Toward a Sociology of the period of the Great Acceleration: An Interview with Randall Collins.
Randall Collins is the Dorothy Swaine Thomas Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a leading contemporary social theorist whose areas of expertise are the macro-historical sociology; micro-sociology; the sociology of intellectuals; the sociology of violence. His books include Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory, The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change, and Conflict Sociology: A Sociological Classic Updated.
Alexandre Rigal is a postdoctoral researcher in Sociology at the University of Lyon. His articles include “The Globalization of an Interaction Ritual Chain: ‘Clapping for Carers’ During the Conflict Against COVID-19”(with D. Joseph-Goteiner).
Keywords: 20th Century; Capitalism; Energy; Great Acceleration; Interaction Ritual; Macro Sociology; Social Movements; War
Abstract
In this interview, Randall Collins discusses various aspects of the period at the origin of climate change (1950 to the present), which climate scientists call the Great Acceleration. The interview provides sociologists with a Durkheimian-Weberian understanding of the economic, social, and cultural causes of climate change. The interview focuses on the relationship between material and social energies, with Collins basing his overall argument on the dynamics of capitalism. After WWII, leading capitalist economies had less need for manual labour and were wealthy enough to expand mass education. The universities became the material bases for social mobilizations leading to the sexual revolution and informalization of demeanor. Conflict created by the Cold War pushed dynamics of cultural and material energy to the global stage. This suggests that people from the 20th century were more mobilized and therefore more energized than ever before. Collins envisions future possibilities in this state of heightened energy.
Introduction from Alexandre Rigal
As climate scientists discover human behaviours at the source of climate change, they address complex challenges to sociologists. On widely diffused graphs, Will Steffen and his team have described the “Great Acceleration”, which consist in the convergence of surface temperature, ocean acidification, marine fish capture, domesticated land, etc. and exponential growth of global population, real global GDP, global primary energy use, world transportation, global telecommunications, international tourism, etc. (Steffen et al. 2015:4). Yet, if climate scientists describe these biophysical and economic trends as relevant indicators of change, they remain silent regarding the sociological origins and mechanisms which underpin them. They also avoid connecting the current crisis to the cultural trends spanning the 1950s to today, such as the sexual revolution, the expansion of universities, and the informalization of demeanor. In the following interview with Randall Collins, we explore possible explanations of the economic, social, and cultural trends of the Great Acceleration.
Sociologists have already tackled the issue of climate change, especially in the UK — e.g., the theory of practice (Shove 2010) and mobility studies (e.g., Urry 2011) — . Still, the complex problems created by climate change are not being addressed by most of the disciplines’ major theories — for one exception in this journal, see the use of Elias’ theory by Rohloff, 2011 — . The British Sociology Association has awarded the Philip Abrams Memorial Prize to only one book dealing with ecology (Martell 1994). No work dealing with climate change or related topics has received the Distinguished Scholarly Book Award of the American Sociological Association. If climate change isn’t a core disciplinary concern, or a high status pursuit, that will likely change (see Klinenberg, Araos, and Koslov 2020).
The following interview illustrates that sociologists, beyond their various specialisations and theoretical preferences, share the necessary resources to deal with climate change. The interview with Randall Collins explores notably the Weberian and Durkheimian-Goffmanian traditions for explaining capitalism and social movements. The aim is to cross-fertilise the problem of the Great Acceleration, and climate change, with sociology. Thus we can start theorising causes of the Great Acceleration already described by climate scientists. Consequently, the interview is an esquisse of a research method. It opens the field to new questions and hypotheses. Despite his long-time involvement in many sociological fields, Collins told me in an email exchange that the interview “raised issues [he] had not thought about before.” I hope that the reader will enjoy the same experience.
Interview with Randall Collins
Alexandre Rigal: The Great Acceleration began soon after your birth in 1941. Are your life experiences and academic trajectory somehow connected with this historical pattern of growth?
