Adam Mount: Forms of political combination.
§1
The collision of galaxies is apparently a relatively common occurrence. Andromeda,
the galaxy closest to ours, is thought to have undergone one such event in the past and is
projected to undertake another, with the Milky Way, some three billion years in the future.
The term ‘collision’ suggests a sort of violence, but because the distances between star
systems are so vast within galaxies, their ‘collision’ is usually nothing more than
unfathomably complex gravitational interactions. Approaching galaxies will often pass
through one another, before vast halos of dark matter dissipate momentum, eject a long and
brilliant trail of star systems, and bring the luminous portions of the galaxies into direct
interaction. Depending on the size and internal structure of each galaxy, a number of results
are possible, varying from simple passage to complete subsumption and dilution of a smaller
galaxy. Frequently, a new form entirely will result from the interaction. In the course of the
collision, a star system can be ejected from its position in a galactic structure—but with no
harm done to the star system itself, which can continue to function unperturbed by the
enormous forces occurring around it.
Contrast this with the collision of states. When states collide, its component units are
not tranquilly ejected to spin off into space, lonely but undisturbed; the collision of states
brings men into collision with bombs, bullets, each other and frequently does tremendous
violence.
There are many differences between the two cases—one is physical and on a much
larger scale, one is social and much smaller, but there are very large composites that interact
violently, and very small composites that interact without conflict—in both social and
physical disciplines. I submit that the salient difference between two different types of
composite entities and that this poses a problem for how we characterize the difference given
that there is no good vocabulary to characterize different types of collectivities.
This problem is particularly pressing in the social sciences, where micro-macro and
agent-structure relations have been foundational questions of sociology for a century. Perhaps
the basic problem of politics is one of inter-level relation: how do combining the properties
of individuals into some unitary quantity. The question gets to the heart of how we live
together, reason together, and act together.
This combination problem1 is present regardless of the substance being aggregated:
disparate factional interests combine to produce a national interest; various congressmen’s
preferences combine to pass a single law; a whole galaxy of personal identities combine to
form a communitarian or national identity. Though a basic problem of political life, the rules
by which each of these aggregative processes occur has not been surveyed widely. Instead,
either reduction —the assumption that composites are nothing more than their constituent
parts—or entitativity—the tendency to treat corporate entities as unitary ones—governs most
political analysis. Various parts of the common problem are addressed by analyses of voting
rules, institutional design, models of social choice, and corporate agency. A list of political
composites contains many, if not all, of the field’s basic concepts: national identity, national
interest, a law, a policy, a norm, an institution, a culture, a nature, a state—all are, one way or
another, some composite expression of some properties of individuals.
1
What I refer to here as the combination problem here is occasionally referred to in the social-scientific
literature as ‘the aggregation problem.’ Because I want to reserve the term aggregation for a particular
solution to that problem I have substituted
The combination problem is an esoteric one and—as we shall see—fairly technical; it
is not, however, a purely academic one. Because we can expect different types of social
composites to exhibit different types of properties and powers, different relations to their
basal constituents, different processes of construction, and different dynamics of
decomposition, a vocabulary of combination can help us identify stable bundles of these
properties that apply to different types of composites. Do material bases combine differently
than preference or identity bases? Do different types of political theories rely on different
types of social composites? How do we get something large and in common from many small
inputs?
Another way of thinking of this problem is to see it as explaining the constitutive
relationships between social kinds: combination theories are unified models of what social
kinds of type x count for or contribute to social kinds of type y. 2
Herein, a simplistic categorization is developed by using philosophical categories to
arrange and supplement social scientific heuristics. After brief reflections on the scope of the
question, three types of combination are offered: aggregation; supervenience; and emergence.
Regrettably, the enormity of the task requires this paper limits itself to a fractional survey of
social scientific models of combination; some characteristic instances are employed to
demonstrate the relation. The paper turns immediately thereafter to demonstrating these
concepts with respect to the higher-level property of state sovereignty and concludes with
implications for political scientists.
§1.2: A note on terminology and intent.
Just below are listed four types of social
combination. Each of these has an epistemological and an ontological component. I am only
interested in arguments about the former insofar as I recommend we treat social composites
of certain types with their appropriate methods and leave it at that. Crucially, and as will
become more clear later, the definitions for each type of combination are not epistemological
arguments in themselves. Accordingly, I have tried to construct definitions for each type that
are the strongest possible and leave little room for slippage that would result in something
like the reductionist claim that emergent entities are simply explaining away unit dynamics
that are beyond our current capacities to model properly. These categories are not heuristic
devices but are productive of some basic character of certain social phenomena. When we
develop models that rely on some notion of a social composite, it is not enough that we assert
that in practice a population behaves as if these composites are true in such-and-such a case
and let the matter drop; this is tantamount to asserting the utility of a heuristic but failing to
consider its consequences. This does not necessarily require that we adhere to a scientific
realism: whether social composites are real or simply useful heuristics to follow, we produce
some type of composite that has consequences beyond the results for which we deploy it.3 In
short, these are ontological claims if social composites are real, and stochastic assumptions if
they are not; in neither case to they rely on our ability to model a situation.
2
Wendt, 1998 comes remarkably close to arguing something like this when he defines constitutive theories
as those that ‘account for properties of things by reference to the structures in virtue of which they exist.’
