Showing papers in "Theory and Society in 1989"

Social movements: Between history and sociology

Abstract: This course investigates the history of movements for social change in American history. Students will explore efforts to alter the structure of society, from abolition through the present day. How do the background conditions of a historical moment give rise to a self-conscious effort to change history’s course? What is the relationship between structural factors and willful choices? Do tactics and strategy matter, and why have different movements dealt with tactical and strategic questions? What is victory for a movement? What is defeat?

How culture works

Abstract: An anthropologist might find the question bizarre, one that by the asking reveals a fundamental misunderstanding. Culture is not something that works or fails to work. It is not something imposed on or done to a person; it is constitutive of the person. It is the precondition and the condition of human-ness. The meanings people incorporate in their lives are not separate from their activities; activities are made of meanings. Culture, as Clifford Geertz says, "is not a power, something to which social events, behaviors, institutions, or processes can be causally attributed; it is a context, something within which they can be intelligibly that is, thickly described."' Insofar as this is true, the question of the "impact" of culture is not answerable because culture is not separable from social structure, economics, politics, and other features of human activity.

Two methods in search of science

Abstract: In terms of the criteria for the growth of knowledge formulated by Popper, I have tried to demonstrate the superiority of the methodology of research program over the methodology of induction. Although the argument used Skocpol's and Trotsky's theories of revolution as illustrations, I constructed general claims organized around the contexts of discovery (induction versus deduction), justification (verification versus falsification and prediction), and scientist (external to or part of the object of knowledge). So long as philosophers of science were concerned to discover the scientific method, they could successfully compartmentalize these contexts. However, as soon as they became concerned to explain the development of scientific knowledge, they quickly discovered, as we have, that these contexts are irretrievably intertwined. So we require alternative categories for comparing methodologies. I have tried to demonstrate that the method of induction stands on a false objectivity. While it claims to generate explanations that map the empirical world, it actually erects barriers to the comprehension of that world. Not “the facts” but methodological premises and arbitrary explanatory hunches become the hidden anchors for theoretical conclusions. The method is at odds with its aims. Paradoxically, the methodology of the research program, precisely because it is self-consciously anchored in a complex of moral values, a conceptual system, models (analogies and metaphors) and exemplars - what Skocpol refers to as “blinders or heavily tinted lenses,” what Lakatos refers to as negative and positive heuristics - creates a more effective dialogue with those “historical patterns.” Blindness comes not from pre-existing theories but from failing to recognize their necessity and then failing to articulate and defend their content. The method of induction claims to be outside and beyond theoretical traditions. Thus Skocpol reduces the classics of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim to inspirations, sources of hypotheses, and even to variables out of which a true macro sociology can be forged. “Compelling desires to answer historically grounded questions, not classical theoretical paradigms, are the driving force [of historical sociology].” , 4–5. We select a problem that takes our fancy and induce its solutions from the facts. Since, in the final analysis there is only one theory compatible with the facts, there is no need to go through the falsification of alternative theories or put one's own theory through severe tests. The methodology of research programs, on the other hand, is concerned to solve puzzles, that is, anomalies thrown up by its expanding belt of theories, discrepancies between expectations and “facts.” Although “facts” are themselves theoretical constructs of sense data, what Feyerabend calls natural interpretations, they have greater stability than the theories created to explain them. That is to say, they have an obduracy - if for no other reason than by convention as in Popper's basic statements - that allows them to act as falsifications of explanatory theories. The health and vitality of a research program depends not on the concealment, obfuscation, denial of anomalies but on their clear articulation and disciplined proliferation. Continual dialogue between theory and data through falsification of the old and the development of new hypotheses with predictions of novel facts is of the essence of a progressive research program. Trotsky's prophetic powers all originate in, even if they are not determined by his commitment to Marxism - a recognition of its anomalies and the need to solve them in an original manner. The method of induction regards the facts as irreducible and given, the problem is to come to an unbiased assessment of them. Science grows by the accumulation of factual propositions and inductive generalizations. This is its internal history. “But the inductivist cannot offer a rational ‘internal’ explanation for why certain facts than others were selected in the first place.” , 104. Problem choice, as we said above, is part of the “external” history relegated to footnotes, prefaces, or to the “sociology of knowledge.” By contrast, the methodology of research programs incorporates into its internal history what is branded as metaphysical and external by inductivists, namely its hard core postulates and its choice of puzzles. What is reconstructed as scientifically rational in the one appears as scientifically irrational in the other. Although what is constituted as rational in research programs encompasses much more than the rationality of induction, nevertheless even here external forces necessarily influence the scientific process. This is particularly so in the social sciences where the object of knowledge autonomously generates new anomalies that the positive heuristic has to absorb. External forces can be seized upon as opportunities for the rational growth of knowledge, but they can also be the source of irrationality. Thus, research programs become degenerate when they seal themselves off from the world they study or when that world wrenches the research process from its hard core. Marxism is particularly sensitive to external history. Where it seeks to change the world it is more likely to be sensitive to anomalies than where it is a dominant ideology and thus more vulnerable to the repression of anomalies. Obviously the methodology of research programs has its own distinctive problems that energize its development. Is it possible to identify a single core to a research program or are there a family of cores and how does the core change over time? What is the relation between positive and negative heuristics? How easy is it to distinguish between progressive and degenerating research programs? How do we know that an apparently degenerating program will not recover its old dynamism? How does one evaluate the relative importance of progressive and degenerating branches of the same program? Is it possible to stipulate the conditions under which it is rational to abandon one research program in favor of another? Such probloems notwithstanding I hope I have made a case for the superiority of the methodology of research programs over the methodology of induction as a mode of advancing social science.

