Showing papers in "Theory and Society in 1996"

Historical events as transformations of structures: Inventing revolution at the Bastille

Abstract: Just as the taking of the Bastille led to a cascade of further events, so the theoretical reflections touched off by my analysis of that event has led to a cascade of further reflections. And as the analyst must draw an arbitrary boundary to establish analytical closure to an event, so must I bring to a close an article that still seems to me radically open and unfinished. I believe I have written enough to establish that thinking about historical events as I do here - that is, treating them as sequences of occurrences that result in durable transformations of structures - is potentially fruitful. Precisely how fruitful can only be determined by future work on other historical events.

What is sociological about economic sociology? Uncertainty and the embeddedness of economic action

Abstract: This article argues that the problem of uncertainty represents the central limitation of efficiency-based approaches to the explanation and prediction of economic outcomes. The problem of uncertainty reintroduces the Hobbesian problem of order into economics and makes it possible to connect questions of economic decision-making with social theory. The emphasis lies not, as in the behavioral theories of the Carnegie School, in the influence of uncertainty on the actual decision process, but in those social “devices” that actors rely on in decision-making, i.e., that structure the situation for the agents. If agents cannot anticipate the benefits of an investment, optimizing decisions become impossible, and the question opens up how intentionally rational actors reach decisions under this condition of uncertainty. This provides a systematic starting point for economic sociology. Studies in economic sociology that argue from different theoretical perspectives point to the significance of uncertainty and goal ambiguity. This contribution reflects theoretically why economic sociology can develop a promising approach by building upon these insights. It becomes understandable why culture, power, institutions, social structures, and cognitive processes are important in modern market economies. But it should be equally emphasized that the maximizing paradigm in economics will not be dethroned without a causal theory of the relationship of intentional rationality and social rigidities.

Multiculturalism and immigration: A comparison of the United States, Germany, and Great Britain

Abstract: If there is one general conclusion to be drawn from these case histories, it is this: having accepted significant numbers of immigrants at one point or more in the postwar period, liberal states had to tolerate the multicultural transformation of their societies. This is because liberal states, while nominally tied to particular nations, are still hesitant to impose particular cultural ways on their members. Liberal states are neutral vis a vis substantive life forms and world views, which proved to be the major inroad for multiculturalism. This communality of liberal states is revealed, shock-like, if one compares them with the illiberal, increasingly immigrant-receiving states of the Near and Middle East or East Asia: states that practice caning of illegal entrants and forced repatriation of labor migrants. This does not mean that, in confrontation with radical challenges to its very premises, liberalism can itself turn into a “fighting creed,” as Charles Taylor put it. This it did during the Rushdie Affair, which remains the most dramatic demonstration of the limits to multiculturalism in a liberal society. The “British liberties” held against protesting Muslims was “liberties” first, and “British” second - the national marker being exchangeable, the commitment to universal (Western) principles like freedom of speech and expression empathically not. As a result of the multicultural challenge, Western nations are increasingly stripped of their particular cultural contents and reduced to civic communities committed to the same procedural rules. This is why a second-generation Turkish-German intellectual could say that immigration offered a (however ignored) “opportunity” for the German nation to ease its historical burdens. In summary, liberal states have multiculturalism, because they have given up the idea of assimilating their members beyond basic procedural commitments.

The reshaping and dissolution of social class in advanced society

Abstract: In 1958 Robert Nisbet declared to a meeting of the American Sociological Association in Seattle that: "the term social class is by now useful in historical sociology, in comparative or folk sociology, but that it is nearly valueless for the clarification of the data of wealth, power, and social status in the contemporary United States and much of Western society in general."1 Why then should an argument now be mounted in support of a similar view? The reason is that the concept has a plasticity in the face of evidence and a resilience to disconfirmation that would be the envy of many a materials scientist.2 Indeed Nisbet's declaration seems to have energized and expanded the "class industry" rather than to have consigned it to the conceptual graveyard to rest peacefully alongside "mores," "the folk-urban continuum," "functional prerequisites," and "the unit act." The two main "enterprises" in that industry are multinational in character, one extending from Madison, Wisconsin to establish branch plants in more than a dozen countries throughout Europe, Asia, and Australasia, the other centering on Oxford and linking with similar operations in Northern Europe, Japan, and Australia.3 In a restless effort to accommodate increased societal

Globalization, the world system, and “democracy promotion” in U.S. foreign policy

Abstract: In any society the dominant groups are the ones with the most to hide about the way society works. Very often therefore truthful analyses are bound to have a critical ring, to seem like exposures rather that objective statements . . . . For all students of human society sympathy with the victims of historical processes and skepticism about the victors' claims provide essential safeguards against being taken in by the dominant mythology. A scholar who tries to be objective needs these feelings as part of his working equipment. Barrington Moore

Towards a theory of intellectuals and politics

Abstract: "The intellectual," Vaclav Havel has written, "should constantly disturb, should bear witness to the misery of the world, should be provocative by being independent, should rebel against all hidden and open pressure and manipulations, should be the chief doubter of systems, of power and its incantations, should be a witness to their mendacity."1 In this wonderfully eloquent passage, composed in 1986 when Czechoslovakia's Communist regime still had the capacity to make life hellish for those who dared to oppose it, Havel provides a particularly vivid expression of the perspective that has dominated most thinking and writing about intellectuals: that they are "disturbers of the peace" whose ultimate responsibility is to tell the truth, even (and perhaps especially) if it arouses the ire of the established authorities. In so arguing, Havel joins a long tradition of discourse about intellectuals, beginning with Zola and extending through Benda and Orwell to Kolakowski and many others, that insists the proper function of intellect is, in the memorable words of Ignazio Silone, "the humble and courageous service of truth."2 That this viewpoint, which we shall call here the "moralist" tradition, retains vitality today is illustrated by no less a figure then Edward Said, who in delivering the prestigious Reith Lectures for the BBC in 1993, repeatedly emphasized that the tasks of the contemporary intellectual is "to speak the truth to power."3

The continuing relevance of class analysis — comments

Abstract: If the evidence I discuss above is correct, then it certainly seems premature to declare the death of class. Class may not be the most powerful or fundamental cause of “societal organization,” and class struggle may not be the most powerful transformative force in the world today. Class primacy as a generalized explanatory principle across all social explananda are implausible. Nevertheless, class remains a significant and sometimes powerful determinant of many aspects of social life. Class boundaries, especially the property boundary, continue to constitute real barriers in people's lives; inequalities in the distribution of capital assets continue to have real consequences for material interests; capitalist firms continue to face the problem of extracting labor effort from non-owning employees; and class location continues to have real, if variable, impacts on individual subjectivities.