However, as has been widely noted, his paper does not bear out this promise: very often the answers to his
‘how-possible’ questions could be satisfied by causal theories. By contrast, the definition above could
perfectly describe a social mereology, which is what I am trying to describe here. Various components of a
social mereology (or social theory of the relations between parts and wholes) could be either causal or
constitutive.
3
Accordingly, while the following will often sound realist, I think it can safely be agnostic about
philosophy of science positions.
However, one major class of causal powers is neglected here: that of downward
causation to the basal units that comprise the composites. Though necessary in places (to
explain decomposition, for example), I have placed a survey of these effects beyond the
scope of this paper. Neglect for the downward half of the problematique is only one reason
why this is not a paper about agents and structures. The other is that only some of the social
composites examined here can meet rigorous definitions of social structure4: simple
aggregations of preferences to produce an ad-hoc policy, for example, can only be called a
structure under the most impoverished of definitions. Similarly, I will give examples that
suggest that types of social composites function at all levels of analysis. The combination
problem stands alone.
§2: Aggregation
We start at the ontologically simplest possibility. William Wimsatt, in trying to
define maximal boundaries of a very broad definition of emergence, developed conditions
necessary to the most basic reductionism. Aggregativity obtains to social composites that are
‘nothing but’ the result of some simple aggregation rule applied to the components of a
system. Rules may be additive, multiplicative, or other, but in each case the composite cannot
be said to generate novel powers relative to those exercised by the system’s components, nor
is it even autonomous relative to the basal properties.
In logical notation, the relation would look as follows, where B are the values of a set
of basal properties of type B, of the ith level entities 1…n, and ƒ represents some relatively
simple arithmetic or statistical function.
(1) If
is an aggregate of properties
time t, holding
unchanged,
, then if
comes to include x at
i1
where Ati1  At1
  (x)
The operation
here cannot be one of identity (because the function ƒ represents some
basic transformation), nor causality (because Bi+1 is not a physical event in and of itself,
 we say the relation is
though it may subsequently produce physical events), nor can
constitutive, because XXXX ; rather we say that the relation is generative. Put simply, (1)
says that some function of basal properties generates a systemic property at the i+1-st level.
Wimsatt’s conditions are as follows. For any composite system, it is a simple
aggregate just in case, for all possible decompositions of that system—
i.
4
IS (Intersubstitution), the systemic property remains despite operations
rearranging or substituting equivalent units from outside the system;
Though, for just about any social fact, one can find a theorist who calls it a structure.
ii.
iii.
iv.
QS (Size scaling), ‘quantitative similarity…of the system property under addition
or subtraction of parts’;
RA (Decomposition and reaggregation) with constant system property;
CI (Linearity), ‘there are no cooperative or inhibitory interactions among the
parts of the system for this property.’5
For practical purposes peculiar to social phenomena, I also want to add—
v.
P (Pliability), an inability to resist synchronic reaggregation.
Testing these conditions means applying them to all possible decompositions of the
composite property. Wimsatt gives the example of linear amplifiers, which fail the conditions
because each amplifier performs variably given the overall organization of the system, as
does the overall amplification ratio. Wimsatt suggests that the conditions are extremely
limited, and probably only met by those basic physical laws that can be modeled by general
conservation laws—mass, energy, momentum, and the like.
§2.2: Social aggregates. As in the natural sciences, approximate claims of aggregativity are
fairly common in political science. Off the top of my head, plausible explanations for the
following could be based on roughly aggregate models: bills from a congress; an economic
policy drawing from interest groups;6 an intergovernmental treaty;7 a revolution; a
reputation.8
Downs’ median voter model is a fine example in which the preferences of the
members of a population aggregates into a societal preference. The relation between the
societal preference and the constellation of population preferences is commutative ( IS),
qualitatively identical (having simply chosen one of the basal properties as representative;
QS), accommodating of decomposition and reformation (RA), and independent of the
interactions of the basal units. (CI) Moreover, the systemic property is relatively resistant to
alternative decompositions; we could think of dividing a society along some social
cleavage—class, ethnicity, family—and then re-running the aggregation rule with similar
effects, provided the classes or whatever are weighted appropriately. Likewise, a
representative congress would achieve a similar result. The relation between the systemic and
the basal properties is aggregative. An ancillary aggregation rule is needed to specify a
particular relation (which is also a method of formation in practice); rather than being
additive or multiplicative or averaged, this is Downs’ insight of the median voter.
Kenneth Waltz, likewise, seems to have gone out of his way to construct a system
property in the balance of power that meets the conditions for aggregativity. Waltz’s ancillary
aggregation rule is not of the same form as Downs’, but rather relies on a simple statistical
summary that counts the number of basal units whose power property exceeds a certain
indistinct quantity. Echoing Ashley’s critique of Waltz as reductionist, Wimsatt’s conditions
5
These conditions are adapted only moderately from Wimsatt, 1997: S376.
Milner, 1997.
7
Moravscik
8
Decision rules for institutions are well-represented here for good reason: they are often explicitly
aggregation rules.