1968, Revolution in the world-system

Abstract: The revolution of 1968 was a revolution; it was a single revolution. It was marked by demonstrations, disorder, and violence in many parts of the world over a period of at least three years. Its origins, consequences, and lessons cannot be analyzed correctly by appealing to the particular circumstances of the local manifestations of this global phenomenon, however much the local factors conditioned the details of the political and social struggles in each locality.

Voracious states and obstructing cities: An aspect of state formation in preindustrial Europe

Abstract: We have considered the evolution of the relations between cities and states as the product of changing relative power positions. For the towns, these mainly consisted of their population figure, their economic and financial prosperity, their communication facilities, their prerogatives in administrative, economic, fiscal, and judicial matters, and their military force. For the monarchies, the continuity and skills of the rulers mattered, while the dimensions, the cohesion and communication facilities of the territory, the available resources and the pressure of neighboring competitors weighed heavily on their destiny. In a pattern of changing relations, coalitions between the weaker partners in the polity against the mightier were normal.

The problem of control in the weak state

Abstract: How does a decentralized, fundamentally weak state achieve a measure of control over societal changes without losing its essential character? That is the question that government, academic, and business leaders in the United States faced in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Before about 1880, most Americans in positions of influence were deeply committed to weak governments, divided sovereignty, and individual self-determination. The federalist structure of autonomous local, state, and national governments, patronage party politics, and a strong court system upholding individual rights contributed to and reinforced this commitment. But in the 1880s and 1890s influential Americans awoke to constant civil unrest and growing inequality in a society transformed by urbanization and industrialization, and began to realize the necessity of controlling the direction and consequences of change. In those years, and continuing at least to 1920, such Americans undertook the task of rethinking democracy. As a consequence of this crisis, the United States embarked upon an unprecedented and still continuing period of state building. This process, as Stephen Skowronek has shown, resulted in a "national administration" that remains wedded not only to the ideals, but also to the institutions of the weak state.'

Cities and states in Europe, 1000–1800

Abstract: increasing subordination of European trade to that of the eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East, the Indian Ocean, and East Asia; continued expansion of Muslim power in continental Europe; the rise of city-states, city-empires, and religious organizations as the dominant European political structures; cyclical destruction of those political structures' power, especially in Eastern Europe, by nomadic invaders from the Eurasian steppe; battles among armed tribute takers and their personal armies as the predominant form of war.