Historical legacies, nationalist mobilization, and political outcomes in Russia and Serbia: A Weberian view

Abstract: In the preceding analysis, I attempt to demonstrate the usefulness of some of Weber's key theoretical ideas on nations, nationalism, and imperialism by way of a comparative examination of contemporary Russian and Serbian nationalism. More specifically, I try to show how long-term historical and institutional legacies, shared memories, and defining political experiences, played themselves out in the contemporary period, influencing the different availability of mass constituencies in Russia and Serbia for nationalist mobilization under the auspices of new “empire-saving coalitions.”

Executing executions: Aesthetics, identity, and the problematic narratives of capital punishment ritual

Abstract: Despite some two-hundred years of debate, capital punishment remains one of the most hotly contested and widely discussed topics of both public and academic discourse. Scarcely a week goes by without a new political or legal issue, murder case, or impending execution fuelling the fires of controversy. The raging intensity of this debate testifies to the continuing centrality of the death penalty for American political and cultural life. Much like the spectacle of the scaffold in centuries past, the poison injection, electric chair and gas chamber are central to the iconography of the contemporary collective conscience. They are a mold around which popular perceptions are formed as to the morality and identity not only of criminals, but also of politicians and indeed the community itself. At the time of writing, the trial of media and sports celebrity O. J. Simpson on a double-murder count appears likely to push the volume and intensity of debate to unprecedented levels. The intense public and mass media interest in the Simpson case, like that of Gary Gilmore during the 1970s, has raised yet again the question of media coverage of executions. Many proponents of the death penalty argue that the tide of history should be turned back and that executions should be not only reported, but also seen by a wider public. They argue that the televisual coverage of executions will send a clear and unequivocal message which will both reinforce conventional moral values and deter crime. At the same time opponents of executions point to an inevitable degradation of the victim that would be reinforced by exposure to an audience as the object of a public spectacle. This article speaks to this debate using the resources of theoretical and historical sociology, and by building on recent developments in cultural and ritual theory. It suggests that the events of the past are canaries to be watched with respect to what might happen in the future and that the advocate's faith in the moral and deterrent semiosis of public executions might be misplaced. Paradoxi-

Orpheus wounded: The experience of pain in the professional worlds of the piano

Abstract: None of the three worlds within the field of professional piano playing has adequately confronted the problem of pain, partly because its causes and treatment could be easily assigned to another world. The medical world could blame pain on “misuse”; the virtuoso world on lack of “genius” or “hard work”; the pedagogical world on “bad teaching” or “lack of talent.” Each world, for its own reasons, has managed either to skirt the problem of pain outright or to develop techniques and languages that fail to offer general remedies, or worse, exacerbate the amount of pain pianists endure. In the meantime, market competition in a shrinking concert market has increased, together with audience dependence upon charismatic virtuosity. The more compact virtuoso world, populated by ever larger numbers of hopeful pianists, creates intense competition in which the causes stimulating pain multiply.

Ideology, culture, and ambiguity: The revolutionary process in Iran

Abstract: To varying degrees, polysemous appeals are a feature of nearly all political coalitions and negotiations. But they are especially important in revolutions in which mass protests accompany a sudden collapse and elimination of the old regime state. In such a situation, it is not the case that a few coalition planks are ambiguous in an otherwise institution-alized political structure; instead, even the main outlines of how politics will operate in a new regime is undetermined. Given the chaos and uncertainty, revolutionary unity necessarily focusses upon rejection of the regime itself, and revolutionaries appeal to widely familiar cultural images (as in the appeal to Islam) whose durability within the society has depended on a degree of flexibility in interpretation and application. There is neither time nor reason for the opposition coalition to settle upon a detailed post-revolutionary program.