6
apply reasonably well: Waltz’s states are interchangeable, commutative, and resistant to
changes from decomposition (provided that the units themselves remain undecomposed).9
Social theories predicated on aggregative systemic properties are elegant and
exhilarating, but the defects are well understood. In constructing elegant and rigorous
theories, aggregative models are by definition bound to assert a simple aggregation rule. In
many social systems, this is not appropriate. Institutional arrangements can prevent the direct
application of an aggregation rule, as when a popular bill gets stuck in committee. Likewise,
all models that rely on some kind of path dependence or contingent construction transcend
aggregativity. Pierson follows Margaret Levi in defining path dependence the increasing
returns that a set of institutions faces as time progresses,10 but path dependency can also be
usefully thought of as a failure of condition RA, of an inability to maintain systemic
invariance under decomposition and reaggregation. The claim here, as with the transistors
earlier, is that the sequencing of composition matters,11 which produces critical junctures
amenable to agential choice or variable external conditions that are unlikely to be replicated
precisely under any reasonably complex social system.
§2.3: Attributes. We can expect social aggregates to exhibit distinctive behaviors that should
be useful both for identifying a composite as governed by a certain combination type and for
extrapolating predictions regarding that phenomenon. IS requires that an aggregate be
agnostic to most distinctive properties of its units apart from the most pertinent. QS means
that the size of a population should still be defined by an instance of that composite. RA may
be thought of theoretically (as it is above), or, perhaps, practically: RA essentially does away
with most path-dependency and external-interference arguments for a class of composites.
Two social systems of with identical populations, then, will produce the same aggregate,
even if they have mature in different environments. Under this condition, a revolution that
does not alter the values of some pertinent basal property will necessarily yield a country
with the same ex-ante aggregate property. CI reemphasizes the impossibility of agential
influence and path-dependence in composing aggregates. P suggests that the composite
should update dynamically: a change in the basal properties should rerun the generative
function and produce a different value for the aggregate.
While most political systems will fail condition RA, failures of others of the
conditions are also possible, even likely. The more seriously that a model takes agency
(relative to structure), the more likely that model is to fail condition IS, in that they take into
account not just the quantity of some basal property but also the powers, capacities, and other
features of that unit. Meeting the CI condition of linearity is perhaps still more difficult for
any political system: applying inhibitions and cooperation in the construction of systemic
properties might itself make a good definition of politics itself.
In short, theories that rely on aggregate properties are always parsimonious and
contentious endeavors, often propagated on rationalist assumptions. Because most political
systems are thought to be sensitive to internal organization, sequences, the character of units,
Condition CI may not be met by Waltz’s Theory of International Politics, for reasons discussed
immediately below.
It is interesting that these are the two cases that came most easily to mind in trying to demonstrate
social aggregativity. Wimsatt had suggested that it is only those basic physical processes for which we have
compositions laws that are likely to meet work as aggregates. If there are analogies to basic physical
properties in the social sciences, they are surely power and preferences.
10
Pierson, 2001
11
Pierson, 2000
9
external conditions, or combination processes, some looser standard of combination is
usually necessary for explanation.
§3: The Supervenience Relations.
The notion of supervenience was developed to correct the undesirable features of
reductionism while still allowing physicalist explanations. The paradigmatic case is in the
philosophy of mind, in which it is commonly held that mental states supervene on brain
states—which is to say that there can be no change in the former without a change in the
latter. This is intended to preserve the primacy of the physical without making the higherlevel property reducible to it.
Jaegwon Kim distinguishes between weak and strong supervenience in a way that is
particularly productive for thinking about social supervenience. Except where otherwise
noted, his definitions are the ones used below. Where A and B are sets of properties and x is
some entity,
(2) ‘If A weakly supervenes on B, then for every F in A there is a property G in B such
that (x)[G(x)F(x)].’12
Put differently: indiscernibility in A entails B-indiscernibility.13 In practice what this means is
that there can be no change in A properties without a change in B properties. The appeal for
philosophers of mind is that supervenience can be used to preserve the primacy of the
physical without holding that mental states are simply reducible to neuronal configuration
(they are clearly different in kind, subject to different descriptions, influences, and so on). It
has another effect as well: if a set of properties (A) is supervenient upon another, it is useless
to speculate about autonomous A-laws in a vocabulary unique to A because the values of A
properties cannot differ without differences in B properties; accordingly, if A weakly
supervenes on B, explanations about A require B-laws.14 Because they are different in kind, it
is often helpful to talk about A properties in A-terms, but this is only an heuristic
convenience; a supervenient vocabulary is not the proper expression of a nomological or
logical relation.
§3.2: Supervenience rules.
Mainly because of these desirable qualities, the concept of
supervenience represents the orthodoxy for many philosophical accounts of inter-level
relation.15 But rather than following most philosophers in accepting that supervenience
constitutes a sufficient explanation of relation, I want to argue that supervenience in itself is
This last part is read: ‘For every x, x having G entails x having F.’
Kim, 1993: 58 has shown that this definition is equivalent to the following, which might be more
intuitive: ‘A weakly supervenes on B if and only if necessarily for any x an y if x and y share all properties
in B then x and y share all properties in A.’ Kim, 1993: 58
14
Sawyer, XXX
Note that this relationship is not necessarily symmetrical, in the sense that though there can be no
change in A without a change in B, this does not entail that an A-state necessarily entails some specific Bstate. This is the multiple realizability condition, which holds that multiple B-states can perhaps produce
equivalent A-states.
