The Relations of Order

I finished Cedric Robinson’s The Terms of Order a short while ago.  T.b.h., it was a bit of a struggle but I think I finally came to terms (no pun intended) with the notion that it may have been a slog on purpose.  I came down on feeling that the book was essentially a critique of political theory using the language and canon of political theory. Robinson had a hard time getting awarded his Ph.D. from Stanford. He grew up in Oakland and was a major autodidact as a youth reading his way through the stacks at the Oakland public library system.  His depth of scholarship shows, but some members of his committee at Stanford quit saying they could not understand his thesis.  After three years of unsuccessful persuasion, he ultimately had to threaten litigious action to get the Ph.D. in 1974  and then he published the thesis as The Terms of Order.  I was feeling a bit sympathetic with the committee quitters for long stretches of the book, but every now and then his project crystallized for me, especially toward the end.  

In using the canon and language of political theory to critique it, he was essentially saying political theory is often a mythology of how society is organized politically which too often overlooks the role of violence and force.  He criticizes political theorists large and small for hammering their conclusions into a tacitly pre-agreed upon framework.  There are bits and pieces here and there that he doesn’t reject outright, but even those he caveats. In particular, he spends a lot of sympathetic time on anarchy and mutual aid.  But he contrasts all of western political theory and organization with the Stateless societies of primitive people which he says grow organically out of a mutuality in the project of survival that is missing from the hierarchical structures of the so called developed world.  

As an undergraduate, Robinson got suspended from the University of California at Berkeley for his participation in student protests there.  On getting his Ph.D. at Stanford he went on to teach African American studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara  and to head the department of Black Studies there as well as the Department of Political Science.  He ultimately founded and directed the Center for Black Studies Research from which he retired in 2010, though he continued to teach Emeritus until shortly before his death in 2016.  After publishing the Terms of Order he went on to write his chef d'oeuvre Black Marxism in which he was the first to describe what he called Racial Capitalism, emphasizing the mutually bound origins of Capitalism and Racism (which he recognized manifested in Europe as exploitation toward European minority populations in parallel with the customary American exploitation of indigenous, African and Asian workers as well as the waves of non-WASP immigrant huddled masses yearning to breathe free).  

The best part of the reading experience for me was in the last chapter, as Robinson is wrapping up his discussion of western political theory by talking about the unintentional value he found in reading about quantum theory – he indicated that although the theorists likely didn’t intend it, he found value in describing ideal order as being organic from the interdependence of all matter on all other matter—the notion that relativity implies the relatedness of everything to everything else.  This resembles the political theories of Carlo Rovelli, the Italian quantum theorist who wrote Helgoland which I read last summer.  It was kind of a beautiful resonance.  (I seriously doubt Carlo Rovelli has read The Terms of Order, but Cedric Robinson definitely read the same quantum theorists that Carlo Rovelli did.) 

Having discovered The Terms of Order only recently (it was mentioned in Palo Alto), I think it’s a good thing to be aware of this rather amazing book.