in turn, blocked itsendogenous consolidation inside Russia.

The ‘philosophical premises’ 21

multiplicity of instances, (in this case, of concretely co-existing societies). They areirreducibly inter-societal effects. And Trotsky’s excavation of them can therefore beascribed to his dialectical method only insofar as that method presupposes the fourthelement of non-identity mentioned above.

It was, however, with the arrival of ‘modern industry’ that the paradoxical qualitiesof Russia reached their highest pitch. Both the sociological differentiation of Russiandevelopment from its Westerly neighbours (unevenness) and its inter-societal entangle-ment with them (the concrete mechanisms of combination) were now dramaticallyand simultaneously intensified. The need to formulate this high point triggers a quiteremarkable syntactical agility in Trotsky’s writing, as it twists back and forth toweave together in thought the play of interactive determinations:

Arising late, Russian industry did not repeat the development of the advanced countries,but inserted itself into this development, adapting their latest achievements to its ownbackwardness. (p. 9)

In this remarkable sentence, Trotsky is once again picturing a specifically inter-national logic of process. It is a logic that radically transforms both the ‘domestic’and the global pattern of social change over time. Yet this international logic is notexternal to the sociology of development. Rather it emerges from the latter’s intrinsicunevenness. Hence the sociological analysis does not play down the significanceof geopolitical anarchy; on the contrary, it traces out further results of that samesocietal multiplicity which gives rise to the existence of geopolitics itself.

What makes the sentence remarkable is that the single statement which it com-poses is made up of four phrases, each of which adds a different directionality to thecomposite orientation of the phenomenon being described. Thus, the linear idea of‘arising’ points vertically upwards; ‘not repeat’ does not cancel that vertical dimen-sion; but it displaces outwards (or expands) the base of the single idea of industry‘arising’; in effect it opens out a second, lateral dimension (of variation) within whichthe erstwhile ‘line’ of development can conceivably move; ‘insert’ is in turn a diagonalmovement across this newly opened-out lateral dimension; finally, ‘adapting’ reversesthe directionality of that movement. What is being mapped here is the peculiar inter-active space generated by the international character of industrialisation. But can thewhole still make sense? Let us unpack it a little more.

We start with ‘A’ (Russian industry) which already has one source of ‘not-A’within it: it is ‘arising’, changing over time (the first element of non-identity). Buteven considered thus as a process, this ‘arising’ also has, (by virtue of being ‘late’), a‘not-A’ outside of itself: the original pattern of industrial development marked out bythe pioneer countries from which (by not repeating it) Russian industrialisation willdiffer (the second element: variation). It will differ, however, precisely because thevery existence of the external ‘not-A’ now enters interactively into the developmentalconditions of ‘A’, adding pressures and opportunities not present in the original cases(the fourth element: interactive multiplicity). The effects of these are reflected in boththe greater speed and the different socio-political form of Russian industrialisation(whose initiation is, in addition, forced to occur in the absence of the social con-ditions which allowed for its spontaneous occurrence elsewhere).

The active response by Russian state and society to these pressures and oppor-tunities generates in turn not one but two further axes of differentiation. The first iscaptured in the double meaning of the phrase ‘inserted itself ’. Most obviously, this

22 Justin Rosenberg

phrase means what we have already implied: joining a process not at the start, but ata later point – the point of insertion – after that process has developed to a certainextent. But it also means becoming a part of (and adding its own determinations to)what is, in effect, a new whole. Thus Russia’s own mutation away from its erstwhileline of development simultaneously comprises an incremental mutation in the direc-tionality of the overall process which it is joining (that is, the global history of indus-trialisation). And this latter sense becomes the bridge to the last phrase of thesentence. Here the direction of the thought suddenly makes a further 180" turn inorder to capture the second of the two additional sources of differentiation. Thetransfer of Western innovations and resources into Russian society altered theircontent and meaning. These products of liberal capitalist development were now inthe hands of an anti-liberal state using them to inhibit liberalising political change.And yet, other aspects of the social logic which they had exhibited in their originalWestern setting now gave the appearance of being dramatically accelerated by thesame transfer. The role of the state meant that Russian industrialisation would notretrace the process by which (in the West) intensifying competition among myriadprivate producers was leading to increasing ‘concentration of capital’. But it none-theless produced, by a different route, both a financial concentration of capital (instate hands) and a physical concentration of workers (in giant factories) which faroutstripped the development of that process (of concentration) even in the Westerncountries themselves. This is what Trotsky means by saying that the artefacts ofWestern development were ‘adapted to’ Russian backwardness. (And he is quick toadd that the paradox of Russian industry being therefore, in some respects, moreadvanced than its Western counterpart ‘does not disprove this backwardness, butdialectically completes it’ (p.10).)