15
Humphreys notes antagonistically—but I think correctly—that supervenience run into difficulty when
applied to properties at the same level. For our purposes, we need only consider the conventional view of
supervenience as inter-level relations.
12
13
inadequate for the purposes of this paper.16 As with aggregation in itself, supervenience
constitutes a general form for the instantiation of a higher-level property but no specific
relation between basal and supervenient properties. Accordingly, this general class of
relations must be supplemented by ancillary rules of combination to explain the relations
between the types of property. To see this, consider again the example from philosophy of
mind: it might very well be that metal states supervene on physical states, but that offers us
very little in the way of explaining mental states. Simply asserting supervenience does not
tell us how physical properties combine to produce a mental state—or even why there is a
difference in kind between the sub- and supervenient properties. The answer certainly falls
well beyond our body of scientific knowledge and so its omission in philosophical arguments
can hardly be resented; but because we understand some social supervenient relations better
than our mental states—and it is not often social scientists get to say this—it will be
important to recognize that there is an omitted argument.
Supervenience, then, specifies a family of complete relations that can be usefully
considered as distinct from aggregative and emergent ones. A satisfactory supervenience rule
will give some account of the dependency of supervenient i+1st level properties on basal ilevel ones to explain (a.), why the former depends on the latter; and, by implication, (b.), how
changes in basal properties produce changes in supervenient ones. These sound like stringent
conditions, but in practice this is social science’s day-to-day work of trying to move beyond
correlation to identify explanatory causal mechanisms.17 In this case, the mechanisms are
mereological—between the whole and its parts—inter-level, or logical dependency ones. In
other words, supervenience rules are ways of explaining constitutive relations between kinds.
I regret that I am not yet able to provide a complete overview of supervenience rules.
Consider, however, two basic possibilities. A very basic supervenience rule would be a
congruence-dependency relation that is supplemented by necessary causal processes; in this
case, we would say that the higher order property nomologically supervenes on its basal
properties. An example might be the bargain that, due to deep socialization about basic
values, a polity’s foreign relations descends from the same values as its domestic politics.18
In this example, a state’s foreign policy values are congruently supervenient.
A slightly more complex supervenient rule would depend on similarly strict causal
relations that nomologically produce a different higher-order property. By way of example,
consider one of the most interesting recent sets of supervenience arguments—those of social
network analysis.19 The method can be deployed for countless purposes, but all rely on
building a schematic of interactions (ties) between social agents (nodes). Based on the
patterns of these networks, certain results are predictable. Montgomery20 used the network
patterns of nuclear proliferation rings to give certain recommendations about inhibiting their
capacities; Goddard21 explains how legitimation claims resonate through and reconfigure
social networks to determine whether territorial disputes become intractable; Hafner-Burton
and Montgomery22 show how states embedded in disconnected network structures are more
prone to conflict, even controlling for other properties of those states.
16
Humphreys 1997a notes this much.
See George & Bennett,
18
Lumsdaine, 1993 might be a good example, as are neoconservative arguments about American foreign
policy.
19
The international theoretic foundations were laid in Jackson & Nexon. General overviews for IR are
Hafner-Burton, Kahler, & Montgomery, 2009 and Goddard (forthcoming).
20
Montgomery, 2005.
21
Goddard, 2006
22
Hafner-Burton and Montgomery, 2006.
17
In each of these cases, the social network structure generates systemic properties (a
star network, a polarized coalition, a clique) that supervene on the properties of their
constituents (namely, their measures of centrality). There can be no change in the network
structure without some change in the centrality measures of their components. However,
though the network is directly dependent on basal properties, it is still not right to say that it
is ‘nothing but’ the properties of its constituent units; to make sense of network, scholars
have needed to formulate distinctive laws at the supervenient level, and anyway networks can
possess properties that their basal units cannot (like, well, a network structure). This is a
tentative example of constitutive supervenience: the relations between basal properties just
count as a higher order property.
Again off the top of my head, the most plausible cases for political supervenience are:
a national perception; an organization; a war; a congress; a coalition government.
§3.3: Attributes. On the definitions outlined above, supervenient entities or properties will
often look to social scientists like simplifying heuristics: all that is really happening is that
individual entities interact in some recognizable fashion; it is just easier to talk about them
using by certain higher-level placeholders. Yet the heuristic is not quite a subjective
description: there is something ontologically irreducible about a war or an organization; they
are different in kind from their basal units, and attempts to do away with the ‘placeholders’
and formulate theories by reference to their components stubbornly refuse to capture the
phenomena whole.
Still, supervenient phenomena do not exercise causal powers independent of the
powers of the basal entities that constitute them. Because they do not exercise independent
causal powers, supervenients have no chance to exercise downward influence to discipline
their constituents and so resist reconstitution or change. Change in the basal properties
logically or nomologically entails a change in supervenient properties.23 Accordingly,
decomposition or change of supervenient entities will not produce independent influences:
patterns in the behavior of the basal entities will change with the changes in their properties,
but change in the supervenient entity will not add any influence.