State and towns in the Middle Ages: The Scandinavian experience

Abstract: The relationship between state and towns in medieval Scandinavia was a close and a complicated one. Towns were part of the political power, but they were also something else “outside” the state. p ]From an “internal” perspective the towns can be regarded as forming part of the power-cum-control system of the state. In medieval Scandinavia this meant that towns should, above all, be considered against the background of the extent and possession of the supremacy right. During the 1000–1150 stage, towns formed political and religious points d'appui for the new feudal sovereignty. In the course of the 1150–1350 stage, they also became vital centers for that exchange of goods that was instigated by the people who were in possession of feudal supremacy. Finally, from 1350 to 1550, the towns became the original bases for the new, mercantile supremacy, in a mutual relation with the emerging territorial state. In feudal society, it was of decisive importance from the beginning to be in control of production; as time went by, however, it turned out to be just as essential to control distribution as well.

Medieval origins of constitutional government in the West

Abstract: This survey of the political history of nonwestern countries has shown that Russia, Japan, and China never developed the levels of constitutional government found in late medieval Europe. Three of the four social origins of constitutionalism in the West, rough balance between crown and noble, contractual-feudal military organization, and lordpeasant dynamics have been largely absent from these countries. Nor has any other substantial source (such as religion or economic organization) been uncovered that compensated for these absences or which otherwise fostered constitutionalism. Consequently, the major institutes of medieval constitutionalism, rural local government, autonomous towns, estates, and the rule of law, have also been largely absent. Village government, on the other hand, which was fostered in the West by the continuance of Germanic peasant organization and by the commune movement of the medieval period, has been found to be quite ubiquitous outside Europe. Village government existed — and in vital forms — in all three nonwestern regions, but always dwarfed by the power of authoritarian organs of the surrounding state structures. Thus, village government in and of itself lacked constitutional significance unless it was able to fuse with other, stronger constitutional institutions as it did in the West.

Cities and citizenry as factors of state formation in the Roman-German Empire of the late middle ages

Abstract: The fundamental characteristics of older German constitutional history were not determined by the urban-bourgeois element but by that of the princely state and nobility; the King/Emperor in this respect equally was a prince. This situation appeared at a very early stage, with respect to some conditions even before the beginnings of German history in the tenth century. An average level of urbanization comparable to that in Flanders or Northern Italy, which may have created a “modern” urban atmosphere, was simply excluded in the context of the development of the Empire. Nevertheless, the urbanization process, starting mainly in the twelfth century, bringing major changes in the fields of demography, economy, and social and cultural phenomena, did have consequences with respect to the “state.” Its many effects occurred in close interaction with the leading aristocracy. This interaction stabilized the social and political aristocratic structure on the short and middle term, and only in the middle and longer term did restructuring occur. The “feudal” Empire and its princely states were for a very long period not less adequate within the European context than were other imaginable social structures.

From hermeneutics in social science toward a hermeneutics of social science

Abstract: standing of their age in terms of its being a product of world-historical progression, where each stage contained its own possibilities and limitations as well as being superceded in turn by another stage. Hegel constructed a grand philosophical edifice on this new ground of selfunderstanding. No one has ever transcended and no one will ever transcend, he contended, in action, thought, project, fantasy or utopia his own Time; we shall not be able to do so either. Yet, Hegel added, the past that we are able to recollect from the peak of our present is the Whole, that is, the whole History and the whole Truth.1 The Hegelian time capsule carries a dual paradox that only the Hegelian system was momentarily able to sublate. Reflected universalism had given birth to Faustian Man, who overthrows all taboos and transcends all limits, who is eager to know everything, to act out all his projects and desires. However, the same reflected universality publicly declared that we are captives of the prisonhouse of contemporaneity. Reflected universalism had transformed Truth into "historical Truth," robbing the world of the eternal, the timeless, without ever being able to quench the thirst for certitude both in the outer and inner worlds. Modern historical consciousness inherently encompasses this dual paradox, just as well as all the attempts to live with it and bear with it proudly.

Plan and control - Towards a cultural history of the information society

Abstract: “Is closer and closer social control the inevitable price of ‘progress,’ a necessary concomitant of the continued development of modern social forms?” We believe that this is indeed the case. Against those who see the new communications technologies as the basis for a coming “communications era,” and the new information technologies as the panacea for our present “Age of Ignorance,” our own argument is that their development has, in fact, been closely associated with processes of social management and control. The scale and complexity of the modern nation state has made communications and information resources (and technologies) central to the maintenance of political and administrative cohesion.

