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Showing papers in "Theory and Society in 1990"


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In many cases the power relations are immediately present in personal life, in matters conventionally thought "private": housework, homophobic jokes, office sexuality, child rearing.
Abstract: The classic feminist slogan "the personal is political" states a basic feature of feminist and gay politics, a link between personal experience and power relations. In many cases the power relations are immediately present in personal life, in matters conventionally thought "private": housework, homophobic jokes, office sexuality, child rearing. Yet there is also a highly "public" dimension of these politics. During the 1970s, Western feminisms made open and substantial demands on the state in every country where a significant mobilization of women occurred. So did gay liberation movements, where they developed. The list of reforms sought includes the decriminalization of abortion in France, a constitutional guarantee of equal rights for women in the USA, rape law reform in Australia, decriminalization of homosexuality in many countries; not to mention expanded state provision of child care, nonsexist education, protection against sexual violence, equal employment opportunity, and anti-discrimination measures. By the early 1980s a women's peace movement had added disarmament and feminist environmentalists had added environmental protection neither conventionally thought of as gender politics but both now argued in gender terms.'

455 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The metaphor of persuading and coercing has been criticised as a misleadingly narrow approach to understanding modern methods of domination as mentioned in this paper, which reveals the metaphor to be their unexamined product.
Abstract: Across the different disciplines of social science, studies of power and resistance continue to be dominated by a single, master metaphor: the distinction between persuading and coercing. The metaphor seems as clear as the difference between mind and body, to which of course it corresponds. Power may operate at the level of ideas, persuading the mind of its legitimacy, or it may work as a material force directly coercing the body. Max Weber founded his sociology of domination on this Cartesian and Kantian distinction, and the distinction colonized other theoretical territory in which it had been originally placed in question, including that of Marx. The metaphor survives today even in the growing number of works that realize its limitations and formally renounce it. 1 This essay offers a critique of the metaphor, as a misleadingly narrow approach to understanding modern methods of domination; at the same time, by offering an alternative understanding of those methods, it reveals the metaphor to be their unexamined product. There are at least two reasons for the metaphor's persistence. One stems from the fact that it is indissociable from our everyday conception of the person. We tend to think of persons as unique self-constituted consciousneses living inside physically manufactured bodies. 2 As something self-formed, this consciousness is the site of an original autonomy. The notion of an internal autonomy of consciousness defines the way we think of coercion. It obliges us to imagine the exercise of power as an external process that can coerce the behavior of the body without necessarily penetrating and controlling the mind. Power must therefore be conceived as something two-fold, with both a physical and a mental mode of operation. This way of thinking of power in relation to the political subject applies not only to individuals but to any political agent, such as a group or class. Much of the recent theoret

325 citations



Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890-1933 (1969) as mentioned in this paper is a book about French ideas of education and culture, of learning and of science during the period between about 1890 and 1920.
Abstract: This essay was written as an introduction to a book about French ideas of education and of culture, of learning and of science, during the period between about 1890 and 1920. Part of my purpose in the projected book is to compare these French ideas with beliefs on similar subjects held among German academics around 1890-1920. The new book thus draws upon what I initially argued in my The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890-1933 (1969). Some of the problems I want to raise in the current essay arose simply because I was forced to confront the difficulties that arise when one tries to compare ideas located in different cultures.