From the 30s to the 60s:The Folk Music Revival

Abstract: ConclusionWoody Guthrie's ashes were spread by the wind over the water from a Coney Island, New York pier a few days after he died on Oct. 3, 1967. His wife and children, including his 19-year-old son Arlo, were present as America's greatest folksinger was laid to rest. One of the last things Woody heard before he died was Arlo's recorded voice singing the draft-dodging tale of Alice's restaurant. He must have sensed that the spirit had been passed on. Woody Guthrie died just as the second great wave of popular interest in American folk music was coming to an end. “Alice's Restaurant” was in many ways one of its last echoes. The symbolism could not have been more poignant. At the center of the first folk revival, Woody Guthrie was a vital source of inspiration for the second.The new generation of singer-songwriters who marked the second wave was largely composed of those with at least some contact with the new mass higher education and those “multi-versities” that were built to dispense it. They were neither members of a déclassé elite, as could be said of Charles and Pete Seeger and John and Alan Lomax, nor were they “authentic” folk singers, like Woody Guthrie. Nor could they be. By the 1960s, the conditions that had created the possibility for the first wave of the movement had been irretrievably altered. After the Second World War, with a postwar economic expansion and population explosion under way, America was a different place. Besides, the first folk revival had already claimed “authenticity” as its own. For the most part, if there was any aspiration toward authenticity amongst the topical singer-songwriters (those in New York City in any case), it was to be as close a copy of the first generation, Guthrie and Seeger, as possible. “Purism” was the second wave's answer to the “authenticity” of the first.Being part of an expanding generation of white, college-educated youths affected the form and content of the music that characterized the second wave. The most obvious aspect of this was the arena of performance and the audience who filled it. Gone were the union halls, the singing in working-class bars and beerhalls and at Party functions, all of which had characterized the first wave. These were replaced first by coffee shops and small clubs, either in Greenwich Village or those surrounding college campuses. The forays into the South in support of the civil-rights movement were for the most part short-lived and highly symbolic, not to say self-serving. The real mass audience arrived with the antiwar activity and was largely university centered.It was also this audience that filled the auditoriums and concert halls for the more obviously commercial performances by the singer-songwriters of the second wave. This overlapping public provided the grounds for a new mass market in folk music. Peter, Paul, and Mary, who sang in front of many mass demonstrations in protest against the war in Vietnam or in support of civil rights, were, although they saw themselves as carrying on in the spirit of the Weavers, an entirely commercial creation. In the article from the East Village Other cited above, written just after “the first big concert in America against the war in Vietnam,” Izzy Young angrily notes that “everybody was a part of it except the people managed by Albert Grossman - Peter, Paul and Mary, and Bob Dylan. When the war in Vietnam became “popular,” three years later, Peter, Paul and Mary flew down to Washington, D.C. to take their place in front of the cameras.”Commercial rationality was much more a factor in defining the second folk revival than the first. The possibilities were greater and the structure of the music industry was different. With a new mass market still in the process of formation and thus unspecified in terms of taste, the larger record companies could afford to take a liberal attitude and to include under their label, “all the revolutionaries,” as Columbia Records proudly announced in its contemporary advertising. Commercial possibilities thus were more important in shaping the musical form and content of second folk revival than politics, which were so central to the first. As opposed to the old left, the new left was a loosely organized contingent of organizations and groups with little coordination between them. In fact, many if not most of the organizations were ad hoc committees formed for a specific strike or demonstration. No one group was thus in a position to exert ideological hegemony. Following from this, at least during the period under discussion, there was little political dogmatism to be found. With no powerful organization to impose it, there was no clear political line to defend and thus to sing about. Even the notion of the “people,” so central to the first folk revival, was relatively absent in the second. Who were the “people” addressed? Certainly not the working class or even the “common man.” “I am just a student, Sir, I only want to learn,” sang Phil Ochs.During the second folk revival, the “people” had become “the silent majority,” the province of the conservative right. Neither in music nor in politics did the new left make many attempts to reach the “common man in the street.” The people had been massified, according to new left theory, and in the new one-dimensional mass society the grounds of political and social identity were always shifting. Besides, country music had already established itself as the musical genre of the rural, southern, western and white, common man. From a commercial point of view, there was little need to look for authenticity or the people; the market was sufficiently large and getting larger as more and more young people entered the institutions of higher education. Politically, this was not a serious problem either, as long as the aim was not revolution as it had been for the old left. It was sufficient, then, to address the masses of youngsters gathering together at institutions of higher education. If there was a revolution at foot, this was it.While the first wave practically had to invent folk music, the second could draw on the reservoir of public culture that to a large extent resulted from this invention. The networks and institutional support provided by the old left and the personal authority of a figure like Alan Lomax made possible the imposition of rather strict criteria for determining in what exactly folk music consisted. Neither networks nor gatekeepers were so determinate to the second wave. With the folksong and folksinger already invented, the new generation could pick and choose from a rather wide range of options. In addition, by the time the new left and the topical-song movement achieved at least a semblance of cohesion, folk music was already institutionally supported by “radical entrepreneurs” like Izzy Young and the more commercial recording industry. There were, thus, strong institutional bases for folk music outside of politics. Politics, in other words, was not the only game in town. But neither was commerce. The civil-rights movement and the new social movements that developed out of it opened for a short period a space, a public arena, in which the idea of folk music could be reinvented anew. Within this space the traditions constituted during the first wave of folk revival were experimented with and modified in light of the new social and historical context. America was not the same place in the 1960s as it had been in the 1930s and neither could its folk music be. The actors, the setting, and the songs were all different, yet still the same.In attempting to account for both this continuity and change in the two waves of folk revival we have drawn from both the cognitive approach to the study of social movements, which calls attention to the creative role of social-movement actors in the production of knowledge, and the production of culture perspective, which highlights the effects of institutional arrangements in the production of cultural goods. From the former, we have focused on the changing character of “movement intellectuals,” those to whom Ralph Rinzler in the epigraph that begins this article gave special place; from the latter, we have noted how, among other things, the changing nature of the recording industry helped recast the folk music revival. We hope that the foregoing has demonstrated that in combining these approaches, as well as areas of research interest, we have uncovered aspects of the folk revival others may have missed.

An institutional analysis of fiscal reform in postcommunist Europe

Abstract: The fiscal systems of postcommunist states in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union are undergoing fundamental transformations The old mechanisms of revenue extraction and expenditure, based on central planning, are breaking down and being replaced by new ones that are better suited to market economies Of course, it will take several years for these new fiscal institutions to develop fully The problem is that although postcommunist states need to pursue fiscal policies in order to facilitate structural change, economic growth, equity, and other socioeconomic goals, these efforts are being hobbled by the lack of well-developed fiscal institutions1 An especially important manifestation of this dilemma is a tendency to incur severe budget deficits and, at worst, fiscal crises where deficits are so large and hard to manage that states encounter great difficulty performing their basic duties2

Structuring the sexual revolution

Abstract: The explosion of sexuality We have seen how ideas of the repression of sexual energies within a sex-economic framework, the revolt of sexuality incarnated in youth and the struggle to control/educate children's sexuality, the revolt of women due to greater independence, and the scientizing of the world of morals were brought together to produce the idea of the “sexual revolution” - a specific interpretation of undeniable changes in mores and behavior. While it might seem that the net has been cast rather widely in describing this complex of ideas, it is my contention that all these themes, seemingly contradictory though they may be, were present in the thought of those formulating the idea of the sexual revolution. (One statement by Calverton shows the synthesis: “In the revolt of youth, connected as it is with the economic independence of modern woman, the bankruptcy of the old system of marriage, the decay of the bourgeoisie as a social class, we have the dynamic beginnings of a sexual revolution growing out of the economic background of social struggle.”)1 But the idea of a sexual revolution had another element, touched upon at the beginning of this essay, namely the belief that a distinction could be made between revolutionary and non-revolutionary times in moral history. This belief was no doubt derived from the Marxist orientation toward revolutionary times that the writers we have studied shared. But can such a discontinuous change, a “spurt” in evolution in which quantity becomes quality, be supposed to have happened, when we have enough records of people suggesting that there was a “sexual revolution” - “a startling and cataclysmic disruption,” to use Schur's words - underway in 1925 (Lindsey), 1927 (Darmstadt et al.), 1929 (Schmalhausen), 1936 (Reich), 1930–1955 (Hirsch), 1956 (Sorokin), 1964 (Schur), and 1966 (Reiss; Kirkendall and Libby)? To some extent, yes. There is indication of great changes in sexual behavior at certain times (though it is hard to separate age, cohort, and period effects); there was an increase in at least educated females' incidence of premarital intercourse in the 1920s. Furthermore, there are clear differences in the amount of attention paid to sexuality, and to sexual mores, during different periods. At the very least, merely the belief that one is in the midst of a sexual revolution is an important datum, for it may point to changes in extremely “ideologically sensitive” portions of the population (e.g., middle-class women) or to the attempt to legitimize already existing patterns of behavior. However, the writers contributing to the idea of the sexual revolution never gave very plausible explanations as to why the change from normal to revolutionary times should have happened when it did. The suggested causes have generally been continuous, and not immediately preceding the times believed to be sexual revolutions. Women's entry into the labor force followed a roughly exponential curve from 1900 to the present, the orientation of the economy toward service-sector production, as well as the increase in disposable income was, aside from the depression-war period, basically uninterrupted, and the pace of technological change certainly never slackened.