§4: Emergence
Where supervenient composites remain inherently and definitionally bound to their
constituent parts, some composites seem to float more freely. Entities are emergent when
they exhibit a metaphysical autonomy relative to their basal entities—they are, in some sense,
more than the sum of their parts.24
Mark Bedau’s work has been instrumental in describing this concept in the natural
world. For Bedau, highly complex systems exhibit weakly emergent properties when they are
not deducible from initial basal properties except through simulation. Some cellular automata
or agent-based models end up exhibiting highly stable features despite numerous iterations of
unsystematic behavior. This is a powerful concept because it preserves causal
fundamentalism, the view that the causal powers of macro entities are determined by the
causal powers of constituent, units while also allowing us to talk about nomological relations
between composites nonreductively. Wolfram and others have posited that such a relation
23
Which type of entailment depends on which type of supervenience, a set of distinctions I have neglected
to discuss here for fear of complicating an already complicated paper unduly.
24
The definitive source is Bedau & Humphreys, (2008).
might condition many natural systems, and so many social scientists will likely find this of
great use. However, it does not meet our standards outlined at the outset: it is possible that
weak emergence is a purely epistemological position, conditional on the current state of
scientific knowledge. There may be no necessary difference between macrostates that can be
determined by simulation and those that cannot; the weak emergence of some entities and
properties may depend on the strength of our reductive explanations, and so it may not be an
ontological difference.
§4.2: The alternative, strong emergence has a long pedigree stretching back to and before
Mill, and rests on four basic intuitions: (a.) some entities are not explicable or predictable
even with complete knowledge of their constituent parts; (b.) some composite entities exert
novel properties that are not logically attributable to its constituent parts; (c.) some composite
entities exert novel causal powers that are not reducible to those of their parts; and (d.) some
composites exert downward causal force on their constituent entities.25 Notice that the first
condition is compatible with weak emergence, while the latter two are not. Bedau claims that
strongly emergent causal powers do not manifest in nature; this can safely be put aside here,
though, because the social world can give far more plausible examples. Because we will
surely blur the definitions later for utility’s sake, we will adopt the most stringent here, which
can satisfy all three properties.
Paul Humphreys’ emergence-as-fusion concept gives us the ontological form we
need. The notation that originally illustrated that concept is, I think, unnecessarily
complicated.26 Alternatively, I see no difficulty in representing the concept as follows.
Remembering that A represents some A-type property of some i-level entity (p, q,…z)—
(3)
or
(3’)
27
where Ei+1 meets the requirements (b.-d.) above of novelty, and causal power;
cease to exist as instantiations in the same form. Here, entities p, q,…z surrender
the values of their A properties to some emergent property E concerned with A properties.
The value of a fusive emergence is that it allows the emergent property a fuller
autonomy from its constituent properties. This is an ontological operation that produces the
epistemological result that Bedau attributes to weakly emergent entities: given the values of
the basal properties
, we cannot predict the character, value, or causal powers of
25
Kim: 145 calls condition (d.) reflexive downward causation exerts effects on its own micro-constituents
and (c.) nonreflexive downward causation.
26
Humphreys, 1997 employed the form
where
P is the mth i-th level property held by x, instantiated at time l, and so on. * is meant to represent the fusive
operation. While it might very well under some circumstances help to differentiate between two different
entities holding both i and j-level properties, since this is not a practicable equation, I see no use in
complicating the issue unduly. Furthermore, this form is little help to those trying to grasp a fusive process,
as social scientists must do, rather than an abstract operation.
27
Read: every emergent property E is the product of some fusion operation of properties at the lower level.
The distinction between 3 and 3’ is that this could happen between properties of different types within the
same entity or, as is more likely in social settings, properties of different types among many distinct (but
obviously related) individuals.
Ei+1 before the operation takes place; even ex-post, we can only discuss these emergent
properties with detailed knowledge of a complex and possibly noncausal fusion operation
(fus.). The novelty conditions mark an ontological difference: because the emergent entity
can possess properties and exert causal powers that its constituent parts could not, Ei+1’s
novelty cannot simply be result from deficient modeling of the situation. In fact, this is how
we determine ontological difference: Ei+1 cannot just be some collection of specific A
properties because it is capable of qualitatively different behavior.
As Humphreys makes clear, fus. is not simply a logical or mathematical function but
some real interaction.28 The fus. process itself has one other unique attribute relative to the
two combinatorial forms discussed previously: because emergence is to be contrasted against
any type of supervenience relation, fus. cannot connote a synchronic process or a simple
adjustment in Ei+1 (which would be simply saying that no E change could occur without a
change in A properties, provided other external influences were fixed). The fact that entities
p, q,…z have surrendered autonomy over their A and B properties, makes this true for two
reasons: first, something must trigger a new fusive process to reconstitute, or reform, or
redefine, Ei+1. Where aggregates were pliable (P), emergents are emphatically not. Second,
because emergent entities can have downward causal effects on the fused properties, it must,
by extension, have downward causal effects on the entities that formerly possessed these
properties. Because this is so, to say that ‘no E change could occur without a change of A
properties’ obscures the relation if we do not account for the fact that Ei+1 might well
determine the values of A properties, or determine whether or not A properties are
instantiated at all. Ei+1 is not, therefore, strictly dependent on i-level phenomena once
instantiated. E persists until fus.‘produces E’.
