Showing papers in "Theory and Society in 1982"

Rentier state and shi'a islam in the iranian revolution

Abstract: The recent overthrow of the Shah of Iran, the launching of the Iranian Revolution between 1977 and 1979, came as a sudden surprise to outside observers from the American friends of the Shah, to journalists and political pundits, and to social scientists including those, like me, who are supposed to be "experts" on revolutions. All of us have watched the unfolding of current events with fascination and, perhaps, consternation. A few of us have also been inspired to probe the Iranian sociopolitical realities behind those events. For me, such probing was irresistible - above all because the Iranian Revolution struck me in some ways as quite anomalous. This revolution surely qualifies as a sort of "social revolution". Yet its unfolding - especially in the events leading to the Shah's overthrow - challenged expectations about revolutionary causation that I developed through comparative-historical research on the French, Russian, and Chinese Revolutions.' "Social revolutions" as I define them are rapid, basic transformations of a country's state and class structures, and of its dominant ideology. Moreover, social revolutions are carried through, in part, by class-based upheavals from below. The Iranian Revolution seems to fit this conception. Under the old regime, the Shah ruled through an absolutist-monarchical military dictatorship, styling himself a cosmopolitan Persian King in the 2,500-year-old image of Cyrus the Great. Iran's dominant class, ostentatiously pro-Western in its cultural style, consisted of state bureaucrats, foreign capitalist investors, and domestic capitalists closely tied by patronage and regulation to the state machine. The Revolution itself involved revolts against this dominant class by urban workers, unemployed people, and old and new middle classes. Finally, the removal of the Shah was accompanied by the dispossession of many (especially politically privileged) capitalists, by the removal of all top officials

Foucault, sociology, and the problem of human agency

Abstract: A consistent feature of reflections within sociological discourse on the general condition of the discipline has been the identification of specific and persistent central problems. Within the various histories and analyses of the discipline these problems have assumed many forms. For example, in some cases the heterogeneity of the discipline, the coexistence of several competing paradigms, has been conceptualized as the central problem, the main obstacle to the development of sociology. In other cases controversy over the scientific status of the discipline has been assumed to be the major factor hindering the progress of sociology. However, in virtually each and every case evaluations of the condition of the discipline seem to presuppose a better or a preferred sociology is a possibility. In other words, the existing state of the discipline may be critical, undesirable, or problematical, but the assumption appears to be that is it not inevitable, that solutions are possible.

Class, patriarchy, and Sartre's theory of practice

Abstract: In the last decade, as the impact of the women's movement on Western socialism has deepened, there has been a good deal of argument about the connection between class and gender relations. Among the attempts to grasp the issue have been an extended debate about the economic significance of housework (somewhat ponderously known as the "domestic labor" debate); Delphy's materialist feminism, arguing the independence of patriarchy from class relations but modelling a theory of the former on Marxist accounts of the latter; Mitchell's attempt to synthesize the two, using psychoanalysis and ideology-theory as solvents; and, more recently, accounts of "capitalist patriarchy" as a specific kind of social order, and attempts to develop a general theory of social reproduction in which everything should fall into place.1

The impact of revolution on social welfare in Latin America

Abstract: The foregoing analysis assessed ways that revolutions affected the social welfare of Latin Americans. It compared differences between societies of roughly similar levels of economic development that did and did not have revolutions, revolutions ushered in by different class alliances, revolutions instituting different modes of production, and revolutions occurring in countries differently situated within the world economy. The class transformations in Mexico, Bolivia, Cuba, and Peru gave rise to more egalitarian societies than they displaced, but low income groups in each country gained most during the new regimes' consolidation of power. Subsequently, the interests of the popular sectors were sacrificed to those of middle and upper income groups. The rural masses benefited from revolution mainly in conjunction with agrarian reforms.

