Uneven and combined development: the social-relational substratum of ‘the international’? An exchange of letters

By A. Callinicos, J. Rosenberg. 2008

111 citations recorded by the source corpus.

ion of the historical process is the only means I’ve yet found for getting behind this problem in order to crack the reification in its generality (rather than just controlling its effects in the particular cases of Absolutism or capitalism). I try to illustrate this in the ‘Interim Synopsis’ of the idea contained in my rejoinder to the ‘Globalisation Theory’ forum (Rosenberg 2007). So I guess this is the difference between our positions: your position implies, I think, that at any rate there’s a great deal more to be said about how capitalism in particular generates ‘uneven and combined development’—and I’m sure that’s right. My position—mostly a hunch, since I haven’t done enough of the work yet—is that even when that ‘more’ is said, the fact of multiplicity itself and what arises from it will not have been addressed in a way that finally deals with the problem of Realism (and with it the problem of ‘the international’ for social 9 Not even where this theory is historicized to locate the emergence of capitalism within an antecedent Absolutist state system, as Teschke (2003) and Hannes Lacher (2002) have both importantly done. Uneven and combined development 81

Subfields: Development, Economics and Econometrics, Political Science and International Relations

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