Vertical and Horizontal: Methodological Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism and Scale

• In Event: 594 - Section on Political Sociology Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 12. Ethnicity and Nationalism

Abstract

Since the 1970’s critics of methodological nationalism have warned that sociology’s persistent fusion of nation state and “society” around political borders risks misidentifying the discipline’s core object of study. As of late Ulrich Beck’s bid for a “cosmopolitan sociology” has figured prominently in attempts to refigure the methodological and normative implications of sociological practice through directly attacking the implications of this “unit question”. The current paper examines Beck’s work in light of debates in political geography regarding the ontological status of political scale. While Beck holds that the problems posed by methodological nationalism are readily resolved through a “politics of perspectives” that fuses the languages of “flows” with that of various spatial scales (i.e. global, national, local, etc), the current paper holds that making such a transposition of metaphors comes with slippery ontological issues that Beck handles poorly. Recounting debates over the ontological status of scale within political geography the paper holds that addressing the methodological questions associated with spatial scale requires greater care as it implies distinct philosophies of social science, and in turn methods of abstraction and theory construction. While the paper does not provide a solution to these issues, in the concluding section I suggest that building upon insights from Bourdieusian analysis in conjunction with an emphasis on the logistical practice of states may provide one means forward to this difficult problem.

Author

• Samuel David Stabler, Yale University