Political practice and the rise of an ethnic enclave

Abstract: The Cuban American community shares many of the structural features commonly associated with other types of immigrant enclaves. But its specific mode of political incorporation into the United States distinguishes it from other enclaves, making it a unique sociopolitical formation: “authoritarian enclave.” The Cuban American enclave arose out of Caribbean geopolitics as an unintentional byproduct of four state-sponsored movements. These movements interlocked in an uneven manner, sometime via the civil, other times via the military, and still other times based on a combination of both. The internally divided Batistianist movement interlocked via its military wing with Trujillo's relatively unified Dominican state. In contrast, the highly unified Conservative movement interlocked with the military wing of the internally divided U.S. state. The Liberal movement, like the previous movement, was internally unified but, unlike them, its contacts were with the civil, not military, wing of the U.S. state. Preliminary research on the Terrorist movement, a community-generated movement that responds to changing geopolitical situations, suggests that its civil and military wing are discreetly and flexibly linked to each other. These movements had the cumulative and unintentional effect of creating a new organizational space within the Caribbean geopolitical system from which the Cuban American community was later to emerge. The Cuban American enclave rooted in Miami is today an important actor in the Caribbean Basin.

Cities, “city-states,” and regional states in north-central Italy

Abstract: Italy provides a significant, eloquent example of the difficulties encountered by state formation in the midst of numerous and flourishing urban centers.' A unitary Italian state only formed in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Although this tardiness was due to many other factors besides the strength of Italy's cities, the roots of a strong municipal tradition dating back to the Middle Ages certainly held back the forces tending toward the country's territorial unification. Most notably during the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance, at precisely the time when the great western monarchies were consolidating, the political system of central and northern Italy was characterized by the citystates' great fragmentation and spirit of autonomy. This situation constituted an insuperable obstacle to any prospect of national unification and a serious barrier even to the formation of smaller state organizations such as the regional states into which Italy later consolidated.

Reification: The ?holistic? and ?individualistic? views of organizations

Abstract: sions partially result from discussions of reification taking place on a theoretical and polemical plane and neglecting a more constructive and empirical plane. I describe reification and argue, through an empirical illustration of the early history of the Tennessee Valley Authority, that it is a feature of both "holistic" and "individualist" approaches to social behavior. Finally, I propose the construction of complementary epistemological and ontological features of holism and individualism to circumvent the errors of reification for each.

Discipline & style: The Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the social production of an American architecture