Critical pessimism and the limits of traditional Marxism

Abstract: Other . Instead it is rooted in the control over objectification, under­ stood in a transhistorical fashion , as concrete labor , by a concrete other (the capitalist class). The dialectical contradiction between the forces and relations of production is then interpreted as between production and distribution, in terms of those moments (the market and private property) that prevent \"labor\" from directly and openly constituting the totality . When , however , that totality is understood as capital, such an interpretation is revealed as one that, behind its own back, points to the full realization of capital as a quasi­ concrete totality rather than to its abolition . That dialectic had , in Pollock's view , run its course : \"labor\" had come to itself. The result , however , was any­ thing but emancipatory . Because of its traditional Marxist point of departure , however , his critique now proceeded from the assumption that the social totality, although antagonistic and repressive , had become essentially non­ contradictory. The presumed transformation of the object of critique necessarily implies the transformation of the critique itself. Critical theory has been characterized as the supersession of the critique of political economy by the critique of politics , the critique of ideology , and the critique of instrumental reason .81 The difference between the critique of political economy and the others, however , is not simply a matter of the relative importance attributed to particular spheres of social life. What characterizes Marx's critique is that , by means of an analysis of the \"double character\" of the historically determinate

The written and the repressed in Gouldner's industrial sociology

Abstract: In many ways Alvin Gouldner's industrial sociology prefigures his later work. His studies of the General Gypsum Company combine what later become two separate branches of his discourses on social theory: the exploration of the liberative potential of structural functionalism and the appropriation of the critical moments of Marxism. In Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy, he explores Merton's ideas of functional equivalence, to suggest alternative forms of factory administration, and of latent function, to unveil the domination behind bureaucratic rules. In WiMcat Strike, he turns Parsons's conditions of stable interaction into their opposite: the conditions for disequilibrium. In both books he draws on Marxian ideas of systemic contradiction and struggle as the motor of change, to explain the emergence of new patterns of industrial bureaucracy and to illuminate purposeful collective action. His subsequent books The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology and For Sociology, on one hand, and The Dialectic of Technology and Ideology and The Two Marxisms, on the other can be viewed as reflections on what was tacit and repressed in his analysis of the General Gypsum Company. Even The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class has roots in Gouldner's construction of the ideal type "representative bureaucracy" based on expertise and in his treatment of bureaucratic succession in terms of the ideologies of locals and cosmopolitans. Nor is this continuity between his early industrial studies and his later critiques of Academic Sociology and Marxism surprising. For Gouldner was not interested in locating the General Gypsum Company historically, or as a specific part of a specific totality. To the contrary, like other major organization theorists of the period (e.g., Lipset, Selznick, and Blau), he was more concerned with stripping away the particular to reveal the general. General Gypsum Company was a laboratory for testing and developinggeneral theories applicable to diverse contexts, rather than a specific sociology of industry. And yet Gouldner's analysis remains particularly relevant to recent Marxist studies of the labor process. His critique of the "metaphysical pathos" behind

Marx's last battle

Abstract: Marxism developed increasingly from a scientific to a Critical Marxism that was much more voluntaristic and stressed consciousness and conscious organization — rather than emphasizing a spontaneous economic evolution that first develops the forces of production. This long-term shift in Marxism is visible in Leninism: Leninism formulates a conception of a “vanguard” revolutionary organization more nearly akin to Bakuninism than to Marxism and adapts the old conspiratorial secret society to a Marxist rhetoric of theory and science by speaking of the vanguard cadres as “professional” revolutionaries. It also devoted increasing attention to the peasantry as an ally of the proletariat with a revolutionary potential. This increasing world drift of Marxism, toward a less economistic and more voluntaristic theory, has more usually been called a “critical” Marxism, when found in Western Europe. Critical Marxism has, therefore, seemed to some, such as Merleau-Ponty or Perry Anderson. a distinctively “Western Marxism.” This, how-ever, misses the point of the greater political success of Critical Marxism in the Third World. In less industrially advanced countries, Critical Marxism's reliance upon the peasantry has been even greater and its convergence with Bakuninism even more obvious. In Asia — including Tsarist Russia and other less developed regions, Scientific Marxism's insistence upon a prior industrialization made it seem irrelevant and generated apathy and passivity among revolutionaries who did not want to spend their lives making a bourgeois revolution. This shift suggests that there was a potential mutual transformability of Marxism into Bakuninism. Each might, under certain conditions, become the other.

