International Comparative
Social Studies
Editor-in-Chief
Mehdi P. Amineh
Amsterdam School for Social Sciences Research (ASSR)
University of Amsterdam and International Institute for
Asian Studies (IIAS)University of Leiden
Editorial Board
Sjoerd Beugelsdijk, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Simon Bromley, Open University, UK
Harald Fuhr, University of Potsdam, Germany
Gerd Junne, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Ngo Tak-Wing, University of Leiden, The Netherlands
Mario Rutten, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Advisory Board
W.A. Arts, University College Utrecht, The Netherlands
Chan Kwok-bun, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong
S.N. Eisenstadt, Jerusalem, Israel
L. Hantrais, Loughborough University, UK
G.C.M. Lieten, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
L. Visano, York University, Canada
VOLUME 24
Bjrn Wittrock.
Photo by Kristian Aunver.
The Benefit of Broad Horizons
Edited by
Hans Joas
Barbro Klein
LEIDEN BOSTON
2010
On the cover: Night Clouds (Nattmoln). Oil painting by Prince Eugen, 1901. Photo by Tord
Lund. With kind permission from the Thielska Gallery, Stockholm.
The benefit of broad horizons : intellectual and institutional preconditions for a global social
science : festschrift for Bjorn Wittrock on the occasion of his 65th birthday / edited by Hans
Joas, Barbro Klein.
p. cm. -- (International comparative social studies, ISSN 1568-4474 ; v. 24)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-90-04-19284-3 (hardback : alk. paper)
1. Social sciences--Philosophy. 2. Civilization. 3. Culture. 4. State, The. I. Wittrock, Bjrn. II.
Joas, Hans, 1948- III. Klein, Barbro Sklute.
H61.15.B456 2010
300.1--dc22 2010036912
ISSN: 1568-4474
ISBN: 978-90-04-19284-3
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
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Typeset by chs:p [Leiden, Netherlands]
Introduction ..................................................................................................... ix
Hans Joas and Barbro Klein
What are the Benefits of Broad Horizons? . ............................................... xiii
Peter Grdenfors
Part One
THE STATE AND THE POLITICAL
The Reconstitution of the Realm of the Political and the
Problematique of Modern Regimes ........................................................... 3
S.N. Eisenstadt
The Strange Hybrid of the Early American State ....................................... 15
Max M. Edling
Policy Metrics under Scrutiny: The Legacy of New
Public Management .................................................................................. 33
Daniel Tarschys
Part Two
HISTORY AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES
History and the Social Sciences Today ........................................................ 53
Jrgen Kocka
The Present Position and Prospects of Social and Political Theory . ....... 69
Dietrich Rueschemeyer
The Contingency of Secularization: Reflections on the
Problem of Secularization in the Work of Reinhart Koselleck ........... 87
Hans Joas
The Missing Sentence: The Visual Arts and the Social Sciences in
Mid-Nineteenth-Century Paris ............................................................. 105
Wolf Lepenies
vi contents
Part Three
CIVILIZATIONAL STUDIES AND THE
COMPARISON OF CIVILIZATIONS
Interpreting History and Understanding Civilizations ........................... 167
Johann P. Arnason
Comparison without Hegemony . .............................................................. 185
Sheldon Pollock
Developmental Patterns and Processes in Islamicate Civilization
and the Impact of Modernization ......................................................... 205
Said A. Arjomand
Towards a World Sociology of Modernity ................................................ 227
Peter Wagner
Part Four
CULTURAL AND SOCIAL DYNAMICS
The First Draft of History: Notes on Events and
Cultural Turbulence ................................................................................ 243
Ulf Hannerz
Cultural Loss and Cultural Rescue: Lilli Zickerman, Ottilia Adelborg,
and the Promises of the Swedish Homecraft Movement ................... 261
Barbro Klein
The Buddhist Connection between China and Ancient Cambodia:
ramana Mandras Visit to Jiankang ..................................................... 281
Wang Bangwei
Autochthonous Chinese Conceptual History in a Jocular
Narrative Key: The Emotional Engagement Qng ............................... 293
Christoph Harbsmeier
On the Contagiousness of Non-Contagious Behavior:
The Case of Tax Avoidance and Tax Evasion . ..................................... 315
Peter Hedstrm and Rebeca Ibarra
contents vii
Part Five
UNIVERSITIES AND THE DILEMMAS OF
HIGHER EDUCATION
Views from the Acropolis and the Agora: Clark Kerrs
Industrial Society....................................................................................... 339
Sheldon Rothblatt
The Growing Confusion Between Private and Public in
American Higher Education . ................................................................ 355
Neil J. Smelser
The Unintended Consequences of Quantitative Measures in the
Management of Science . ........................................................................ 371
Peter Weingart
The Compression of Research Time and the
Temporalization of the Future ............................................................... 387
Helga Nowotny
CODA
Better to Be Than Not to Be? ...................................................................... 399
Gustaf Arrhenius and Wlodek Rabinowicz
More than perhaps anybody else in the world, the Swedish political sci-
entist and sociologist Bjrn Wittrock has contributed, both on intellec-
tual and institutional levels, to making a truly global social science pos-
sible. As Principal of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS)
in Uppsala, as President of the International Institute of Sociology (IIS),
and in numerous other capacities he has over the years brought together
scholars from the humanities and the social sciences to develop a social
science that is not restricted to the present but is deeply historical and at
the same time open to the comparative study of civilizations and to the
possibility of multiple modernities.
nent Swedish political scientist and former member of the Swedish Parlia-
ment, Daniel Tarschys.
Part Two of this book is called History and the Social Sciences. This
relationship is central to Bjrn Wittrock, who, both in his scholarship and
in his work as educator, has consistently sought to strengthen, on a world-
wide scale, the historical orientation of the social sciences. Two contribu-
tors, Jrgen Kocka and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, discuss broad and funda-
mental problems in this relationship while other authors select specific
areas and exemplary cases. Hans Joas concentrates on religious history
and secularization, Wolf Lepenies on art history, Lars Magnusson on eco-
nomic history, and Rolf Torstendahl on the history of professionalism.
In Part Three, Civilizational Studies and the Comparison of Civiliza-
tions, focus is placed on areas of scholarship to which Bjrn Wittrock has
devoted intense energies during the last few years. These are particularly
rewarding but also extremely demanding areas of a truly global science in
which a profound understanding of long-term cultural traditions is seen
as the necessary prerequisite for comparative studies. We here present
contributions on fundamental questions by four renowned scholars: Said
Arjomand, Johann P. Arnason, Sheldon Pollock, and Peter Wagner.