73 citations




Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors propose an alternative approach to what happens after production, using an understanding of the social nature of objects that springs from Marcel Mauss's distinction between gifts and commodities.
Abstract: I began this article with Colin Campbell's lament about the productionist bias in sociology and the related point that most sociologists concerned with consumption have ignored private meanings and small-scale structures in favor of public meanings and large-scale structures. This article calls attention to and builds on an emerging alternative approach to what happens after production, using an understanding of the social nature of objects that springs from Marcel Mauss's distinction between gifts and commodities. Mauss's model directs attention to the conflict in industrial societies between the two realms of commodity exchange and gift exchange, which I have cast as the conflict between the world of work and the world of family, and as the contrast between commodities and possessions. Thus, the model directs attention to the fact that objects are not simply transformed in production and displayed in consumption. However important these facts may be for understanding objects and society, they do not exhaust the important ways that people experience, use, and think about the objects that surround them. In particular, Mauss's model throws into relief the problematic nature of the objects that surround us and that we use in our social relations. And in doing so it directs attention to the ways that people try to reconstruct and redefine those objects by transforming them into personal possessions. This transformation makes objects acquired as commodities suitable for gift transactions, and hence suitable for the key task of recreating social relationships and social identities, the task of creating, not merely defining, who we are and how we are related to each other. Although the Maussian model addresses many of the links between people in the worlds of work and the home, and many of the ways that objects are part of these links, I am concerned here primarily with the ways that people can appropriate commodities in the process of purchase: shopping. This concern with shopping points out the social significance of retail trade, which I take to include advertising and shopping. This is not simply a passive conduit between production and consumption. Instead, it is an important point at which objects begin to leave the realm of work, commodities, and commodity relations and enter the realm of home, possessions, and gift relations. Shopping is an ubiquitous activity in industrial society and one that is highly significant culturally: we spend vast amounts of time, energy, money, and attention on it. Doubtless part of the reason for this is utilitarian, for we need to buy to live, but it would be foolish to reduce the significance of shopping to some combination of the need of individuals to acquire in order to survive and the need of companies to generate demand in order to profit. Thus, retail trade needs to be seen as well as a set of relations and transactions between seller and buyer that define and are defined by the objects and services involved, their history, and their future. My focus on purchasing food in supermarkets has the advantage of throwing into relief the problem of appropriation, because of the impersonality of object and social relations in large, self-service supermarkets. However, the very extremity of this example can create a false impression. As I noted, in other forms of shopping the social relations between buyer and seller, like the social identity of objects, can be more personal. This personality can be real, as when buyer and seller know each other or where the object is hand-made or even unique. Alternatively, it can be more purely symbolic, as when the selling company touts itself or its employees as friendly and caring or where the manufacturer advertises the personal nature of its commodities. In some cases, indeed, the manufacturing or trading company can present itself in such a way that the company itself becomes the “person” with whom the purchaser transacts. Some of the complexities of this personification are described in Wally Olins, (London: Design Council, 1978). In addition, because of the focus on the appropriation of commodities in purchasing, I have touched only briefly on production and the world of work more generally. As does life at home, so life at work involves the transaction of objects and labor. Relations at work, then, will shape and be shaped by the nature of what is transacted. Co-workers who transact things that are more clearly stamped with their own identity, as among service workers and craft producers, will likely have more personal relations with fellow workers than will those who transact things that are themselves relatively impersonal, as in assembly-line production. This variability in the objects and relations at work suggests that people will have diverse understandings of work, and hence of manufactured objects more generally, which will affect the need they feel to appropriate commodities. It is also likely that those involved in more craft-like production will face a problem that is the inverse of those faced by shoppers: the need to make impersonal the things that they have produced and infused with their identities. One would expect that such workers have rituals and activities of alienation, the inversion of the rituals and activities of appropriation that have been described in this article. In all, though, the point of this article is simple. People use objects to create and recreate personal social identities and relationships, and in industrial capitalist societies these objects are likely to be produced and purchased as commodities and understood as “manufactures” in Miller's sense. Our experience with and understanding of the production and sale of objects will affect the way we use them in transactions that create and recreate social identity and relationship, and will affect our understanding of the social identities and relationships that are created and recreated. Thus, the objects that people use in social relationships mediate between realms of economy and society, between the public realms where those objects are produced and distributed, and the private realms where those objects are transacted as part of social reproduction. The fact of this mediation and its effects on people's understanding of objects and social relations deserve careful attention.

