Showing papers on "Ideology published in 1976"

Culture and practical reason

Abstract: "The main thrust of this book is to deliver a major critique of materialist and rationalist explanations of social and cultural forms, but the in the process Sahlins has given us a much stronger statement of the centrality of symbols in human affairs than have many of our 'practicing' symbolic anthropologists. He demonstrates that symbols enter all phases of social life: those which we tend to regard as strictly pragmatic, or based on concerns with material need or advantage, as well as those which we tend to view as purely symbolic, such as ideology, ritual, myth, moral codes, and the like. . . ." Robert McKinley, "Reviews in Anthropology""

Norms and ideology in science

Abstract: For many years, the scientific research community within the modern Western academic setting was depicted by sociologists as being predominantly openminded, impartial and objective. These features, it was claimed, although they were not unique to the scientific community, were present there to a degree unrealised in other fields of intellectual endeavour. This supposed fact could not be explained in terms of the special characteristics of scientists as individuals, because it was recognised that the motives, interests and qualities of individual scientists were quite diverse and by no means always in accord with the special attributes of their professional community. It seemed preferable, therefore, to regard these attributes as characteristics of the community as such, that is, as norms which defined the social expectations to which scientists were generally obliged to conform in the course of their professional activities 1. As a result of this line of reasoning, a long list of putative norms or normative principles has been developed, among which the most important are

Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III

Abstract: Part I. Introduction: 1. Hanoverian politics and the 1760s 2. Historiography and method Part II. The Reconfiguration of Politics: 3. Whig and tort 4. Opposition and the proprietary parties 5. From Old Corps to Rockinghamite whigs: the emergence of a party 6. Pitt and patriotism: a case study in political argument 7. Ministerial responsibility and the powers of the Crown Part III. An Alternative Structure of Politics: 8. The press in the 1760s Part IV. Focused Radicalism: 9. Personality, propaganda and ritual: Wilkes and the Wilkites 10. American ideology and British radicalism the case for parliamentary reform Part V. Two Political Nations: 11. The politicians, the press and the public 12. The present discontents party ideology and public unrest.

The Republican Mother: Women and the Enlightenment-An American Perspective

Abstract: THE GREAT QUESTIONS OF POLITICAL LIBERTY AND CIVIC FREEDOM, OF THE relationship between law and liberty, the subjects of so many ideological struggles in the eighteenth century, are questions which have no gender. Philosophes habitually indulged in vast generalizations about humanity: Montesquieu contemplated the nature of society, Rousseau formulated a scheme for the revitalized education of children, Lord Kames wrote four volumes on the history of mankind. The broad sweep of their generalizations has permitted the conclusion that they indeed meant to include all people in their observations; if they habitually used the generic "he" two centuries before our own generation began to be discomfited by it, then it is a matter of syntax and usage, and without historical significance. Yet Rousseau permitted himself to wonder whether women were capable of serious reasoning. If the Enlightenment represented, as Peter Gay has remarked, "man's claim to be recognized as an adult, responsible being" who would "take the risk of discovery, exercise the right of unfettered criticism, accept the loneliness of autonomy," it may be worth asking whether it was assumed that women were also to recognize themselves as responsible beings. Is it possible, by definition, for women to be enlightened? The answers to that question have important implications for historians of political thought and for those who seek to write women's intellectual history. We should be skeptical of the generous assumption that the Enlightenment man was generic. Philosophe is a male noun: it describes Kant, Adam Smith, Diderot, Lessing, Franklin, Locke, Rousseau. With the conspicuous exceptions of Catharine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft, women are absent even from the second and third ranks. They hover on the fringes, creating a milieu for discussions in their salons, offering their personal and moral support to male friends and lovers, but making only minor intellectual

Clashing Beliefs Within the Executive Branch: The Nixon Administration Bureaucracy*