Culture and its varied role within the social sciences as well as the rela-
tionship between cultural, historical, and social dynamics are in focus in
Part Four of this anthology. Here, two essays link up with Bjrn Wittrocks
commitment to applying broad perspectives to fields of study that, in his
own words, are crucial to an understanding of the world in its cultural,
historical, and linguistic varieties. In one of these essays the sanskritist
Wang Bangwei delineates Buddhist connections between China and An-
cient Cambodia, while the historian of Chinese language and thought,
Christoph Harbsmeier, brings us close to the conceptual interests of a
Chinese seventeenth century scholar. In two preceding essays cultural dy-
namics is investigated by the social anthropologist Ulf Hannerz and the
folklorist Barbro Klein, who in very different ways examine long range
and short term cultural events and developments. Finally, in this section
the sociologists Peter Hedstrm and Rebeca Ibarra present a methodo-
logically exciting study of macro-level dynamics of social behavior.
In the fifth and final part, Universities and the Dilemmas of Higher
Education, this anthology highlights a field to which Bjrn Wittrock has
made crucial contributions, namely the social-scientific analysis of higher
education, again in broad historical and global perspectives. In this sec-
tion we find articles by the eminent University of California scholars,
Sheldon Rothblatt and Neil Smelser, who focus on higher education in the
introduction xi
Much more than we have hinted at so far could be said about Bjrn Witt-
rocks scholarly interests and career achievements. Let us briefly mention
a few more aspects. As holder of the prestigious Lars Hierta Professor-
ship of Government at Stockholm University, he taught and encouraged
young political scientists with broad historical and comparative interests.
At the same time he increasingly involved himself in scholarly issues and
developments in Europe and the United States. Not least important was
his interest in the Institutes for Advanced Study that by this time could be
found in Princeton, Stanford, Wassenaar, Berlin, and a few other places.
In 1985, he became a co-founder, with the historian Rolf Torstendahl and
the late economic historian Bo Gustafsson, of the Swedish Collegium for
Advanced Study in the Social Sciences.
Since 1985, Bjrn Wittrock has tirelessly contributed to the scholarly
quality and renown that SCAS now enjoys all over the world, not least in
East Asia. All along, he has held prestigious visiting positions at differ-
ent universities and institutes. In 1999, he received the Torgny Segerstedt
Medal and in 2003 he was awarded an honorary doctorate at the Uni-
versity of Tartu in Estonia. He has also been appointed to many editorial
boards, research councils, academic advisory boards and panels in many
countries, most recently at the European Research Council. Particularly
important is Bjrn Wittrocks work as member of the Advisory Board of
the Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg) in Berlin and in
similar capacities at other German institutions. Indeed, Bjrn Wittrock
has deep knowledge of German thought and has long played a central
role in helping to increase the awareness in Sweden of scholarly advances
in Germany. In 2008, Bjrn Wittrock could add to his other honors the
Federal Cross of Merit (Bundesverdienstkreuz, 1. Kl.), which he was
awarded by the President of the Federal Republic of Germany.
xii hans joas & barbro klein
Peter Grdenfors
One explanation for what happened when the ancestors of humans (hom-
inins) separated from those of chimpanzees is that the hominins adapted
to a life in open landscapes, while the early chimpanzees remained in for-
ests or denser vegetation. The adaptations to a savannah landscape pro-
vided new evolutionary pressures on our ancestors, who had to travel over
larger distances, and foraging demanded planning for longer periods of
time. We have become the far-ranging apes. In brief, the ecology forced
the hominins to broaden their spatial and temporal horizons.
But the selection pressures also affected the hominins inner worlds.
In the same way as they needed to see further across the savannah, they
needed to be able to see further within themselves. I shall argue that the
evolution of human rationality is closely connected to how we have suc-
ceeded in broadening our inner and outer horizons.
When we begin investigating our inner worlds, we find many kinds of
psychological distances, that is, distances in our inner worlds. One in-
formative way to study them is to consider how we talk about the ways
we perceive the world. We frequently use metaphors such as close and
far when we describe abstract phenomena. The most established uses
of such metaphors concern distances in time: tomorrow is close, while
next year is far away. We often think of life as a journey (Lakoff and
Johnson 1980). Spatial metaphors are so ubiquitous in the ways we speak
of temporal concepts that we do not even notice them. Sometimes we re-
verse the metaphors and use time to talk about physical distances: It is
five minutes to the liquor store, but half an hour to the nearest hospital.
xiv peter grdenfors
The subjects were instructed that the pictures were practice exercises in
preparation for the real test. One group of subjects was told that the test
would happen soon, another that it would take place in the distant fu-
ture. Surprisingly, the group that was informed the test would take place
in the distant future performed significantly better at solving the prac-
tice exercises. Liberman and Trope interpret the results as indicating that
the perceived distance in time makes it easier for the subjects to perceive
a greater spatial distance to the pictures and thereby interpret them more
successfully.
In a closely related way, the theory further aims to describe how these
different kinds of distance influence our decision making. At a distance,
you dont see the trees but only the forest. In the same way, details that
may influence a decision disappear when a broader perspective a wider
horizon brings out the larger picture.
A recent experiment shows another kind of spill-over between dimen-
sions (Bruny et al. 2010): When participants were asked to choose be-
tween two routes to a goal on a map one northern and one southern, both
of equal length they prefer the southern option. The explanation accord-
ing to Bruny et al. (2010) is that north is perceived as up and south as
down and moving upwards is associated with more strain than moving
downwards. Hence the participants tend to choose the path that is per-
ceived as the less strenuous. Note that the choice depends on the imag-
xvi peter grdenfors
The experience of here and now is necessarily filled with details, but if one
creates a mental image of something that is not present, that image will
necessarily be more abstract and will be experienced as taking place at a
greater psychological distance.
One finds conflict situations of a similar kind in many social contexts.
A familiar idea within game theory is the so-called prisoners dilemma,
an example of which might be choosing whether or not to pay ones taxes.
