60 years ago today, March 20, 1962, the American sociologist C. Mills Wright Mills died at the age of 46. On the 60th anniversary of his death, we re-read his most influential classic, The Sociological Imagination, and in this way reflect on the imagination of the social sciences. We interviewed chen yingfang (sociology), Ren Jiantao (political science) and Liu Hailong (communication studies) and other three scholars. This article is an interview with political scientist Ren Jiantao.
In the eyes of many colleagues in political science, Ren Jiantao's interest in the department of political science at Tsinghua University may be a little too "mixed": taking the history of ethical thought as the beginning of his research career, the academic footprint covers political science theory and international political comparison, and in recent years, he has focused on emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence. Just this past 2021, he also published a book that interprets Han Feizi from the perspective of political science. His continued interest in the history of political thought is also unique in the field of political science, where quantitative positivism has become widespread.
The situation of traditional Chinese ideas such as Confucianism and Law in China at present, the identity of "political philosophy", the rebirth of artificial intelligence and "human politics"... The topic selection style of Ren Jiantao's papers often has a grand vision, reflecting the distinctive characteristics of their generation of scholars: research starts from a strong sense of problems, and is good at breaking through the boundaries of different knowledge and not too rigid to the institutionalized disciplinary tradition. The clue to these boundaries, in the words mentioned by Ren Jiantao in a previous interview, is "history", and specifically to his own research, it is the history of political thought.
Ren Jiantao believes that back in the context of intellectual history, we can find the connection between our own research and these truly key "big problems", look at real problems with a more three-dimensional perspective, and at the same time cultivate our academic taste and "sense of reality". As a discipline with strong reality orientation, political science in particular needs to avoid what Mills calls "abstract empiricism" and move away from political reality in highly specialized trivial studies.
And he argues that while Mills has sharp criticism of the Grand Theory, it has a specific context. In fact, grand theories have an irreplaceable role in our three-dimensional and in-depth understanding of real political reality.
This article is from the B04 of the Beijing News Book Review Weekly's March 18 topic "Reclaiming the Imagination of Social Sciences".
"Theme" B01丨 Reclaim the imagination of the social sciences
"Theme" B02-B03丨 Imagination and its problems
"Theme" B04 丨 Ren Jiantao Historical Perspective of Political Science Research
"Theme" B05 丨 Chen Yingfang Sociology needs more research on "modern"
"Theme" B06 丨 Liu Hailong uses academic imagination to get out of the discipline anxiety of communication science
"Literature" B07丨 In Chinese marriage, how many invisible women are there
"Literature" B08 Kotaro Isasaka
There is no need to dogmatically understand
Mills' critique of the "grand theory"
Ren Jiantao, a professor in the Department of Political Science at Tsinghua University, is the author of "Public Political Philosophy" and "When the Classics Become Classics".
Beijing News: As a sociologist, Mills's influence is far more than limited to the discipline of sociology, but has spread to various humanities and social sciences in a broad sense, including political science. When did you first come into contact with Mills? What inspired me when I first read his work?
Ren Jiantao: Mills's currently famous book "The Sociological Imagination" actually did not leave a deep impression on me when I first read it, and I did not even finish reading it when I first read it, and at that time I still regarded it as a theoretical work of sociology. As I spent more and more time doing research, and my research interests gradually spilled over from the scope of political science, I suddenly realized the importance of Mills's book. In fact, in this book, he uses sociology as a window to examine the methodological consciousness of the entire humanities and social sciences, such as political science, law, economics, communication, anthropology, history, etc.
As a scholar of political science, I paid the most attention to Mills's work in the books "The Power Elite" and "The Marxist". The latter, in particular, is also a timely translation of the book in our country, printed shortly before Mills' death, and consists of two parts, one part of the works of Marxist authors excerpted by Mills, and the other part of his commentary on these contents. It shows that Mills's understanding of Marxism has its own very unique place.
I went to university from 1978 to 1982, and the main study of sociology at that time was Marxist historical materialism. The later introduction of Max Weber's work also almost shaped the form of social science (not only sociological) thinking at that time. Mills was heavily influenced by Weber and Marx, but he was somewhat out of their way of looking at problems. For Marx, Mills was not satisfied with the "vulgar Marxism" that we usually criticize, that is, an economic determinism.
For Weber, Mills also engaged in a kind of "hidden dialogue" with him, and provided a sociological discourse that was very different from Weber's. For example, Weber talks about "value neutrality" and also has a wary attitude towards the times and social participation, which is obviously different from Mills. Mills precisely emphasized that researchers should integrate their care into the environment of the times and integrate their personal lives into academic research, which was also a great shock to me at that time.