From the 30s to the 60s: The folk music revival in the United States

Abstract: Woody Guthrie's ashes were spread by the wind over the water from a Coney Island, New York pier a few days after he died on Oct. 3, 1967. His wife and children, including his 19-year-old son Arlo, were present as America's greatest folksinger was laid to rest. One of the last things Woody heard before he died was Arlo's recorded voice singing the draft-dodging tale of Alice's restaurant. He must have sensed that the spirit had been passed on. Woody Guthrie died just as the second great wave of popular interest in American folk music was coming to an end. “Alice's Restaurant” was in many ways one of its last echoes. The symbolism could not have been more poignant. At the center of the first folk revival, Woody Guthrie was a vital source of inspiration for the second. The new generation of singer-songwriters who marked the second wave was largely composed of those with at least some contact with the new mass higher education and those “multi-versities” that were built to dispense it. They were neither members of a declasse elite, as could be said of Charles and Pete Seeger and John and Alan Lomax, nor were they “authentic” folk singers, like Woody Guthrie. Nor could they be. By the 1960s, the conditions that had created the possibility for the first wave of the movement had been irretrievably altered. After the Second World War, with a postwar economic expansion and population explosion under way, America was a different place. Besides, the first folk revival had already claimed “authenticity” as its own. For the most part, if there was any aspiration toward authenticity amongst the topical singer-songwriters (those in New York City in any case), it was to be as close a copy of the first generation, Guthrie and Seeger, as possible. “Purism” was the second wave's answer to the “authenticity” of the first. Being part of an expanding generation of white, college-educated youths affected the form and content of the music that characterized the second wave. The most obvious aspect of this was the arena of performance and the audience who filled it. Gone were the union halls, the singing in working-class bars and beerhalls and at Party functions, all of which had characterized the first wave. These were replaced first by coffee shops and small clubs, either in Greenwich Village or those surrounding college campuses. The forays into the South in support of the civil-rights movement were for the most part short-lived and highly symbolic, not to say self-serving. The real mass audience arrived with the antiwar activity and was largely university centered. It was also this audience that filled the auditoriums and concert halls for the more obviously commercial performances by the singer-songwriters of the second wave. This overlapping public provided the grounds for a new mass market in folk music. Peter, Paul, and Mary, who sang in front of many mass demonstrations in protest against the war in Vietnam or in support of civil rights, were, although they saw themselves as carrying on in the spirit of the Weavers, an entirely commercial creation. In the article from the East Village Other cited above, written just after “the first big concert in America against the war in Vietnam,” Izzy Young angrily notes that “everybody was a part of it except the people managed by Albert Grossman - Peter, Paul and Mary, and Bob Dylan. When the war in Vietnam became “popular,” three years later, Peter, Paul and Mary flew down to Washington, D.C. to take their place in front of the cameras.” Commercial rationality was much more a factor in defining the second folk revival than the first. The possibilities were greater and the structure of the music industry was different. With a new mass market still in the process of formation and thus unspecified in terms of taste, the larger record companies could afford to take a liberal attitude and to include under their label, “all the revolutionaries,” as Columbia Records proudly announced in its contemporary advertising. Commercial possibilities thus were more important in shaping the musical form and content of second folk revival than politics, which were so central to the first. As opposed to the old left, the new left was a loosely organized contingent of organizations and groups with little coordination between them. In fact, many if not most of the organizations were ad hoc committees formed for a specific strike or demonstration. No one group was thus in a position to exert ideological hegemony. Following from this, at least during the period under discussion, there was little political dogmatism to be found. With no powerful organization to impose it, there was no clear political line to defend and thus to sing about. Even the notion of the “people,” so central to the first folk revival, was relatively absent in the second. Who were the “people” addressed? Certainly not the working class or even the “common man.” “I am just a student, Sir, I only want to learn,” sang Phil Ochs. During the second folk revival, the “people” had become “the silent majority,” the province of the conservative right. Neither in music nor in politics did the new left make many attempts to reach the “common man in the street.” The people had been massified, according to new left theory, and in the new one-dimensional mass society the grounds of political and social identity were always shifting. Besides, country music had already established itself as the musical genre of the rural, southern, western and white, common man. From a commercial point of view, there was little need to look for authenticity or the people; the market was sufficiently large and getting larger as more and more young people entered the institutions of higher education. Politically, this was not a serious problem either, as long as the aim was not revolution as it had been for the old left. It was sufficient, then, to address the masses of youngsters gathering together at institutions of higher education. If there was a revolution at foot, this was it. While the first wave practically had to invent folk music, the second could draw on the reservoir of public culture that to a large extent resulted from this invention. The networks and institutional support provided by the old left and the personal authority of a figure like Alan Lomax made possible the imposition of rather strict criteria for determining in what exactly folk music consisted. Neither networks nor gatekeepers were so determinate to the second wave. With the folksong and folksinger already invented, the new generation could pick and choose from a rather wide range of options. In addition, by the time the new left and the topical-song movement achieved at least a semblance of cohesion, folk music was already institutionally supported by “radical entrepreneurs” like Izzy Young and the more commercial recording industry. There were, thus, strong institutional bases for folk music outside of politics. Politics, in other words, was not the only game in town. But neither was commerce. The civil-rights movement and the new social movements that developed out of it opened for a short period a space, a public arena, in which the idea of folk music could be reinvented anew. Within this space the traditions constituted during the first wave of folk revival were experimented with and modified in light of the new social and historical context. America was not the same place in the 1960s as it had been in the 1930s and neither could its folk music be. The actors, the setting, and the songs were all different, yet still the same. In attempting to account for both this continuity and change in the two waves of folk revival we have drawn from both the cognitive approach to the study of social movements, which calls attention to the creative role of social-movement actors in the production of knowledge, and the production of culture perspective, which highlights the effects of institutional arrangements in the production of cultural goods. From the former, we have focused on the changing character of “movement intellectuals,” those to whom Ralph Rinzler in the epigraph that begins this article gave special place; from the latter, we have noted how, among other things, the changing nature of the recording industry helped recast the folk music revival. We hope that the foregoing has demonstrated that in combining these approaches, as well as areas of research interest, we have uncovered aspects of the folk revival others may have missed.