Participants in the prisoners dilemma game have two basic strategies, to
cooperate or to defect: in this case, to pay ones taxes or not. The collec-
tively best outcome would be if everybody cooperated (paid their taxes),
but from each individual participants perspective it would be better to
defect (not pay the taxes). However, if everybody defects, everybody will
be worse off than if everybody cooperates; while the sucker who tries to
cooperate when everybody else defects loses most of all. In experiments
that study prisoners dilemma situations it has been found that people be-
have much less self-centeredly than game theory suggests. An explanation
could be that seeing the alternatives at a distance makes it easier to take
a wider view on ones own interests. A consequence of broadening your
horizons is that you become more cooperatively minded.
So if you are an arbiter in some delicate negotiations, you would do
well to try to make the disputants see the negotiations in a broader per-
spective and thereby at a greater psychological distance. If you can make
them raise their eyes, step back from the current conflict, and adopt a
longer-term perspective or put the conflict into a wider social context, the
possibilities for cooperation will increase; it will be easier to achieve an
agreement. An experiment reported by Liberman and Trope shows that
if negotiations concern something far in the future, disputants are more
prepared to take more factors into account, while with a shorter-term per-
spective they focus narrowly on a small number of factors.
Liberman and Tropes construal level theory can be placed quite useful-
ly into an evolutionary context. For a long time it was difficult for biolo-
gists to explain unselfish behaviour within a Darwinian framework. In the
1970s, sociobiologists proposed that it is not primarily individuals that are
subject to natural selection, but their genes. The idea was that the genes
should be seen as selfish, not their bearers: hence the title of Dawkins
1976 book The Selfish Gene. In this case, the evolutionary explanation of
why you should be unselfish toward your relatives is that it will ultimately
benefit your own genes. Your genes, so to speak, take a wider perspective
even if you do not.
xviii peter grdenfors
The ideal of Bildung is that you should be prepared at all times to rise
above everyday routines, to listen to your opponents, and to expose your-
self to the views of other cultures. A good heuristic is that before you criti-
cize somebody elses position, you should know it so well so as to be able
to argue for it yourself. This can be uncomfortable, even nauseating, and
risks alienating you from all sides of the debate; but it disciplines you al-
ways to strive for broader perspectives and for breaking out of your cur-
rent frames of reference. Evidence suggests that you will be a wiser person
for it. As Nietzsche writes: Those thinkers in whom all stars move in cy-
clic orbits are not the most profound. Whoever looks at himself as into
vast space and carries galaxies within himself, also knows how irregular
galaxies are; they lead into the chaos and labyrinth of existence. (2001,
227)
We have been gifted with a psychology whereby broader horizons help
us to be more rational, more moral, less egocentric, and better educated.
We became Homo sapiens the wise human when our ancestors adap-
tations to the open savannah led to broader perspectives in their inner
worlds or perhaps we are still on our journey to becoming.
xx peter grdenfors
References
S.N. Eisenstadt
The major thesis of this paper is that the basic problematique of modern
political regimes, their great promise as well as their potential vulnerabil-
ity and breakdowns, is rooted in the continual crystallization within them
of demands for the reconstitution of the realm of the political a dimen-
sion of political processes that has not been systematically explored in the
relevant literature.
As in all societies, large parts of political processes and political struggles
in modern societies are focused on routine, pork barrel politics, and on
the pursuit of manifold concrete interests, be it demands for allocation of
resources, of conditions of work, for special treatment by the authorities,
and the like although in modern societies all these are usually prom-
ulgated in much more open and often ideological ways than in other
regimes. Second, in modern societies fully articulated demands tend to
develop, demands which are often rooted in sectarian heterodox orien-
tations and ideologies that work toward radical change of regimes and
their legitimation. These are most fully manifest in revolutions, but they
are also promulgated as programs of different parties or movements. The
promulgation, and especially the practical implementation, of such de-
mands is by definition relatively rare. Nevertheless, they are an inherent
possibility in the constitution of modern regimes.
But in between, as it were, these two levels or types of political struggle
modern societies continually develop a third type, the central character-
istics of which is contestation regarding the reconstitution of the realm of
the political, i.e. regarding the realm of the activities that should be un-
dertaken in the political arenas. The contestation concerns specification
of the boundaries of legitimate political action and of the spheres of life
4 s.n. eisenstadt
1 Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social
Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989).
2 Jrgen Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1998).
reconstitution of the realm of the political 5
II
III
The tendency toward the continual reconstitution of the realm of the po-
litical and its legitimation is rooted in the basic characteristics of the cul-
tural and institutional program of modernity. Above all, it is rooted in the
breakdown of traditional legitimation of the political order and, to follow
Claude Lefort,5 in the loss of the markers of certainty and the continual
search for their reinstatement, i.e. in the concomitant opening up of dif-
ferent possibilities for the constitution of such order, and in the conse-
IV
6 See in greater detail S.N. Eisenstadt, The Great Revolutions and the Civilizations of
Modernity (Leiden: Brill, 2006).
7 Ibid.
8 s.n. eisenstadt
Or, in greater detail, the major issues of struggles around the recon-
stitution of the realm of the political that developed first in Western and
Central Europe under the impact of the expansion of modernity in other
parts of the world (and which in a way became prototypical for the devel-
opment of all modern regimes) were focused, first, on the definition of the
symbols and boundaries of these collectives. They were especially focused
on the relative importance in their constitution of primordial, territorial,
civil, and transcendental-religious or secular often revolutionary com-
ponents: on the definitions of the territorial scope of such collectivities
and on the autonomy of different groups within them.
Second, the demands were related to the problems of the constitution
of the symbols and boundaries of collectivities, and those bearing on the
mode of the legitimation of the new regimes and their basic constitutional
formations. In this context the most important demands were those speci-
fying the right of access of various status sectors of the population to
economic classes, primordially defined groups, or categories of people, es-
pecially those defined according to gender or age, race, ethnic origin, or
religious affiliation, to the collectivity and the center i.e. the definition of
the scope of citizenship.
The third major arena of political contestation and of concomitant de-
mands for the reconstitution of the realm of the political focused on the
relations between the basic components of collective identity, the primor-
dial, civil and sacred ones in the constitution of the political and cultural
collectivities, i.e. of states and nations.
The fourth major pole or focus of contestation concerning the reconsti-
tution of the realm of the political in modern societies is related to the de-
velopment of modern capitalism and industrialism, and their major social
repercussions. In this context the major foci of contestation and the ma-
jor demands for the reconstitution of the realm of the political developed
around the paramount economic problems, especially those related to the
distribution of economic power, to the state of economic activities, to the
scope and limits of regulation, to the distributive activities undertaken by
the state, and to the concomitant constitution of the public good and of
access to it.
tors and the rulers but became foci of open public political activities and
contestations.