Abstract: This article examines two key political beliefs of high level American federal executives: their views on the role of government in providing social services and their views regarding inequities in political representation. Data were collected in 1970 through open-ended interviews with a sample of 126 political appointees and supergrade career civil servants in the domestic agencies. Both of the beliefs analyzed were pertinent to the efforts of the Nixon administration to reorder national priorities and policies. The evidence in the paper establishes differences in the outlooks of administrators depending on agency, job status, and party affiliation. Agency and party affiliation are particularly important variables, and their joint effects on the beliefs examined are substantial. Democratic administrators in the social service agenoies were the most liberal and Republicans in the non-social service agencies the most conservative. Our data document a career bureaucracy with very little Republican representation and a social service bureaucracy dominated by administrators ideologically hostile to many of the directions pursued by the Nixon administration in the realm of social policy. The article closes with a discussion of the implications of our findings for future conflicts between the elected executive and the bureaucracy.

Moroccan Islam: Tradition and Society in a Pilgrimage Center

Abstract: Note on Transliteration Preface Introduction 1. Morocco, Islam, and the Maraboutic Crisis 2. Marabouts and Local Histories: The Sherqawa 3. Boujad: The Town and Its Region 4. Social Structure 5. Impermanence and Inequality: The Common-Sense Understanding of the Social Order 6. The Ideology of Maraboutism 7. Sherqawi Identity 8. From Center to Periphery: The Fragmentation of Maraboutism Appendix. The Wheel of Fortune: The Last Maraboutic Intrigues Notes Glossary Bibliography Index

Zulu Zion and some Swazi Zionists

Abstract: Bengt Sundkler's-Bantu Prophets in South Africa (1948, second ed. 1961) has become widely known as a pioneering work on the life and ideology of Independent African Churches. After him, a large num ...

Environmental Politics: the Structuring of Partisan and Ideological Cleavages in Mass Environmental Attitudes*

Abstract: This paper explores the impacts of political party identification and political ideology on two dimensions of mass environmental beliefs—awareness of environmental problems and support for environm...

Ideology and Theory: The Tension Between Political and Economic Liberalism in Seventeenth-Century England

Abstract: DURING THE LAST TWO DECADES of the seventeenth century-ninety years before the Wealth of Nations appeared-a number of British writers challenged the central premises of the balance-of-trade theory for economic growth. The currency crisis and the craze over Indian cottons had sharpened a sense of conflicting interests among Englishmen, and these divisive issues called forth a body of writing which attacked the principles underlying the mercantile system. Examining in a new way the operation of the market, Dudley North, Nicholas Barbon, Dalby Thomas, Henry Martyn, Francis Gardner, James Hodges, Henry Layton, John Houghton, and several anonymous pamphleteers produced explanations of economic relations which were far more sophisticated than the prevailing theories, anticipating at many points the premises of Adam Smith's monumental synthesis. Yet despite this new plateau in economic reasoning, the conceptually flawed balance-of-trade theory, with its built-in corollary that economic regulation was essential to national security, became even more firmly fixed in the public mind in the eighteenth century. The ideological implications of the rejection of these writings have not been explored. Scholars have assumed the science of economics had to wait for the path-breaking geniuses1 or that the balance-of-trade critics were too exceptional to treat as a significant group.2 Charles Wilson recently described Dudley North as a swallow who did not produce a summer.3 The analogy is worth pursuing. Taking a closer look at the birds in hand, it is possible to conclude that it was not the lack of swallows that counted, but the distaste for summers, that, in fact, economic thought ran ahead of social developments, and the analytical insights of the

The Structure of Mortgage Finance: Building Societies and the British Social Formation

