Showing papers in "Theory and Society in 1984"

Stalinism, famine, and Chinese peasants

Abstract: What do the two cases have in common and what sets them apart? Both have in common a high degree of administrative incompetence and mismanagement. The preceding analysis shows this clearly in the Chinese case. In the Soviet case, the issue of incompetence can be formulated as follows: Given the decision to extract rural resources for the sake of industrialization, how could the damage to agriculture and peasant morale be minimized? Stalinist planners could have learned lessons from some of their predecessors, who had similar problems, such as the Bolsheviks of 1918–1920 or Count Witte of the Russia of the 1890s, who also harshly squeezed the peasantry on behalf of industrialization. Stalinist officials, however, plunged into the tasks of collectivization and grain procurement without giving much thought to procedures that might secure minimal peasant subsistence and hence keep alienation within bounds. The result was to set in motion a cycle of repression and concessions that culminated in the 1932–33 famine. Administrative incompetence in the Soviet Union was linked to the fundamental stance of the state toward the peasants, which was one of war. The state viewed its relations with the peasants as a zero-sum conflict - “it's them or us,” as one Central Committee member reportedly put it. Viktor Kravchenko, (New York: Scribners, 1946), 91. The author was an official sent to the rural areas during this period. The state adopted a scarcely disguised view of peasants as enemies. See, for example, the Kaganovich speech cited in note 44, with its emphasis on “kulak psychology” among the collective farm peasants, (20). This conflictual posture was the basis for Stalin's determination to force the peasants unconditionally to subordinate their interests to those of the state. Even if top leaders did not make an explicit decision to inflict famine upon peasants, they were prepared to pay this price. The catastrophe of 1932–33 was thus an extreme manifestation of the conflictual state-peasant relationship that characterized the entire Stalin era: “For a good quarter of a century, extracting grain from the peasants amounted to a permanent state of warfare against them and was understood as such by both sides.” Lewin “Taking Grain,” 282. In the Chinese case there is simply no evidence that the state regarded peasants in this light, Mao's acknowledgment of interest conflicts notwithstanding. There is no evidence that GLF procurements were viewed as a weapon of war or of punishment, designed to force peasants into submission to state goals. What then was the state's stance toward the peasants during the GLF? It was to harness the peasantry to unprecedentedly ambitious developmental goals, goals shaped by Mao's new ideological conceptions. In the process of implementing them, the state's domination of the peasantry reached new heights, thereby bringing China closer to Stalinist reality. As in Stalin's case, GLF policy called for increased extraction of resources from the peasants, not just for national but also for local purposes. But this was based on the assumption that a breakthrough had occurred in agricultural production, a belief, in other words, that increased extraction was compatible with peasant welfare. This assumption turned out to be erroneous; it was part and parcel of the extraordinary mismanagement of the GLF. Famine was an unanticipated outcome of this mismanagement, an outcome for which Mao Zedong and his associates are responsible. When Chinese leaders finally realized what was going on in late 1960 they retreated from the policies of the Great Leap Forward. In the years that followed, procurement continued to be an important issue of conflict between the state and the peasants, but both the extent of extraction and the conflict fell significantly short of the Stalinist case. See Oi, “State and Peasant in Contemporary China.” Yang and Li report that since 1962, the purchases have remained stable or “became a little lower” but that because of population increase, rations remained low, leading to “semi-starvation” in some areas. See “Agriculture, Light Industry and Heavy Industry”: 207. To the extent that in relation to the peasants Stalinism amounted to the intentionally extreme exploitation of the peasants, to that extent the Stalinist label is not fully appropriate even for the Great Leap Forward, nor for the rest of the Maoist era.

The state and the economy in late imperial China

Abstract: Non-development of a modern economy, the failure to begin modern economic growth, I am prepared to argue but that would require another article- is “over-determined.” It's not a particularly interesting theoretical question any more. Proponents of economic, political, cultural, social structural, demographic and other explanations have each adduced overwhelming arguments and evidence for their favored explanations. In fact, any one - or two - is a sufficiently mortal debility for the premodern economies and societies that they have studied. More is merely overkill. What we really don't know for sure yet is how modern economic growth begins - even in the case of Western Europe whose economic history has been minutely examined for more than a century. The common fate of most of mankind before the very recent past - slow and uncertain premodern growth of population and output where it occurred, stagnation or decline otherwise - has not (by historians at least) received attention comparable to the more fashionable problem of modern development, whether that be phrased as the Marxist “transition” from “feudalism” to “capitalism,” the neo-classical growth model, or the perhaps now somewhat faded study of “modernization.”