45 citations



Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Theories of ideology are critical when they distinguish beliefs about the social and political world according to their impact on the individuals who hold them as discussed by the authors, and they are especially concerned with beliefs that reconcile individuals to power relations that are not in their interest.
Abstract: Theories of ideology are critical when they distinguish beliefs about the social and political world according to their impact on the individuals who hold them. Critical theories are especially concerned with beliefs that reconcile individuals to power relations that are not in their interest, that is, beliefs that transform power into domination. Distinguishing these kinds of beliefs from others is both necessary and problematic. The necessity is primarily normative: any political theory that values the capacities of individuals to determine their futures as do democratic and democratic socialist theories needs to distinguish forms of consciousness according to their effects on political selfdetermination. Yet the distinction is problematic because it is notoriously difficult to draw without portraying individuals as passive recipients of socially determined ideas, and without privileging related distinctions between true and false consciousness that are difficult to justify and easy to abuse.

34 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article argued that the emancipation of human relations need not require or depend upon the complete emancipation of nature, and they pointed out that the spirit of the early Frankfurt school theorists is the same as that of the environmental movement.
Abstract: My principal ecocentric objection to Habermas's social and political theory has been that it is thoroughly human-centered in insisting “that the emancipation of human relations need not require or depend upon the emancipation of nature.” 1 Although Habermas has moved beyond the pessimism and utopianism of the first generation of Critical Theorists by providing the conceptual foundations of the practical and emancipatory cognitive interests, he has, as Whitebook points out, also “markedly altered the spirit of their project.” 2 Yet it is precisely the “spirit” of the early Frankfurt school theorists, namely, its critique of the dominant “imperialist” orientation toward the world (rather than its critique of a simplistically conceived idea of science) and its desire for the liberation of nature, that is most relevant to - and provides the most enduring Western Marxist link with - the ecocentric perspective of the radical Greens.