Abstract: ConclusionThe formation of a professional discipline of design in the United States was not a foregone conclusion. It was a particular achievement carried out by particular agents, taking advantage of particular social and cultural resources to construct a coherent practice. As a strategy that organized the efforts of widely dispersed practitioners, however, this formation displayed a discernible logic. It was not simply a question of the impact of external constraints nor of the working out of the internal logic of particular architectural traditions, but of the specific ways the latter could be mapped on to the former by practitioners operating within certain immediate social and institutional contexts.The Beaux-Arts episode is a particularly clear example of the dynamic of architectural development that resulted from efforts to maintain a discipline of design under changing historical circumstances. These efforts were shaped in fundamental ways by the social basis of the practice of architectural design as it first emerged in the United States. At the core of professional design, there has been a persistent tension between countervailing forces of eclecticism and discipline. The structure of the market produced a centrifugal tendency that eroded standards and disrupted the organization of the professional production of architecture. At their core, the projects typically associated with professionalization reflected a strategic counter-tendency toward a purification of disciplinary ideals, and away from unmediated reflection of the social conditions of practice.Throughout the history of American architecture, these contradictory tendencies have produced an oscillation in the balance between the expression of formal ideals and responsiveness to the needs of client and society, each swing an expression of recurrent reforming tendencies in the profession. Discipline could be achieved only with effort against the tendency of individualized practice towards eclectic, idiosyncratic responses to particular local clienteles. Modernist criticisms of Beaux-Arts design (in the 1930s) and postmodernist criticisms of modernist design (in the 1970s–1980s) suggest that incorporation of various forms of responsiveness has typically set in motion a dynamic of stylization and a move toward abstracted formalism. It is no accident that postmodernist complaints with regard to the architecture of the modern movement echo the modernists' own criticisms of Beaux-Arts formalism.It is striking that the recent criticisms of modernist architecture focus on its academic sterility and its failure to accomplish precisely the responsiveness to modern conditions that it promised. See, for example, Brent C. Brolin, The Failure of Modem Architecture, (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold & Co., 1976). For a more popularized criticism of modern architecture, see Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House, (New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1981). The literature within the architectural profession criticizing modernist design is extensive. This recurrent cycle of formalism and reform has been driven by tensions inherent in the disciplinary structure of professional design, tensions that reflect the problematic nature of the profession's efforts to contain an awkwardly broad and culturally diffuse jurisdiction within a certain kind of social structure: a professional labor market.The structure of professional status set up tensions that have been played out in the practices of design and that are evident in the patterns of development of architectural style. At each point in the history of the profession, the disciplinary effort to contain these tensions within a rhetoric of style has mediated the effects of large-scale historical developments originating outside the discipline. Demands and pressures from outside the profession elicit responses from individual practitioners, in pursuit of their function and their careers. These responses are what presents these pressures to the discipline as a whole as a problem of integration. Innovations have to be both ideologically and socially located before they become “significant.”As the discipline moves toward the abstract and “architectural,” it moves away from problems that immediately concern clients but also from those that plague practitioners. The irony of the “American Renaissance” is that while allowing the profession to establish a clear identity and an authoritative jurisdiction, it came at the cost of the discipline's capacity to respond in coherent ways to the pressing social, economic, and technological problems that the architect had to confront as practical problems. The reception of European Modernism in the thirties can be understood as a response to dilemmas set up by the Beaux-Arts construction of the discipline. European Modernism offered precisely the same advantages as the Ecole model: a rational and unified conception of design that drew on contemporary “high” cultural aesthetic conceptions, a systematic approach to design education, an established language of form with the mystique of an avantgarde that could also be codified for broad diffusion of its principles (the “International Style”), and an elite of expatriate Europeans to focus its introduction into the academy (Gropius, Breuer, Moholy-Nagy). In addition, it offered something Beaux-Arts historicism could not: a final abstraction from history and a modus vivendi with industrial technology that was anything but submission to its pressures. It represented a final reification of the medium of architecture into a symbolic practice abstracted from cultural traditions, a final step toward the separation of the rhetorical framework within which the designer's intentions were formulated from the framework within which the users' experience might be interpreted. The dominance of Beaux-Arts design in the American architectural profession was a crucial step in the transition from the eclecticism of High Victorian architecture to construction of a modern discipline of design - for sociological reasons. It represented a routinization of the charisma of eclecticism that was necessary for the construction of the social and institutional foundation on which a distinctive discipline could be sustained.This analysis of the sociological determinants of the reception of Beaux-Arts architecture in the United States suggests some general consequences for a sociology of cultural production. In his essay, “Art as a Cultural System,” Geertz argues that it is necessary to get away from a narrow focus on art as a specialized cultural institution, and to regard it in its broader cultural context. It is out of participation in the general system of symbolic forms we call culture that participation in the particular form we call art, which is in fact but a sector of it, is possible. A theory of art is thus at the same time a theory of culture, not an autonomous enterprise.Geertz, “Art as a Cultural System,” in Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretative Anthropology, (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 108–109. Geertz's concern is to situate art as one manifestation of the seamless web of meaning that makes up a particular culture. Forms of art have power and purpose because of their connection (or their ability to make connections) to a general cultural sensibility that they participate in creating.Although Geertz's general point is well taken, the location of art in the web of cultural meaning is not seamless. In fact, much of the meaning of artworks and the significance of art in general depend on particular arrangements of the seams between art and general culture, the particular ways that art stitches itself into the fabric of social life. In modern western societies, artists have developed specialized professional skills: techniques, notions of genre, stylistic conventions, and their own sensibilities related to specific techniques and materials. As Geertz points out, following the vivid example provided by Baxandall, artists rely on the perceptual and interpretative capacities of their audiences; these capacities reflect, derive from, and depend on skills and knowledge available in the broader culture.Michael Baxandall, Painting & Experience in 15th Century Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972). Artists also rely, however, on the ability and willingness of their audience to apply these skills within an interpretative framework that is specifie to art; it is this framework that grafts an additional level of significance, additional possibilities for the activation of meanings, on to the objects produced. Baxandall, for example, examines specific capacities for looking at pictures that were relevant to the institution of fifteenth-century painting, capacities that emerged as part of changes in the relation between painters and patrons. Painters made use of what Baxandall refers to as “the period eye,” but they worked with the capacities of the audience to produce a relatively specialized “taste” for paintings. “Much of what we call “taste” lies in this, the conformity between discriminations demanded by a painting and skills of discrimination possessed by the beholder.”Ibid., 34. Artists, as creative workers, co-opt cultural material and incorporate it into practices that make sense within the specialized cultural institution of “art.”As the institutional theories of art have made clear, the context in which art is interpreted includes the art world itself, in which specialized aesthetic practices are generated and sustained. This production of a distinctive body of practices has both an ideological and a sociological side: an art world is a “cultural enclave” in which works refer to each other within a specialized context of interpretation and producers can establish identity and reputations both among themselves and for a relevant public. These processes cannot be reduced to direct reflections of material conditions or simple instances of a cultu