Organizing the poor

Abstract: Piven and Cloward aimed to be provocative, but they did so by badly overstating their argument. They are too fair-minded to ignore completely the contribution and courage of organizers in these movements. In spite of their thesis, they pay occasional obeisance to movement organizers and exemplars. “There were nevertheless organizers in these [labor] struggles,” they acknowledge. “Some of these organizers were insurgents from the rank and file; others were radicals whose vision of an alternative future helped to account for their exemplary courage. Wherever these organizers came from, their vision helped goad workers into protest, and their courage gave workers heart and determination” (148). Nor can they ignore the role of organizational activists in the civil-rights movement. They seek exemption from the implications of this activity by noting that these organizations were not much concerned with building formal membership and were “cadre organizations.” But the idea of cadre organizations doesn't appear in the index, is introduced in an ad hoc manner to preserve their argument, and is never developed. In their account of the National Welfare Rights Organization, Piven and Cloward advocate a cadre organization, modelled on the successes of the civil-rights movement and of SCLC in particular (, 282–85). When Poor People's Movements goes from general thesis to specific case analysis, the argument becomes less provocative but more reasonable. Apparently, it is not every organization that discourages insurgency, aspires to create a mass membership and hierarchical bureaucracy, and is willing to sell its birthright for a mess of elite pottage. Some movement organizations' stimulate anger and defiance, and escalate the momentum of the people's protests. Some use their communication networks to spread disruptive forms of collective action and their organizational planning to chart strategy and timing, and to increase the effectiveness of collective action. Some institutionalize their dependence on their own constituency rather than come to rely on elite resources for survival. If some militant organizations later become tame and abandon their oppositional politics, other formerly docile organizations sometimes become centers of militancy - as the black churches and colleges did in the Southern civil rights movement. The intellectual task becomes the more exacting one of figuring out what types of organization are likely to facilitate insurgency or abandon their oppositional politics under different historical conditions. Poor People's Movements might be interpreted as providing one kind of answer to this question, an argument against mass-membership organizations. This is certainly a much less dramatic and provocative thesis. But in the end, an analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of different forms of organization is a great deal more useful to students of social movements than the anti-organizational phillipic that the authors offer us.

Embarrassment and Erving Goffman's idea of human nature

Abstract: What is the distinctively human manifestation of emotion? According to Darwin, it is blushing: "Blushing is the most peculiar and the most human of all expressions. Monkeys redden from passion, but it would require an overwhelming amount of evidence to make us believe that any animal could blush." (Darwin's contemporary, Mark Twain, agreed: "Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.") We blush because of our "sensitive regard for the opinion, more particularly, for the depreciation of others." But Darwin explains: "It is not the simple act of reflecting on our own appearance, but the thinking what others think of us, which excites a blush."' That is a line to warm the heart of any social scientist who believes that society is a moral order sustained by the individual's internalization of thejudgments of significant other people in the world. And yet, sociology has not paid great attention to blushing or to the social situations that give rise to it. If Darwin is correct that the capacity for blushing is a distinguishing characteristic of the human being, then the social sciences have been remiss in failing to investigate it.

Patriarchalism in imperial China and Western Europe

Abstract: My analysis suggests that Weber's typology of domination - the cluster of patriarchalism, charisma, and law - does not fit Chinese history as it does European history. The typology has particular relevance in Europe because Weber purposefully developed types of domination that reflected and synthesized essential elements of Western historical experience: the struggles between kings and nobles, between popes and priests, between leaders and followers of all types. Deeply aware of the patterns of Western history, Weber understood that his concepts of analysis constituted “historical summaries,” not simply ideas and abstract beliefs but distillations of patterns of actions and of the justifications supporting and channeling those patterns. Roth, “Introduction,” xxx. Although Weber fashioned these ideal types from his knowledge of Western history, he wanted to make them genuinely “trans-epochal and transcultural” so that he could test, through “comparative mental experiment and imaginative extrapolation,” causal explanations about the course of Western history. Ibid. That the generations of students of Western society continue to learn from and struggle with Weber's concepts and historical theories demonstrates that Weber was hugely successful in his work. But are Weber's typologies as useful in the analysis of non-Western societies as they are in that of Europe? I have only dealt with Chinese society, but for this society my analysis suggests that the answer to this question is no. As Weber defined them, patriarchalism, charisma, and law do not apply to China in the way that they apply to Europe. They do not represent summaries of Chinese history; they do not distill the debates and struggles of two millenia; they do not tap those shared understandings that informed Chinese patterns of action. And because they do not gain an equivalent grasp of Chinese as they do of Western history, they are less useful and often very misleading when one uses them to analyze and explain the course of Chinese history. If those concepts do not get at the same reality in China, what is the logical status of the conclusions drawn from using them to analyze China? As I have attempted to show in this paper, they can be used to indicate through comparison what configurations are absent from China. But they are less useful in developing a genuine understanding of Chinese history. Therefore, to understand China, and perhaps most non-Western societies, Weber's typology of domination and particularly his analysis of traditional domination, should not be used directly as a summary of an underlying reality. Weber's warning about the “perniciousness” of Marxian concepts and theories when “they are thought of as empirically valid or real ‘effective forces’” should be applied with particular vigor to Weber's own concepts and theories when applied to non-Western societies. Max Weber, (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1949), 103. But, by equal measure, if one assumes that Weber's typology of domination misrepresents non-Western societies in some regard, it still provides an example of the sort of conceptual framework needed to analyze the historical development of state structures in any society. Weber championed comparative research, because he believed without comparisons it was impossible to examine rigorously the course of history and to develop theories of historical change. Weber rightly believed that comparisons were only possible with generalized historical concepts. But to Weber, historical research does not lead to better or more general sociological theories. Instead, sociology, as Weber put it to a noted historian, “can perform ... very modest preparatory work” to an adequate historical analysis. , lviii. Concepts must lead the way to historical explanations and not the reverse. Similarly, Weber's analysis of the West provides the preparatory work for a better understanding of non-Western society. In this sense Weber's concepts are indispensable for the analysis of non-Western society, not because they are the last word, but because, along with other products of Western sociology, they are the first word, words that are used only to have their meanings altered by subsequent research. This, too, is the conclusion of Wolfgang Schluchter () 17: “Weber did not understand his terminology as a final one. This does not mean that it is unsystematic or only useful to specific problems, but the sequence of terms is not always obvious in its ramifications, and therefore it sometimes needs an explication or interpretation. A critically productive evaluation of Weber's work has to include a clarification of terminology and the investigation of the historic content.”