Randall Collins: My father was in Germany in 1945 with the US Army and stayed as a diplomat. My earliest memories are from 1946, crossing the Atlantic in a former troop-ship and arriving at bombed-out Berlin in a military plane. We lived in Moscow when the Korean War broke out; posts in West-zone Germany, Washington, and Latin America. It was the era of maximal US prestige and hegemony, of the largest wealth gap from the rest of the world. American cars and styles permeated rapidly-recovering Europe, at least for a few decades. Later I learned it was a cycle of capitalist world-system hegemony; World War II having destroyed the previous competitors, Britain and Germany. I learned geopolitics early by living in the midst of it.
Also fortuitous in my career was the massive expansion of university education; a worldwide trend, but led quantitatively by the US — the first to make secondary schooling near-universal for the youth cohort; then in the 60s beginning the same process for universities. In Europe, France and Italy led a similar expansion. It became the material base for the radical student movements of that time. It was also a jump in quality for American universities, receiving the outflow of the German academic world. In the early 20th century, Americans went to Germany where the research university had been invented — as my father had done in 1930; so had my Harvard professor of the early 60s, Talcott Parsons, who had sojourned in Europe in the 1920s and imported Weber and Durkheim to America. In graduate school, my Berkeley professors included Weber expert Reinhard Bendix; and veteran Marxist Leo Lowenthal, who had fought in the Spartacist uprising in 1919 — a combination of academic capital that produced a left-Weberian sociology in my generation. Another professor was Erving Goffman, who was creating a Durkheimian micro-interactionism launched by his sojourns with British social anthropologists, importing French sociology via Britain and Canada. By the time I left Berkeley in the year of uprisings 1968, I had roughly the same Marx-Weber-Durkheim ingredients that Pierre Bourdieu was shaping into his sociology of fields of power, except with more emphasis on historical geopolitics.
AR: You have long been interested in the cultural trends beginning in 1950. Most famously, you proved the existence of credential inflation and explained its mechanisms (1979/2019). You also studied the informalization of demeanour and deference and hypothesised the rise of new forms of stratification in daily life (2014). Moreover, you explored the dynamics of sexual markets and the roles of various sexual revolutions (2015), among other cultural trends. Can you draw a general pattern, even if hypothetical, based on the several cultural trends you exposed?
RC: At the time, the big expansion of schooling was interpreted as a functionalist need for technical skills in a modern economy. But Weber regarded the emphasis on diplomas — which German states had pioneered as they built simultaneously the modern university and state bureaucracy — as monopolising high-status positions. I also knew that during the late mediaeval Chinese dynasties, scholars sat for an expanding sequence of examinations into their 30s, an inflation of credentials (based not on tech skills but on writing classic poetry) as the numbers of competitors increased. My PhD research documented this for the US: before 1940, high school graduates were a small elite and a sufficient degree for management jobs; as high school became mass rather than elite, in the 1960s the same jobs now required a B.A; by the 1990s, an MBA. The sociological argument had been that mass schooling created social equality; but statistically it became clear that extending the length of schooling continued to give more credentials to the children of educated parents. In my 1979 book, I argued that equality would never be achieved along this path; better to decredentialize by banning credentials in hiring.
The sexual revolution was another long trend. Historically, families had arranged marriages for political alliances and property holdings. This became less important with the rise of the modern state and business corporation. The 1920s created a distinctive youth culture, dating and partying out of parents’ control, separating sex from marriage, although still a prelude to it. The 1960s had an even more rebellious youth movement; its figureheads were the hippies, living in free-love communes; in reality most followers of the “counter-culture” were weekend hippies getting stoned at rock concerts. The main effect on the family was the sudden rise of cohabitation among the unmarried — formerly associated with the lower class, but now considered avant-garde. It was socially accepted surprising quickly in the years around 1970, becoming a form of serial monogamy (free-love communes never lasted long), together with a sharply rising divorce rate. What was different from traditional marriage, other than the ceremony? The big difference was the rapid acceptance of illegitimate childbirth, formerly a big scandal. Legitimacy also meant property inheritance. But in the era of mass schooling and postponement of adult careers, middle-class students were less concerned with inheritance than sex. The revolutionary acceptance of illegitimacy (a term soon to be banned) started in Scandinavia, where welfare states supported unmarried mothers and their children, in an atmosphere where sexuality became much more open. The 1970s extended the sexual revolution to mass circulation photo magazines like Playboy, the end of censorship in films and literature, and of taboos on speech once considered obscene. The following decades produced an attention-grabbing series of homosexual movements, including a radical branch of feminism condemning heterosexuality. Throughout these movements from the 1960s onwards, the home base of sexual revolution has been the massive university population in the era of credential inflation.