Thus we have in one sentence four vectors of linear motion, cross-cutting eachother. But these are not just random empirical complications. Each of them can bederived as a theorisable consequence of co-existing multiplicity. Hence, rather thancancelling each other out, they in fact build up to compose a logical template ofinteractive change characterising multilinear development.

How then is this template applied beyond Russian industry to anatomise thewider social structure of ‘belatedness’? Let us pick up the thread again. As we havealready seen, the Russian economy was increasingly a contradictory blend of advancedand archaic elements. Orchestrated by a pre-capitalist state under external pressure,and utilising the ‘privilege of historic backwardness’, the industrial sector showed‘extraordinary speed’ in its expansion. And yet the economy overall remained muchless developed than its Western counterparts. This applied whether measured by thedemographic comparison of industry to peasant agriculture, or by the extent of itsmastery of its natural environment (expressed in the low spatial density of its railwaycommunications system) (p. 9). Seventeenth-century levels and forms of agriculturalproduction co-existed with a degree of concentration of capital in industry whichexceeded that of the advanced countries. This concentration hastened in its turnthe dominance of industry by ‘giant industry’, and the dominance of even ‘giantindustry’ by the banks – which were themselves subjected to the ‘European moneymarkets’ where they raised their capital.

What was the primary result of this pattern of change for the structure of Russiansociety? In brief: it had been twisted out of all correspondence with ‘A’ – that is, withthe dynamic pattern of Western development which it was compelled to ‘follow

The ‘philosophical premises’ 23

after’, which had yielded the original concept of capitalist development – Marx’s‘classic form’ (by which, in turn, the Russian experience could not any longer beunderstood). Russian development, in other words, had mutated to a point where itexceeded the ‘tolerance’ of the original Marxian conception of capitalism. In themidst of a sea of peasants had emerged a small and very concentrated capitalist class,unusually dependent upon an autocratic state, (of a kind which other capitalistclasses elsewhere had already long since overthrown). Furthermore, this capitalistclass lacked the stabilising influence of ‘transitional layers’ of smaller-scale industrybeneath it, from which its peers elsewhere had organically coalesced. And not onlywas it hereby held back from playing the liberal revolutionary role of its Westernequivalents; it was also (through the same process) confronted by a working class –concentrated in large factories, radicalised by Czarist political oppression and opento the most extreme socialist doctrines reaching it from the West – in which the con-ditions for insurrectionary mobilisation were more advanced than among its Westernpeers. Needless to say, this circumstance in turn reinforced further the politicalinhibitions of Russian liberalism. And in this way, one path to political change(replicating the Western pattern) was closed off, even while another (produced none-theless by interaction with the very same West) was uniquely opening out. Trotsky’sanalysis, by presupposing the fourth element of non-identity, was able to track andexplain the mutation, and thereby to bring the Russian experience back within the‘tolerance’ of a Marxist explanatory framework. But in the process, as we earliersaw him suggest, that framework too ‘under[went] transmutation, change[d] like thebasic cells in various tissues of an organism change’.50

Step IV: totality

In its original application, therefore, the idea of U&CD incorporated the causalsignificance of inter-societal interactions into the Marxist theory of modern history.However, the significance of this advance becomes fully manifest only in Step IV ofTrotsky’s argument (pp. 12–15). Considered as causal determinations, unevennessand combination have thus far been viewed mainly at the level of the parts (that is,individual societies and their interrelations). Now, however, they are about to berevisualised as properties of a totality (human development as a historical whole).And these properties turn out to be generic to the interactive shape of the historicalprocess itself, further enlarging the significance of ‘the international’ as a dimensionof social reality.

Steps I–III have operated with a series of gradually telescoping timescales. Earlyreferences to ‘the ancient civilizations of Egypt, India and China’ (p. 4) invoked themillennia of (post-neolithic) human development as a whole. Over the course of StepIII, the discussion of pre-modern Czarist state-formation reduced this scale to that ofcenturies (pp. 6–9), while the analysis of Russian industry reduced it once again to amatter of decades (pp. 9–12). Step IV now carries this process of zeroing in almostto its conclusion, dropping down first to ‘eleven years’ (p. 13) – in order to narratethe events separating the abortive revolution of 1905 from its successful return in

50 Trotsky, Notebooks, p. 111.

24 Justin Rosenberg

1917 – and then finally to ‘a few months’ (p. 14) – those separating the February andOctober revolutions of 1917.