Changing nationalism and Israel's “open frontier” on the West Bank

Abstract: Israel generally has not been thought of as exhibiting the dynamic typical to frontier societies. On the general historical plane, Jewish and European frontier ventures did not take place contemporaneously. By the time Jewish immigration to Palestine began, Turner concluded that the zone of “free land” in the continental United States was exhausted and, with the exception of the feeble attempt to settle in Kenya, no new targets were selected by Europeans.58 As far as Israeli history is concerned, after the War of Inde-pendence of 1948 it seemed that frontier expansion had halted. Since the Six Day War, however, and more dramatically since the major settlement drive of 1981, Lamar and Thompson's contention that “probably the nearest contemporary approach to the kind of frontier ... where rival societies compete for control of the land, is to be found in Israel”59 seems to be born out. The emphasis on the continuous formative impact of the frontier situation provides, therefore, a theoretical framework for the study of Israeli society and national identity. The pattern of frontier movement as the basis of nation-building was typical of the Palestinian Jewish community and has not been discarded since. The question now being debated by the major political camps, each one of which is involved in a different phase of settlement in the West Bank, concerns the extent of expansion that is wise to undertake and the appropriate goals of this expansion. Settlement is the “heroic” aspect of Israeli nationalism, and therefore a major route for the acquisition of hegemonic influence, elite position, and prestige. The compelling character of the formative national experience is still very much alive, and therefore it is justified to see Israel as similar to other frontier societies. At the same time the forces and interests favoring the expansion of settle-ment across the 1948 borders have been much weakened. Israeli society has become considerably more urban as the cities absorbed the largest part of the immigrant population. Even rural settlements now mix agriculture with industry. Not surprisingly then, no spontaneous mass movement of colon-izers, similar to the Stockade and Watchtower settlers, have emerged. For some fifteen years, only an unsubstantial migration, motivated by the rela-tively weak momentum of intergenerational change, has taken place. Until the end of 1983 only about 0.9 percent of Israeli Jews had moved to the West Bank. Only in late 1981 has a government policy, by turning construction and settlement into a profit-making capitalist venture, created the potential for making a dent in the solid Palestinian Arab demographic composition of the West Bank. The process of massive settlement is still in its preliminary stages and may be slowed down, arrested, or reversed by a number of external factors. Even if the “One-Hundred-Thousand Plan” will be carried out, that number would involve only about 3 percent of Israel's Jewish population, and leave a ratio of 7:1 Arabs for each settler on the West Bank. But numbers alone are not the sole decisive factor. The emergence of a regional interest, translated into electoral strength through the agency of the Techiya Party (founded by members of Gush Emunim and the Movement for Greater Israel), which, according to Goldberg and Ben-Zadok, is in “active opposition toward the larger society's culture,”60 could make territorial withdrawal or compromise unlikely, if not impossible. I have undertaken this study with the intention of contributing a case study to the evolving field of comparative frontier research. Simultaneously I examined the impact of the second period of frontier expansion on Israeli nationalism. To this I will now turn. There are three potential trends or dangers to which I am able to point: In the first era, Jewish-Arab relations were essentially mediated by the central authority of the British Mandate; in the second, both the colonial and the settlers' roles were played out by the same national group, giving Israeli-Palestinian confrontations on the West Bank particularly ominous contours. The pre-state Jewish community operated from a position of weakness and its dominant sectors were predisposed toward compromise with the Palesti-nian national movement. Today, Israeli strength has led to intransigence. Jewish-Arab conflict in Palestine flared up at times of massive influx of Jewish refugees. Currently this is scarcely so. Finally, Jewish pioneers, like other brands of revolutionary nationalists experimented with novel forms of social organization and relations. No more. Turner concluded that popular democracy was the outcome of the frontier situation of the United States. In Israel, I believe, the erosion of the demo-cratic structures is hinted at by her frontier processes. There already exists a dual legal system: Israeli settlers are adjudicated under Israeli law and the Palestinian Arabs live under military law that has for all practical purposes revised the previous Jordanian legal system out of existence.62 In addition there is a stringent enforcement of the law against its Arab violators and often benign neglect of Jewish offenders, especially in matters concerning land ownership.63 But the question concerning the impact of the increased demographic, and ultimately cultural and political, pressures of the growing settler population on the Palestinians, and the latter's potentially more embittered and militant defensive and offensive practices, on the internal democracy of Israel proper, also must be raised. Can the Israeli personality, institutions and forms of domination created in the West Bank, be prevented from filtering through into the mainstream of Israeli society, and subverting the spirit, even if not necessarily the formal expressions, of its democracy? Should democracy give way under the demand for “unquestioning assent to governmental decisions” then the third of Hayes's criteria of integral nationalism would have been implemented.

