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Northwestern University Law Review,
Summer 1987,
81 Nw. U.L. Rev. 664
Plasticity Into Power: Two Crises
in the History of France and China
By J. C. Cleary and Patrice Higonnet
Roberto Unger's massive
opus turns on the two interwoven axes of theory and applied history. It is to
the latter, and for him the less important of these two dimensions, that we
address our remarks. Our limited purpose here is to consider two events in the
context of his work. The focus of our concern centers on Unger's urgent
perception of the latent plasticity of most historical "arrangements."
I. PLASTICITY IN EARLY MODERN CHINA
The Chinese puzzle for comparative history and social theory is this: Why did
the most technologically advanced and bureaucratically organized society of the
middle ages, the Chinese Empire, fail to emerge as a great power in the modern
world of capitalism and science?
For a long time in the Western world, images of a changeless China, timeless and
stagnant, seemed a sufficient answer to this question. Because they lacked an
adequate appreciation of the historical diversity and progression of Chinese
civilization, Western social theorists overlooked the openness of China's early
modern culture and politics, with its potential for development along a
different historical path. They saw instead in the abject China of c. 1840-1945
a picture of ageless political and cultural debility, held in place by an
ideology with no critical or innovative standpoint.
But if we form a more detailed picture of Chinese developments contemporary with
the early modern breakthrough in Europe, we see a society deep in the throes of
institutional malaise and of economic and cultural changes. Here was a situation
that held the promise, or so it seemed, of many possibilities for new directions
in social forms and self-conceptions. In sixteenth- and early
seventeenth-century China, the "formative institutional and imaginative
assumptions of social life" were widely challenged in both theory and practice.
China was in a period of relative "plasticity" amidst intensifying social
conflict. If we look only at this period itself, without assuming in advance the
actual outcome of the struggle, it is evident that Chinese society had before it
many potential new paths to increased wealth and power. When we observe how this
period of plasticity ended, with power struggles decided in favor of a
reinforced backward-looking orthodoxy, we can arrive at a more interesting idea
of why China "failed to progress" in a way comparable to the early modern West.
In many important respects, the Chinese case dovetails well with Unger's
reflections on history and the mechanisms of social change set forth in
Plasticity into Power. His account of the political options available to
agrarian empires could have been constructed with China specifically in mind. In
stressing the key role of collective struggles from below in shaping history,
Unger echoes Mao Zedong's celebrated dictum which holds that the struggle of the
people has always been the motive force in historical progress. Unger's own
account of later imperial China is blurred, no doubt due to the defects in his
Western language sources. However, the fundamental link he sees between
constraints on collective conflict and the failure of institutional invention is
well illustrated in the history of early modern China.
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