Realism, structurism, and history

Abstract: The question of the proper methodological foundations for the social, political, and historical studies is now seemingly in a greater state of intellectual contention than at any time this century. Perhaps this is a consequence of the incipient breakdown of neo-Enlightenment modes of thought with their at least partial coherence around the projects of rational inquiry and promotion of progressive social justice. The propagation of new and ever more sophisticated versions of relativism now poses a serious threat to the whole possibility of intersubjective understanding and explanation, not just of society but of nature too. I fear that with that possibility goes the possibility of rational, democratic, emancipatory transformation of the world. Social critique and rational emancipation would seem inevitably to depend on some universalistic concepts, as well as on a commitment to the principles of equality and democracy.

Marxism and methodological individualism: A critique

Abstract: “Analytical” or “rational choice” Marxism explicitly proposes to synthesize non-Marxist methods and Marxist theory. It is therefore in-appropriate to attack it solely by demonstrating that the methods advocated were not Marx's: this is, after all, acknowledged at the outset. (For this reason I have tried to show that both the assumption of MI and the process of reduction are problematic on their own empiricist or positivist terms, and have therefore largely been discarded as viable projects by philosophers of science.) Any attempt to synthesize two such distinct research traditions nonetheless demands some consideration of the metatheoretical problems that one might expect it to encounter, and this is particularly so if Marxist theory is to be recast on the basis of the positivist and empiricist assumptions explicitly rejected by Marx. Curiously, however, the analytical Marxist literature does not address such problems: indeed, metatheoretical considerations are notably absent. Discussions focus instead on particular “tools of analysis,” e.g., rational choice theory and game theory, as if these were neutral with respect to the underlying philosophical commitments of the two traditions. In fact, of course, these methods do reflect such commitments; after all, the justification for rational choice Marxism, infusing Marxian analyses with “scientific” rigor, reflects the rejection of the conception of science embodied in the Marxist tradition. By way of a conclusion I therefore briefly discuss the uneasy relationship between rational choice Marxism and classical Marxist theory. I argue that this relationship cannot be one of synthesis because the empiricist assumptions of rational choice Marxism violate the “hard-core” of the Marxist research tradition in at least three important ways: 1) most generally, its atomistic ontology directly contradicts the relational ontology of Marxist theory; 2) the empiricist conception of science undermines the Marxist conception of social science as critique; and 3) more specifically, rational choice and game theory mark a retreat from the social and relational philosophical anthropology of Marx back to the liberal individualist tradition initiated by Hobbes.