The Marxist, by C. Wright Mills, The Commercial Press, July 1965.
Beijing News: Regarding the study of theory, you have mentioned many times that there is a need for "grand vision", and in this regard, Mills has made a harsh criticism of the orientation of "grand theory", and he has pointed at Parsons of sociology. In terms of political science research, what do you think of this criticism of his?
Ren Jiantao: I think Mills mainly pointed to the various drawbacks brought about by the rise of social science in the United States in the era of separation from society and the establishment of a closed knowledge community. Mills's critique of grand theories is also often brought up by future generations of scholars and students. This rejection of grand theories is actually not very much agreeable. Objectively speaking, Mills himself has also somewhat ignored the significance of grand theory, and several of his works have unfortunately not had much theoretical original significance. To criticize the grand theory itself too much in order to attack the specific limitations of an era (the closure of disciplines) is to go a little too far. Starting from the political science research I have done, grand theories are a very important way to help us understand the world, and it is also lacking in people's thinking and research at present. We do not have to dogmatically understand Mills's criticism of grand theory, he in "The Sociological Imagination" specifically pointed to Parsons, Parsons's theory is very typical structural functionalism, and we all know that this theory attaches importance to the problem of "structure" and limited "function", has conservative overtones, and is unable to explain and predict changes in social structure. The problem with mills shelling was concrete. In fact, when Mills was doing sociological research, he was clearly influenced by grand theories, and he himself made it clear that he was influenced by Marx and Weber. Without the support of grand theories, even the construction of what he advocated, which can be called "middle theory", would not be possible.
What's more, in his later years, Mills was also trying to gradually refine his "grand theory", and the "Marxist" he compiled before his death had a great change in the orientation of the problems he had studied in the early stages. In addition, he has been committed to the correction of American sociological theory, and his target Daniel Bell is also very empirical, but he also tries to construct and explain the structural changes in capitalist society. This is a manifestation of Mills's grand theoretical construction method shared with his critics.
In short, grand theoretical and empirical research should not be abandoned. China's current political science research, and even humanities and social science research, is not good enough in these two aspects, which can be described as a "lose-lose" situation. Although China is now always doing more empirical research in abstracts, in fact, I often say that we do not have much rigorous empirical research at present, there are very few real "normative studies", there is more repetitive work, and theoretical creation is rare. This is precisely the situation in which grand theoretical and empirical research needs a double breakthrough.
Personally, I believe that this is related to the tradition of social science research pioneered by Mr. Fei Xiaotong. Chinese sociological historians point out that the problem type of "Native China" is close to that of academic prose, and some insights derived from social investigation are very easy to read and enlightening, but lack of in-depth and systematic interpretation in theory. In this regard, the contributions of Fei Lao's teachers Wu Wenzao and Pan Guangdan were even greater. But their works are not so easy to read, the popularity is limited, and they do not play a large role in popularizing sociology.
I have a lot of respect for Fei Lao, and I have benefited from the inspiration of his writings in my research. This can be confirmed by my purchase of the Complete Works of Fei Xiaotong and my claim that my writing method was shaped by Fei Lao's "whole zero writing". But I have to admit that his research from native China to township China to urban China, although there is a progressive clue, as if they are relatively isolated from each other, there is no consistent grand social theory construction to connect them. This is a pity. This is a lesson that Chinese sociology and social sciences must make up.
The Complete Works of Fei Xiaotong, by Fei Xiaotong, Inner Mongolia People's Publishing House, December 2009.
The study of the history of ideas can help us
Improve your academic aesthetic
Beijing News: Your research interests have shifted many times, and in recent years, your research horizons have been very broad, involving comparative politics, the history of ideas, and even the relationship between new technologies and politics (artificial intelligence). Can you briefly describe the process of changing your research interests? What have been the most concerned issues lately?