A third aspect of these revolutions was informalization in clothing styles and demeanour. Historically personal appearance was a badge of class ranking. In the 1920s, women — traditionally more conservative in displaying class propriety — began to dress more like men, slimmer silhouette and shorter hair, flaunting liberated sexuality. In the 60s, hippies dressed outlandishly, and men wore their hair long, erasing some male/female boundaries. A series of weird clothing fads followed, but the main result, by the 1980s, was that it became more prestigeful to wear casual clothes, especially sports uniforms, T-shirts with emblems, and blue jeans. In the 1990s, led by the high-tech industries and the Internet, titles and polite forms of address gave way to calling everyone by their first name or a nickname. Men in the professional/management class discarded suits and neckties; prestige shifted to looking like one was at leisure, even at work. Young women flaunted torn clothes, “heroin chic,” although professional women turned to more conservative styles as they advanced in rank.
All three of these movements rebelled against traditional class respectability. Not to say that economic class stratification no longer exists, but it has become disguised; the upper-classes no longer displaying their superiority, while everyone else embraces a new form of stratification: the cool and hip, versus the straight and square. One could also say this is the triumph of the leisure/entertainment economy.
AR: Being a firm defender of the conflict tradition (2015), you demonstrated the role played by competition in socio-cultural processes. You also discussed a theory of capitalism based on Weber’s late work (1980). Based on your theoretical model of capitalism, can you help us see the connections between various forms of competition and contemporary capitalism?
RC: Is there a reason why credential inflation, sexual revolution, and informalization, occurred in a capitalist economy? The most immediate connection is that the leading capitalist economies in the 20th century had industrialised, and had less need for manual labour; and they became wealthy enough to expand mass education, first in secondary schooling, then in universities. As I mentioned, it wasn’t that modern technology needed a huge, highly-educated labour force (a modest number of scientists and engineers is enough); mass education is a luxury that rich societies can afford. Once there was a sizable youth cohort with years of freedom from work, this provided the troops for the sexual revolution; starting with the upper and upper-middle classes of the 1920s (in England and Germany as well as the US); and again with the informalization movement when credential inflation was keeping a large part of the population in school. It is not the “logic of capitalism” per se to have informalization, in-your-face sexuality, and mass education (since these did not exist in the earlier phases of capitalism); but these trends did provide new markets for more capitalist products — capitalism has no morality, it is willing to produce anything if it can be sold at a profit.
AR: The USSR was not a capitalist country. Yet it also participated in the Great Acceleration, with specific characteristics. According to what we know, if the USSR had won the Cold War, would the explosion of various socio-economic trends have stopped? In other words, how strong is the link between capitalism and the Great Acceleration?
RC: The USSR is an anomaly from these trends, but it was a society trying to imitate the capitalist West in economic development. The USSR created a mass educational system, in sheer numbers second only to the USA; but it restricted education largely to technical skills, and did not allow student-led cultural rebellion — instead of relying on education for political indoctrination and career channels into the privileged nomenklatura. The USSR collapsed in a period of “blue-jeans diplomacy,” envy of Western youth’s culture of rock-n-roll entertainment and sexual revolution. Communist styles were frozen in 1930s suits, ties and haircuts, a bourgeois look in the eyes of the youthful West. The Soviet states were successful in heavy industry but missed the phase of consumer products capitalism led by the US and Japan — the latter a centuries-old culture of aesthetics whose products swept the world in the 1980s. If the USSR had been able to extend its type of socialist planned economy to the entire world, the revolutions in personal life would not have happened. But history would not come to an end; just not the route we have seen in the West. Political and military causes drive social change too; a Russian (and Chinese) hegemony would continue to have geopolitical strains, and something further would happen.