Cities and the state in Spain

Abstract: Leaving aside details and qualifications, the major turning point in relations between cities and the monarchy occurred during the second half of the sixteenth century. The cities paid a very high price for their initial support of the crown. The more the logic of imperial power took over, the less cities had any chance of developing on their own. Nonetheless, they never became simple toys in royal hands. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, as the power of Genoan financiers declined, the monarchy tried again to obtain the support of cities, which finally gave in - at a price. The most crucial price of all was the imposition on the crown of a fiscal system (the servicios de millones) that was even more favorable than the alcabala to the cities having votes in the Cortes. Furthermore, the millones placed severe restrictions on the monarch's use of the funds; from that point on, the monarch had to avert his eyes from the procedures the privileged cities used to collect the taxes that constituted his principal ordinary revenues. Unlike the French case, the Spanish experience, as seen from Castile, did not end with the complete submission of cities to the monarchy's expansive centralization. Yet we must recognize that the cities never tried to create a form of political organization that could have been a Castilian version of the urban republics. Formally the situation unfolded as a series of ritual confrontations in the Cortes, where each of the parties was well aware of its limits. With that balance of forces, any attempt to enhance state power the monarchy tried to initiate could only succeed with the approval of the cities. This series of intermediate barriers meant that the process by which communities became subject to statist royal power was halting and indirect. In addition, great administrative decisions became diluted when they entered the interlocked network formed by local urban authorities. Not until the first half of the eighteenth century, after the liquidation of Spain's imperial territories elsewhere in Europe, can we speak of the consolidation of an administrative monarchy, a true predecessor of what one day would become a Spanish state.

Godot is waiting too

Abstract: It has long been unfashionable to write about historical causes and effects. Historical ends fall under a similar stricture, whether intended in a teleological sense to signify a purposive telos, a higher reality, or simply a finis beyond decline and fall. For even longer it has been been out of fashion to use the old organic metaphors to depict the painful birth, promising youth, prolific maturity, faltering old age, and final demise of an epoch or civilization. An empiricist rectitude may save the rare historiographer from such claims, but many humanists feel, or at least write, as if history has its origins, aims, and ends. Our language cannot prevent an indulgence in the mythical conceit that history has shape and purpose, and is even somehow a reflection, however distorted, of the hopes and sorrows of human life. We are intelligent enough to know, of course, that this is not really true, or cannot be held to be true. Yet history, as the very word implies, is a story that cannot be deprived of its fictive elements.

Considering women's experience: A reformulation of power theory

Abstract: All views of power, as Lukes points out, are both contested and ideological. The view I present here was developed through efforts to construct a theory of power grounded in the central themes of feminist research, especially its focus on the social construction of reality. The most salient realities addressed in this context are the ethics and social structure of obligation, relationship, and care, especially as these affect differential identities, social rankings, and asymmetries in power. These inequalities are socially constructed. They stabilize power contests of the past in prescribed relationships of the present.

Power and towns in the Polish Gentry Commonwealth: The Polish-Lithuanian state in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

Abstract: When studying the relation between the state authorities and the towns in the Polish Commonwealth of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one should consider certain characteristic features of the PolishLithuanian state. First, within the European economic system of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Poland and Lithuania were in the agricultural and raw materials zone. The Polish economy was based almost exclusively on extensive exploitation of natural resources, and on an equally extensive agricultural and breeding production, with almost complete neglect of industrial production.' This meant an absolute predominance of villages over towns, economic weakness of towns, underdevelopment of industry, and lack of capital in the hands of the burghers. In the Commonwealth, then one of the largest countries in Europe, which covered an area of some 990,000 sq. km., there were more than 1,800 towns, with their townspeople accounting for over 20 percent of the population but only nine towns numbering more than ten thousand inhabitants.

Convergences in recent democratic theory

Abstract: A discussion of Robert Dahl, A Preface to Economic Democracy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Benjamin R. Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Norberto Bobbio, The Future of Democracy: A Defence of the Rules of the Game, translated from II Futuro della democrazia (1984) by Roger Griffin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); and David Held, Models of Democracy, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987).

Cities and the state in Portugal

Abstract: At the end of the thirteenth century, Lisbon had 23,000 inhabitants, a middle level in the European urban scale. A century later, its population was 35,000 people, which brought it to the level of such middling cities as Salamanca, Dijon, Siena, and Danzig. For Portugal, however, Lisbon was enormous, at least twice the size of the next in line (8vora, Santarem). At a lower level stood a set of small urban centers, dominated by the interior cities that lived from stock-raising, agriculture, or trade with Castile.