VI
The major demands for the reconstitution of the realm of the political
were up to the post-second-world-war period played out, above all, in
the institutional arenas of national and revolutionary states. Many of the
social movements that developed in these periods in Europe and later on,
were not confined to the limits or frameworks of any single society or
nation state, even if it was such societies or states that constituted the ma-
jor arenas for the implementation of the programs and goals heralded by
such activities. The more successful among such movements have contin-
ually crystallized in distinct ideological and institutional patterns which
often became identified, as was the case first with Revolutionary France
and later with Soviet Russia, Communist China, or Cuba, with specific
countries but whose reach went far beyond them. Until lately, there devel-
oped only relatively few independent international arenas in which such
demands were successfully promulgated. Even the universal, in principle
international or transnational movements and organizations, such as the
Catholic Church, as well as the transnational and trans-state socialist or
labor movements or organizations, which propagated international orien-
tations and were also sometimes organized in international federations,
had to play mostly in the political arenas constituted by the territorial or
nation states. It was also the different states that constituted the major
rule-setters in the international orders. In addition, they were the major
actors within such orders.
The various demands for the reconstitution of the realm of the politi-
cal and their institutionalization as borne by the different actors social
movements, political activists and organizations, especially political par-
ties developed not only in periods of intensive change or in periods
when protest usually surges forward as a major component of the political
process, but also in less dramatic situations, thus attesting to the fact that
the continual reconstitution of the realm of the political constitutes a cen-
tral component of the political process in modern societies.
The centrality of these demands in modern regimes attests to the point
that it is not just conflicts between the interests of various groups that
constitute the major threat to the continuity of modern regimes. It is rath-
er the combination of such conflicts with contestations among various
conceptions of the general good, of volont gnrale, that constitute such a
reconstitution of the realm of the political 11
VII
Such demands for the redefinition and reconstitution of the realm of the
political always entail conflicts and contestations for power, and antago-
nistic relations between different sectors of society. But it is indeed char-
acteristic of modern regimes, in contrast to Carl Schmitts conception of
the reconstitution of the realm of the political, that they need not neces-
sarily entail a confrontation between a total conception of political or-
der and a total reconstitution of the regime.9
It is only in rather exceptional situations, in situations of crisis which
are specific to modern regimes that the demands and practices of the
reconstitution of the realm of the political coalesce with demands for
radical, total change. Indeed, in most cases the various demands for
the reconstitution of the realm of the political could develop in several
directions in different modern societies and sectors thereof. They could
develop as demands for the redefinition of some of the premises and of
8 Ira Katznelson, Isaiah Berlin in Modernity, Social Research 66 (1999); Isaiah Berlin,
Two Concepts of Liberty: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered before the University of Oxford
on 31 October 1958, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959).
9 Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1988); idem, The Concept of the Political (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
1976); Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt (London:
Verso, 2000).
12 s.n. eisenstadt
VIII
IX
Soviet Union, the changes in the Chinese Communist regime, or the tran-
sition to democracy in Spain, Portugal, or Greece attest to have such po-
tentialities within them. But in the latter, the continuity of their respective
regimes has been of much shorter duration than that of the continuous
constitutional democratic ones.
Given the openness of the political program and processes in mod-
ern pluralistic constitutional democratic regimes, these regimes may be
seen as the most vulnerable or fragile modern regimes. The image of the
seeming stability of autocratic or totalitarian regimes has indeed pervaded
much of the modern political discourse. This is of course a distorted pic-
ture even the longest lasting totalitarian regime, the Soviet Union, can-
not be compared in terms of its longevity with the continual democratic
constitutional ones the U.S., British, the Scandinavian regimes, and even
with France with all its turbulences in which indeed the very openness
of their political process constituted a crucial component of their struggle.
But this is of course not true of those societies including Germany,
Italy, countries in Central Europe, most countries in Southern Europe
and in Latin America in which the institutionalization of constitutional
democratic regimes was much more intermittent and turbulent. Many
constitutional democratic regimes such as those in Central Europe in the
1930s have floundered precisely because they were unable to cope with
the problems of incorporation of symbols and themes of protest into their
central frameworks, of the different attempts to reconstitute within them
the realm of the political. In a different way, the same is true of the Civil
War in the U.S.
Until recently, it was the spirit of these problems, their constitutive and
distinctive potentialities, that were played out in the arena of the nation
and revolutionary states. It was indeed only with the intensification and
diversification of the processes of globalization that various transnational
public spheres crystallized, that new types of demands were promulgated,
calling for a new diffusion of the realm of the political. Concomitantly,
there developed several shifts in the demands for the constitution of the
realm of the political. One such shift was from an emphasis on universal-
istic criteria for the allocation of resources to all citizens to a recognition
of different types of collective identities, including a very strong post-
colonial shift in large parts of the world to abolish the colonial situation
in which they were put by the imperialist expansion of especially, but not
only, Western Imperialism. Another far-reaching shift was that toward
inter-national, inter-global arenas, entailing new bases of legitimation, es-
pecially the growing emphasis on human rights or on collective identi-
14 s.n. eisenstadt
Max M. Edling
More than anything else, this tendency to give the early American state
short shrift is the result of conceptual confusion. Historians do not deny
the existence of a national government from 1789 and onward. Nor do
they deny that this government had its share of responsibilities, or that
it carried them out with surprising efficiency. Rather, what they typically
argue is that the antebellum federal government did not resemble a state
and that its actions did not influence the course of the nations history
overly much. The federal union created by the Declaration of Independ-
ence in 1776, the Treaty of Peace and Amity in 1783, and the Constitution
in 1787, does not look like a European centralized regime. It was a curi-
ous half-breed between international union and national government. A
member of the Philadelphia Convention, the body that drafted the Con-
stitution, even called it a mongrel kind of government. The dissimilar-
ity between the American federal union and European monarchies, which
would soon develop into centralized nation-states, has been taken as evi-
dence that state-building somehow failed in the period of the founding.
Even the present American state is described with some regularity as
laggard, backward, and reluctant, or as incomplete and divided.2
Alongside the purebred European nation-state the nineteenth-century
federal union looks unshapely and somewhat ridiculous.