Additionally, note that one of Ei+1’s novel behaviors is that the fusive process allows
for lateral causation on level i+1, or causal influence from level i+2. Because a fused entity
gains autonomy from, and influence over, its basal properties, an Ei+1 change need not
necessarily result from the powers of i-level phenomena. In other words, there can be a
change in Ei+1 without a change in any Ai.
Finally, note that under both (3) and (3’) allows for two concepts of emergence. Thus
far we have been implicitly discussing a mereological emergence in which the A properties
from which Ei+1 will emerge belong to basal entities that will become parts of the emergent
whole E in some form. This mereological emergence might be something like what
descendents of Hobbesian social contract traditions have in mind when accounting for
sovereignty as produced by the ascent of the governed. But notice that there is nothing in
either definition that requires entities p-z to remain within the confines of E once constructed:
in other words, a relational emergence could account for social definitions of sovereignty29
by which S’s sovereignty emerges from some properties of entities that cannot be called part
of the emergent entity S after its having emerged.
§4.3: Social emergence.30. Because of all this, our expectations of emergent phenomena are
straightforward: we expect emergents to be durable features of the world, rarely always
pliable to the whims of their constituent parts, and often powerful entities in their own right.
Because emergent laws cannot be expressed in reductive vocabulary, they will demand their
own literature or sub-discipline to deal with perhaps unique or counter-intuitive behavior.
28
Humphreys, 1997: 10. It was physical for Humphreys, but could just as easily be a real social
interaction.
29
Wendt, 1994 details some mechanisms by which this occurs.
30
My spring break could use summa that right about now.
Because emergent entities result from a discrete, diachronic interaction of the relevant
basal properties, we should expect that the inauguration of an emergent entity occurs by
means of a tipping point model, or something like it.31
Colin Wight32 and I33 have both argued that for theoretical reasons, instances of the
latter half of the agent-structure problematique should demonstrate emergent properties or
powers. As the forgoing discussion of aggregation and supervenience has demonstrated, the
term ‘social structure’ is often not used in this way. Still, there is something intuitive about
the association: for how else could social structures depend on the ideas or properties of their
agents yet still exert influence over them? Aggregate structures (like Waltz’s) feel more like
summary statistics than autonomous social structures. Accordingly, many—if not most—
emergents will exhibit some characteristics of social structures, or serve as structures to some
agents.
At first blush, there appears to be one problem with adopting an ontological and
fusive emergence for use in social settings: in Humphreys’ terms, emergence occurs when the
basal entities surrender their former identity to the new, fused entity. But in dealing with
cases of political emergence, this seems implausible: though our actions help to instantiate a
state, we do not cease to exist. But this is not quite the entirety of the matter. For example,
Humphreys writes that the emergent-basal properties, ‘no longer exist as separate entities and
they do not have all of their i-level causal powers available for use at the (i+1)st level. Some
of them, so to speak, have been ‘used up’ in forming the fused property instance.’34 This is
where Humphreys’ convoluted notation becomes valuable—because the emergent
base
distinguishes the i-level property instance
from the entity holding it, .
In other words, the entity does not cease to exist, but it does cease to hold the same
properties, which have been delegated or altered by the process of emergence. This is the
same function that allows a constitutive relation to have its proposed effects: when studentteacher relationship, for example, is abrogated, neither ceases to exist as a physical entity but
both cease to exist as property instantiations (the ‘student’ no longer exists qua student).35
And, as Wendt has argued, this is exactly the kind of political relationship we often see in
practice!
§4.4: Marks of social emergence.
Decomposition of fused emergent properties is a
difficult topic about which I think little can be said in the abstract. Consider the role of
properties that had fused to produce a composite: can these properties simply revert back to
their original basal entities or have they been changed by the act of contribution to a
composite such that they can no longer recovered in any recognizable state. There is no
logical reason to think that either is impossible simply given the form of emergence.
Once again, the fus. operation is unacceptably broad without further specification;
some type of emergence rules are needed to explain the relation between basal and emergent
properties.
One emergent rule involves thresholds of property accumulation. While an
accumulation of some simple properties do not produce aggregate properties that are different
in kind from their bases, accumulating other properties above certain thresholds creates the
31
Bedau and Humphreys, 2008: 2.
Wight, 2006.
33
Mount, 2008.
34
Humphreys, 1997: 10.
35
This analogy is merely illustrative; I am not arguing that emergent relations are necessarily constitutive
ones.
32
possibility for phase transitions. For example, an accumulation of quanta or electrons produce
macrostates that are no different in kind—they are simply more light or more electric current;
however, all molecules inevitably pass some structural threshold to form some emergent
macrostate simply by virtue of there being many of them. In this case, emergence is not some
feature of the fus. operation specifically (which in this case involves passing a certain
threshold) so much as features of the basal entities themselves.
While molecules form emergent properties by accumulation across thresholds,
precisely which properties they form is dependent on their forming some specific structure.
Ions that fail to form a crystalline structure may have passed a threshold that allows them to
possess the properties characteristic of macroscopic entities, but they may remain amorphous
liquids if they do not form salts.
Again, off the top of my head, the most compelling social emergentist arguments
could be made for: a state; a norm; a culture; a political party.