The politics of private woman and public man

Abstract: Four themes run throughout this article. First, the tendency within male-stream analyses of political activity to exaggerate the extent of differences between women and men, and the recovery through feminist analysis of an unacknowledged political dimension underlying distinctive elements of women's experience. Second, the need to interrogate more rigorously the theoretical terrain on which the feminist engagement with the standard writings has taken place, particularly the unreflected emphasis upon the opposition between private woman and public man. Mapping political/ apolitical and male/ female onto the public/private divide encourages silence on boundaries of the political within the public sphere. It fails to address the political nature of the private, and implies that women are defined exclusively by the private sphere and men not at all. Third, the importance of re-examining men's political capacity, and distorted concepts and criteria of the political developed without sensitivity to gender. Male-stream writings misrepresent male political capacity by failing to recognize the parameters of men's political response - its parochialism and partiality, as well as the extent to which it is, like women's, reflective of “private” experience. Whether in political analysis or practical politics, it will not do to treat men's concerns, or policies formulated largely through traditionally male institutions, as the stuff of which politics is made. Fourth, the recognition that myopic visions of the political underlying misrepresentations of women's and men's political capacity are reproduced in many accounts of the relation between the private and the public, the personal and the political. Against such short-sighted views of politics, it is crucial to assert that the boundary between private and public arenas does not mark the limits of the political, and indeed is itself constructed through political process.

Role models and role distance

Abstract: Fall semester, 1960 was a good time nationally. The country was confident and optimistic. The rust corroding America's underbelly was barely visible. John F. Kennedy had just been elected President. It seemed there was no Viet Nam, no Silent Spring, no dogs and water hoses turned on demonstrators. There were no assassinations, no burning cities, no Orangeburg or Kent State, no Watergate. Grass still meant lawn. Bob Zimmerman had not become Bob Dylan. A beard symbolized nonconformity, rather than conformity. Unemployment was relatively low and there were few Ph.D.s without jobs, except by choice. If you happened to live in a warm sunny environment with a magnificent view of the San Francisco Bay through the eucalyptus and be a twenty-one year old male in good health with a sports car, able to prolong the youth culture by staying in school, it was a good time indeed.

Why China failed to create an endogenous industrial capitalism

Abstract: Weber almost anticipated the idea of the high-level equilibrium trap. Speaking about bureaucracy, he observed that “as always in the area of'techniques' ... advance proceeded most slowly wherever older structural forms were in their own way technically highly developed and functionally particularly well-developed to the requirements at hand.” , 987. It is a pity that he did not utilize this insight to analyze what he called the “increasing stability of the economic situation under conditions of the economically self-sufficient and socially homogenously composed world-empire of China.” , 137. Instead he pursued the idea that the absence of self-generated capitalism in China was due “basically” to “the lack of a particular mentality.” , 104. This inappropriate mentality had several aspects. One was the “personalist principle.” , 236. Others are listed in a catalog of alleged traits of personality taken largely from Arthur Smith's Chinese Characteristics. , 231–32. Cp. ibid. 235-39. See Arthur Smith, (New York: Reveil, 1900). They include stolidity, patience, dislike of novelty, absence of curiosity, credulity, and a general distrust of and dishonesty towards all. Having acknowledged China's “considerable technical endowments” and ‘“inventions’” (Weber's own quotation marks), , 199. he argued that “the magic stereotyping of technology and economics... completely precluded the advent of indigenous modern enterprises in communication and industry.” , 199. The Chinese world, in a famous phrase, was “a magic garden” in which “the ethical rationality of the miracle [was] out of the question.” , 200. Certain points of detail may be disputed. Thus the miracles attributed to the piety of sons and the fidelity of widows were entirely ethically rational. Mark Elvin, “State Sponsorship of Private Virtue in Imperial China,” (forthcoming, autumn, 1984). But the crucial fact is that this conception of the problem led Weber in practice to place an excessive faith in the explanatory power of an analysis of ideas considered in relative isolation from their socioeconomic context. It probably also weakened his sense of the need to sort out more systematically the somewhat internally contradictory opinions that he held on the more specifically economic aspects of Chinese society.