With this last shift the various collective actors already introduced reappear inthe concrete setting of a specific political conjuncture. Following military defeat byJapan in 1905, says Trotsky, Czarism tottered (p. 12). The Russian middle-classesand democratic intelligentsia sensed their opportunity, and pressed for politicalreform. As the campaign developed, however, it became apparent that the uniquelyconfigured Czarist state would have to be overthrown before such reforms couldoccur. And this would unleash the power of the proletariat and the peasantry alike,a power that, due to combined development, was both out of proportion withmiddle-class power and also beyond the reach of any liberal ideological hegemony.Faced with this conundrum – that there might well be a revolution, but it couldhardly be a bourgeois one – the middle-class fell back on the state. This closed theopportunity of the 1905 uprising, but opened the way for other classes to substitutetheir own leadership when the crisis returned in 1917.

Thus in Step IV Trotsky begins by showing how the conditions of combineddevelopment act as a barrier to bourgeois revolution. And he ends by arguing that afurther intensification of this combined development pushed the Russian revolution,when it did come, to jump over key stages of political change, just as Russian industry(by a combination of pressures and opportunities) had leapt over key stages oftechnological development. In effect, the peculiar combination of class actors thrownup by combined development produced a compression into ‘the course of a fewmonths’ of a historical process (liberal democratic revolution being followed bysocialist revolution) which in the West had already been stretched across two centurieswithout yet reaching its conclusion there.

And yet something else is going on here too. For Step IV takes, so to speak, a‘running jump’ at this final compression. This section, which completes the telescop-ing of time-scales, begins (and ends) by reaching right back across several centuriesto the English revolution. In this way it absorbs the close-up analysis of the approachto October 1917 into a wider comparative (but also interconnected) analysis of theEnglish, French, and Russian revolutions. Why does it do this?

Perhaps the answer can be found in an underlying narrative of the text, which ispresent from the start, but which only now becomes fully explicit. This narrative isexpressed in recurrent metaphorical references to journeying, advancing, compress-ing, stepping over, leaping, skipping and so on. It is a narrative about the socio-historical development of human agency. If we examine the distribution of thesereferences across the chapter as a whole, we find that they are tracking a slow butfundamental change in their object: human development begins as a struggle withnature; yet it gradually becomes an increasingly conscious self-overcoming of sociallimitations. These limitations are now confronted in the enduring class structure ofhuman societies. And that confrontation itself has undergone a process of interactive,dialectical mutation:

Advancing from the sturdy artisans and independent peasants of the army of Cromwell –through the Sansculottes of Paris – to the industrial proletarians of St. Petersburg, the revolu-tion had deeply changed its social mechanism, its methods, and therewith its aims. (p. 12)

The broad shape of this narrative was of course inherited by Trotsky fromMarx’s own writings. In updating it here, however, Trotsky simultaneously inserts

The ‘philosophical premises’ 25

the international into its logic of process. The result is a drastic swerve of historicalexpectation which clarifies why Trotsky’s theory could make sense of the approach-ing Russian revolution, while Marx’s theory on its own could not.

Up until now (throughout Step III, anyway) the analysis has been focused on theproduction of difference among the parts (separating the Russian experience from theWestern one). Now, however, the camera suddenly ‘pans out’, as we saw it doearlier, but this time across both space and time. As a result, the argument now positsa four dimensional process of European history whose inner logic of movement is aninteractive process of change.

Key to this logic is the way that these three revolutions are simultaneously linkedto and differentiated from each other. We have already seen this process (of linkageand differentiation) operating on the parts, through the lateral (spatial/synchronic)interconnection of developmental processes. Now this formula of unevenness andcombination is upended, so to speak, in order to unfurl the vertical (temporal/diachronic) dimension of the whole which is made up of these interconnected develop-ments. And this finally reveals unevenness and combination as the logic of movementand mutation of the whole over time. For the interconnections here are no longer justthose between contemporaneous phenomena at different levels of development. Theynow include transformative interconnections and mutations across time – a sequenceof events occurring in different times and places, each of which provides both acondition for its successor and a reason why that successor would be different. Inother words, it is not just belated industrialisation which exhibits these properties,but the historical process itself – ‘development’ in its widest sense.