The typical approach to the early American state is well captured in a re-
cent presidential address to the Society for Historians of the Early Ameri-
can Republic, the principal professional society for scholars specializing in
United States history from the Revolution to the Civil War. Entitled Cul-
tures of Nationalism, Movements of Reform, and the Composite-Federal
Polity: From Revolutionary Settlement to Antebellum Crisis, it tells the
story of state-building in the early republic as a story of failure. According
to John Brooke, the men behind the Constitutional Convention of 1787 set
out to create something akin to a European state. These reformers, the so-
Princeton University Press, 2002); William J. Novak, The Myth of the Weak American
State, The American Historical Review, vol. 113, no. 3 (June, 2008), 752-72; Mark R. Wilson,
Law and the American State, from the Revolution to the Civil War: Institutional Growth
and Structural Change, in Michael Grossberg and Christopher Tomlins, eds., The Cam-
bridge History of Law in America, vol. II: The Long Nineteenth Century (17891920) (New
York, 2008), 1-35.
2 Novak, Myth of the Weak American State, 756.
the strange hybrid of the early american state 17
called Federalists, embraced a concept of the state that even Max Weber
would have recognized. They hoped to create a centralized regime where
power radiated outward from a sovereign center, which would allow the
government to control, regulate, and legislate over both territory and
population. Yet their dreams and aspirations came to nothing. Compared
with the hopes of the Federalists, says Brooke, the federal government in
the antebellum years was a cipher, a mirage.3
Federalist hopes failed principally because the reformers were out of
tune with the general political mood in the post-Revolutionary United
States. Apart from the Federalists themselves, nobody really wanted a
centralized regime able to regulate the economy and society. The majority
wished to retain state sovereignty and local autonomy. Thomas Jefferson,
the third president of the United States, made himself their spokesper-
son. In the standard account, his election to the presidencythe so-called
Revolution of 1800constitutes one of the most important breaks in early
American history. With the election, the Federalist dream of creating a
centralized, consolidated state in America suffered a violent death and
would not be resurrected until the Communist menace arose in the So-
viet Union. Instead of a Federalist centralized regime, Jefferson restored
the pre-Constitutional order in which the states held sovereign status in
a voluntary and conditional union, as Brooke puts it. As a result of this
restoration, the formidable formal powers that the Constitution invested
in the federal government were never used and in practice governance in
Washington barely mattered in the lives of ordinary Americans.4
Two aspects of this standard story are worth noticing. The first is the
unwillingness to adopt a more flexible concept of the state, which would
be able to account for variations in the institutional make-up and func-
tions of different types of states that have existed throughout history.5
In Brookes case, an early modern composite state is contrasted with
a modern fiscal-military state. The former does not qualify as a state
proper, and because the United States in the early nineteenth century re-
sembled the composite state more than the fiscal-military state, the
injustice along divisions drawn by race, class, and gender. To this critical
project the international dimension of American history has appeared
largely irrelevant.
But the neglect of the international has had an unfortunate side-effect
that most American historians would not appreciate. The blind spot in
their historical vision serves to maintain the myth that the rise of American
power through territorial and commercial expansion was providential and
peaceful. The neglect of the international also hides from view the origins
of what is perhaps the most interesting feature of the American state to-
day, namely the combination of, on the one hand, a fundamentally liberal
regime within the nations territorial borders with, on the other hand, a
government possessing the ability and willingness to regularly mobilize
and project military power on an enormous and unprecedented scale be-
yond the nations borders. Although it should always be borne in mind
that the national government before the Civil War was a small institution,
it is still possible to recognize that a significant outcome of the Constitu-
tional Convention was the creation of a federal union that allowed a vigo-
rous use of national government power in foreign affairs and in the regu-
lation and administration of the federal territories.
This essay will proceed by arguing three points intended to promote
a better appreciation of the anatomy and function of the state created by
the American founding. First, it will question the degree of difference
between the Federalists and the Jeffersonians with regard to their ideas
about the proper functions of the national government and thereby the
idea that the Revolution of 1800 marked a fundamental break in Ameri-
can political history. Second, on the basis of this discussion it will argue
that although the early American state differed from the centralized Eu-
ropean state, this difference was not the result of failure but of a conscious
and widely recognized attempt to create an alternative form of state. The
aim and result of the Constitutional Convention were to create a state that
was both a federation between state-republics and a national government
that could act as a unitary state against foreign nations. Third and finally,
it will claim that the actions of the national government in the antebellum
period were in fact of some importance to the future course of American
history.
II
The origin of the American union lies in the need to coordinate the war
effort against Britain. In short, the need to stand up against a foreign en-
20 max m. edling
emy was the primary rationale behind the formation of the union. As a
congressional committee remarked in 1781, America became a Confed-
erate Republic to crush the present and future foes of her independence.9
The first American compact of union was the Articles of Confederation.
They were drafted by the Continental Congress in 1777 but only adopted
in 1781. Through their perpetual Union the United States of America
entered
into a firm league of friendship with each other, for their common defence,
the security of their Liberties, and their mutual and general welfare, binding
themselves to assist each other, against all force offered to, or attacks made
upon them, or any of them, on account of religion, sovereignty, trade, or any
other pretence whatever.
The former comprehends war, peace, the sending and receiving ambassa-
dors, and whatever concerns the transactions of the state with any other
independent state. The confederation of the United States of America hath
lopped off this branch of the executive, and placed it in Congress.11
Despite the fact that the federal Constitution of 1787 radically reshaped
the structure of the American union, it did not alter the allocation of du-
ties between the national government and the states. James Madison was
therefore correct when he wrote in The Federalist that should
the new Constitution be examined with accuracy and candor, it will be
found that the change which it proposes, consists much less in the addition
of new powers than in the invigoration of its original powers.
Although it was true that the Constitution gave Congress the right to reg-
ulate foreign commerce, a right Congress did not possess under the Arti-
cles of Confederation, the
powers relating to war and peace, armies and fleets, treaties and finance,
with the other more considerable powers, are all vested in the existing
Congress by the articles of Confederation. The proposed change does not
enlarge these powers; it only substitutes a more effectual mode of adminis-
tering them.12
11 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peters Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988), 365; Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. and ed. Anne M.
Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1989), 156-57; The Essex Results, in Philip P. Kurland and Ralph Lerner, eds., The
Founders Constitution 5 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986) I, 117.
12 James Madison, The Federalist No. 45, in Jacob E. Cooke, The Federalist (Middle-
town: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 314.