Misreading status as class: A reply to our critics

Abstract: Within these three moderate and fair-minded critiques of our essay, a central criticism concerns the accuracy of our portrayal of the class paradigm. This is partly an empirical question, and partly a matter of semantics. The summary propositions are derived from the class literature with the intention of capturing typicality rather than constructing an easy target. Naturally, our critics have every right to distance themselves from some of the elements. Indeed, we insist that not all four propositions are embraced by every class approach with equal vigor, and that one would expect to find differences among class theorists on the precise meaning of "the fundamental structuring principle;' "real features" or "transformative capacity." We endorse Wright's objection to the excessive determinism that characterizes some versions and his stress on the relative autonomy of politics. However, we disagree with our critics on two points. First, Manza and Brooks's depiction of our argument as "one-sided" and "misleading," relies on a misinterpretation. Of course, class analysts can and do address racial, ethnic, and gender divisions, but it is simply a fact that they do so within a context of an either explicitly stated or an assumed primacy of economic-class divisions. This means privileging class divisions and relations by disproportionate attention or by misattributing causal directionality. This should be seen as a fair representation of not only the more orthodox Marxism of, say, Poulantzas or Miliband but also of more sophisticated neo-Marxist analyses of Wright and the "neo-Weberian" class studies of Marshall et al. 1 Such analyses also seldom theorize these non-class divisions.

Does class analysis still have anything to contribute to the study of politics? — comments

Abstract: We can accept Michael Mann's recent claim that in their endless debates about the social and political importance of class, sociologists are sometimes guilty of engaging in what he calls “classrurbation.”1 Far from being an intellectually immature activity, classturbation — to apply the former U.S. Surgeon General's remarks to a novel context — is in reality a safe and productive outlet for healthy questions about the linkages between inequalities and political alignments. We recognize, as does every serious contemporary class analyst we have ever read, that a class-analytic framework can shed light on some types of social phenomena, but not others. It certainly is true that class analysis no longer has any claim, if it ever did, to a privileged position in the development of a critical sociology. But we firmly reject PW's claims that for class to matter in understanding political behavior, its effects must necessarily be larger than that of all other salient cleavages for every time and place. Not only have class analyses of political behavior progressed well beyond dated and misleading conceptualizations, they provide no evidence for a universal pattern of class dealignment.

Figures of Weberian Marxism

Abstract: The notion of "Weberian Marxism" was invented by Merleau-Ponty in order to define, in his book Les Aventures de la Dialectique (1955), the Western-Marxist thinkers who systematically used certain key ideas of Max Weber in particular Georg Lukacs and some of his followers. It is a formulation that seems, in many regards, paradoxical: do not Weber and Marx represent two contradictory and mutually exclusive systems of thought? Are not their scientific theories rigorously incompatible?

The discursive origins of Israeli separatism: The case of the Arab village

Abstract: We should note, however, that the achievements of the control system cannot in and of themselves explain the success of the discourse on the Arab village. Indeed, with the benefit of hindsight, one must acknowledge today that what the control system produced was a “secondary order” reality at best, a representation superimposed over, and obscuring other social realities. It never managed (nor did it try) to stop the proletarianization of peasants. It never managed (though it did try) to put an end to illegal construction and de-facto urbanization. It did not even manage to repress the emergence of grass-roots national political organization in the villages. More often than not, its sole achievement was to obscure official (and academic) perception of these processes. Thus, one often finds nowadays settlements to which the term “village” is officially applied, while their physical structure already merits urban status. Urbanization took place in the villages regardless of the designs of planners, and this fact alone is enough to demonstrate how discourse detached them from reality. This was also why, in 1976, Orientalists and government experts were completely taken by surprise, when the “committee for national direction” (composed of “village” mayors!) organized mass demonstrations to protest government plans to confiscate more Palestinian lands. The events of this day, later known as “land day,” signaled the emergence of rural Palestinians as a national political force to be reckoned with. Quite contrary to what the notion of “hamula struggle” led them to believe, experts discovered that the villages were an effective mobilizing ground for national political action.