Thus, (in Trotsky’s narrative), the seventeenth-century English bourgeois revolu-tion was clothed in the religious language and beliefs of the Reformation, leavingbehind the pre-bourgeois worldview of Catholicism which continued to hold swayin France (unevenness). When French society underwent its revolutionary trans-formation, a century and a half later, it did not repeat the (now outmoded) Englishcultural formula. Partly under the influence of Anglo-American capitalist develop-ment, partly under its pressure, and increasingly as a critique of it, the French revo-lution instead ‘leap-frogged’ into the language of radical democracy and nationalcitizenship (combined development) – from Puritanism to Jacobinism. A furthercentury on again, and the staggered, interactive process of capitalist industrialisationhad produced in Russia an urban proletariat, extremely concentrated by combineddevelopment, wedded to the Marxist critique of capitalist democracy and formulat-ing its goals in terms of a materialist language of relations of production.

Just as France stepped over the Reformation, so Russia stepped over the formal democracy.The Russian revolutionary party . . . sought an expression for the tasks of the revolutionneither in the Bible nor in that secularized Christianity called ‘pure’ democracy, but in thematerial relations of the social classes. (p. 15)

Puritanism; Jacobinism; Bolshevism: these were not just different national names forserial explosions of the same phenomenon – ‘the Revolution’ – in different times.They also recorded the inner mutation of the phenomenon itself as it was differen-tially but cumulatively produced and reproduced within the uneven and combinedmovement of capitalist development across historical time and geographical space.In the logic of process at work in this sequence, the international itself can be seenas a driver of social development. Indeed it is what enabled Trotsky to explain what

26 Justin Rosenberg

Marx’s theory of capitalist development could not: the eruption of socialist-inspiredrevolution in the ‘backward’ East instead of in the advanced West where it supposedlybelonged.

It seems impossible to isolate what is of value in all this without cutting away thesurrounding phantasmogorical elements which would otherwise discredit or obscureit. An essentially political judgement is therefore needed at this point: Trotsky waswrong about the Russian revolution; and here, at the end of the chapter, he wasalso wrong to resolve the multilinearity of the process back into the higher unity ofa political teleology. Perhaps, being a political actor, he can be forgiven this. Perhapsnot.

Either way, however, Trotsky was surely right about one very big thing. Whetherviewed in the long term of world history or at the quotidian level of shifting politicalconjunctures, social development – meaning causally cumulative change – is shapedby interactive, as well as reproductive, logics of process. This dual character is areason why historical process is resistant in principle to unilinear analyses – ‘fixedabstractions’ – even though, as conceptualisations of development, these analysesalready incorporated an awareness of change over time. Their fixity lay rather intheir failure to internalise a quite additional (lateral, interactive) source of change,as a result of which their real-world objects would necessarily mutate even as theyunfolded. It lay, that is, in the blindness of classical social theory to the genericsignificance of the international.

Conclusion

The phenomena of geopolitics, foreign trade, and inter-societal influences of all kindsare of course widely recognised to have played a major role in human history – theyare general to the historic process. Quite obviously, these phenomena subtend uponthe co-existence of more than one society. And a sociological understanding of them –just as obviously – therefore requires a presupposition of societal multiplicity as partof its basic definition of social reality. As noted in the Introduction, it is the absenceof such a presupposition in existing sociological traditions – liberal, Marxist, andothers – which accounts for the interlocking problems of internalism, methodologicalnationalism, and the reification of the international in realism.

Yet these problems cannot be solved by the theoretical fiat of simply declaringthat society always exists in the plural. That presupposition of societal multiplicityitself requires a yet deeper premise about historical development from which it canderive as an organic axiom of social theory. Otherwise, it may end instead by import-ing the reifications of realism into sociological theory – as indeed was widely held tohave occurred in the works of Theda Skocpol and Michael Mann.51

What all this tells us is just how deep-lying an adjustment to sociological theory isrequired in order to bring the international within its conceptual reach. In Trotsky’s

51 See A. Jarvis, ‘Societies, States and Geopolitics: Challenges from Historical Sociology’, Review of Inter-national Studies, 19:3 (1989), pp. 281–93; Michael Mann, ‘Review of Rosenberg’s The Empire of CivilSociety’, British Journal of Sociology, 46:3 (1995), pp. 554–5; Stephen Hobden and John Hobson (eds),Historical Sociology of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); GeorgeLawson, ‘The promise of historical sociology in international relations’, International studies review, 8:3(2006), pp. 397–423.