22 max m. edling
III
13 Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist No. 23, in Cooke, ed., The Federalist, 146-47;
Jefferson to Gideon Granger, August 13, 1800, in Julian P. Boyd et al., eds., The Papers of
Thomas Jefferson, 36 vols. to date (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950) XXXII, 96;
First annual message, ibid, XXXVI, 60.
14 Alexander Hamilton, The Examination No. IX, in Harold C. Syrret, The Papers
of Alexander Hamilton, 27 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 19611987), XXV,
502-3.
the strange hybrid of the early american state 23
15 Brian Balogh, A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nine-
teenth-Century America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 151-218; Stefan
Heumann, The Tutelary Empire: State- and Nation-Building in the 19th Century United
States (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2009).
16 Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Ad-
ministrative Capacities, 18771920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 19.
the strange hybrid of the early american state 25
17 Lance Banning, The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the
Federal Republic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); Cathy D. Matson and Peter S.
Onuf, A Union of Interest: Political and Economic Thought in Revolutionary America (Law-
rence: University Press of Kansas, 1990), 101-23, quotation at 101.
18 Douglas Bradburn, The Citizenship Revolution: Politics and the Creation of the
American Union, 17741804 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009); Peter S.
Onuf, Jeffersons Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (Charlottesville: University
of Virginia Press, 2000).
26 max m. edling
19 James Madison, in Max Farrand, ed. The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787.
4 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937) I, 465.
20 Bensel, Yankee Leviathan, ix.
the strange hybrid of the early american state 27
21 Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist No. 6, in Cooke, ed., The Federalist, 28. 31-32;
David C. Hendrickson, Peace Pact: The Lost World of the American Founding (Lawrence:
University Press of Kansas, 2003).
22 Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, Pt. II, in Bruce Kucklick, ed., Paine: Political Writings
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 160; Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval,
July 12, 1816, in Julian P. Boyd et als., eds., Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 36 vols. to date
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950) XV, 39-40.
28 max m. edling
states because only union could prevent the war system from spreading
across the Atlantic to North America.23
The idea of the union as a peace pact between the American state-re-
publics should not be confused with a general aversion to war. The found-
ers opposed the war system, not warfare. To the contrary, they saw war as
a legitimate tool of statecraft and a core function of the national govern-
ment. The American state was a union and a peace accord between the
member states, but it was designed to act as a unitary state in interactions
with foreign powers in the international state system and with the state-
less peoples of North America and elsewhere. The need to possess a state
with sufficient military capability arose from the founders realist theory
of foreign relations. They believed that the international state system was
characterized by extreme competition for territory and commercial ad-
vantage. Ultimately, the outcome of this competition was determined by
military power, in a world in which the weak succumbed to the strong.24
In relatively recent times the Welsh, Irish, and Scots had been swallowed
up by England, and Poland had been partitioned between its neighbors.
This pattern would be repeated in North America in the course of the
nineteenth century and belies the notion that the continent was governed
by international peace. The French and the Spanish were made to leave
in the early decades of the century. Texas was annexed in 1845. Mexico
was militarily defeated and forced to give up half its territory in 1848. The
Confederacys attempt to establish an independent nation was crushed
in 1865. Russia withdrew from the North American continent in 1867.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the United States made war against
the Native American stateless peoples, deprived them of their land, and
forcefully removed them beyond the Mississippi and hounded them into
reservations. It is no coincidence that the only nation that managed to
withstand the U.S. onslaught was British North America, watched over by
the most powerful state in the world.25
23 James Madison, The Federalist No. 41, in Cooke, ed., The Federalist, 272; Herbert
E. Sloan, Principle and Interest: Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Debt (New York: Ox-
ford University Press, 1995).
24 Reginald C. Stuart, Half-Way Pacifist: Thomas Jeffersons View on War (Toronto: To-
ronto University Press, 1979); Karl-Friedrich Walling, Republican Empire: Alexander Ham-
ilton on War and Free Government (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999).
25 Walter LaFeber, Jefferson and an American Foreign Policy, in Peter Onuf, ed.,
Jeffersonian Legacies (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993), 370-91; Bradford
Perkins, The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations I: The Creation of a Republi-
can Empire, 17761865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Francis Paul Prucha,
The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians, 2 vols.
the strange hybrid of the early american state 29
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984); Kenneth Bourne, Britain and the Balance of
Power in North America, 18151908 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967); C.P.
Stacey, Canada and the British Army, 18461871: A Study in the Practice of Responsible Gov-
ernment (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963).
26 Cf. The Rough and Ready Almanac, For 1848 (Philadelphia, 1847), 9; Frederick
William Adolphus Bruce to John Russell, Oct. 16, 1865, in James J. Barnes and Patience P.
Barnes, eds., The American Civil War through British Eyes: Dispatches from British Diplo-
mats, 10 vols. (Kent: The Kent State University Press, 2005) III, 344-45; Walter LaFeber,
The American Age: U.S. Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad (New York: W. W. Norton and
Company, 1989, 2nd ed.), 171.
30 max m. edling
IV
27 Forrest McDonald, States Rights and the Union: Imperium in Imperio, 17761876
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000); Nicholas Onuf and Peter S. Onuf, Nations,
Markets, and War: Modern History and the American Civil War (Charlottesville: University
of Virginia Press, 2006).
28 Bensel, Yankee Leviathan; James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War
Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Mark R. Wilson, The Business of Civil War:
Military Mobilization and the State, 18611865 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2006).
the strange hybrid of the early american state 31
tion provided the material basis for the United States rise to world power
status. But this status also rested on the national governments capacity
to mobilize social resources in an efficient and legitimate manner and to
translate them into political and military power. This capacity was ac-
quired and improved in a series of wars in the period between the adop-
tion of the Constitution and the end of the Civil War until it reached truly
phenomenal proportions. Although the nature of the union changed fun-
damentally with the Civil War, the growth of power never undermined
the American republics commitment to a regime built on limited gov-
ernment demands and accountability to the people. And in this way the
foundation was laid for the strange appearance by the middle of the twen-
tieth century of a liberal superpower.
POLICY METRICS UNDER SCRUTINY: THE LEGACY OF NEW
PUBLIC MANAGEMENT
Daniel Tarschys
In his 1984 book on the age of the grand programmes, Bjrn Wittrock
criticised monistic elements in the paradigm of radical rationalism in
policy-making, arguing instead that the multiplicity of actors in various
policy settings necessitates novel forms of pluralistic rationalism. The gov-
ernance reforms subsumed under the conceptual umbrella of New Public
Management (NPM) have often been based on similar assumptions of a
single policy-making centre and single-dimensional success indicators.