32 citations



Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors of as discussed by the authors pointed out that professional managers had come to control the corporation on the premise that they could more efficiently produce shareholder value than the original founder-owners, and they turned shareholding into a passive investment on the same premise.
Abstract: After half a century of growing dominance of the large corporation by non-owning managers, the 1980s were marked by a slowing or even reversing of their quiet revolution. Professional managers had come to control the corporation on the premise that they could more efficiently produce shareholder value than the original founder-owners. They turned shareholding into a passive investment on the same premise. As companies faced increasingly competitive pressures during the 1980s, however, the legitimacy of the rule of incumbent management came under challenge. No longer could government interference be blamed for many of the problems facing business; fingers pointed at management itself. As the criticism of corporate leadership gathered momentum, a leading diagnosis focused on one of managerial capitalism's crowning achievements: the autonomous power of professional management. The critique viewed the managerial autonomy as excessively permissive, the agency system as no longer effective. Professional managers had come to show too much concern for the social welfare of various stakeholder groups, including themselves, and too little concern for the financial welfare of the only stakeholder group that should really count — the shareholders. Many of the restructuring efforts were thus undertaken in the name of returning companies to the single-minded pursuit of ownership interests. What had stood in the way of such a pursuit was less a matter of government constraint and more a matter of inadequate stockholder vigilance by their appointed agents. Mindful of the critique, incumbent managements moved during the mid- to late-1980s to improve stockholder returns by paring the workforce and cutting other costs. Corporate acquisitions and leveraged buyouts brought new management teams to the fore where others had seemingly fallen short. The resulting restructuring reached a large proportion of the nation's major companies. Half or more of the largest companies had undergone a significant reduction in their workforce. And the dollar value of company resources changing ownership hands expanded considerably. The aggregate purchase price of mergers and acquisitions of publicly-traded firms in 1988 was nearly three times greater than in 1981. Even more striking was the sharp increase in the number of publicly-traded companies and divisions that were taken private. The aggregate dollar value of such buyouts in 1988 had increased almost 25 times over that in 1981. This opening of the market for corporate control among major U.S. firms brought a significant fraction of the nation's large corporations more directly under the immediate oversight of ownership interests. The reassertion of ownership control over large corporations was usually taken in the name of improving corporate earnings. Would be takeover groups generally promised more internal discipline and stronger financial performance. See, for instance, Jensen, “Eclipse of the Public Corporation,” 1989. Whatever the actual financial impact of the intensification of ownership interests, available research suggests that it has had organizational impact. General company strategies may come to be more centrally guided while specific operating actions are devolved further down the organization. Ownership change and other restructuring steps have also ramified into corporate social and political action. That outreach is likely to be less vigorous and more divided. It is also being redirected. During the 1970s and early 1980s, corporate energies focused on reducing government regulation and improving community opinion. Those energies are now increasingly focused on facilitating or resisting restructuring. Companies have fought legislation that would limit the process of plant closings, but they have also sought legislation to protect themselves against hostile takeovers. The evidence also suggests that considerable managerial discretion remains in shaping company response to the restructuring pressures. Although market and organizational factors are sure to act as constraints, top management, whether a relatively autonomous non-owning management group or an owner-dominated management, retains an important independent capacity to exercise strategic choice. That choice is likely to receive special shaping by the long-term ascendance of financial managers and the decline of manufacturing personnel at the executive level. Yet corporate change must not be viewed as isolated managerial responses to changing market conditions. Companies and managements frequently look to one another for guidance in coping with ambiguous circumstances. DiMaggio and Powell's analysis of organizational “isomorphism,” for example, suggests that firms frequently adopt organizational practices not because they are dictated by the firm's market strategies, but rather because they are already used by other companies. Paul DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell, “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields,” 48 (1983): 147\2-160. Similarly, Granovetter's analysis of the social “embeddedness” of economic action indicates that company decisions are partially shaped by top management's contacts with their counterparts in other firms. Mark Granovetter, “Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness,” 91 (1985): 481–510. Understanding company responses to restructuring pressures therefore requires a focus on inter-company flows of ideas and doctrines as well as purely internally generated responses specific to the company. Reactions to the restructuring pressures that are collectively developed and defined in the broader business community may prove to be as critical as individually fashioned solutions in guiding management approaches to restructuring during the years to come.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Theory and practice are essentially separate activities as mentioned in this paper, and there is probably no such thing as social theory that does not embody, at some level, the practice of past or present society.