Charismatic religion as popular protest

Abstract: I intend to make a historical case that may at first appear implausible: that "tongues," or speaking "in the unknown tongue," as Pentecostalists phrase it, can be a tactic of revolution. In order to make this historical argument I must at the same time make a theoretical one about the interpretation of charismatic religion. Our ordinary approach to the extraordinary aspect of religion makes my proposed historical argument seem unlikely on its face. To Western common sense, tongues scarcely manifest anything real, still less anything political. But we do not have our "sense" in common with all people of all times and places. To the Apostles awaiting the worldwide upheaval that would attend Christ's Second Coming and the beginning of the Millennium, the revolutionary significance of tongues was obvious. For example, at Acts 2:17 we read, "And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams." With this in mind, the Apostles worked toward the new order of a world utterly changed. The fact that tongues have no obvious revolutionary significance to us creates a theoretical problem in historical analysis. "On doit la verit aux morts," as Montaigne said so well. But whose "verite?"

Synthesis, or a new problematic in economic anthropology

Abstract: This essay is not the place to provide a thoroughgoing critique of the neo-Marxist articulationist school. This will be done elsewhere. Prattis, “Alternative Views of Economy and Society in Economic Anthropology,” forthcoming in (1982). I have pointed out in this essay that previous use of the notions of strategizing man and situational logic was to introduce substantive elements into formal considerations of the decision making process. It would seem, however, that it may be more useful to ally situational logic with production theory in order that the micro-macro gap in analysis is bridged. This may ensure that the systemic preoccupations of neo-Marxist theory in anthropology has an actor situation perspective as a caveat. My main concern, however, is with a realistic perspective on the various issues, implications, and contentions of the methodology polemics in economic anthropology. Of the two alternatives posed at the beginning of the essay it is evident that I am in favor of discarding the fragmented segments of current orthodoxy in economic anthropology, finding it more fruitful to develop the problematic introduced by the French school of historical materialism. This school of thought has the potential to provide an integrated approach simply by asking different questions.