The ‘philosophical premises’ 27

writings, this adjustment is made by placing the ontological assertion of unevenness –‘the most general law of the historic process’ – beneath the explicitly sociologicalpremises of historical materialism. Some of the implications of this placement hewas able to capture in his rehearsals of dialectics – unevenness expressed in changeover time, for example, or in variation across instances. But these perceptions, as wehave seen, were already available via other routes. The one result which was notavailable elsewhere, and which in fact operated within his writings to make themso distinctive, eluded his conscious retrieval. The hypothesised fourth element ofnon-identity – unevenness as multiplicity of number – is the hidden link betweenthe general assertion of unevenness and the subsequent presupposition of more-than-one society as the proper (expanded) optic of social theory. It is the expressionat the level of philosophical premises of what it was that enabled Trotsky’s socialtheory to conceptualise the interactive logics that comprise the international.

Perhaps inevitably, Trotsky’s version of uneven and combined development in-cludes limitations that reflect its formulation at the high-water mark of the Europeanstate in world history. Thus, for all his emphasis on interactive development, his his-torical narrative of human progress is almost entirely internal to the West, threaten-ing to perpetuate the wider ‘civilizational internalism’ of Eurocentric social science.52

There is of course no denying the global pressures created by the fact that Europeansocieties industrialised before other parts of the world. But that historical priorityitself owed much to a history of borrowings from the non-European world anda global conjuncture in which interconnections with American, African, MiddleEastern, and Indian societies played a key role.53 In Trotsky’s writings, Europeancapitalism can sometimes appear as the uncreated creator of the modern world, thesole exception to the general rule that socio-historical change has a wider, generativecontext in the interactive multiplicity of human societies. This is not an exceptionthat either can or should survive the fuller development of his own theory. In thissense, Trotsky’s idea needs to undergo its own ‘postcolonial moment’.54 And theresult might even enhance the existing postcolonial critique of Eurocentrism. For, asKamran Matin and others have recently argued, that critique has rightly rejected thefalse universalism of a West-centred, unilinear social evolutionism; but it has yetto find the alternative social scientific language through which to explain the globalsocial processes underlying its subject matter.55

It seems then that Robert Heilbroner was right. Searching for the ‘philosophicalpremises’ of U&CD might have seemed at first an obscure and even pointlessexercise. (Why not just get on with using it?) Yet the ‘ultimate strengths’ of the ideado lie here. Indeed all the conclusions to which our investigation now points are, asanticipated in the Introduction, bound up with the extra premise we have uncovered.

52 I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer and the Editors for this point.53 Lynda Shaffer, ‘A Concrete Panoply of Intercultural Exchange: Asia in World History’, in A. Embree

and C Gluck (eds), Asia in Western and World History (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), pp. 810–66;J. R. McNeill and W. H. McNeill, The Human Web. A Bird’s Eye View of World History (New Yorkand London: Norton, 2003); R. Marks, The origins of the modern world: fate and fortune in the rise ofthe West (rev. and updated edn, Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).

54 I am grateful to the Editors and an anonymous reviewer for emphasising this very important point.55 Matin, ‘Redeeming Universalism’. See also Rosa Vasilaki, ‘Provincialising IR? Deadlocks and

Prospects in Post-Western IR Theory’, Millennium – Journal of International Studies, published online11 July 2012, DOI 10.1177/0305829812451720.

28 Justin Rosenberg

These conclusions are of two kinds. On the one hand, rendering the premiseexplicit has repaired a widely noted disconnection between Trotsky’s philosophicalwritings and his political and sociological analyses;56 it has revealed the intellectualdistinctiveness of U&CD, suggesting how fundamentally it differs from apparentlysimilar notions of uneven development (whether Lenin’s at the time, or Neil Smith’stoday); and it has shown how Trotsky’s idea opens out into a (non-internalist) theoryof historical process in general, and not simply an analysis of capitalist developmentin particular. On the other hand, this same exercise has also explained the otherwisesurprising ineffectiveness of other dialectical approaches in international theory;unlike them, it has yielded an alternative, non-realist conception of the internationalitself (rather than simply an argument about the latter’s changing historical forms);and finally, in so doing, it has arguably provided the means to repair the largestdisconnection of them all: that between the philosophical premises of social andinternational theory.

56 Burnham, ‘Science and Style’, p. 104; Knei-Paz, Social and Political Thought, pp. 487–8; Thatcher,‘Trotsky’s Dialectic’, p. 142.

The ‘philosophical premises’ 29