Abstract: Theory and practice are essentially separate activities. Just as the artist invents imaginary worlds, so the social theorist invents pure states of society. In neither case is the disjunction absolute, of course. The imaginary world of the artist is built of the bricks of the world he inhabits, however novel and fantastic the structures he creates; all science fiction attests the truth of Freud's observation that "the imagination remains incurably earthbound." So also there is probably no such thing as social theory that does not embody, at some level, the practice of past or present society. The world of Rousseau's The Social Contract, for instance, partakes, in however reworked and rarefied a form, of the practices of the classical Greek polis, especially those of Sparta.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors consider the role played by the nonprofit sector in relation to capital and the state in response to crisis tendencies in the U.S. economy and its role in the larger capitalist world system.
Abstract: As we head into the final decade of the century, debate has increased concerning the long-term strength of the U.S. economy and its role in the larger capitalist world system. While a number of authors have examined "crisis tendencies" in capitalist society, to date, none of them has specifically considered the role played by the nonprofit sector in relation to capital and the state. In this article we consider the crisis literature in an attempt to understand how the nonprofit-sector health and social services may be employed as a buffer and a resource for capital and the state in responding to crisis tendencies. Central questions concern the use of state intervention in periods of crisis; the ensuing social struggles; and the consequences of the processes of crisis production and crisis resolution for nonprofit health and social services. We give primary emphasis here to understanding both the links between crisis and crisis tendencies of capital and the state and what is transpiring in society with regards to different elements of the nonprofit sector. Health and social services, major and important components of the nonprofit sector as a whole, are the lenses used in this exploration of the relation of systemic crisis tendencies to the nonprofit sector.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The research program proposed by Robert Park in 1915, and largely carried out by himself, Ernest Burgess, and their students over the next twenty years, brought empirical sociological research into an academic setting on a scale not accomplished previously.
Abstract: The research program proposed by Robert Park in 1915, and largely carried out by himself, Ernest Burgess, and their students over the next twenty years, brought empirical sociological research into an academic setting on a scale not accomplished previously. This "appropriation" of social research was justified by the idea that knowledge produced by academic scientists was of a higher order than research findings of nonacademics.' University-based scientists alone were thought to be capable of a "pure sociological gaze" entailing the disavowal of immediate interventionist goals in their encounters with their objects of study. Historical studies have often adopted this justification for admitting new practices into the field as an explanation for scientific change.2 They forget that the criteria of scientificity they adopt are a product of the same historical development and were imposed by the very actors whose work they are now used to evaluate. Thus the symbolic struggle to impose a new definition of science, in which Park had to engage in order to gain legitimacy for practices previously regarded as unscientific, is left unanalyzed. The problem of "scientific advance" thereby becomes the purely logistic problem of organizing the institutional forms that more closely realize a static notion of science. As a consequence, the analysis of sociology as an institutional form is severed from the analysis of its symbolic products, and the relation between the two is either overlooked or treated as a wholly contingent one. Many studies of "institutionalization," or of "professionalization;' of social science are products of this approach in which the sociology of sociology subjects only the organizational or administrative aspects of science to its scrutiny, stopping at the actual content of sociological works, which is left to textual analysis by historians of ideas.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors argued that computerization, by automating production and improving communication, would make possible a more democratic industrial system freed of routine and painful work, while the pessimists argued that the computer would bring universal surveillance and control, not to mention technological unemployment.
Abstract: The initial determinist assessments of the computerization of society projected either optimistic scenarios of social salvation or nightmares of impending dystopia. The optimists argued that computerization, by automating production and improving communication, would make possible a more democratic industrial system freed of routine and painful work. The pessimists argued, on the contrary, that the computer would bring universal surveillance and control, not to mention technological unemployment.1