Power and autonomy in the sociology of education

Abstract: This critical analysis of the literature in the sociology of education has shown that investigators who emphasize the dependence of the school on other structures in society or on their elites tend to have a much more global conception of power than do investigators who treat the school as autonomous. The deficiencies in the conception of power of these two groups, although different, have led both to serious problems in their analyses and conclusions. The first group lumps together power to command, power to constrain, and power to profit from. It fails to distinguish between these fundamentally different capacities which are included under its broad, imprecise, and usually undefined rubric “power”. Although it has been able to show the functions the school serves for sustaining the wider society or its dominant groups and show the correspondences between school structures and other social structures in society, it has not much advanced our understanding of the causal processes which have resulted in those functions and correspondences. This has at times led members of this group to a quasi-mechanistic conception of the subordination of the school to other social structures. It has at other times led to a sliding between meanings of the concept “power” which has promoted undemonstrated implications of a successful ongoing conspiracy by economic elites to command that a particular content and process of education be imposed on schools. Both of these consequences obscure the important role of the formal autonomy of the school system in legitimating inequalities in advanced capitalist societies. If the paradox of the school being autonomous and yet serving the interests of society's dominant groups is to be understood, and if the autonomy of the school is to be seen as something more meaningful than that of a service station delegated power by a large company, then it is necessary to distinguish clearly the power of society's dominant groups to command the school from their power to exert constraints on the school through their other (e.g., economic) activities and it is necessary to distinguish both of these capacities from the power of such groups to profit from the consequences of a school system which is autonomous in a sociologically significant sense. Investigators who treat the school as more orless autonomous, on the contrary, conceive of power as if it referred mainly to what I have called power to command. They tend to ignore power to constrain and power to profit from as essential dimensions of power when carrying out their analyses. Because they observe that the school and its members are rarely obliged to obey commands coming from other structures or their elites, for example from the economic elite, these investigators conclude that the wider society has relatively little power over the school or they carry out their studies as if this were the case, by largely restricting their analyses to ad hoc practices within the school. Their narrow conception of power has led them to ignore relationships between the school and other structures which should properly be seen as power relationships and which must be included in the analysis in order to understand what occurs in the classroom. Curiously, then, both the global, unrefined and the narrow conception of power have led to much the same result, of failing to direct attention to the causal processes involved in the relationship between the school and the wider society. The first conception has tended to assume that the description of the structural correspondences between the school and the wider society and the description of the functions the school serves for sustaining the wider society demonstrate the power over the school of the wider society whose needs are met. The specification of the causal processes which have brought about the correspondences and functions is reduced to the rank of a detail of secondary importance. The second or narrow conception of power has promoted the description of everyday, face-to-face, ad hoc, classroom interaction and its taken-for-granted assumptions, which in turn has similarly resulted in a failure to analyze the power relations and causal processes by which the wider society constrains and profits from classroom interaction and leads its assumptions to be taken for granted. The distinctions between the three different types of power have been proposed here in order to direct research towards specifying and investigating the causal processes involved in the power relationship between the school and the wider society. Two causal processes particularly important for understanding that relationship have to be differentiated. The power of the bourgeoisie to impose arbitrarily its bourgeois culture on the school, seen as so important by Marxists, For example, Baudelot and Establet. must be analytically distinguished from the power of the bourgeoisie to acquire the scholastic culture of the school and profit from it in order to reproduce and legitimate social classes. Scholastic culture in the latter sense does not have to be assumed universal and absolute. It may in large part be the arbitrary imposition of the educational and intellectual elites. The bourgeoisie will have little need to adapt the school to itself if it has the power to adapt itself to the school. The latter enables the school to remain autonomous and appear fair to all, which is the key to the successful legitimation of the process of social class reproduction by the school. Distinguishing the different capacities underlying power makes it possible to understand how the school can be autonomous and yet at the same time contribute to the reproduction and legitimation of the existing social class structure of society. Although the autonomy of the school is mutually exclusive with the power of society's dominant groups to command the school, it is not mutually exclusive with their power to profit from the school or to constrain it in the course of their other activities, e.g., their economic activities. External constraints on the school may make certain alternatives appear less sanguine than others to educators, students, and parents, and thereby influence their choices and subsequent actions, without denying them the possibility of choosing and taking independent initiative, and without obliging them to obey commands from external sources. The process involved will be incorrectly analyzed if the constraints are seen to determine in a mechanistic or authoritarian fashion the functioning of schools or if the external constraints are ignored. The autonomy of the school is of course only formal, in the sense that the school is not formally obliged to obey the commands of society's dominant groups, such as the economic elite. This does not mean that its autonomy is unreal - indeed, its reality is crucially important in legitimating inequalities. The school is, however, far from being fully autonomous because it is informally and indirectly subject to constraints which result from the actions of society's dominant groups and because the school does not have the power to control the use that will be made of the consequences of schooling. In a capitalist society it is especially owners of large enterprises in the market-place who have the power to constrain and to profit from the school. The content, structure, and processes of the school are subject to the constraints resulting from the development of an advanced capitalist economy. It is precisely the fact that power to constrain and power to profit from are less visible forms of power than power to command that leads dominated groups to misrecognize the power relations involved between the school system and the wider society, and this makes the formal autonomy of the school system an effective mechanism for legitimating and transmitting inequalities in capitalist society. Thus the key element for understanding the contribution of the school system to the transmission and legitimation of inequalities in advanced capitalist societies is its formal autonomy, according to which society's dominant groups have the power to constrain the school in the course of their activities, especially economic activities, and the power to profit from it without having to resort to the power to command the content, structure, processes, or form of schooling. Although authoritarian power to command may characterize the relationship between the school system and the political system in existing societies which call themselves socialist, I would suggest that it is power to constrain and power to profit from which characterize the relationship between the school system and the economic system in capitalist societies. The three-fold distinction presented here among the types of power is essential for understanding the relationship between the school system and the economic system in capitalist society. I have limited my discussion to the school here. I would suggest, nevertheless, that these distinctions among the types of power could lead to a constructive critique of theories of the “relative autonomy” of other apparata of the state in capitalist society and to directing research towards the more precise specification of the meaning of the concept “relative autonomy” in the case of each state apparatus.

Comments on Skocpol

Abstract: The importance of Professor Theda Skocpol's essay ought to be underlined. So far, more than a dozen books and hundreds of articles have appeared on the Iranian Revolution. Almost all of them are works either by policyoriented analysts, by experts on Iran, or by participants mostly as incumbents in Iranian politics. Professor Skocpol's essay is one of the rare attempts by a scholar of revolutions to discuss the Iranian revolution comparatively, with reference to other revolutions in modern history. I hope that this article marks only the start of her interest in Iran; I also hope that other students of revolution will follow her example. For, whatever one's view of the Islamic movement that overthrew the regime of Shah Mohammed Riza Pahlevi, one cannot deny that an event of lasting historical significance has occurred in South-West Asia.