AR: Some scientists set the start date of the Great Acceleration on Monday 16 July 1945, when the first atomic bomb detonated in New Mexico. The explosion emitted radioactive isotopes found in the atmosphere worldwide. The event is a symbol of the Great Acceleration. Yet, according to your work, it seems that wars and military organisations are more than symbols, but are in fact the leading causes of the shapes of states (see Collins 2015:Ch.5). What relations do you perceive between war, and especially the two world wars, and the growth of socio-economic trends?
RC: War was a central cause of social change in a particular period of history. This was the “military revolution” at the end of the European Middle Ages. The large number of feudal states winnowed down as some shifted to professional armies, provided by government with guns and artillery, expanding by conquering and absorbing each other. This made the state vastly more expensive, so that the successful states created a centralised tax system, staffed by bureaucrats rather than aristocratic families; penetrating into local households, enrolling the population as individuals on the rolls of the state, as soldiers, objects of education, and recipients of welfare. The military revolution was the platform on which the cultural revolutions of the 20th century were built. But by 1918 the destructive power of war had become so lethal, and so costly, that the further expansion of the warfare pathway to growth was perceived by most people as a dead end. This did not prevent the further destructiveness of World War II, and the prospect of destroying the world with nuclear weapons. War policy since then — at least among the big, well-armed states — has been deliberately limited, leaving the field to capitalist competition. It also favoured the USA, the least damaged by the world wars because of its geographical location.
Throughout history, the style of wars and diplomacy has shifted numerous times; periods of all-out wars to extermination have alternated with a diplomatic etiquette of wars with limited aims; and that has been the dominant style for the last 70 years. Geographically delimited proxy wars are not allowed to disturb capitalist markets. Whether this will continue in the era of cyberwar is a question not yet answered. Unlike previous periods of geopolitics, the biggest and wealthiest states are not automatically the most powerful in weaponry; cyberwar is relatively cheap (ironically, spread by the commercialism of the Internet), and is a weapon of the weak. Cyberwar cannot capture territory, but potentially it can wreck an advanced computerised economy.
AR: If we want to explain the Great Acceleration, we need to describe how a high number of people got enough energy to transform the whole Earth. Analysts often attribute this fact to the diffusion of new forms of material energy, like oil (Steffen et al. 2015:4). But based on your work, it seems that we can go further and answer the question: how did people find the social energy to produce the Great Acceleration (and consume a high amount of material energy)? Can we hypothesise that the quantity of emotional energy increased from the ’50s to today?
RC: Emotional energy is the result of successful interaction rituals, operating on the micro level: individuals who experience shared rhythms of voice and body, focusing their attention and creating intersubjectivity and feelings of membership. Looking at society as a distribution of individuals, there is an array of persons with high or low emotional energy; some have high levels of confidence, enthusiasm and initiative; others have failed interactions and feel passive and depressed. How many there are of each kind has not yet been counted. We can also look at a more macro-level, where we see social movements: chains of individuals in repeated and cascading interactions, focusing on their own brands of rituals and symbols of membership. Durkheim showed that such rituals have been at the centre of religions since tribal times; later the great historical religious movements dominated by recruiting widely to bring in new followers. Politics in the era of mass mobilisation also centres on collective rituals, assembled crowds cheering and chanting to charismatic speeches or engaging in protest actions, non-violent or violent.
Comparing these two levels, it is not clear to me whether modern people, as individuals, have more emotional energy than persons in mediaeval societies, surrounded by religious rituals. But on the macro level, modernity is the era of social movements; organising a social movement of protest (or of ostentatious public display) has become a widely-used social technique. As Charles Tilly showed, protest movements were very localised and short-lived until the late 18th century; then the growth of a centralised state provided a target around which protests could mobilise; at the same time state penetration provided roads, transport, and communications by which movements could go into action.