Scientific management and class relations

Abstract: It has been the contention of this article that the true significance of the scientific management movement lies in what it can tell us about the engineering profession. Scientific management was not simply capitalist ideology, nor were the engineers who developed it simply the prisoners of capitalist ideology. Instead, scientific management was the product of the insertion of once-independent engineers into the complex, collective labor process in large corporations. It reflects both their inability to break loose fully from the dominant ideology and the fact that their interests as engineers were in conflict with the interests of their capitalist employers.

Collective violence in China, 1880–1980

Abstract: This article began by noting that certain current theories of rural violence, predicated upon the demise of the peasantry, are of limited applicability to China. However, it is not my intention to argue that China scholars should therefore feel free to ignore general theories altogether. Quite the contrary. As the preceding discussion has tried to show, general theories are of considerable value in illuminating our understanding of specific cases of raphy cleaves to a rigid “five modes of production” approach, in recent years alternative arguments have gained some currency. The least innovative of these alternatives is a resurrected Asiatic Mode of Production theory, an approach whose main appeal lies in its claim to Marxist legitimacy. Though Marx and Engels should be credited for the recognition that hypotheses developed to account for West European history may be ill-suited to explain the social history of India or China, their resort to an “Asiatic Mode” has, quite properly, drawn criticism. For one thing, Asian societies differed markedly among themselves. For another, the allegedly despotic political systems of Asian countries did not in fact prevent substantial socioeconomic change over time. Despite these familiar criticisms, however, in some respects the theory is of interest to the student of China. As Marx described it, the foundation of “Oriental despotism” was actually collective property, “in most cases created through a combination of manufacture and agriculture within the small community which thus becomes entirely self-sustaining...” Karl Marx, , ed. E. J. Hobsbawm(New York, 1964), 70. The key to a powerful state, in other words, was the strength and isolation of local corporate communities. The theory is interesting for the attention it focuses upon two elements: the state and local collectivities. Recently in China, a number of theorists - while rejecting many of the assumptions of the Asiatic Mode - have nevertheless retained its concern with state and local society. Some theorists, characterizing the Chinese polity as an “ultrastable system” (chaowending xitong), have stressed bureaucratic continuity. See, for example, Jin Guantao and Liu Qingfeng, “Zhongguo lishishang fengjian shehui de jiegou: yige chaowending xitong” [The structure of feudal society in Chinese history: an ultrastable system], 1 (1980): 5–24. They emphasize the homeostatic properties of the imperial political system: flexibility provided through peasant rebellions, migration, partible inheritance, and the like. Such safety-valves, these theorists suggest, allowed periodic changes in the ruling elite, but no fundamental alteration of the strong state structure itself. Other theorists, emphasizing China's “small-peasant economy” (xiaonong jingji), look to the peculiarities of traditional Chinese agriculture for the key to her historical experience. Chen Ping, for example, identifies the Chinese concentration on grain production, in contrast to Europe or the United States where grain production has been balanced by animal husbandry and forestry, as a critical factor. Chen Ping, “Danyi xiaonong jingji jiegou shi woguo changqi dongluan pinqiong de binggen” [Unitary small-peasant economic structure is the root of China's long-term turmoil and poverty], (16 November, 1979), 3. By his account, the mixture of agricultural pursuits in the West encouraged a division of labor, commercialization, and scientific progress. The Chinese system, by contrast, stunted such developments and served instead as a secure foundation for landlord-bureaucratic domination. According to Chen Ping, it was small-peasant agriculture that constituted an “ultrastable economic structure” (chaowending de jingji jiegou). Although particular dynasties came and went in periodic peasant rebellions, the limiting economic system continued to reproduce despotism. Chen Ping's lessons for contemporary China are basically economic: utilize the international market, diversify beyond grain production to develop an ecologically balanced agriculture, encourage a type of industrialization that complements agricultural needs. Though the critique presented by the “small-peasant economy” theorists remains largely in the realm of economics, another group offers a more directly political challenge. These are the writers who characterize contemporary China as operating under a system of “agricultural socialism” (nongye shehuizhuyi). See, for example, Ying Xueli and Sun Hui, “Guanyu woguo shehuizhuyi gaizao houqi de jige lilun wenti” [Some theoretical questions concerning the later period of China's socialist transformation], 4 (1980): 98–104. According to their analysis, the persistence of small-scale production has given rise to a pernicious bureaucratism that permeates all facets of socialist China. Cadres - chosen for their peasant class origins rather than for any expertise - are said to operate by principles opposed to economic progress. Administrative fiat, maintained by political force, overshadows efficiency as the criterion of operational feasibility. While arguing that the root of the problem lies in small-scale peasant production, the “agricultural socialism” critics insist that bureaucratism has become a major barrier to further development. Limited as these various formulations are, their attention to state and local peasant society resonates with a central theme of this essay. Much more research is needed to delineate the precise structure of state and local collectivities, interactions between them, and variations over time and from one geographical setting to another. But eventually such work promises to take us nearer to the reality of the Chinese case than we can hope to approach through the wholesale transfer of theories devised to explain quite different historical developments. The peasant studies school, whose central thesis hinges - ironically enough - on the demise of the peasantry, offers but partial explanations for a society whose peasants refuse to die.