The social psychology of Adam and Eve

Abstract: I am arguing for three links between the biblical creation myth and social theory. First, I am arguing that, by exploiting the story for the social psychological ideas that can be drawn out of it, we have a rich way to appreciate the nuances of the myth. By treating “Adam and Eve” as a parsimonious and memorable form of sociological theorizing, we can effectively appreciate the elaborate, highly tuned, richly coherent, and subtle structure of the myth. We can answer a series of initially enigmatic questions about the logic of the story, and in the process we can bring out some of its neglected features, such as the burden in the final gift. Here empirical theory serves to clarify the hermeneutics of a powerfully appealing element of cultural life. Next, reversing the perspective, we can reveal the myth as a testable empirical theory. In this article, I can only suggest the promise of such a theory. But this operation draws out theoretical ideas about emotions - such as their dualistic and dialectical character - that are difficult to summarize elegantly without the aid of the symbolic powers of mythical narrative and that point empirical investigation in new directions. Third, there is the empirical question of the impressive resonance of the story of Adam and Eve. I am arguing that the everyday emergence and decline of emotions, in typically brief, typically inconsequential, social interactional episodes, parallels the metamorphosis described in Genesis. This parallel indicates a ground for the appeal of this creation myth wherever people structure their emotions into socially situated forms, wherever “falls,” literal or figurative, can lead alternatively to shame, laughter, crying, or anger. The narrative structure of everyday emotions is surely not the only nor the most important basis of the appeal of Adam and Eve, but there is a grounding for the resonance of the story, a tacit basis for its pervasive appeal, in the stories that we corporeally convey as we construct socially situated episodes of shame, laughter, anger, and crying. Something similar was argued by the English and German literary and philosophical Romantics but their claims were far more ambitious. They frequently appreciated biblical stories such as those of the Fall from paradise, the prodigal son, and the tearing of Christ from communal embrace and eventual resurrection, not as history or allegory but as proto-scientific summaries of ongoing human realities. In M. H. Abrams's review, the Romantic “tendency was... to naturalize the supernatural and to humanize the divine.” All the figures and events of the bible were “‘to be seen and felt within you.’” My position in this essay is neither so grand nor so optimistic. I am arguing that emotions in everyday social life describe a metamorphosis of fall, chaos, and an attempt at graceful reintegration, but not that this process describes all of social life, much less all of history, nor even that it describes what is most fundamental, best, or most elevating in life, as the Romantics might have said. For Schiller, the Fall was “fortunate” because it led to a spiral ascent toward a paradise more grand than the one Adam lost. Our situated emotions routinely lead back to the banalities from which they emerged. Moreover, much of emotional life does not necessarily take the form of bounded narrative episodes; indeed much of what may be most important about social life, in any number of senses, is not characterized by the bouts of crying and anger, phases of shameful feeling, and moments of laughter that this essay addresses. But the story of Eden resonates elaborately in emotionally colorful moments within the mundane prose of routine interaction, just as those sensually vivid experiences are narrated in corporeally distinctive ways. Revisiting Genesis, we can grasp its wisdom reverberating through the workings of emotions in everyday social life.

Pacific century: Myth or reality?

Abstract: These words of an obscure British parliamentarian, one Mr. Stapleton, appear to have returned to haunt his successors more than one hundred years after they were uttered in 1873 with the emergence of China as the fastest growing economy on earth in the 1990s, and when sweatshops in the garment industry are reported to be relocating from Hong Kong to New York on account of cheaper wages.2 At the same time, a series of seismic transformations in the geopolitical ecology of the world since the late sixties the high rates of growth consistently registered by Japan and the "Four Dragons" (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore) in the seventies and eighties when most other economies have performed sluggishly, the eclipse of the transAtlantic trade by that across the Pacific by the late seventies, the rapid industrialization of several Southeast Asian states (Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia) and the parallel de-industrialization of most highincome economies in the eighties have led many observers to resurrect one of the lesser-known predictions of Marx and Engels: that the Pacific will replace the Atlantic as the "center of gravity of world commerce."3 Additional corroboration for this prognosis came from the growth of industries based on new technologies along the Pacific seaboard of North America and the concurrent de-industrialization of

Why and how East Germans rebelled

Abstract: Attempts to explain the East German uprising are particularly significant because it was probably the most important event in the collapse of European communism. The building of the Berlin Wall was the symbol of the Cold War division between Eastern and Western Europe and its fall led to the reunification of Germany and marked the end of this European partition. Elizabeth Pond has written: “When the Berlin Wall fell, the crash obliterated a country, an empire, and an era.” Pond, , 1. There are several obstacles to adequate explanation, however. The reasons why East Germans rebelled cannot be separated from the end of communism in Europe. The GDR was “imprisoned” within the socialist bloc (similar to the way the SED “locked up” its own people). Rebellion could only (successfully) occur when Soviet domination had eased. The popular rebellion in East Germany was precipitated by a wave of “exit” unleashed by reform communists in Hungary who had eliminated border controls. The Wall was opened from outside before it was pulled down from within. Even when confined to the protests within the GDR, that is to the second stage of the revolt, the main causes of the uprising have often been misunderstood. The would-be “exiters” were an important part of “voice” and often prompted the activities of the pro-GDR opposition. “Loyal voice” did play a significant role in calling for and speaking at anti-regime rallies. But these oppositionists did not mobilize the population themselves. Mass exodus, and political reform elsewhere in Eastern Europe, had set off the revolt by giving many East Germans a new found sense of political efficacy that led them to act spontaneously. Opp, Voss, and Gern, , show that the organized opposition had too few contacts to organize demonstrations but simply announced them, to which ordinary people finally began to respond in large numbers in early fall 1989. To show exactly how this largely spontaneous process took place, the authors concede a social-network analysis of friends and family members encouraging each other to participate would be needed (but proved too expensive!) (chap. 14). Without private advantages and aware of the personal risks, millions of ordinary citizens went onto the streets because they felt a collective sense of obligation to do so. The key to understanding how East Germans rebelled, that is, to explaining the distinctiveness of the revolt, is the ex-GDR's lack of national identity. While the Polish and Hungarian leaderships could initiate democratization and hope to protect some of their interests under postcommunist rule, the SED risked losing “its” state as well. Hirschman underestimates the GDR leadership's dilemma when he argues that “the extinction of the German Democratic Republic can be seen as the ultimate penalty for the long suppression of exit and voice” (p. 200). The GDR could only survive by preventing its citizens from leaving for the bigger, richer, and more democratic state in a divided nation. East Germany was inconceivable as a liberal state. Reform efforts always literally ran into the Wall. Not only does the lack of national identity explain the hardline nature of the regime, it also illuminates the “revisionism” of the opposition. It is only an apparent paradox that in a “state without legitimacy” the loyalty among the GDR intellegentsia was particularly intense. Fricke, “Die Geschichte der DDR: Ein Staat ohne Legitimat,” in Eckhard Jesse and Armin Mitter, editors, (Bonn: Bundeszentrale fur politische Bildung, 1992), 41–72. The same matter-of-fact nationalism that made many East Germans feel a part of the Federal Republic (of which they were, by nature of the West German Grundgesetz, “virtual” citizens), tied artists, writers, and oppositionists alike to the ideal of the “better German state.” They felt that the evils of German nationalism could best be preempted by socialism, which offered a clear anti-fascist position and justified the continued existence of the GDR. German nationalism and calls for unification were often associated with the “” (Greater Germany) of the Nazis. When the made unification possible, warnings were heard of (annexation), the term used to describe the Nazi seizure of Austria. This not only implied a return to the extreme nationalism of the past, it was also an indirect critique of parliamentary institutions: the East German , freely elected in spring 1990, to unify with West Germany. East Germans had to rebel against an unrelenting SED and then abandoned the pro-GDR opposition's hope for a rejuvenation of East Germany. Continued emigration and mounting protest doomed efforts to reform the regime and rescue the state. Elections had to be moved up from May to March 1990 to head off pending economic and political disaster. West German parties, which supported GDR “affiliates,” and Western politicians, who were well known and often better liked than their East German counterparts, played a dominant role in the campaign. The vote brought a conservative coalition to power that had promised the fastest and marginalized the two major opponents of immediate unity: the reformed communists (PDS) and the opposition alliance (Bundnis 90). Democratic transition had become part of German unification.

