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The ‘philosophical premises’ of uneven and combined development

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2012

JUSTIN ROSENBERG
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Abstract

Recent debates over Leon Trotsky's idea of ‘uneven and combined development’ (U&CD) have focused on its potential in the field of International Relations, but they have not established the source of this potential. Does it derive from the philosophical premises of dialectics? The present article argues that the idea of U&CD in fact involves an innovation as fundamental for Marxist dialectics as for other branches of social theory. And it also argues that in formulating this innovation, Trotsky provided a general solution to some of the most basic problems in social and international thought. The argument is set out in three parts. The first part reconstructs Trotsky's own account of dialectical premises and their implications for social explanation. The second shows how the concept of U&CD departs from this, in ways that presuppose the tacit addition of a further ontological premise. Finally, part three analyses the locus classicus of the concept – the opening chapter of Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution – showing how it is this additional premise which underpins the central achievement of the idea: its incorporation of ‘the international’ into a theory of history.

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Articles
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Review of International Studies , Volume 39 , Issue 3 , July 2013 , pp. 569 - 597
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2012 

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References

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19 Trotsky, Notebooks, pp. 99–101.

20 Trotsky, Defense, p. 50. A cone bearing is an engineered machine part which connects other parts together, usually involving the use of ‘ball bearings’.

21 Trotsky, Defense, p. 50.

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26 Ibid., p. 50.

27 Ibid., p. 111.

28 Ibid., pp. 50–51.

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39 Generally speaking, those who have discussed this neglect explain it by reference to the historical context of the emergence of the modern social sciences: namely the nineteenth-century construction of modern centralising states in Europe, and the ideological premium placed on discourses of order and unity at a time when capitalist industrialisation had dissolved the bonds of pre-modern community. See especially Wolf, Europe, p. 9ff, and Tilly, Big Structures, p. 7ff.

40 As Trotsky himself put it: ‘[t]he fundamental “cell” of dialectical thinking is the syllogism. But it [too] undergoes transmutation, changes, like the basic cells in various tissues of an organism change.’ (Trotsky, Notebooks, p. 111).

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46 After all, Trotsky himself presents Russian development as having been shaped by both a ‘whip of external necessity’ and a ‘privilege of historic backwardness’ long before the emergence of capitalist society in the West.

47 An intellectual conundrum for Marxist writers at the time was the question of how and why capitalist industrialisation could have proceeded as far as it had in Russia without, however, producing a capitalist ruling class. By contrast with its Western counterparts, where absolutist states had been overthrown by ‘bourgeois revolutions’ much earlier in the national developmental process, Russia's ‘bourgeois revolution’ appeared ‘belated’ indeed.

48 Trotsky is referring to the fact that the Russian lands were never territorially absorbed into Graeco-Roman civilisation, and hence could not directly access the latter's achievements as part of their own inner heritage. While literally true, this claim ignores the foundational role of interaction with Byzantium in early Russian state-formation. Byzantium was not only the direct politico-cultural continuation of Rome, but also a remarkable fusion of European and non-European cultural forms. In this sense, Trotsky's narrative itself needs to be rescued from its own incipient Eurocentrism. I am grateful to the Editors and to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.

49 More accurately: this splaying of differentiation across an inter-societal axis which, in turn, blocked its endogenous consolidation inside Russia.

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52 I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer and the Editors for this point.

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54 I am grateful to the Editors and an anonymous reviewer for emphasising this very important point.

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