Vicissitudes of the sacred: Erving Goffman and the book of job

Abstract: Since the late 1960s and early 1970s, American sociologists have been made increasingly aware, mostly by Marxist and phenomenological critics, of the latent moral or practical implications of what often purports to be objectively impersonal scientific theories. Whereas Goffman's imaginative writing style and intensely personal observational technique never allowed him to be easily placed in the camp of the positivist objectivists, the profound moral issues and assumptions of his work, as Friedson's statement implied, never fully appeared in a clear light either, probably because of Goffman's strategic decision to accommodate his moral insights somewhat to the positivist intellectual milieu of the 1950s. The present analysis reveals, however, that, even more than allowing tacit moral assumptions to operate in the back-ground of his work, Goffman focussed centrally on an investigation of the various levels of moral understanding, a project for which he used the Book of Job as his signpost. Goffman's inquiry, it should be emphasized, was not conducted through an external observation of other people's consciousness but rather by means of an intensely personal reflection upon the governing “frames” of his own consciousness as it looked out upon the everyday social world. What we have chronicled in this essay is the dramatic evolution of Goffman's own moral consciousness, not the moral understandings of the subjects of his studies, the latter, of course, changing as Goffman's own moral understandings evolved. exact nature and purpose of his moral investigation. As we have seen, an ongoing reference for Goffman's moral inquiry was not a rationalist philosophical treatise, but rather one of the most poetic and profound narratives of the Bible, a work in which the radical mystery and transcendence of the Sacred, beyond all structures of nature, society, and the human ego, are asserted. The symbolic and narrative features of the Job text accord well with its emphasis on the mystery of Being, whose fundamental depth and power could not easily be compressed within the outlines of abstract rationalist propositions. Goffman, likewise, combines a final emphasis on the mystery of Being, beyond all finite “frames” and “fabrications,” with a pervasively symbolic and narrative style in his writing. In directing our attention toward the ultimate mystery of Being, of which finite “frames” provide only a tentative revelation, Goffman mounts an additional critique of Durkheim, not only for naively assuming that sacred representations must always reflect the social rather than the individual inclinations of human nature, but also for assuming that the social dimension of “homo duplex” alone serves as the ultimate and final reference for sacred forms. Much like contemporary existentialists who emphasize human finitude and the mystery of Being, Goffman uses Job's increasingly open psyche as his basis for understanding that beyond nature, beyond society, and beyond the individual lies a mystery of Being that continually surpasses, indeed itself engenders the ever-changing outlines of these other finite structures of existence. In the end, Goffman is perhaps more mythmaker than moralist, a religious poet who, for an age in which the traditional symbols of Being have been displaced by new cognitive forms, particularly those of science, magically transformed contemporary scientific language into archetypal symbols of the Sacred. Goffman's task was extremely difficult, one that would have strained the intellectual ingenuity and linguistic resources of a less talented man, namely the task of conveying to large numbers of relatively unprepared, deeply preoccupied and increasingly self-absorbed moderns a message about a completely unfashionable, economically useless and essentially ego-threatening mystery. Let us hope the large silence that now exists in his absence will not be filled by words less meaningful than his own.

A curse on the Great Wall

Abstract: The rise of modern nationalism, the unfolding of a rural based revolution, and the quest for a new world view are the distinguishing characteristics of twentieth-century Chinese history. This complex of simultaneous processes makes the Chinese experience a paradigm for much of the Third World. It has also captured the interest of Western social theorists because of the tension between the external imperatives of modernization and the internal prerequisites of social change. One dimension of that tension, most apparent in the lives and work of critical intellectuals, has been the conflict between jiuguo and qimeng, between national salvation and enlightenment. Beneficiaries of modern education in China and abroad, these intellectuals share their compatriots' commitment to a strong, independent China. They have been integral to the success of the Chinese Revolution while, at the same time, never quite identifying its success with the realization of a new world view.

