Showing papers in "Theory and Society in 1977"

The arrangement between the sexes

Abstract: 1. In modern industrial society, as apparently in all others, sex is at the base of a fundamental code in accordance with which social interactions and social structures are built up, a code which also establishes the conceptions individuals have concerning their fundamental human nature. This is an oft stated proposition, but until recently its awesomely ramified significance escaped us. The traditional sociological position that sex is "learned, diffuse, role behavior" fair enough in itself seemed to have innoculated previous generations of social scientists against understanding instead of allowing the disease to spread. More even than in the matter of social class, these students simply acted like everyone else, blindly supporting in their personal conduct exactly what some at least should have been studying. As usual in recent years, we have had to rely on the discontented to remind us of our subject matter.

Perks, pilferage, and the fiddle: The historical structure of invisible wages

Abstract: History lives on. The perpetual and perpetuating myth of the present is to believe that we -are liberated from the anguish of the past. On the contrary, the greatest source of history is impregnated in the mundane and everyday world of the present. The meaning of the world of work, for example, is revealed in its relationship to its past. Workers are not only, on the whole, paid as a class,1 those situated at structurally disadvantaged parts receive large segments of their wages “invisibly” - as tips or fiddles from customers, or pilferage and perks from employers. The crucial common factor in these forms of “invisible wages” is the added power which accrues to employers through their establishment. They are meaningfully located, however, not simply as archaic relics in the gradual rational liberation of the present from the feudal bond, but as forms of domination crucial to the persistence and growth of modern capitalism because of their solution to those disciplinary problems not soluble in money alone.

Protest and profanation: Agrarian revolt and the little tradition, Part II

Abstract: Perhaps one reason why political scientists and historians generally overlook the moral and political ideas of the little tradition is that both, unlike the anthropologist, tend to concentrate on the written record-the product, par excellence, of the great tradition. The little tradition achieves historical visibility only at those moments when it becomes mobilized into dissident movements which pose a direct threat to ruling elites. It is for this reason that I have had to rely so heavily on evidence from millenial revolts in constructing my argument. Yet it seems to me that there is a “shadow history” which remains to be written for almost every mass movement in the Third World.

Kenneth Burke and the method of dramatism

Abstract: It is possible that sociologists have read the work of Kenneth Burke and found it neither important nor interesting, a One searches in vain for any expository treatment of his work in those journals read by sociologists, or indeed, for any expository treatment of the sociological importance of Burke in other journals. Yet Burke has been lurking in sociologists' footnotes since the 1930s, and recently his system, "Dramatism," has been promoted to equal rank with "Symbolic Interaction" and "Social Exchange" in the coverage given to these aspects of "Interaction" in the InternationalEneyelopedia o f the Social Scienees. ~ What are we to make of this?

Getting it together in burgundy, 1675-1975

Abstract: The municipal archives of Dijon occupy several cluttered rooms in the grand old palace of the Dukes of Burgundy. The archives' main door looks out onto the elegant semicircle of the Place de la Liberation, built in the late seventeenth century as the Place Royale. Readers in the high-ceilinged salle de travail have no trouble tallying arrivals and departures. A strident bell sounds in the room so long as the outside door is open. The interruption usually lasts five to ten seconds, as the newcomer closes the street door, crosses the anteroom, fumbles with the inner door, and enters. In bad weather arrivals are more disruptive; after the long bell stops sounding, visitors stomp their feet unseen, remove their boots and hang up their raincoats before presenting themselves for inspection. Exists are equally distracting, for they mirror the entries precisely: thud, shuffle, stomp, ring. Distractions, however, are few. Not many people come to the archives: a few city employees, an antiquarian or two, an occasional student from the university, now and then an itinerant historian. Those few have riches before them. They have the surviving papers of the capital of Burgundy, both as an independent power and as a major French province. The archives are especially full up to the point at which the centralization of the Revolution shifted the balance of power, and paperwork, toward the state's own bureaucracy. Among the thousands of bundles in the pre-revolutionary collection, 167 fall into series I. Series I includes Police, in the broad old-regime meaning of defense against all manner of public ills. Its topics are sanitation, public health, fire protection, asylums, pursuit of beggars, vagrants and criminals,

The ideological connection: Or, smuggling in the goods, Part II

Abstract: The study of political ideologies and belief systems typically has been focused around the notions of logical and psychological constraint. Originally offered by Philip E. Converse, these have long served American political science as the standard conceptions of the nature of ideological connections.la I shall criticize this logical/psychological constraint distinction for affording neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for ideological connection. On this basis, I shall propose a reinterpretation of the research findings of the belief systems literature. Then pushing beyond criticism to construction, I shall propose an alternative account of ideological connection. This new account has important implications for not only the Converse-inspired study of belief systems, but also the numerous other recent attempts to formulate a more viable conception of ideology.