The mass of the population entered the political arena through the device of social movements. As the means of mobilising have become even more widespread, there has been an outpouring of political movements, as well as the lifestyle movements I have described. Mass education, especially at universities attended by adults, have been the recruiting grounds and organisational centres of all kinds of movements. (An exception was the Red Guards movement in China during the 1960s, which was mobilised around secondary school students; the Red Guards were eventually suppressed by closing the schools for years.) Thus in the macro sense, at least, it appears there has been a large increase in Durkheimian rituals, in the form of social movements’ rituals, in the 20th century over all previous centuries. Is it a linear increase, growing exponentially in the second half of the century? That is not clear to me; the communist and fascist movements of the first half of the century were massive and pervasive.
Such questions need not be decided by theorising. Emotional energy — high, low or medium — is visible in people’s faces and bodies; we are able to measure it in present-day visual sociology, with an abundance of mobile phone images, CCTV, etc. For the 20th century, we can estimate the pervasiveness of various emotions, by examining photos and film, and eye-witness accounts.
But the Internet era is a paradox. The Internet has unprecedented capacity for linking people together and seeking out others with similar concerns and opinions; thus it has been able to mobilise protest movements swiftly, such as the MeToo movement in 2017; the gilets jaunes in 2018; the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020; Islamic State and its imitators. But universal mobilisation of social movements has its limitations; one is that vehemently emotional movements provoke counter-movements; another is that a large array of movements mobilising simultaneously tend towards gridlock. This may be why in recent decades politics in many societies have been deadlocked between antagonistic positions.
Another limitation has appeared during the Covid epidemic, although it was visible before. When people do most of their social interactions on-line rather than in bodily presence, it is more difficult to establish rhythmic coordination, with its accompanying sense of intersubjectivity and emotional energy. Interaction rituals can happen online but they are emotionally weaker. Persons who spend most of their time online have become more anxious and depressed. If the trend continues of replacing in-person work and entertainment with electronically mediated devices, even after the health crisis is over, there may be a growing generation that displays a large drop in emotional energy.
But even if this trend continues, it will not affect everyone. This suggests a new form of stratification: persons who spend all their time online will be led, or dominated, by those who are more energised because they also continue to have a lot of embodied contacts with other energised people. (This is the pattern of successful politicians, rebels, artists, intellectuals and even high-tech entrepreneurs. )
AR: You are credited with predicting the fall of communism. It shows that you take the social sciences as potential sources of predictions. Still, in a text you recently published (2020), you criticise C.W. Mills’ prediction about the possibility of a Third World War (1960) during the Cold War. But has this possibility of a new major conflict disappeared since?
RC: C. Wright Mills’ analysis did not reckon with the growth of social movements, including the anti-nuclear movement, since he concentrated on the USA and USSR as parallel rivals in nuclear escalation. But as mentioned above, tacit agreements against using nuclear weapons were developed, with a shift to small-scale proxy wars. My prediction of the fall of the Russian empire (USSR and its satellites) was based on a different theory: the factors that favor an increase or decrease in territorial power. The Soviet Union became geopolitically overextended by its own success in fostering communist movements; the cost of deploying troops with expensive weapons in many parts of the world eventually led to a reform movement attempting to back away from the expensive military competition with the West. The USA also hit this overstretch — in Vietnam, and again in Iraq and Afghanistan. Both of the old rivals have lost much of their geopolitical reach. Russia lost much more territory; but this eventually led to geopolitical efforts more modestly confined to weak nearby states. The sensible policy for the USA is to avoid military confrontations. Will this continue, during an era when China is approaching Western levels of wealth and military technology? A US/China war is not inevitable; but it is the kind of thing that could happen, given the war-making power of political heads of state and their emotions.
AR: In the same text (2020), you envision political futures and the pressure of global warming. You describe the risk of a political impasse because of the opposition of very different political factions, making it difficult to challenge the trends of the Great Acceleration and global warming. Can you tell us more?