Gouldner's theoretical method and reflexive sociology

Abstract: There is a further, more substantial proof that Gouldner, somewhere in the deep metaphorically of his thought, recognized the digression of his sociolinguistic phase. It turns out that the Culture of Critical Discourse did reappear one more time after its repression in The Two Marxisms. In the book on Marxism and intellectuals, left unpublished at the time of his death, CCD reenters in a crucial chapter “The Origins of Marxist Theory in the New” “Class.” How and where it reappears is most telling.

Gouldner's theory of intellectuals as a flawed universal class

Abstract: This paper critically examines Alvin W. Gouldner's contribution to the theory of the New Class, focusing on two major propositions from The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class1: first, the emergence of a New Class comprised of humanistic intellectuals and technical intelligentsia, which takes the role Marxist theory assigned to the proletariat, but whose universalism is badly flawed; and, second, the growing dominance of this class under both state socialism and Western capitalism, as a cultural bourgeoisie whose power is rooted in a monopoly over cultural capital and professionalism. Not only are these propositions central to Gouldner's life work as a synthesis of his long-standing interest in the sociology of knowledge, sociolinguistics, and revolutionary intellectuals, but they are also a new contribution to earlier theories of the New Class. The first proposition, part of Gouldner's dark dialectic, is an exciting contribution to contemporary sociology. Based on a Hegelian critique of Marx and a Marxist critique of Hegel, this concept attempts to lay the foundation of a left neo-Hegelian sociology. With it Gouldner demystifies the Marxist scenario of socialism and returns to the Hegelian search for the historical agent that will act as a universal class. The second proposition is more problematic. First, the concept of the "flawed universal class" is probably most relevant to the analysis of intellectuals under state socialism, but those intellectuals cannot be regarded as members of a cultural bourgeoisie. They are dependent on the action of other classes to make changes in the economic system on which the intellectuals' new dominance rests. In contrast to this situation, under Western capitalism intellectuals do appear as a privileged cultural bourgeoisie, but it is difficult to see in what sense they are becoming a "flawed universal class." Although their cultural capital may create a "positively privileged position in the labor market," it cannot overrule the logic of reproduction and accumulation as governed by money capital. Thus the new

The theory of democratic development

Abstract: Theories of democratic development address themselves to two distinct though related questions: What are the common pathways that all of today's democracies have had to pursue to emerge out of nondemocratic feudalisms into democracy? And, what conditions must be met by newly emergent democracies if they are to endure and achieve stability? Political histories of democracies typically pursue the question of emergence whereas modern analytic studies tend to focus on the conditions of stabilization.' Of all the recent theoretical works in the field, Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy2 stands out as the major effort to answer both sets of questions. In a generally laudatory review, Ronald Dore says of Moore's work that "anyone who has harbored the fantasy of spending some years licking the recent social and political history of the world into some sort of intelligible shape ... will read Barrington Moore's book with envy."3 Even Moore's most acerbic critics have acknowledged that his work is the predominant one in the field. One of them, Joseph Femia, states that Moore's book "has been the most challenging, influential and highly touted of all the writing examining the prerequisites of democracy."4 Another, Stanley Rothman, notes that "it is not hard to find reasons why Barrington Moore's Social Origins has had such widespread influence. ... Its approach, that of comparative historical sociology, seeks clues to the present in the past, and Moore demonstrates mastery of a wide range of historical materials."5