On the historical origins of Chinese underdevelopment

Abstract: The Imperial regime bequeathed to its successors a double heritage and a double handicap: on the one hand, an exceptionally strong population pressure on the area of cultivated land; and on the other, a radical break between interior China (rural bureaucratic, traditional) and coastal China (cosmopolitan, enterprising, open to innovation). The history of the twentieth century only accentuated these contradictions and worsened these handicaps. Rooted in its urban bases, the Guomindang regime of 1927–1949 did virually nothing to transfer technology to the countryside, so that the gap between the two Chinas - coastal and interior - widened, and the regime was condemned to be swept away by peasant revolution. As for the People's Republic, by postponing the adoption of a real birth-control program until 1973, it wiped out a large part of the benefits that a policy of modernization extended for the first time ever to the whole country would have brought, and made economic take-off even more difficult in 1981 than it was in 1949.

Capitalist development and educational reform

Abstract: The early formulations of reproduction theory fail to grasp uneven educational development because of a reliance on a mechanical, base/ superstructure model of social organization. Unlike neo-Weberian models which attempt to sever the necessary connection between the existence of public education and commodity production, reproduction theory emphasizes the “correspondence” of public education and the capitalist economy. But this “correspondence” does not adequately conceptualize the unity of form and content in capitalist relations of production. As a causal model it implies that economic relations develop in the absence of their institutional counterparts. The weight of economic “needs” then calls institutional reform into play. Such a model reduces historical development to the movement of pure forms. The early formulations of reproduction theory confuse abstract and historical levels of analysis. They also fail to adequately grasp social units. Capitalism is a world economy in which production extends well beyond national boundaries, yet in which labor power is reproduced on the whole by national states. Without an analysis of relations among nations, uneven educational development is unintelligible. The patterns of educational development seen in Ireland and Upper Canada resulted from the colonial status of these countries which made educational reform appear a potential solution to imperialist struggles. Educational reforms blocked in England because of class struggles and sectarian divisions could be invoked in the colonial situation by virtue of the relative independence of the colonial state. These reforms, however, embodied structural features peculiar to capitalist relations of production. Precocious educational development in these cases results from the heightened development of the colonial state in relation to the colonial political economy. Public education does not, one would think obviously, eliminate class relations. Rather, public educational reform is a mode of reformulating class relations by the state. This reformulation changes the appearance of class relations but not their basis. Public education is not compensation for the loss of liberty political subjects endure by consenting to be ruled by the state; it is more usefully seen as one way in which the state administers class relations. As such, it reproduces class struggles in displaced forms. Such displaced struggles are seen by neo-Weberian writers as “constellations of interests,” but one should not lose sight of the structural origins of such interests. While reproduction theory has presented serious critiques of liberal theory and has stressed the historically specific character of public education, it has embodied functionalist assumptions which limit its ability to come to grips with concrete historical development. To escape these assumptions it is necessary to reject a base/ superstructure model and to seek rather to understand the expanded reproduction of the essential social forms of capitalist society.

Afro-American intellectuals and the people's culture

Abstract: Locke, Johnson, and other like-minded black intellectuals of the twenties attempted to construct a basic framework of resistance to racial domination. Their turning toward Afro-American “folk-culture,” and to “ancestral” Africa, was a bold effort to appropriate the very domains which had been declared “primitive” and “savage,” and to transform those domains through an analysis which clarified their deep-rooted positive values. For a time in which “Negro” folk-lore was associated with blackface minstrels and Africa was associated with sub-humans, the work of Locke and others was courageous in its reach.

Nietzsche’s Concept of Ideology

Abstract: Paul Ricoeur has argued that Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche constitute the modern "school of suspicion" concerning illusions of consciousness.' The intuition in Ricoeur's argument is a fairly common one, namely, that Freud's and Nietzsche's suspicious approaches to consciousness might somehow be seen as growing out of the same soil as Marx's concept of ideology. It has proved to be a good deal easier, however, to determine what a theory of ideology entails for Marx and Freud than to determine what it entails for Nietzsche. Nonetheless, not only can a concept of ideology be discerned, delineated, and defended in Nietzsche, but there is some value in doing so, for it is in crucial respects complementary to the theories of Marx and Freud.