But the prescriptions of this movement have also met with scepticism and
resistance. In recent debates about the strengths and limitations of NPM,
there is growing interest in alternative approaches to the measurement of
policy results and impacts. The following paper examines some revisionist
tendencies generated by the surge of rational models of policy-making in
the last few decades.
The two thirds of a century that have passed since the end of World War
II constitute one of the most remarkable transformative periods in human
history, both in OECD countries and many emerging economies. The
early stretch of this itinerary was marked by extensive growth. The years
defined as les trente glorieuses saw a strong recovery of industry and an
incipient expansion of services. A stage of reconstruction paved the way
for the consumption society in which the provision of both private and
public goods multiplied in close interdependence.
Upon this stage there followed an era of more intensive growth, based
i.a. on falling costs for transport and communication, financial innova-
tions, expanding international trade and new forms of organisation and
management. Government continued to expand in this period but also
faced new challenges. Tax receipts grew at a slower pace while new de-
34 daniel tarschys
The spread of NPM-inspired changes is not limited to the OECD area, but
this is where the most publicised reforms have taken place. Some of the
early impulses came from the United States (reinventing government)
but it was then principally in Europe and a few other industrial countries
that the movement gathered momentum and left its mark on the structure
of administration and public policy.
Hood (1996) distinguished three groups of countries with high, me-
dium and low NPM emphasis, including Sweden in the first group with
the UK and Ireland; France, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Italy, The Neth-
erlands, Portugal and the U.S. in the medium NPM emphasis group; and
Greece, Germany, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and Turkey in the low group.
Today, this verdict from the mid-1990s would have to be revised as sever-
al of the former low-impact countries have adopted administrative chang-
es along NPM lines. In France, the main adjustments have ensued after
the adoption of the 2001 organic law on public finance (LOLF).
While most of the salient reforms have been carried out at the nation-
state level, many ripples have also reached regional and local government
as well as organisations in civil society. New forms of budgeting, evalua-
tion and separation of functions have been espoused by regions and mu-
policy metrics under scrutiny 37
Is NPM still alive? A substantial number of scholars argue that the move-
ment reached its apex in the 1990s and is now dead, moribund or dying.
Some date its demise to the years around the turn of the century. Others
claim that the ripples of NPM are only slowly reaching developing coun-
tries while its influence is subsiding in the old epicentre. Several names
have been proposed to emerging new paradigms succeeding the previ-
ous trend: Post-NPM (Christiansen & Laegreid 2007), Digital Era Gov-
ernance (Dunleavy et al. 2006), the Neo-Weberian State (Dunn & Miller
2007), joined-up government or the whole-of-government approach
(Bogdanor 2005). Hood & Peters (2004) speak of the middle aging of
NPM and distinguish three stages in its academic development: an early
phase of casual empiricism, a second one of comparative studies and a
third period of treatment in encyclopedias and comprehensive textbooks.
In spite of there being so many reports on the decline of NPM, the
persisting influence of its key concepts and guiding principles is still very
much in evidence in the discourse on public policy and organisational re-
forms. Many of the principal tenets have found their way into the main-
stream textbooks on governance and public administration.
Much can be said and much has been said about the positive
achievements of NPM reforms. By and large the ambitions described
above have contributed to greater rationality, efficiency and productivity
in public policy. Structural changes along these lines have helped govern-
ments cope with the constantly increasing pressures on their resources.
They have facilitated the modernisation of political agendas and the
build-up of new administrative capacities. But along the road many stric-
tures have been levelled at NPM from different angles:
1. NPM as neo-liberalism. One common concern in the commentary on
reforms inspired by the practices of market organisations is that qual-
ities specific to the public sector are lost. The citizen becomes a cus-
tomer; the traditional ethos of public service is imperilled; the welfare
state dissolves into endless bargains between demand and supply; the
common and collective side of public policy is eclipsed as all attention
turns to private users and beneficiaries.
2. NPM as neo-gosplan. In an entirely different perspective, the new tech-
niques reincarnate the recently discredited methods of the planned
economy. The large-scale use of targets and the accompanying requests
for a measurement of results in quantitative terms contain risks well-
known from the economic and political history of Soviet-type socie-
policy metrics under scrutiny 41
ties. It is sometimes pointed out as ironic that such methods were em-
braced in Western Europe more or less at the same time that they were
discarded in the Eastern part of the continent
3. Gaming, creaming, skimping, dumping and the dumbing down of de-
grees. Target-setting and measurement of results can affect behaviour
and performance in many different ways. Gaming refers to the strategic
reaction of individuals, organisations or countries to the use of meas-
ures. Creaming is the over-provision of services in health care. The op-
posite is skimping, defined as the under-treatment of high severity pa-
tients. Dumping occurs when difficult cases are dropped. In education,
the dumbing down of degrees refers to the lowering of standards in
response to success measured by the number of examinations.
4. Will quantity squeeze out quality? Besides distorting incentives, a fo-
cus on quantitative targets may have other undesirable side-effects.
One is promoting myopia by putting too much weight on short-term
results. Another one is suboptimisation through a one-sided focus on
the achievements of ones own organisation (tunnel vision and si-
loisation). A third risk is that qualitative aspects may get lost. What
counts is eclipsed by an excessive interest in what can be counted. In
Academia, there is considerable concern about simplistic targets and
success indicators being adopted as a result of the frenzy for bibliome-
try, rating and ranking. Using citation scores as a proxy for impact and
quality seems to work reasonably well in some disciplines, but less so
in others.
5. The downside of living in a knowledge society: reporting, red tape and
loss of autonomy. While regulatory simplification is an important ele-
ment in NPM reforms, often promoted through requirements for
Regulatory Impact Assessment (RIA), other parts of the same plat-
form seem to generate more red tape. This springs from the reporting
burden connected with a host of evaluation and oversight procedures,
internal pricing mechanisms, and other methods intended to increase
cost consciousness and an emphasis on results. Doubts have been ex-
pressed whether the proclaimed gains of autonomy are for real; at least
some ingredients in NPM reforms may rather have an opposite impact.
A stronger accent on leadership and managerialism will decrease the
discretionary leeway previously enjoyed by various professional elites.
