Pluralism, Crisscross, Intersectionality

Your intellectual genealogies don't hold up

I’ve been sour of late on intellectual genealogy (intellectual history) as an explanation for contemporary trends like “wokeness”, but when in the course of my important studies I encounter what appears to be a historical analogue to a modern intellectual trend, I feel obligated to report on it.

Below I survey some trends analogous to the “intersectionality” so important to “wokeness”, which is the most recent instantiation of critical studies (or what I’d call ethnomethodology in the humanities).

Once upon a time in Anglo-American sociology, it was common to speak of Conflict and Consensus “theories” of social dynamics, with Conflict theories typically (though not always) reducing ideology and social dynamics to mechanical, non-psychological forces like economics. Marxism, for example, with its reduction of social dynamics and ideology to class conflict, would be classified as a Conflict theory. In the synthesis of C. Wright Mills, whose work informs much of the conspiracy left today, economics and social status are collapsed into a concept that defines who is “elite”. In the synthesis of Pierre van den Berghe, whose work was influential on Steve Sailer, the Marxist reduction is retained but deprecated in favor of inclusive fitness, i.e., the natures of ideologies and social movements are explained primarily by Hamilton’s rule and genetic competition, and secondarily by class conflict.

A Consensus theory was offered by what John Murray Cuddihy called the WASP sociological tradition, espoused by sociologists like Talcott Parsons (I’ll be writing a separate post on Parsons’s theory of Black liberation). Although the tradition begins with the American social gospel movement in the 19th century, it was influenced by non-WASP continental authors such as Emile Durkheim and Max Weber.

Cuddihy refers to “Crisscross” but the theory itself seems to predate the label. Roughly, the theory affirms the independence of variables like status, power, wealth, race, and religion without reducing any one variable to another. These sociologists further observed that “crisscross” (tension or conflict) among multiple irreducible variables could explain the stability of states and communities better than Conflict theory. Cuddihy points to E.A. Ross, an American sociologist writing in 1920:

“A society, therefore, which is ridden by a dozen oppositions along lines running in every direction may actually be in less danger of being torn with violence or falling to pieces than one split just along one line. For each new cleavage contributes to narrow the cross clefts, so that one might say that society is sewn together by its inner conflicts.”[i]

Wow, was Ross trying to stop Occupy Wall Street?

In 1930, the German legal philosopher Carl Schmitt (pic related) encountered this approach in a different context through the “Pluralism” of GDH Cole (Fabian society member) and Harold Laski (Labour). As a staunch defender of the secular continental state, Schmitt called such Pluralism “Anglo-Saxon theory” and polemically summarized the perspective:

“The state becomes a social group or association existing at best side-by-side with, but on no account above, the other associations. The ethical consequence and result of this is that the individual lives in unorganized simultaneity of numerous social duties and loyalties: in a religious community, economic associations such as unions, combines or other organizations, a political party, a club, cultural or social societies, the family and various other social groups. Everywhere he has a duty of loyalty and fidelity; everywhere ethics emerge: church ethics, professional ethics, union ethics, family ethics, association ethics, office and business ethics, etc. For all these complexes of duties—for the “plurality of loyalties”—there is no “hierarchy of duties,” no unconditionally decisive principle of superiority and inferiority. Specifically, the ethical attachment to the state, the duty of fidelity and loyalty, appears as merely one among many other ties, besides loyalty to the church, union, or family; loyalty to the state takes no precedence, and state ethics is a special ethics among many other special ethics. Whether there is any total social ethics whatsoever is unclear in both Cole and Laski; the former speaks vaguely of an apparently all-encompassing “society” [English in the original], Laski of “humanity.”[ii]

The most recent restatement of this theory seems to have been influenced by the left via Louis Althusser and other absurd French “intellectuals” with quintessentially French personal lives, who in turn trace their ideas to Marx, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. The term it falls under now is “Intersectionality”. The internet tells me it was invented by a bBlack legal philosopher named Kimberle Crenshaw (pic related) during the last round of academic culture wars in 1989. However it seems other 1970s feminists claim it was their invention. In Kimberle’s words, this is intersectionality:

"Intersectionality, one of the foundational concepts within the social sciences, complicates traditional approaches toward the study of race, gender, class, and sexuality by treating these factors as interconnected variables that shape an individual's overall life experiences, rather than as isolated variables. Power, privilege, and oppression are often much more complex than has been traditionally thought, as an individual may be relatively privileged in one or more aspects of their life, while simultaneously experiencing prejudice, discrimination, or oppression stemming from other aspects of their social background or identity. Intersectionality seeks to explain how these different variables come together to shape experience, identity, and society."[iii]

At first blush this sounds like a theoretical refinement designed to resolve disputes over who is the meekest (and therefore most deserving of inheriting your parents’ estate), but it also contains a concession that within some broader community (say, academics) there exist multiple forms of conflict deriving from race, culture, religion, gender, and so forth. Intersectionality is therefore a nod toward pluralistic consensus. Intersectionality simply transforms vectors of victimization into sources of legitimate ethical duties such that it is more or less functionally equivalent to the Crisscross and Pluralism models discussed above. Thus it appears that both Anglo-Saxons and French theory activists arrived at the same framework for identitarian pluralism.

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[i] The Principles of Sociology, E.A. Ross, 1920

[ii] “Ethics of State and Pluralist State”, Carl Schmitt, 1930

[iii] Intersectionality - Privilege and Intersectionality - Research Guides at Rider University