Abstract: Analysis of urban processes must start by conceptualizing the structure of the society in which these processes are situated. This can usefully be achieved by using the concept of social formation. Attention then focuses on the nature of the relationship between institutions, with pertinent effects on the processes under consideration, and the structure of the social formation. The influence of the institutions within the urban system is then interpreted in terms of this higher-level relationship of institutions to theoretical structure. Here this approach is illustrated by examining the relationship of building societies to the structure of the contemporary British social formation. Study of Newcastle upon Tyne is used to show how this relationship is manifested in the allocation of mortgage finance to property and borrowers of varying characteristics, and in the spatial pattern produced. INVESTMENT in urban infrastructure has been characterized as a flow of capital mediated through a set of governmental and financial institutions.1 Here it is argued that any analysis of urban processes will remain superficial unless we examine the role of such institutions in terms of the deep structure of society. A starting point can be to adopt the concept of 'social formation.'2 This is a theoretical construct conceptualizing particular real societies in terms of economic, political and ideological levels articulated in a specific way to form a complex whole. The structure of a particular social formation implies a particular distribution of class power and of the social product of the formation, and the social formation will tend to maintain this structure and continuously to reproduce itself. This necessitates reproducing the means of production, consumed goods, and the social relations of production (the manner in which society is structured around the production process). Fixed capital formation embodied in urban infrastructure is a major process of urbanization, and is vital to the reproduction of the social formation. One can now view the production of urban infrastructure in terms of a set of interacting economic, political and ideological levels which are made manifest by a specific set of institutional intermediaries which produce a particular pattern of investment in infrastructure. In the case of housing, which is examined in this article, a structured output of housing resources is produced over which households of varying characteristics have varying degrees of command. Problems of housing production and allocation must therefore be seen as surface manifestations of the deep structure of the social formation. Thus in attempting to understand the housing system we must first examine the relationships between institutions which pertinently affect housing and the structure of the social formation and second see how the institutions operate, in the context of the formation, to pattern the production and allocation of housing resources. Studies of the housing system which focus upon the form and function of institutions have been growing in number recently,3 and constitute a major step forward from the welter of purely descriptive models of the outputs of a housing system, and from models which

The classless profession : American schoolmen in the nineteenth century

Abstract: "Professor Paul H. Mattingly's The Classless Profession: American Schoolmen of the Nineteenth Century is unquestionably a major contribution to the history of American education. It rests on a thorough command of the scholarship of the field and on a shrewd and original analysis of a great body of primary materials, many of which have not previously been carefully exploited." -- Merle Curti, University of Wisconsin, Pulitzer Prize Winner "Mattingly's study should be read by everyone interested in the development of the public schools and of the teaching profession, and especially by those whose criticism of today's schools derives from a belief that things were much better in the 1870s than the 1970s." -- Albert Shanker, United Federation of Teachers "Mattingly's book is superlative in its exploration of the distinctive cultural qualities of the teaching profession." -- Joseph Kett, Review of American History "What remains solid and permanently useful...is his intellectual history of early leaders - the best such study to date." -- David Tyack, Journal of American History Mattingly is at his best describing the variegated experiences of early teachers as they sought to transform teaching from a haphazard, seasonal occupation to a developing profession. He explores the dynamics of career choice for teachers with subtlety and insight." -- Julia C. Wrigley, American Education Research Journal The Classless Profession traces the history of the special pride teachers took in the depoliticized image of their work. This image of a classless profession, one which preferred no class ideology not advanced any social group over another, necessitated costs which teachers then and since have often ignored. In an effort to describe the process of constructing this profession - its images, behavioral routines and institutional structures - this study also assesses the historical forces which actually have favored certain social groups and certain educational ideologies over others. This eye-opening work is unique in that it features interdisciplinary methodology which draws on sociological, demographical, and historical methodologies and delineates career-line analyses of several generations of schoolmen. It should prove vital reading to all those involved in the profession as well as the process of education - i.e. teachers, sociologists, social and educational historians, school planners and educational policy-makers, unionists and administrators alike.