While I hope the suggested classifications I have made could help clarify theory
development for scholars studying the political phenomena in question, the real utility of this
framework will be in contesting different classifications of certain phenomena. I turn now to
briefly sketching out how one of these debates might play out: how should we think about a
state?
§5: The state as composite.
Constituent properties may or may not be properties of entities that are internal to the entity
exhibiting the combined property. Inter-national institutions like sovereignty are properties of
composite entities that are not necessarily—or not entirely—composite properties.
§5.1. Aggregated states
As they are in philosophy and the natural sciences, models of
aggregation are generally unfashionable. For reasons described above, too often aggregate
models do not properly describe emergent properties, even when they fail to meet their own
rigorous standards.
For these reasons, it is unsurprisingly difficult to find aggregate models of state
sovereignty in the contemporary literature. Various political scientists, though, have given
theories that cover parts of what we normally think of as sovereignty. Many of the
interlocutors of the ‘bringing the state back in’ volume, as well as Krasner’s literature review
seem to have something like a material aggregate in mind in which the state possesses few
autonomous properties or powers apart from the interest groups or individuals that comprise
it. Some idealized rationalist models concerned with the influence of interest groups on
international economic policy may approximate this limit.36 Likewise, models of the
American congress that suggest that the body is just a simple expression of the interests of
constituents, lobbyists or interest groups come close. Graham Allison’s Model I, his unitary
model of foreign policy might also meet aggregativity standards under certain specifications.
A fully aggregate model of sovereignty would be a slightly odd bird, but not totally
unintuitive, if posed as something like the following. State sovereignty is a product of
national autonomy, conceived of negatively: states are sovereign when they are free from
external interference. The states that are most likely to be autonomous in this sense are those
that are most powerful, and what matters is not military or economic power thought of
36
Milner, 1997.
narrowly, but the collective material power of a polity. If power in turn is a function of the
properties of the constituents of that polity (their wealth, military virtue or prowess,
possessions, and so on), this odd sort of sovereignty might meet aggregativity standards.
Note that aggregated states are not necessarily material formations. In fact, there is
another logically coherent possibility: models of sovereignty predicated on allegiance,
nationalism, or acceptance of proffered legitimation might well be aggregate models if it is
supposed that some distribution of these properties simply results in sovereignty. It may not
matter, in other words, who precisely holds these properties, what other properties those
constituents possess, or how they organize themselves politically; some balance of
identification might itself constitute a sovereign.
§5.2. Supervening states.
While it may seem in some ways an intermediate, least stable,
and poorly-defined category, most political science takes place under the rubric of
supervenience. This pattern holds across theorists of widely disparate ontological and
epistemological commitments. Consider the similarities in the otherwise dissimilar concepts
of the higher-level property of sovereignty of Spruyt and Reus-Smit.
While Spruyt’s sovereignty results from a mostly material process, Reus-Smit’s is the
product of deep ideational movements. Sovereignty for Reus-Smit, is essentially an empty
category, given meaning and function by domestic understandings of the moral purpose of
the state. ‘The legitimacy of the sovereign state rests on values other than the principle of
sovereignty.’37 For example, modern European sovereignty was produced by an embedded
understanding of politics. Jean Bodin expressed this view of the state as an organism,
reminiscent of the family, with the King as its father. Individual rights had scant place here,
and the King’s authority was granted by god.38 The moral purpose of the state was seen to be
the ‘preservation of a divinely ordained, rigidly hierarchical social order.’39 Fundamental
international institutions were an extension of this perspective: sovereignty in absolutist
Europe was not an acknowledgement of equality but a product of Kings vying to be the ‘most
Christian.’40 This extension produced a state system characterized by natural international
law and “old diplomacy.”
Characteristically of political science, it is not quite clear how exactly this extension
occurs, and how it comes to produce the higher-order property sovereignty. While Reus-Smit
deals precisely with the types of inter-level relations discussed above, his diagram of the
relation shows only an arrow pointing upward.41 The fact of supervenience is neatly
established: there can be no change in fundamental institutions without a change in basic
constitutional structures; the former supervenes on the latter. Indeed, this is the most glaring
difficulty with the book: it fails to specify a supervenience rule that would explain how a
change in basal property produces a change in the supervening one. Instead, Reus-Smit gives
us ad hoc explanations for each case: because international relations are different from
domestic politics in kind, the result cannot be congruent; because the domestic politics are
not ‘parts’ of international relations, this cannot be a mereological supervenience. Reus-Smit
uses the terms ‘link,’ ‘provide the justificatory foundations for,’ and hastily sketches in a
37
Reus-Smit, 159.
Ibid, 97-8.
39
Ibid, 120.
40
Ibid, 103.
41
Ibid, 7.
38
communicative process by which fundamental institutions come into play—but clearly there
is a lot of crucial space here gone unspecified.
§5.3. Emergent states.