On being informed

Abstract: Although the principles of democracy have commanded near universal assent, at least since World War II, its modern history is still brief, fragmented, and inconclusive. Unfortunately, the familiarity of the first point has often served to distract attention from the importance of the second. That "we are all democrats today" may say something about our good intentions, or about our conceptual confusion, or about our hypocrisy, but it says very little about the future prospects either of the ideal or of efforts to realize it. Certainly we have too much evidence of the fragility of the democratic impulse to continue to hold any Whiggish confidence in its promise as our appointed destiny. The problems of realizing democratic rule are put into useful perspective by recalling some of the arguments that were employed, not so very long ago, when we were not all democrats. One of the most influential of the arguments brought against suffrage expansion in the nineteenth century amounted essentially to a rather simple claim: the elimination of political privilege threatened, indeed it promised, the elimination of socioeconomic privilege as well. An equal distribution of the right to vote would lead directly and rapidly to a redistribution of property from the wealthy few to the impecunious many. Here, for example, is the warning issued by Robert Lowe to the House of Commons (and to the entire propertied elite of Britain) in 1866 on the consequences to be expected from extending the franchise to working men:

Benjamin's materialist theory of experience

Abstract: In his early aesthetics Walter Benjamin had pursued the problem of the dissolution of man's capacity for experience, i.e., the decline of his capacity to live a meaningful and fulfilled existence, from a decidedly theological perspective. Life in the profane continuum of history was deemed incapable of fulfillment a priori insofar as it was the diametrical antithesis of the Messianic age, the sphere of redeemed life. So extreme was the opposition between these two dimensions that neither could have any direct and immediate bearing on the other. They existed in a state of pure antithesis. According to this schema, historical life, as the antipode to the eternal life represented by the Messianic realm, was subject to an irremediable fate of decay and decline. It was comprehended as "natural history" whose inevitable lot, like that of all organic life, was ultimately death and putrefaction, an eventual return to the condition of inorganic life. As such, the telos of all such mere, unsanctified life was death. This outlook served as the historico-philosophical vantage point from which Benjamin masterfully analyzed the German Trauerspiele of the baroque age.1 The manifest absence of all immanent meaning to life compelled the Baroque dramatists to conjure voluntaristically a vision of redemption through the roundabout technique of allegory.2 If one could with any justification speak of the problem of the "disintegration of community" in the Trauerspiel book,3 it would be the dissolution of an integrated, organic totality of meaning. Such a "community" can be said to have existed previously only in Paradise, before man was condemned to perdition by original sin. For the early Benjamin, as soon as one begins surveying the unreconciled domain of historical life, one finds the continuum of experience in a state of perpetual disintegration. There are exceptions, however; in the realm of aesthetic experience, where the artist momentarily breaks through the mythical realm of historical life, and in the realm of eternal repetition or

Anamnestic totalization: Reflections on Marcuse's theory of remembrance

Abstract: At a time when the memory of Herbert Marcuse is fresh in the minds of many on the left, it is perhaps particularly fitting to focus our attention on the special place held in Marcuse's thought by the concept of memory. Many of his earlier commentators have, in fact, already noted its importance.' One of the more astute of their number, Fredric Jameson, even went so far as to claim that the theoretical foundation of Marcuse's philosophy

The educated minotaur: The sources of Gouldner's New Class theory

Abstract: A general theory of the New Class cannot be understood only as an objective description of the world. It also entails reflection about intellectual speakers and the social organization of their communities. So, while a New Class theory makes statements about the world, it also makes statements about intellectual speech about the world. It necessarily implicates the speaker of truths (and of half-truths) as interested in the fate of the world he is committed to describe, to organize, to transform, to revolutionize, and in which he must at least make a living.

A note on Marx and Weber in Gouldner's thought

Abstract: The panel on Alvin Gouldner's work at the 1981 American Sociological Association meetings in Toronto achieved as high a collective intellectual level as any I have heard on similar occasions.1 Yet, as was revealed in the discussion period at the end of the session, I was not alone in thinking that the speakers had unduly neglected the influence on Gouldner of Max Weber. Several of them displayed a corollary tendency to overemphasize Gouldner's complex relation to Marxism, especially by claiming to find traces in his earlier work of his later interest in the Frankfurt School theorists. One senses that Keats' "hungry generations tread thee down" when awareness dawns that one's memories have become "history," if only intellectual history. I am at least a decade older than any of the members of the ASA panel and, although I never knew Gouldner personally until 1969, I became a graduate student in sociology at Columbia in the fall of 1945, the term immediately following his last term in residence. Not surprisingly, Al was still a remembered presence among the senior graduate students, especially several who had been his close friends and shared his commitment to the American Communist Party.