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Sombart's approach takes the development of capitalism out of the hands of ordinary entrepreneurs, and puts it squarely into the laps of aristocrats who did little business yet reaped rewards from the economic efforts of others as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: In The Structures of Everyday Life' Fernand Braudel dismisses out of hand Werner Sombart's suggestion2 that there is a close connection between the ravenous patterns of consumption in early moder court life and the growth of capitalist production The idea that businesses and trade might have been spawned to fill this demand is not, to Braudel's mind, worthy of serious consideration Court sumptuousness is a cultural aberration to Braudel, not an essential part of an emerging capitalist economy There is a tone of deep contempt in this dismissal, presumably because Sombart's approach would lead researchers to sanctify outrageous spending and to study the well-known stock players of elite history, not the equally fascinating but more obscure characters now the major focus of historical research Sombart violates current norms by thinking and writing about kings and queens Worse than that, Sombart's approach takes the development of capitalism out of the hands of ordinary entrepreneurs, and puts it squarely into the laps of aristocrats who did little business yet reaped rewards from the economic efforts of others It seems an insult to those living more modest lives who helped to transform European life through the development of new business practices and a new economic mentality

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The following survey of some recent interpretations of rationality in Weber's theory is meant to suggest the place of the present essay among them on this issue and on the broader issue of human nature and its bearing on human society.
Abstract: Although Max Weber's conceptualization of "rationality" in no sense exhausts his image of human nature and its relation to human society, rationality is unanimously agreed upon as a key component of that image. The following survey of some recent interpretations of rationality in Weber's theory is therefore meant to suggest the place of the present essay among them on this issue and, by implication, on the broader issue of human nature and its bearing on human society.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The Decline of the German Mandarins and Education and Society in Modern Europe as mentioned in this paper are two of the most important works in the field of intellectual history, both of which are based on Ringer's work.
Abstract: Accompanying the recent resurgence of interest in intellectual history has been a vigorous and increasingly sophisticated discussion of its methods and theoretical underpinnings. Absorbing lessons from philosophy, anthropology, literary criticism, sociology, and other relevant fields, historians such as Quentin Skinner, Hayden White, Dominick LaCapra, James Clifford, and Roger Chartier have become full-fledged participants in the larger cultural debates of our day. It is particularly gratifying to see Fritz Ringer join their number, for he has long been recognized as a master practitioner of the intellectual historian's craft. Those who have been fortunate to study with him, as I did in the midsixties, as well as those who know him solely through his exemplary books, The Decline of the German Mandarins and Education and Society in Modern Europe, can only welcome his intervention.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The Decline of the German Mandarins as discussed by the authorsritz Ringer's book failed to give the students in a graduate seminar in social theory what they sought, for a good but insufficient reason: they would warm more to the theories of Weber, Mannheim, and the others, if they knew something of the lives of these exceptional persons.
Abstract: Nearly twenty years ago I failed my first reading of Fritz Ringer's The Decline of the German Mandarins. Or, perhaps, it failed me. I wanted, then, something it could not give. What I sought, I sought for a good but insufficient reason. I wanted a book for use by students in a graduate seminar in social theory. I thought they would warm more to the theories of Weber, Mannheim, and the others, if they knew something of the lives of these exceptional persons.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors propose a way to analyze the relationship between economic reform and changing modes of party control in the former USSR, and connect the explanation of conflict and change in the system to the dual and contradictory role of the party machine.
Abstract: Recent developments in the USSR demonstrate a new phase of political thaw in the cycle of oscillation between periods of hard-line authoritarianism and (relative) liberalization characteristic of Soviet policy since the death of Stalin. And as usual, the issue of economic reform lies at the heart of much broader questions concerning democracy and accountability in government. In a way, the connection between economic and political liberalization seems obvious enough. Because Stalinism is defined by the link between the command economy and state terror, it is hardly surprising that the ideology of market socialism has figured prominently in movements for reform in the Soviet powersystem. Nevertheless, the relation between economic reform and changing modes of party control remains a matter of much theoretical controversy. The nub of the dispute concerns the usefulness of assimilating state socialism to some version of a capitalist model, and then treating them as analogous social formations. The trouble with this procedure, as Goldthorpe long ago pointed out in his demolition-job on the "logic of industrialism,"1 is that it usually ends up as an appeal to some kind of base/superstructure distinction, ultimately derived from Marxian political economy. The model can vary greatly in degrees of sophistication, and in form (neo-marxist, functionalist, or marxisant), but the basic problem remains the same. The assumption is that, at the most fundamental level of analysis, communist and capitalist industrialism are homologous structures of power, so that the striking differences between them, in terms of class structure and political organization, cannot be explained, only explained away. In this essay I propose a way to analyze communist industrialism that takes these differences as its starting-point, and connects the explanation of conflict and change in the system to the dual and contradictory role of the party machine. The communist party-state is not just a form