The ‘White Working class’ in South Africa

Abstract: In general, the analysis of classes in the literature on South Africa beginsfrom the political and ideological levels and not from the concept of the mode of production. The effect of this is to obscure the nature of the class structure and changes in it and leads to a neglect of shifts in class alliances in the class struggle. In this paper, concepts of the ‘white working class’ commonly found in the literature are critically analysed and an alternative conceptualization which begins from the mode of production is outlined. The paper ends with a brief analysis of changes in the relationship between the white working class and the state.

Althusser and the theory of ideology

Abstract: Althusser’s writings on ideolgy1 have transformed a virtually moribund region of Marxist theory. Althusser has challenged certain central aspects of the classic Marxist theories of ideology and he has attempted to introduce a new set of problems. Althusser’s challenge consists in essence in rejecting the sociologistic and reductionist methods of analysis of ideology dominant in Marxism. His attempt to change the terms of the problem of ‘ideology’ consists in the rejection of the conception of ideologies as reflections of social reality in consciousness and the substitution of a conception of ideology as a structure of social relations no less ‘real’ than the economic and the political and articulated with them.

Dominant Male Ideology and Female Options: Three East African Case Studies

Abstract: The aim of the essay is to highlight gaps in existing knowledge of African women and bring to light new queries. The argument being presented is that African women assert their individuality by exploring the options available within their respective societies. While it is unsafe to generalize about Africa the dominance of men in the public especially the political and ritual spheres is well illustrated by ethnographies on Africa. Women are on the whole invisible or shadowy figures except in a handful of ethnographies that take a womans perspective (for example Leith-Ross 1939; Kaberry 1952; and Paulme (ed.) 1963). The ideology of male dominance is taken for granted as representative of the true state of affairs between men and women in Africa. Whereas every researcher probably knows that ideologies are not realities somehow that knowledge becomes insignificant when dealing with African societies. (excerpt)

Poverty and Poor Relief in Pre-Revolutionary Philadelphia

Abstract: R ECENT studies have given clear indications that poverty had become a major problem in eighteenth-century America, especially in the urban centers.' But lost in generalized notions of increasing social stratification, growing propertylessness, and swollen poor relief rolls is a particular understanding of when and why poverty became the lot of a large number of city dwellers, who and how numerous the poor were, and how ideology and social conditions interacted in the responses of public officials and city leaders to this blotch on the promise of American life. Because extensive records of private and public agencies that dealt with poor relief have survived for eighteenth-century Philadelphia, it is possible to provide some tentative answers to these questions for at least one colonial city and, in the process, to uncover new data about changing social conditions in that city before the Revolution. Philadelphia might seem an unlikely place to study poverty in colonial America because the city has been viewed so often, both by eighteenthcentury commentators and by modern historians, as representative of the nearly unlimited possibilities for social ascent. The legend of Benjamin Franklin on his "way to wealth" has clouded historical vision for a long time. Moreover, it is widely believed that Quaker humanitarianism, upper-class benevolence, and social progress were the distinguishing characteristics of Philadelphia life. This view has been most compellingly presented by Carl and Jessica Bridenbaugh, whose study of the "social uses of the favors of providence" in Philadelphia portrays an elite who believed intensely in the Enlightenment view of the perfectibility of mankind. Regarding the "indignities of poverty, illness, social injustice and misfortune" as affronts to

The Problem of Anthropology in Historical Perspective: An Inquiry into the Growth of the Social Sciences

Abstract: In times of crisis there is an inevitable return to fundamentals. Questions such as the relation of knowledge to the world of experience are revived, often in a disharmonious way. That such a state of affairs obtains in anthropology can only be judged by the frequence which divergent views concerning the status of their discipline have occurred among modern anthropologists. Starting with isolated individual and intuitive insights and misgivings in the mid-sixties, the process gathered momentum and had reached near-rebellious proportions by the end of the sixties. Whereas earlier writers such as Hooker, Maquet, and Levi-Strauss I represented a critical liberal reevaluation within traditional anthropology, the later and younger writers such as Gough (generational difference notwithstanding), Goddard, Magubane, Moore, Faris, Stauder, Banaji and Talal Asad represent a leftist denunciation of colonial (not to say positivist) anthropology.2 While historical instances have largely coincided, the theoretical nuances of the same movement have varied from country to country. In America the rebellion has tended to be more ideological than theoretical.3 In Britain, despite a sharper generational gap than in America, the ideological aspect has been played down in favour of what is called "academic discussion." In practice this has led

On Joining Interest Groups: An Empirical Consideration of the Work of Mancur Olson Jr.