Ren Jiantao: In a nutshell, the changes in my research interests are closely related to the positioning of my profession. I studied the history of Chinese philosophy at Sun Yat-sen University as a graduate student, and after graduating in 1989, I stayed in the moral education department of CUHK, and this period was basically the study of ethics and moral education, combined with my doctoral major, specifically to do the history of ethical thought. Later, I was transferred to the Department of Political Science to teach, and since 1993 I have been teaching political theory and the history of Chinese political thought at Sun Yat-sen University. In 2009, when I went to Chinese Min University, because I already had teachers teaching the history of Chinese political thought, I changed my teaching to the history of Western political thought. In 2016, I was transferred to Tsinghua University again, and this course was taught again, and I changed my way to teaching the history of Chinese political thought. So objectively speaking, the multiple transfers of my career have allowed me to often organize my research around the direction of the current class. In a way, this is actually quite in line with the kind of research method that Mills wrote in the appendix to "The Sociological Imagination", making a database and constantly sorting various research questions according to the current situation.
In addition to the factors of career change, the topics I care about also change with some of the confusion I face at different times. China's changes from tradition to the present are so drastic that the "subset of scriptures and histories" classified according to tradition is no longer sufficient to cope with the intellectual challenges of "modernity". During the period when our generation of Chinese scholars were educated, from undergraduate to graduate, it was almost around this core that we would be able to solve how China could successfully complete the transformation from "traditional to modern" from all aspects. There is no doubt that this is difficult to solve in any single discipline, so when I was doing administrative work at Sun Yat-sen University, I had a confusion that the sociology department at that time did not open "social theory", and I wondered whether this was a very serious problem. Social theory was not "sociological theory", and at that time university sociology departments basically only opened the latter. We often reduce a comprehensive and macro grasp of society to the study of some specific social problems. At that time, the sociology major of Sun Yat-sen University and our political science major were in the same college, and I also took the initiative to ask for help, saying that if you don't teach "social theory", I can talk about it.
In recent years I have paid special attention to the issue of the technological revolution, which is very closely related to politics. If the previous technological revolution was a continuation of the general technological revolution of the 20th century, the technological revolution at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century came almost in a state where human beings were not mentally prepared. If nanobots can deeply affect the functions of the human body as expected, when they are all over your body, are you a human or a machine? This is not only a technological revolution, but also a revolution of ideas. Inheriting the ideological legacy of the Enlightenment in the past, the mechanical worldview believes that machines are external to us, that man has independence, subjectivity and superiority, and that now everything will become different. In addition, the breakthrough of genetic technology has also made us rethink the boundaries of life and death. For thousands of years, for Chinese, the ethics of life and death and the "ethics of gods and men" are two basic ethical consensuses that are quite important. Why did we once believe in God, because they can prescribe that God is eternal and that we will die, but are we moving toward "God" today? "Living to die" is a fundamental concept that lurks in our minds and is now facing challenges.
Changes in technology will lead to drastic social changes, which in turn will lead to changes in political control and governance. I think that as a political scientist today, you should not be satisfied with traditional issues, such as how the state is born, how it develops, how it works, how it is governed... Rather, we should always face the changing world, constantly expand our horizons, and examine the historical clues behind this change from a broader perspective.
Beijing News: You mentioned a historical perspective, which is actually a point specifically mentioned in Mills's "Sociological Imagination". We will find that in recent years, there have been many political scholars who have focused on techno-political relations, such as Fukuyama and Sandel, and they often use the perspective of intellectual history when dealing with this issue. In the study of political science, how do you see the value of "historical vision"? What is the significance of the study of the history of ideas for the study of political science?
Ren Jiantao: There is a popular saying in Chinese academia that "X science is the history of X science", for example, philosophy is the history of philosophy, and politics is the history of political science. This statement is of course debatable, after all, for the study of a discipline, the history of ideas is a specific perspective. Whether it is philosophy or political science, pure theoretical construction is also very important. The study of the history of ideas is mainly to allow us to see some of the basic big questions faced by the discipline and how each generation of scholars can find ways to answer them.
For example, political science always has to think about "what is the state", philosophy always has to think about the problems of existence and consciousness, and these basic questions define a discipline. In this sense, for any discipline, the history of ideas is an inextricable research resource. Therefore, looking at the history of ideas and studying the history of ideas is actually conducive to improving our academic aesthetics and opening up our horizons, which is a matter of "taking the law from the top to the middle". Reading important works by major scholars in the history of a certain discipline helps to build a better academic interest.
Beijing News: Different scholars, such as the Cambridge School and strauss school that we are familiar with, study the history of ideas in different ways. You've written a few articles about Chinese political thought in recent years, and this year you've published a book about Han Fei. Specific to the study of political thought, what is your experience?