Journal ArticleDOI
Charles Tilly1
TL;DR: For example, none of us should advise aspiring sociologists to drift into the field untrained through personal connections, as George did, even if it resembled the way that George's great-uncle Brooks Adams became professor of history at Harvard as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: As a sociologist, George Homans did not live an exemplary career. For all but the most talented and tough-minded, imitating him would be a terrible mistake. None of us, for example, should advise aspiring sociologists to drift into the field untrained through personal connections, as George did, even if it resembled the way that George's great-uncle Brooks Adams became professor of history at Harvard. We should not advise our favorite students to take out five years for military service; to battle their most prestigious and powerful colleagues; to speak their minds loudly, articulately, and often; to detest cant even more than ignorance; to insist that J. M. W. Turner was the first and greatest Impressionist painter; to argue openly that their field's fundamental propositions come, and should come, from behavioristic psychology; to work simultaneously in Medieval history, social theory, poetry, and the study of small groups; to write autobiographical statements that, while charming in other respects, reveal their contempt for much of what paraded as social science. George did these risky things, and got away with them, more or less. But then George was ... well, George.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Critical theory is critical because it reflects on the circumstances of its own existence and it takes utopia seriously, which means, in part, never short-circuiting the distance between reality and Utopia as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Critical theory is critical because it reflects on the circumstances of its own existence. It is critical too because it takes utopia seriously, which means, in part, never short-circuiting the distance between reality and Utopia. Reparative reason, it has been argued, is no substitute for this philosophical project, but a source of support for it, one better suited to the concerns of the Frankfurt School than eros. What both reparative reason and the reparative impulse require is guidance as to the most deserving objects of our care and concern. Critical theory can provide this guidance.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Lemert and Martin Jay as mentioned in this paper argued that my approach neglects the biographical and pointed out that the only possible difference between Lemert and myself is that I care less about "stories of exceptional individuals" than about coherent accounts of their ideas.
Abstract: I am grateful to Charles Lemert and Martin Jay for the trouble they have taken with my essay, and for the interesting problems they have raised. Anxious to reply as concisely as possible, I begin by dealing with two criticisms by Lemert that seem to reflect an incomplete understanding of my position. First, Lemert charges that my approach neglects the biographical. He and his students, he reports, want "access to ideas through the lives of ... exceptional persons" (295) "to hear the stories of special individuals" (296). He writes of my "forceful methodological opposition to biography"; but I am conscious of no such opposition. I approvingly cited a strong example of intellectual biography, (000) and I wrote that the study of great texts and of fields must proceed interactively (278). I only proposed that (a) intellectual fields should be studied in their own right, and (b) intellectual biographies are likely to be most coherent when based upon prior studies of the relevant fields. I see no contradiction at all between the concept of the intellectual field and my special interest in intellectuals who creatively clarified the traditions in which they stood. "Fields may be entities of their own kind," Lemert stipulates; but this "does not entail that there be no place in the field for the individual" (297). We are in perfect agreement, especially because fields are networks of individual positions. The only possible difference I sense between Lemert and myself is that I care less about "stories of exceptional individuals" than about coherent accounts of their ideas.

Journal ArticleDOI
Agnes Heller1
TL;DR: In this article, a model of just procedure is described as "a highly idealized version of democratic decision-making." The model is based on the idea of "distillation" of existing practices, be they old or just in making, put the distilled elements into a fairly coherent shape and "idealize" them.
Abstract: My model of just procedure can rightly be described as "a highly idealized version of democratic decision-making." Philosophers never invent morals or conceptions of justice; they rather distill them from existing practices, be they old or just in making, put the distilled elements into a fairly coherent shape and "idealize" them. I did just the same, only that I did not claim to have deduced those principles from reason, neither that they are "eternal." What I said was rather simple. We live in the modem world. What will happen tomorrow we do not know. We need to extrapolate the situation called "modernity" into our close future, and if this is so, we can also extrapolate the main values of modernity into this future. Since modernity has actually universalized the value "freedom" and is about to universalize the value "life" as well, we need to think up a concept of justice that could be adequate to this situation.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: For example, the authors pointed out that the well-known models put forth by Western historians to comprehend modern Chinese history and politics by and large left out the interest of the Central government.
Abstract: The interesting question, therefore, is this: why have we seldom heard about the destabilizing consequences of Central government policy in the pre-1949 Chinese countryside? Surely one reason has to do with the fact that the well-known models put forth by Western historians to comprehend modern Chinese history and politics by and large left out the interest of the Central government. Up until the time Theda Skocpol published States and Social Revolutions there were, generally speaking, three such models. In the first of these models, the Central government was said to have been a “state blown apart” by military separatism. Advocates of a second model acknowledged that Chiang Kai-shek led the Central government to defeat most of the aristocratic warlord armies of the 1927–30 period, but nonetheless portrayed the center as lacking the bureaucratic machinery necessary to penetrate the vast rural interior and halt the devolution of state power. According to Philip Kuhn, William Wei, and Philip C. C. Huang, this devolutionary process played into the hands of entrenched local elites who were against state building, or who, as Prasenjit Duara has brilliantly shown, acted as brokers to alter Central government claims in order to serve their own interests. Yet a third model was sketched out in the insightful historical studies of Lloyd E. Eastman. According to Eastman, the Republican center was real enough, but the plans of its policymakers to create economic wealth and expand their controls over rural society were confounded by factional infighting and cut short by the Japanese invasion of China in 1937.