Abstract: The academic literature on interest groups has tended to concentrate on the assessment of the relative influence of these groups in different political systems, and on the implications of the activities of interest groups for democratic ideology. In recent years, however, the work of Mancur Olson has stimulated an increasing interest in the formation of interest groups, and in the reasons why individuals (or corporate bodies) join them. The aim of this article is to examine Olson's analysis in the light of a study of one major British economic interest group, the Confederation of British Industry. In the course of this examination I hope to illustrate some of the weaknesses of Olson's analysis and to suggest how it might be refined and developed.

Coffee and Class: The Structure of Development in Liberal Guatemala

Abstract: TURING the nineteenth century the raw material and market demands of the industrial revolution generated fundamental structural changes within the newly independent Latin American republics. Conflict between Enlightenment ideals and Hispano-traditionalism gave way gradually to a general agreement among segments of the elite-producers of new bulk export crops, their adjunct commercial sectors, and reformist caudillos-on the desirability of national development. The Liberal governments established after mid-century were largely a product of this emerging consensus.1 But what is perceived as development is ideologically determined by the apparent interests of a group, class, or individual. The dominant ideology of these new Liberals, usually labeled vaguely as Positivism, consisted of an amalgam variously compounded in the light of local circumstances of popularized Comtean dogmas, racist interpretations of Social Darwinism and postulates of Free Trade. National progress, the Liberals proposed, demanded not simply political constitutionalism but the transformation of material life to admit as rapidly as possible such visible characteristics of North Atlantic civilization as railroads, export industries and a "moderm" working class. By using a revamped state apparatus to implement measures and neutralize opposition, a "semi-parliamentaiy

The Presidency of Thomas Jefferson

Abstract: Thomas Jefferson occupies a special niche in the hagiology of American Founding Fathers. His name is invoked for a staggering range of causes; statists and libertarians, nationalists and States' righters, conservatives and radicals all claim his blessing. In this book, Forrest McDonald examines Jefferson's performance as the nation's leader, evaluating his ability as a policy-maker, administrator, and diplomat. He delineates, carefully and sympathetically, the Jeffersonian ideology and the agrarian ideal that underlay it; he traces the steps by which the ideology was transformed into a program of action; and he concludes that the interplay between the ideology and the action accounted both for the unparalleled success of Jefferson's first term in office, and for the unmitigated failure of the second term. Jefferson as president was a man whose ideological commitments prevented him from reversing calamitous policy stances, a man who could be ruthless in suppressing civil rights when it was politically expedient, a man who was rarely, in the conventional sense of the word, a Jeffersonian. McDonald's portrait reveals him to be at once greater, simpler, and more complexly human than the mere "apostle of liberty" or "spokesman for democracy" that his adulators have relegated him to being.

The politics of South India, 1920-1937

Abstract: The interwar years witnessed great changes in the political life of India, with the establishment of new governmental institutions, the emergence of political movements based on class, caste and ideology, and the rapid expansion of the nationalist campaign. This book looks at the complex of political changes during this crucial and formative period in the Madras Presidency, the largest but often the most neglected province of British India. Among the many strands of political life and behaviour which Dr Baker studies are the non-Brahman movement, peasant agitations, caste movements and the rise of the Indian National Congress to a position of undisputed primacy in the region. Making use of hitherto unresearched materials Dr Baker attempts the first overall study of the political process and the dynamics of political change in the province. The book may also be seen as a case-study of political change in a late-colonial society.