Ren Jiantao: First of all, I still want to mention Mills. Mills actually emphasizes that we should make a "general survey" of our writings, including past research and intellectual history, before doing specific research, and then identify the thinkers who inspire you most from the complex spectrum of ideas. For example, I personally think that he attaches great importance to an "elitist tradition", so he specifically mentions Mosca, Michels, Pareto, etc. Here, however, Mills's sociology can be said to be a mid-level theory, and the history of ideas is basically a tool to serve the needs of a particular subject of study. Incidentally, Mills's vision of this sociological study was very rigorous, and this is well reflected in the appendix to The Sociological Imagination. This is an interesting contrast, as he once very bluntly described himself as an "anarchist," but apparently this does not seem to be the case when emphasizing "discipline in research."
As far as political science is concerned, I think that the study of the history of ideas in various paths has its value. The Strauss school and the Cambridge school can actually be seen as doing a kind of "knowledge reduction" research. The former is to understand the deep meaning behind "implicit writing" from "text", but there may be some problems of "living with oneself". The latter's emphasis on the reduction of the historical "context" can be seen as a correction of the former, but it may weaken the subjectivity of the thinker himself, as if all great thinkers are only pulled by the general trend of history.
To some extent, attempts to restore "context" may not help us grasp the bigger political issues. Therefore, the most brilliant works of the Cambridge School, such as Skinner's "The Foundations of Modern Political Thought" and Bocock's "Machiavelli Moment", are basically focused on a short period of time in the early modern period, such as the 14th and 16th centuries. In this respect, the Straussians may instead make a grand interpretation of the classical-modern relationship through the interpretation of the text. Sometimes I find it strange that it seems that the Cambridge School should present the rhythm of historical changes and the changes in the historical structure, while the Strauss School is more likely to do a kind of "exhortation" kind of research, but the results seem to be the opposite.
The key problem is that doing this kind of political research with a sense of historical depth requires choosing a path that matches personal excitement. At the same time, it is better to have a present care and use the problems of the times we are facing to determine our unique perspective on history.
Public Political Philosophy, by Ren Jiantao, The Commercial Press, June 2016.
Look at political thought
Don't "value first"
Beijing News: When I wrote the book "Politics: Forty Lectures on Han Fei", how is there a sense of problems that are close to the present?
Ren Jiantao: Writing Han Fei's book began with an audio lecture, at first I was not prepared to spend a lot of energy, but when I read the relevant materials, I found that there were some problems in it that were still worth investigating. Although some of Han Fei's statements do not sound very good, such as "employing people like ghosts", there are also many insights into the nature of politics, and the Western thinker who often compares him is Machiavelli. How meaningful this comparison really is can be discussed. But it can reflect the importance of Han Fei. One of the problems that exists now is that many criticisms of Han Fei are, in my opinion, not very valid. For example, a common view is that China's modern transition to democracy and the rule of law is fraught with difficulties, and Han Fei has a lot of responsibility, and where can Han Fei and the legalists bear such a heavy responsibility. Since modern politics is the activity of the world of experience, the main responsibility for whether Chinese politics can achieve a "modern" transformation lies with the present people, not the ancients. Of course, Han Fei did not have to bear any responsibility for whether or not he had stepped out of the so-called "Qin government" in modern times. Moreover, he did not have the necessary or ability to take on this responsibility.
We should shift this reproachful view and look at Han Fei's texts relatively objectively. In his time, imperial art was indeed the primary political issue at that time, and whether the country should be unified, whether to build society and state by military merit or blood relations, Han Fei gave valuable suggestions on these issues. This can inspire people today to think about it. He is not to be harshly reproached for spanning millennia, but to take responsibility for the modern transformation of Chinese politics. In the study of Chinese political thought, today's neo-Confucians, new Taoists, new Mojia, and new lawyers must not put values first, and use strong modern "empathy" to measure the gains and losses of ancient thinkers, which will hinder the academic community from concentrating on studying real problems, resulting in the "party and the party" in the academic circle.
The study of political thought cannot take modern times as the only coordinate. We should acknowledge that there is a "change between ancient and modern times", although there must be continuity in this change. The founding of ancient China, which was founded by blood relations, was a "large small country" that failed to create a "small big country" like modern Britain, and there are significant differences between the two. Ancient China was a "large and small country", which means that although the country is large in scale and has a large population, the scale of social organization is not large in terms of families. Like Fei Xiaotong's "Native China", the "tooth order structure" is a basic social structure. This makes it much simpler for China to deal with the problem of sorting in social life than in the West, for example, many times according to age, people in the same field are easy to identify. But a "small big country" like Britain, though small in population and small in place, has created a complex modern state system.
