Status Is Cultural: Durkheimian Poles and Weberian Russians Seek Great-Power Status

doi:10.1017/CBO9781107444409.006

4 - Status Is Cultural: Durkheimian Poles and Weberian Russians Seek Great-Power Status

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014

Iver B. Neumann

Edited by

T. V. Paul ,

Deborah Welch Larson and

William C. Wohlforth

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Iver B. Neumann: Affiliation:
London School of Economics
T. V. Paul: Affiliation:
McGill University, Montréal
Deborah Welch Larson: Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
William C. Wohlforth: Affiliation:
Dartmouth College, New Hampshire

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Summary

Like its etymological twin − the state, status emerges within a specific cultural context or, to better capture the importance of relations between polities, a civilizational context. According to Durkheim and Mauss, “[a] civilization constitutes a kind of moral milieu encompassing a certain number of nations, each national culture being only a particular form of the whole.” Status-seeking between any groups of polities takes place in a specific social context. What Durkheim and Mauss had in mind was Christendom.

The historical fact that the state system grew out of Christendom and a Christian legal code (first ius gentium, then ius inter gentes) has repercussions not only for those left status-less, but also for how status was conferred within the system. Conflict over status played itself out as a discussion of which king was closest to God. Earthly powers were ordered in a hierarchy of descending closeness to God, with France on top, then other Christian rulers, then non-Christian rulers (and, we may add, people who were seen to be without rulers altogether). This hierarchical order carried over into early modernity and beyond, most recently as a “standard of civilization.”

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Type: Chapter
Information: Status in World Politics , pp. 85 - 112

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107444409.006 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2014

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