Max Weber's ethics and the peace movement today

Abstract: The decisive change since Weber spoke of “our responsibility before history” has not been the demise of the German nation state after only seventy-five years but the sudden dawn of the nuclear age Now the survival of populations, not of nation-states is at stake - a situation not anticipated by Weber and his contemporaries It is quite possible that many millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, will die because of rational strategic decisions by political and military leaders, but it is no longer possible to legitimate a great war as a matter of honor, as Churchill and Weber did, or as an enterprise “to make the world safe for democracy,” as Wilson and Roosevelt did If there can be no more victors, it also becomes impossible to load the “responsibility before history” on their shoulders, as Weber did in “Politics as a Vocation” Today a new concept of responsibility is appropriate, which has a general and a specifically German aspect The latter involves the German responsibility for the World Wars Weber had vehemently rejected the Allied charge that Imperial Germany was primarily responsible for the war, even though he was very worried about what might be buried in the German archives Today it can no longer be denied that Imperial Germany was largely guilty as charged After the second war, it was impossible to deny the German responsibility During his tenure as chancellor Helmut Schmidt pointed time and again to the Federal Republic's moral obligation to assure the Soviet Union that it would never again be attacked Since the German nation does no longer exist, the foreign minister under Schmidt and Kohl, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, now speaks of a “German-German community of responsibility” (Verantwortungsgemeinschaft), in contrast to the “community of fate” shared with the Western allies At the same time the peace movement has used the German responsibility for the Second World War and for organized genocide as a moral argument for a special German duty to help prevent another war Before the First World War pacifism was propagated by only a handful of intellectuals Afterwards the “Nie wieder Krieg” (“Never again war”) movement was supported by masses of people who had experienced the horrors of the “Great War” Today the peace movement is no longer what it was for Weber, a cause for “a few pacifist Utopians” or of a generation that suffered through a world war Cited in Marianne Weber, 410 The danger of a nuclear holocaust has given the movement a novel historical significance If the new kind of pacifism is not merely a matter of humanitarian commitment, which aims at a world without war, but a movement that struggles to help humanity survive, then it is equally a matter of “good intentions” and of responsibility - and Weber's distinction collapses Weber could take it for granted that there would be generational succession and hence history in the future We cannot do so any more This has created a special kind of responsibility not before our descendants but for the very possibility that new generations will be able to live - a totally new ethical situation Saving whole populations and even having to ensure the continuance of life has become a new “ultimate value,” transcending the salvation concerns of religious virtuosi and the political Utopias of revolutionaries as well as the traditional interests of the leaders of nation-states Before this situation Weber's distinction between the two ethics loses its political applicability Finally, the new ethical situation forces us to look beyond “politics as a vocation” as a matter merely of political leadership Today the peace movement is an endeavor to make politics everybody's vocation in the face of perplexed governments who surrender the people to the rationality of military technology During the Second World War the atom bomb was constructed in total secrecy For many years afterwards its further development lay in the hands of a tiny number of political leaders and scientists, who withheld as much information as possible from the public The tendency toward secrecy has remained strong, but a large part of the public is now fighting for disclosure If Clemenceau believed that war was too important to be left to generals, the new wisdom has it that the dangers of a nuclear war are too great to leave the armaments race and military strategy to elected politicians without effective public participation In contrast to Weber's polar concepts, his battle-cry “our responsibility before history” has not remained part of public memory Perhaps it should be resurrected today with a changed emphasis as a peaceable call to take responsibility for history This might help both sides in the current struggles over nuclear defense policies in western Europe and the United States to remember their human commonality in spite of highly emotional confrontations

Revolutionary Mexico and the world economy

Abstract: Obregon and Calles encountered intense but disunited resistance at home and abroad. They responded with land and labor reforms to coopt campesinos and urban workers, thereby undercutting popular opposition and enlisting the masses in the campaign against regionalist bosses, Porfirian oligarchs, and foreign investors. These populist alliances helped the Sonoran diarchy build more loyal and professional military and civilian bureaucracies, which in turn helped regulate local and metropolitan firms, increase and stabilize tax revenues, and develop the economy's infrastructure. Following Obregon assasination in 1928, Calles forestalled collapse by integrating many military and civilian bosses into a central party organization. Yet the state remained only partially consolidated. At the end of the Calles administration, regionalist cliques retained considerable political autonomy, and a major campesino rebellion challenged federal authority. Furthermore, dependence on foreign petroleum and mining companies limited government revenue and spending. In mid-1927, Calles inaugurated several years of conservative domestic policies and open collaboration with North Americans. But Calles did not purge all progressive elements from the state machinery. His quest for political stability led him to enroll in the official party many elites who depended on mass followings and who opposed the rightward shift of government policy. During the Great Depression, these elites formed a coalition with intellectuals, small business, and the lower classes that after electing Lazaro Cardenas president, ended Callista hegemony and undertook far-reaching reforms. Thus the Cardenistas completed what Obregon and Calles had begun: the Mexican state's transformation from the poorly centralized oligarchic structure of the Porfiriato to the highly centralized, mass-inclusionary structure of the postrevolutionary era. In the next decade, Mexico joined the ranks of the world's intermediate, “semiperipheral” economies thanks to import-substitution and metropolitan capital. Since then, Mexican governments have maintained political stability and spurred industrialization by steering a pragmatic course between reformism and conservatism, nationalism and collaborationism.