Ideology, narrative analysis, and popular culture

Abstract: By showing that the formal analysis of mass culture has come of age, two recent books suggest that a new way of raising the old questions about the relationship of culture to society is possible Indeed, they make important, if unequal, contributions to the methodology of narrative analysis in general, at the same time that they suggest that a rigorous investigation of cultural forms of the internal dynamics of superstructures as such may prove a good deal more crucial to the student of social history, particularly in the area of periodization, than has often been thought Both Will Wright's Sixguns and Society and John G Cawelti's Adventure, Mystery, and Romance~ offer materials for a new theory of ideology-surely the key link or mediatory concept in any attempt to link cultural objects with social phenomena They demonstrate that a new conception of the ideological, if it is to draw on the findings of the study of myth, of psychoanalysis and of structural anthropology, must take as its privileged object of investigation narrative itself, now considered as a "form of reasoning" about experience and society (Wright, 200) of equal dignity to the various types of conceptual thought in service in daily life

Social theory and the progressive era

Abstract: Even the mass media have noticed that many of our current societal maladies are basically the same as those faced by Americans at the turn of the century: gross political corruption, corporate arrogance coupled with consumer impotence, environmental pollution and failed conservation, ethnic antagonism, pockets of acute poverty, and urban decay. Such recognition suggests that it is high time that scholars and laymen alike turned with renewed interest to comprehending what transpired during the early 1900's. The first two decades of the twentieth century constitute a crucial period in the development of the United States because, although the processes of urbanization and industrialization had begun well before 1900, it was only after the turn of the century that Americans first recognized and tried to grapple with the structural changes and problems wrought by those twin processes. Indeed, the period roughly spanning the years from 1900 to 1920 has been termed the "Progressive era" because of the extensive amount of thought and action directed at the ill effects of massive urbanization, industrialization, and immigration. It would seem that if we are to deal with these problems today, it would be wise to study how they were confronted yesterday. That is, before we can ask "what is to be done?" in the current context we must first undertake to understand "what has happened before."

The equality debate: What does justice require?

Abstract: Less than 20 years ago John Kenneth Galbraith stated that "few things are more evident in modern social history than the decline of interest in inequality as an economic issue... inequality has ceased to preoccupy men's minds."1 Perhaps Galbraith's judgment was mistaken even then; it is certainly incorrect today, for we are living at a time when there are increasing demands for a whole host of equalities: political, social, and economic.

Mimesis in the origins of bourgeois culture

Abstract: Efforts to understand the problems of contemporary society have frequently led to a search for the origins of these problems in key transformations of the past, especially those in which economic reorganizations have been transcribed into new cultural forms. Research on such periods of social change often views certain social classes as having made the decisive break from one social system to another. These classes' formulation of prototypical social values, as well as their realization of such values, are identified as significant to the change. So there is a recognized though undetermined relationship between social class and social change. While an increasing number of sociologists and historians are seeking the substance of this relationship by investigating the institutional rearrangements of early modern society, the analysis of social class in that period remains problematic. Possibly the fault lies in the failure to supersede the nineteenth-century paradigm of class with a more systematic theory.1 Even today, controversies continue to be generated by very basic analyses of social classes in such cases of change as the transformation from feudalism to capitalism; the outbreak of the French Revolution; the origins of the "modern world system"; the emergence of the affection-based nuclear family; and the collective choice or rejection of a work ethic.2 Intertwined in the problematic of such analyses are three questions: the historical analysis of a particular process of change, the analytic problem of social class, and the philosophical concept of innovation.

On turning theory against itself

Abstract: Thoughtlessness continues to be one of the outstanding characteristics of our time. Even Marxism has failed to reflect critically on the conditions of our social existence so as to demystify them. Its frequent call for the abolition of the "separation" of theory from practice has been quite consistent with this thoughtlessness. 1 But the Marxist tradition has usually been more silent about a more subversive theme, namely, the history of Marxism as the history of attempts to collapse the critical tension between theory and practice. Plekhanov's attempt to sacrifice theory before its empirical object ("..the march of ideas is explained by the march of things, the march of thought by the march of life") is but a crude and extreme case of this for, as Jacoby has shown, such "automatic Marxism" was a powerful influence throughout the whole of the Second and Third Internationals.2 This automatism expressed Marxism's enslavement to the creeping rationalization of the twentieth century bourgeois world. Yet one source of this objectivist urge within Marxism can also be traced directly to Marx himself. This is the legacy not only of Marx's classification of his critique of liberal capitalism with the natural sciences; it is equally the legacy of the finale of the Theses on Feuerbach: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is, to change it." Marx's thesis that philosophy cannot be realized without its abolition remained thoroughly ambiguous. It was not at all certain whether he intended the abolition of all hitherto existing philosophy, or whether every past, present and future philosophy was also to be abandoned. Through this ambiguity, the very status of Marxist theory has