Now that we are discussing traditional Chinese political thought, we need to adapt to this drastic change. For example, we cannot fantasize about the modern highly mobile society, and we can return to the construction of the state with the home as the basic unit, so I have always been critical of the discussion of restarting the "home country and the world" in recent years. We cannot depart from contemporary reality and "go back to antiquity" in a vacuum, looking for a cure for real problems from the scriptures. In fact, this will make our study of history disconnected from practical experience, and fall into what Mills called "abstract empiricism.".
Beijing News: In a previous interview, you mentioned that you were recently writing a three-volume volume of modern Chinese political thought.
Ren Jiantao: In The Sociological Imagination, Mills mentioned that the best humanities and social science research is to relate personal confusion to the structural problems of the times. So although I write about the history of ideas, it is actually oriented to my personal specific experience, and it is also related to the problems that I have always cared about.
The first volume of the book, "The Modernity of Difficult Childbirth: Political Thought in Transition china," deals primarily with why China's modern transformation has been so difficult since the late Ming Dynasty. China's modern transformation did not begin with the Opium War in 1840, and Western studies, especially Western classics, were gradually introduced to China in the late Ming Dynasty, so why did not it receive a more positive social and political response in the late Ming Dynasty? Subsequently, we went through the change of dynasties, up to the Republic of China and the People's Republic of China, and the modernization experience was very tortuous. How can China face the conflict of values in this process and use institutional arrangements to solve the problem. These are big questions that need to be studied in a concentrated way.
The second volume, Broad Modernity: The Creation of Modern Politics in the West, mainly discusses the creation of modern politics and attempts to highlight the continuity between the Western tradition and the modern. Now many people criticize the modern West for being too arrogant, cutting off the tradition, and considering themselves to be clever, but in fact, the mainstream of the modern West is humble in the face of tradition, and their attention to classical culture is not weak. Taking the two discourse areas of "embracing tradition in modernity" and "shaping modernity into pluralism", we can fully prove that the breadth of modernity is not to cut off tradition, but precisely to open up tradition and modernity.
The third volume, The Modern Age of Hope: Political Ideas Stirred by Dramatic Change, deals with technology and politics and their associated implications. In the past few hundred years, human beings have become accustomed to the seemingly omnipotent state of science and technology, but they have not done enough to reflect on it. At a time when the so-called third technological revolution may turn the world upside down, it is necessary to think forward-looking about the strange results that technology may break the boundaries between god and man, life and death, and material and self. These three volumes of books, named after the history of ideas, are indeed a "great history of ideas" positioning, expanding the theme and scope of research of the history of ideas, and are not traditional works of intellectual history that follow the rules.
Politics: Forty Lectures on Han Fei, by Ren Jiantao, Guangxi Normal University Press, November 2021.
Beijing News: For the study of political thought and theory, there is often a question, that is, we have to face the distance between theory and experience - this is also a concern of Mills. I think about when the Taliban entered Afghanistan last year, president Ghani's behavior also caused some controversy. Some people commented that Ghani, as a political scientist who did a very good job of research, also wrote works such as "How to Repair Failed Countries", but suffered a complete failure in political practice. Political science seems to be particularly acute due to its strong realistic orientation. What do you think of this?
Ren Jiantao: In fact, this question is not complicated. For a modern society with a high degree of social division of labor, the demarcation of occupational boundaries is a consensus that we need to have. Political scientists are not equal to politicians, and if research is done well, the effect of political practice may not be good. As a researcher of an empirical discipline, political scientists themselves need to clarify this positioning, according to Hills, scholars are not "philosopher kings" or "imperial masters", but professional scholars who connect power and the masses. Therefore, even if a political scientist intervenes in political practice, he basically gives his own views from a normative point of view. However, the essence of political action is "non-normative", full of accidental games. This makes scholars who follow the expertise to comment or intervene in politics often be mocked by reality. Ghani is just the latest case.
However, we also need to find a balance. A successful political theorist should also have a more dimensional view of political life and maintain his "social adaptability" to the greatest extent possible. In addition to being able to understand the experiences you are facing, you must also be able to learn from the experiences of others, so that you have a more reliable observation ability and agile action ability for realpolitik. Vice versa, politicians also need to maintain the necessary interest in political theory, to be able to sublimate sporadic political experience into universal political theory. But it's an ideal that's hard to become a reality.
Written | Liu Yaguang
Editors| Anya and Luo Dong
Proofreading | Wu Xingfa and Xue Jingning