Power in Communitarian Evolution

The Working Paper is a chapter forthcoming in Piki Ish-Shalom, Markus Kornprobst, and Vincent Pouliot, eds, Perspectives on Cognitive Evolution and World Ordering: Opening New Vistas, discussing Emanuel Adler’s opus magnum on World Ordering.
It uses Adler’s analysis of power to unpack his political and explanatory theory by making two claims. First, Adler’s understanding of power accentuates the agentic components of power – and hence order – and downgrades the role of domination in social order. Whereas his ontology would allow for a wider conception, his communitarian political theory does not. Second, in his explanatory theory, power (as ‘epistemic practical authority’) becomes a central cause for understanding the evolution of social orders. Yet, assuming evolution to be constituted by contingent and contextual processes that remain indeterminate, epistemic practical authority cannot carry this causal weight.