The paradox of Durkheim's manifesto: Reconsidering The Rules of Sociological Method

Abstract: In summary, my three formulations of Durkheim's The Rules of Sociological Method as a manifesto have progressively found it to be epistemologically and pedagogically embedded in its object of scientific interest. In the first and most limited formulation, Durkheim's text was a violent and strategic preparation for his vision of sociology, that laid its grounds, but was ultimately inessential to sociological practice itself. It marked what he hoped was a historical rupture in western thought, after which true sociological reason could get underway. In my second formulation his text was the creation of a precise sociological object and moral reality. And while constituting sociology's first action, the manifesto could then be superseded as this morality began to sustain itself. Nevertheless, more than in the first formulation, it actively produced a new “social fact” in European culture. Finally, in the third formulation, Durkheim's manifesto is an ongoing moment of sociology itself (in the sense of a Hegelian “moment,” which is fully visible only in its first conflict-ridden appearance, but subsequently constitutes an essential part of the phenomenon's makeup). This manifesto is sociology's first clear attempt to understand representation as the fundamental element of social life. As such, sociological images and language are more than new “social facts,” they are also “collective representations” themselves, that reveal how the collective both imagines itself and interprets its own images. In this last formulation, sociology is deeply intertwined with the phenomena it seeks to explain, and becomes increasingly so as it proceeds historically. The implications of understanding sociology as a collective representation are manifold. But among the most important is that sociology develops by way of a dialectical relation to its object. Not surprisingly, a century after the appearance of Durkheim's manifesto, popular mass culture is permeated with reified sociological language, The most general of such utterances include: “society says,” “society wants,” and “society makes us.” The third of these contemporary common-sense observations picks up especially well on a central Durkheimian theme that we are both constituted (“made” human) by social forces, and necessarily constrained by them (“made” to act in particular ways). while cultural and mass-media studies have become a central interest of contemporary social theory. One could even speculate what Durkheim might say about late twentieth-century North American or European culture, and the place of sociological images therein. Would he, like one might imagine Freud, despair at the popular tropes and metaphors that he helped produce? Would he see only a monster of his own creation? Unlike Freud, who might be able to condemn popular psychoanalytic language as itself an indication of an immature culture looking for therapeutic fathers, Durkheim formulated the inevitability of the reification and deification of sociological language. For example, he explains that his own time was dominated by the language of the French Revolution: ...society also consecrates things, especially ideas. If a belief is unanimously shared by a people, then ... it is forbidden to touch it, that is to say, to deny it or to contest it. Now the prohibition of criticism is an interdiction like the others and proves the presence of something sacred. Even today, howsoever great may be the liberty which we accord to others, a man who should totally deny progress or ridicule the human ideal to which modern societies are attached, would produce the effect of a sacrilege. Durkheim, , 176. He gives “Fatherland,” “Liberty,” and “Reason” as examples of the sacred language inherited from the Revolution. And although he understands that these ideas are historically contingent, he nevertheless defends their value, especially the value of “Reason.” Evidently, Durkheim is not troubled by the knowledge that thoughts are shaped by the sacred ideas of their time. Noting the popularity of his own texts in the undergraduate classroom, Durkheim might ask how they function now. He might ask how The Rules of Sociological Method is an academic collective representation. He might also ask more generally how the word “society” has come to be used as a moral reality, or a social fact. How do speakers gain a moral stronghold on conversation by invoking “society” as the overarching totem (signifying everything from tradition and order to constraint and oppression)? Durkheim would probably conclude that in its current usage “society” means many things, and perhaps is even reducible to a dada utterance. Society is the punishing god and the forgiving god; it is used to authorize the judge and justify the deviant. It is, most generally, the way our culture signals its attempt to formulate itself by way of its sacred images. And yet, to avoid concluding that sociology, as it proceeds, ultimately becomes another instance of the object it studies, one must see Durkheim as providing the opportunity within his images and tropes to make them more than religion or ideology. In other words, although social reality has traditionally been represented as the Judaeo-Christian god in western cultures, that does not mean that “Society” will in turn become the new god of the organically solidary collective. As Durkheim provided sociology with a basic manifesto orientation (in all three of my formulations of sociology as strategic, moral, and interpretive), he also provided the opportunity for sociology continually to change its object by studying it. While normally for scientists their influence on their object constitutes a disastrous error, because the data have been contaminated by the act of observation, Durkheim makes clear that sociology inevitably has this effect (indeed it has this moral obligation and responsibility). Sociology encourages a culture where the openness of human identities and practices is generally known, and where this openness does not lead to anomic despair. This was Durkheim's promise to his time - i.e., that looking at ourselves as agents of our collective condition provides an opportunity to produce sacred objects that are sacred by the very fact that they are patently produced collectively. One could, for example, make a case for “liberty, equality, fraternity” as self-consciously sacred objects which were understood by the revolutionaries as products of mass action, while still being elevated to the status of the sacred. But given the self-destructive nature of the revolution through its leaders' attempts to deify all of its aspects, their irony toward this sacredness seems lacking. A contemporary example is found perhaps in “identity politics” which in its strongest form takes democracy as the ironic and rhetorical opportunity for new gender, sexual, and racial identity constructions. See Judith P. Butler, (New York: Routledge, 1990). While all collectives produce representations of themselves, what is peculiar to the sociological culture is that it is supposed to be able to identify these as such - it is supposed to see its own totem building. This requires a certain ironic orientation grounded in an insight that the collective could be drastically otherwise, without provoking a crisis of meaning. In this way, sociology is a system of beliefs without being an ideology or religion. And, of course, within a sociological culture change does occur. Once these sociological tropes are established, they undergo interpretation and reinterpretation as they are disseminated, circulated, and used in popular discourse. As the dialogue between academic language and popular language continues through time, sociologists are required to imagine sociological interventions that keep these images dynamic rather than ideological. Hence, as sociology contributes to the sacred language used by opinion (or doxa), it is neither reducible to opinion, nor fully distinguishable from it. Sociology seeks to influence the way opinion recollects its basis (i.e., social life), and in so doing must change its own language to continue to induce para-doxa. It is possible therefore that the tropes and images introduced by Durkheim have served many rhetorical purposes and need to be reinterpreted by each new generation of sociologists as they consider the particular sociological “rules of method” of their own time. But what is inexhaustible about the Durkheimian legacy is his insight that sociology must look for its effects at a general discursive level, remaining cognizant that it is a part of modernity's particular collective representations. Thus formulated, the grounds of sociological thought are necessarily present even in the most specialized of contemporary research, as each topic covertly speaks about collective representational desire. Sociology also meets its own limits (even the possibility of its own death) at the very point where it becomes self-conscious as a cultural practice - i.e., its various inevitable “crises” as to its relevance point to its entanglement in the representational anxieties characteristic of modernity in general. It seems to me crucial that sociological practitioners acknowledge and orient to this condition so that sociology remains vital to itself and to the collective life it studies. Or in stronger, more polemical words: sociology is a significant cultural force to the extent that it understands itself already to be one.

