The Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership

by Cedric J. Robinson

Do we live in basically orderly societies that occasionally erupt into violent conflict, or do we fail to perceive the constancy of violence and disorder in our societies?

Cedric J. Robinson contends that our perception of political order is an illusion, maintained in part by Western political and social theorists who share a dependence on the concept of leadership as a basis for describing and prescribing social order.

Robinson uses a variety of critical approaches in his analysis: he synthesizes elements of psychoanalysis, structuralism, Marxism, classical and neoclassical political philosophy, and sociology to support his case for considering Western thought on leadership to be mythological rather than rational. He then presents examples of historically developed "stateless" societies with social organizations that suggest conceptual alternatives to the ways political order has been conceived in the West.

As an American Black political theorist, Robinson examines Western thought from the vantage point of a people only marginally integrated into Western institutions and intellectual traditions. His perspective on the conceptualization that structures Western thinking on the most basic levels contributes to the questioning on how our conduct, values, and even perceptions may be shaped by our symbolization.

Genres: Politics, Political Science, Philosophy, History, Theory, Race, Nonfiction

283 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2016

About the author

Cedric Robinson was a professor in the Department of Black Studies and the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He headed the Department of Black Studies and the Department of Political Science and served as the Director of the Center for Black Studies Research.

Reviews

[i. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would be lying if I didn't say this text didn't challenge me. Terms is a dense, challenging read, one that deconstructs the intellectual histories of concepts that became and are central to the hegemonic Western conception of the political - "order," "leadership," and "power." It is through such a thorough deconstruction that Robinson brings to the fore the ways in which the mythmaking project that is the political order, that authority, has come to both dominate the field of political science, and become reified within the work that is produced in the field of political science. If Robinson's critique of the field of Western social science can be summed up into one statement, it is that which is taken for "granted" is that which is so specifically-situated in the context of Western development, and it is that exact obfuscation of mythmaking that makes these ideas so insidious. But much like in the rest of Robinson's body of work, The Terms of Order is not without hope: though Western political thought might be dominated by ideas that reify the myth of the necessity of domination, it is through his examination of anarchy -- not Western anarchy, of course, which, itself, is as much a product of power as the systems it positions itself as against -- but through understanding "stateless societies" that modes of resistance and possibility become visible.

The foreword by Erica Edwards is especially elucidating for this piece, and while this is not the easiest of Robinson's pieces to really understand -- it is, more than Black Marxism, in the tradition of "pure" political theory, and thus required many read-throughs on my end -- it lays the groundwork for the interventions that Robinson makes in Black Marxism and beyond, making it not only much-needed for anyone invested in the disciplines of social science, but for anyone engaging in Robinson's project of the Black Radical Tradition, as well.

[Jesse · Rating 2 out of 5]

Despite the title, Robinson is actually pro-leadership, as long as it takes the form of a messiah figure. What he's against is politics. He thinks that western anarchists (including marxists) unwittingly uphold the metaphysics of western civilization - either too individualist or too economistic, but firmly stuck within the political. His goal instead is to use the disciplines of psychoanalysis and anthropology to render the idea of a non-political society thinkable. But his arguments are shockingly sloppy, intensely Foucauldian, and give the impression of never having read the primary literature (the number of times he says "X says that Y says" is incredible).

[K. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sweeping and insightful, but mostly incomprehensible (to me).

[sylvie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not gonna lie, this one was a challenge. I was so damn excited to read this one, as I know it has been very formative for Stefano Harney and Fred Moten's All Incomplete, but so much went over my head in this dense, highly academic text.

Terms of Order is a research into the genealogy of the political and sets out to answer the question why the political, in spite of the anti-political challenges to Western political bodies, came to mark the limits of what constitutes social cohesion and political organisation?

Terms shows how the Western conception of political order as marked by "leadership", "authority" and "power" is naturalized and reified by the domain of political science, rather than questioned.
Robinson shows how these terms are assumptions and myths that help to sustain this particular conception of political order. The Terms, being a PhD thesis in political science, is an attempt at speaking back against the discipline, using and deconstructing the language it has rendered so familiar to itself. It is a "deconstruction" of the terms of order found in the Western canon of political science.

What I loved is, how the book is very much a critique of the violence used to maintain the political and an investigation of anti-political forms of living. The foreword is very illuminating in this regard.

There's an interesting chapter on Anarchism, contrasting the history of Western anarchism and anarchism of non-western societies, like the stateless society of the Tonga, showing different modes of resistance and relating. Where anarchism in the West developed as a negation of the development of political authority - the State - and in the Tonga, kinship is the ordering principle, anarchism in a non-political society. A society where everyone understands themselves to be all equally incomplete.

[Nick Salvato · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book pissed me off because i found it personally incredibly difficult to read but when i closed it i had to admit that hes still that guy, he’s still a genius. Compared to his fluency as a writer in later works like black marxism or an anthropology of marxism I felt he just didn’t have the cogency or the language but it could also be a problem of genre. My biggest takeaway was his point about “antipolitical” euro-settler movements like anarchism or revolutionary marxism internalizing the logic of the state through an oppositional identity instead of transcending that logic and embodying a really, romantically new spirit — kinda blew my mind a little woahhhh. But what a slog