modernist, Eurocentric worldviews to more detached viewpoints, those approaches
reject narratives that describe history as a progressive journey from barbarism to
civilisation. As an example, Toynbee’s Mankind and Mother Earth, which is still one
of the best accounts of the coalescence of regional civilisations, is insistent that all
teleological or progressivist orientations corrupt knowledge of the past.^13
It is paradoxical that studies of human interconnectedness are largely uncon-
nected, having appeared over recent years as mainly separate endeavours.^14 There is
no detailed assessment of whether the methodologies that underpin those studies are
compatible, and whether they provide partial interpretations that are best combined
in a higher synthesis. Future work in the area must address parallel endeavours
in International Relations that have also evolved in separate ways, selectively
borrowing from the literature on world history. Further investigation is required
to determine how far their methodological commitments and substantive findings
are compatible with grand narratives in the social sciences more generally.^15 There
is a key role for theorists here. The theoretical analysis of diverse approaches
can proceed with the aim of producing conjectures about the general course of
human history that can then be tested against the findings of specialised scholarly
inquiries. Over an extended period, the process of moving back and forth between
theoretical inquiry and historical analysis may lead to breakthroughs to grand
narratives that satisfy those sceptics who doubt that the sweeping overview of
the past can escape distortion and over-simplification. Those fears raise large
issues that cannot be considered here about how far synthesis lags dismally behind
analysis in the social sciences, about the costs that attend the advances that are gained
through academic ‘overspecialisation’, and about the political implications of
approaches that prefer the ‘retreat into the present’ to the investigation of long-term
processes.^16
One might expect future grand narratives to broadly support the anti-pro-
gressivism that is evident in Toynbee’s writings as well as in neorealism and process
sociology. A shared contention is that, in some basic respects, world politics have
not changed over the millennia. As noted earlier, Waltz argues that the international
political realm displays certain recurrent patterns, and adds that there is no obvious
escape from the security challenges that often drive the great powers into rivalry and
outright war. Elias maintained that the continuities between different periods of
history are as marked as the contrasts, and observed that there has been a broad trend
towards the formation of larger territorial concentrations of coercive power that may
only end when the long history of ‘elimination contests’ between ‘survival units’
culminates in the establishment of a worldwide state. Elias advanced a broadly realist
account of the principal dynamics of anarchic systems (seemingly without engaging
with the literature in International Relations). His thesis was that it will be a very
‘advanced civilisation’ indeed that succeeds in promoting high levels of individual
and collective self-restraint without the enforcement mechanisms that a stable,
monopoly of power can supply.^17 A level of self-restraint that rivals what is usually
only possible under such conditions might forever elude the human race, but ‘it was
worth trying’ to make progress in that direction.^18
Human interconnectedness 309