Opening remarks: Alvin Gouldner's Theory and Society

Abstract: I take this opportunity to say something about the origins of Theory and Society and to relate that beginning to the gathering represented in this volume on the occasion of the twenty-first birthday of Theory and Society. These remarks, then, will be a remembering, and an invitation to join the Theory and Society collegium in a Gouldnerian celebration. Theory and Society, founded by Alvin Gouldner in 1974, was from the start two things: an intellectual project and a political project. The intellectual project was to find and publish the most creative social thought and analysis available, whether produced in the academy or out of it. The political project was to support a group of individuals - intellectuals - in their quest for a more just and humane world. Over the course of many years, Gouldner sought to understand the social and historical conditions that would support emancipatory intellectual work, and he came to the conclusion that what was needed as a start was a collegium. Theory and Society was to be that collegium, to become a liberated zone for new theoretical resources, a safehouse for a community of scholars. It was for social theory, personified in a community of critical theorists, to become the agent in developing a rational discourse about social worlds, capable, where previous grand visions had failed, of treading the delicate path between recovery and holism. Thus would societies be reclaimed for humans. Gouldner came to his notion of a collectivity of intellectuals, and the Theory and Society collegium, through years of thinking about how social theory was produced and how it was institutionalized. The social organization that the community became reflected Gouldner's ideas of creativity and his sociology of social theory.

Politics, religion, and the analysis of culture

Abstract: Recent books demonstrate a renewed scholarly interest in the interactions between religion and politics. Both the "end-of-ideology" proposal and the too-easy assumption that secularization has permeated all aspects of contemporary life have fallen apart as religious organizations mobilize their constituents for political action, social movements draw resources from religious communities and traditions, and cultural discourses drawn from religious sources are used to define public problems and solutions. In this essay, I focus on three books that deal with religion and politics less in the conventional terms of institutional actions and electoral outcomes, and more as a dynamic of cultural struggle and ideological adaptation. Barry Alan Shain's The Myth of American Individualism, Robert Booth Fowler's The Greening of Protestant Thought, and Michael Barkun's Religion and the Racist Right1 go beyond religious organizations and individual-level attitudinal research, to relate religious and political culture in both historical and current settings. Barkun discusses the religious resources used by a segment of the extremist right as it constructs itself as racially pure and authentically "American." Fowler examines the development of religious environmentalism in American Protestantism and its relations to the secular environmental movement. Shain studies public religion in the U.S. Revolutionary and Founding eras in search of the connections between religious ideas and the cultural individualism often called our primary political tradition.

The declining significance of class: Does gender complicate the story? - Comments

Abstract: Sociologists are often slow to realize what laypersons have long known. In this regard, the most recent resurrection of the "death of class" thesis by Pakulski and Waters (in this issue) is illustrative, since they seemingly fail to appreciate that women complicate matters.1 Like other class theorists, Pakulski and Waters ignore one of the most fundamental forces for class destructuration, namely, the massive entry of women into the labor force. In this comment, we will ask the question that Pakulski and Waters have thus left unasked: Does the entry of women into the labor force render models of class less tenable?2 We shall proceed by first asking whether the so-called conventional model of class can be salvaged and then asking whether various revised formulations might be preferred.

Durkheim and the idea of soul

Abstract: I have looked forward to the opportunity presented by a conference such as the Theory and Society one to debrief in a sense, to test out some observations I made while retranslating Emile Drukheim's 1912 masterpiece, Les Formes elementaires de la vie religieuse. But since it is in February, which is African American History Month, and since this is for a conference session on race, ethnicity, gender, and class, it is well to start with a forewarning or a reassurance (as the case may be) about the word soul in my title "Durkheim and the idea of soul." I do not intend to affiliate Durkheim, or Fields, with those collective representations, popular two decades ago, that joined things like jazz with a way of talking, and collard greens with a way of walking, in an alleged African racial essence baptized then as the idea of soul. What I have in mind is Durkheim's own title for Chapter Eight of Book Two of Formes: La Notion d'ime, he wrote, "the idea of soul." He did not write La Notion de l'ame, "the idea of the soul," as Joseph Ward Swain's 1915 translation mistakenly tells us, and the difference is consequential. When Durkheim meant the soul, something thought of as an inward and individual possession, he said so. When he said "soul," without the "the," he meant a generic substance or essence thought of as partly independent of individuals.

For theory and its others: Comment on Jay

Abstract: I find Jay's discussion to be extremely useful. By identifying Theory's "others" both longstanding and new versions of Theory's alterities he elaborates clearly the various anti-theoreticist tendencies with which a Theory and Society community, or collegium, contends. With that elaboration, Jay can reconstruct the general ambition of a Reflexive Sociology or Critical Theory, moving it away from the grandiosity of Human Liberation toward a clarification of why Human Liberation is so hard to realize, and what more modest goals can take its place. This interest in dialogue is not so common, however.