RC: The various dimensions of this question are discussed in my blog post “Predicting World War III” (Collins 2020). Here I will add only one further point. The consumer-oriented capitalist economy is a major cause of global warming; its profit dynamic depends on creating new products for sale, and these need energy and raw materials (even if these are for electric batteries). But capitalism may not continue very far into the future. Capitalism depends on having masses of people who can buy its products, and that means people who have jobs and earn enough money to spend. But contemporary capitalism is investing heavily in eliminating jobs — — not just manual labour, accomplished previously in factories — but white-collar labour, labour of communication and management. Current trends are towards self-driving cars (eliminating truck drivers), robot warehouse loaders, self-check-out machines in stores (eliminating sales clerks); artificial intelligence algorithms that attempt to replicate how people write, what managers do, even what high-skilled professionals create. High-tech enthusiasts’ predictions about the future of white-collar computerization see a highly automated future by around 2040, give or take 10 years in either direction.
Hardly anyone has studied the long-term consequence of eliminating a large proportion of the middle-class labour force. It is conventionally argued that people always develop new tastes and demands for new products, so that there will always be customers for whatever capitalism creates for them to buy in the future. But the question is, will they have the money to buy it? Automating the labour force, both manual and middle-class, into unemployment is a formula for capitalist crisis. Profit cannot be made if no one buys its products.
The solution, it has been suggested, is universal guaranteed income; but this would likely be resisted by the wealthiest section of the population, whose wealth must be confiscated in taxes to keep the consumer economy alive. Steps in this direction may lead to socialism. And whatever the faults of previously existing state socialism, it has one merit: it can continue indefinitely as an economy without growth. If the crisis of capitalism happens soon enough in the 21st century, it could be the solution to global warming. [For more on this issue, see my chapter in Wallerstein et al. 2013]
References
Collins, R (1980) Weber’s Last Theory of Capitalism: A Systematization. American Sociological Review 6(45): 925–942.
Collins, R (2008) Violence, A Micro-sociological Theory. New Haven: Princeton University Press.
Collins, R (2014) Four theories of informalization and how to test them. Human Figurations 3(2). Available at: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.11217607.0003.207 (Accessed: 14 March 2022)
Collins, R (2015) Why does sexual repression exist? Sociological-Eye. Available at: https://www.drrandallcollins.com/sociological-eye/2015/02/why-does-sexual-repression-exist.html (Accessed: 14 March 2022)
Collins, R (1979/2019) The credential society. New York: Columbia University Press.
Collins, R and Sanderson, SK (2015) Conflict sociology: A sociological classic updated. New York: Routledge.
Collins, R (2020) Predicting World War III, Predicting Climate Change. Sociological Eye. Available at: https://www.drrandallcollins.com/sociological-eye/2020/1/6/predicting-world-war-iii-predicting-climate-change (Accessed: 14 March 2022)
Klinenberg, E, Araos, M, and L, Koslov. (2020). Sociology and the climate crisis. Annual Review of Sociology 46: 649–669.
Martell, L. 1994. Ecology and Society: An Introduction. London: Polity.
Rohloff, A. 2011. Extending the Concept of Moral Panic: Elias, Climate Change and Civilization. Sociology 45(4): 634–649.
Shove, E. 2010. Beyond the ABC: climate change policy and theories of social change. Environment and planning A 42(6): 1273–1285.
Steffen, W, Broadgate, W, Deutsch, L, Gaffney, O, and Ludwig, C (2015) The trajectory of the Anthropocene: the great acceleration. The Anthropocene Review 2(1): 81–98.
Steffen, W et al. (2004) Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet Under Pressure. New York: Springer-Verlag.
Urry, J. 2011. Climate change and Society. London: Polity.
Wallerstein, I et al. (2013) Does capitalism have a future? Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wright Mills, C (1960) The Causes of World War Three. New York: Ballantine Books.
Cite: Rigal Alexandre, Collins Randall. “Toward a Sociology of the Great Acceleration: An Interview with Randall Collins.” Anthropocene2050, 2022.