In his canonical ‘reflections on the history of European statemaking,’ Charles Tilly takes up the same subject, and phrases it in precisely these terms. The
structure of European states could only be fully explained with comparison to those forms of
state organization which failed. All of the options, in Europe, shared similar permissive
conditions: but what would allow states to (1) survive [after 1500] as a distinct unit; (2)
undergo territorial consolidation, centralization…; (3) become the nuclear of a national
state?’ In other words, the question was precisely one of explaining certain emergent
properties: ‘What features of a population would have permitted us to make the same kinds
of predictions about the political units claiming jurisdiction over it?’42
When we recall Tilly’s slogan ‘war made the state and the state made war,’ it would
be easy to attribute the formation of national states to the process of war-making and the
decisions to go to war. In fact, this is only partly right. The explanation for the emergent
property sovereignty relies on certain properties of the basal individuals: the availability of
resources, geographical protection, political entrepreneurship, homogeneity, strong coalitions
of central power.43 In those polities where these properties were absent, the fusive
interaction—war-making—that produced the emergent capabilities of a state could not have
occurred.
It is the fusive process war-making that for Tilly pushed certain European political
entities over the capabilities threshold to emergent statehood. Once crossed, the state could
exercise novel causal powers, and exhibit novel properties, like specialized organization,
territorial autonomy, centralization, and a monopoly over the use of force.44
While we have above considered both aggregate and supervenient forms of normative
sovereignty, we can also certainly conceive of an emergent normative sovereignty.
Habermasian communicative action theories might meet the standards of a fusive interaction
and the resulting national entity would probably exhibit novel emergent properties. Likewise,
we could think of a poststructuralist sovereignty that occurs contingently but puts in place a
co-constitutive relation that conditions its individual constituents who in turn reproduce the
emergent sovereignty through their acquiescence. As in any case of emergence, the key
indicator is the fusion operation must be sufficiently complex and durable to produce a
genuinely novel result.
§5.4: Where does this get us? The utility of classifying models of something like
sovereignty lies in its heuristic ability to illuminate logical inconsistencies in ontological
assumptions. How, for example, do we get emergent powers from a combinatorial process
that looks supervenient? Thinking of things in terms of types of inter-level relation also
allows us to deploy whole bundles of implications intact rather than having to induce them de
novo for each new theory.
Directly above, we did not find any glaring inconsistencies with respect to state
sovereignty, but consider the case of Hendrik Spruyt. We might ask Spruyt precisely the
question outlined above: his theory primarily on the choice to ally with burghers, which
42
Tilly, 40.
Ibid.
44
Ibid, 27.
43
would produce a supervenient state; however, Spruyt’s states clearly possess emergent
properties which he attempts to account for through other mechanisms. It is, in other words, a
sort of hybrid explanation. Attempting to append one combinatorial process to another in
successive stages can have two possible outcomes. The first is that Spruyt sufficiently
differentiates the supervenient process from the emergent: certain social coalitions produce a
temporary, unstable, supervenient state which then draws on a fusive process presumably
relating to resource mobilization or international recognition (though this is not totally clear).
If he achieves this differentiation properly, Spruyt begs the following ontological conundrum:
namely, how can a i+1st level supervenient entity undertake a fusive operation and produce
an emergent at the same level? At best, this seems dubious. On the other hand, if Spruyt fails
to distinguish his two combinatorial processes, his theory is logically incoherent.
By way of illustration, consider that Spruyt originally suggests that ‘a change in the
constitutive units of the system is only likely to occur after a broad exogenous change, or an
environmental shock, if you will. Such an exogenous change will lead to political and social
realignments.’45 This is a classic example of the necessity of a downward causation argument
characteristic of a supervenience relation: because a change in a supervenient property cannot
occur without a basal change, an external process had to influence those basal properties
directly, which then transmitted the change upward to the supervenient entity, the state. But
at some point presumably Spruyt’s states could no longer be altered radically through foreign
influence on domestic social structures; certainly by the eighteenth century, most changes to
social coalitions did not produce radically new state structures. The state itself must have
come to possess autonomy from its basal entities, or downward causal power itself on the
social patterns of its constituents. Either is plausible, but either requires an emergent state.
When did this transition happen, and how?
§6: Conclusion
Return to the problem posed at the outset: why do the collisions of states do violence
to their citizens while the collisions of galaxies remain peaceful? The answer is that a galaxy
supervenes on its component stars. Because a galaxy possesses no autonomy relative to its
stars, it posses no downward causal power over them.46 The lack of this causal power also
seems to suggest a lack of a causal pathway: when galaxies collide, they are unable to
transmit violence downward to the units and because the supervening structures are not
material kinds but gravitational ones, no physical violence is done in the act of collision.
By contrast, what we know of war counts as a mark in favor of thinking of states as
emergent. When states go to war, it is not states that bear the costs per se, but their citizens.
People die, go hungry, mourn—most states persist, even after losing in war. States seem to
possess this downward causal pathway by which the collisions of states can transmit violence
to their constituents. It is just this sort of consideration that I had in mind when I noted above
that the main problem of political science is to grasp these relations of combination. Without
doing so, we lose sight of how to provide justice for individuals in war, capabilities for
humans in economic development, freedom for citizens in designing institutions.
I do not think this reflection settles the question conclusively. There are other logical
possibilities for thinking of states, and indeed we have seen some of them above. I hope I
45
46
Spruyt, 22.
The gravitational influences that produce the galaxy structure are really the influences of other stars.
have argued sufficiently well to have suggested the necessity of thinking systematically about
the constitutive relations between kinds and inter-level relation more generally.
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