6. Evaluation and goal dynamics. Many implementation problems linked
to NPM reforms relate to the functions of evaluation and impact as-
sessment. Such exercises become particularly difficult when goals keep
shifting. In a non-linear perspective, policies may often be much more
42 daniel tarschys
stable than their objectives, and objectives are sometimes chosen to fa-
cilitate the political marketing either of new proposals or long-estab-
lished programmes. This introduces difficulties at the evaluation stage:
should the evaluator take aim at the substance of the programme, or
the rhetorical wrapping in which it was presented?
Are goals set first, or are they simply ornaments attached to established
policies and institutions? There seem to be two rival interpretations of the
policy process, one based on the primacy of policy objectives and the other
one treating objectives as derivative and evolving appendices to policies.
The cook-book version of NPM suggests a progression of policy-
making in orderly stages: a problem is identified, its supposed causes are
pinned down, different policy options are outlined, their costs and bene-
fits are compared, a solution is chosen and then a strategy devised for fol-
low-up and evaluation. Competing empirical interpretations draw more
on chaos theory or notions of coincidence. Just as there are problems
looking for solutions, there are solutions looking for problems. Aspects of
political competition intervene, and the policies ultimately implemented
come about through a confluence of several factors. In this perspective,
several elements of the normative model hover in limbo.
Many textbooks present the former version, dividing the policy process
into neat and separate stages. The 2009 Impact Assessment Guidelines of
the European Commission (SEC [2009] 92) provides an excellent example:
The first step in policy formulation is to identify a problem and then to
describe its nature and extent. The key players and affected populations
should be pinned down as well as the drivers and underlying causes. At
this stage the DGs are also required to assess whether the problem is
situated within the remit of the European Union and whether it passes
the necessity and value added tests.
Second, objectives must be defined. These must correspond to the prob-
lem and its root causes and should then be established at several levels,
going from general to specific or operational. Coherence with the main
lines of EU policy should also be established, such as the Lisbon and
sustainable Development strategies.
44 daniel tarschys
A third stage is to develop the main policy options. Regulatory vs. non-
regulatory approaches should be identified. At this stage the DGs
should narrow the range through screening for technical and other
constraints, and then measure its potential outputs against criteria of
effectiveness, efficiency and coherence. The result might be a shortlist
of potentially valid alternative options for further analysis.
Fourth comes the impact analysis. Economic, social and environmental
consequences must be assessed, with an eye both to direct and indi-
rect effects. Affected populations both inside and outside the EU must
be identified and the impacts compared to the baseline in quantitative,
qualitative and monetary terms. In addition, attention must be paid to
the administrative burden imposed by the various options.
The fifth step is to compare the alternative options, weighing the re-
spective positive and negative impacts for each option on the basis of
performance criteria clearly linked to the objectives. At this stage it is
important to consider both aggregated and disaggregated results, tak-
ing into account the implications for particular groups of stakeholders.
Based on this analysis a preferred option may be indicated.
The sixth and final part of the process is to draw up guidelines for
policy monitoring and evaluation. Core progress indicators for the key
objectives of the possible intervention must be identified and a broad
outline provided for follow-up and subsequent assessment.
Variants of this prescribed procedure can be found in many NPM-style
manuals. Their common denominator is an assumption of linear progres-
sion in the decision-making process from the pinning down of a problem
over the analysis of its underlying causes to the identification and assess-
ment of possible cures or remedies. The steps are taken in an orderly fash-
ion, one after another.
Yet are they, in reality? Linear models have come under attack in many
different sciences. The serene and predictable universe of astronomer and
mathematician Laplace is now challenged by novel notions of complexity
and stochastic dynamics. Hierarchical concepts are increasingly sidelined
by images drawing on networking, self-organising processes and chaos
theory (Mainzer 2009). A significant line in policy analysis derives con-
crete decisions less from linear rationality than from the confluence of sev-
eral underlying or triggering causal factors.
Forerunners of this trend can be found among 19th century historians,
such as Hippolyte Taine who coined the phrase race, milieu et moment.
Taine traced sentiments from the nervous system and spent several years
studying medicine to deepen his understanding of art and fiction. He ar-
policy metrics under scrutiny 45
Conclusion
References
Jrgen Kocka
Drifting apart
When Hobsbawm looked back on new links between history and the so-
cial sciences, he referred to different minority developments which had
much to do with one another, although they emerged in different coun-
tries. Among them were the interdisciplinary approaches experimented
within the pages of Annales in France and the writings of Marxist histori-
1 Gerhard Botz et al., Geschichte: Mglichkeit fr Erkenntnis und Gestaltung der Welt.
Zu Leben und Werk von Eric J. Hobsbawm, Vienna 2008, 74.
54 jrgen kocka
ans close to the journal Past & Present in Britain. He referred to practi-
tioners of historical sociology in the United States and, in other ways, to
the New Economic History of the 1950s and 1960s, as well as to social
history, history of society, and Historische Sozialwissenschaft which
emerged in West Germany in the 1960s, strongly influenced by Max Weber.
These and some other currents were very different from one another,
but they had a few things in common. Firstly, they all stressed structures
and processes over actions, persons, and events as dimensions of investi-
gation. Only a minority of historians came out explicitly for Strukturge-
schichte. But many were more or less convinced that in order to really
explain change one had to look deeply into economic, social, political,
or mental structures and processes which underlie perceptions, ac-
tions, and single events while being influenced by them at the same time.
Secondly, within those different currents of historiography analytical ap-
proaches were adopted that went beyond a hermeneutic reconstruction of
meanings. In the 1960s and 1970s, this meant seeking the explicit defini-
tion of concepts, experimenting with theoretical frameworks, sometimes
turning to quantitative methods, and applying comparative approaches.
History became more analytical. Thirdly, in both programme and practice,
close cooperation with systematic neighbouring disciplines was sought,
especially with sociology, political science, and economics. The pro-
gramme of Historische Sozialwissenschaft developed this thrust most
explicitly. Fourthly, socio-economic dimensions were emphasized, both
as subjects of study and as clues for a better understanding of history in
general. Social history flourished, and sometimes developed into broader
versions of societal history (or history of society). And fifth: These his-
toriographical trends were frequently part of a politico-intellectual atmos-
phere which criticized traditions and advocated basic change, both within
the discipline of history and with respect to the society at large.2
After the late 1970s or early 1980s the trend changed, and the relation-
ship between history and the social sciences became more distant again.
This was mainly due to a fundamental reorientation within the study of
history. Social history lost much of its glamour as an oppositional and in-
novative current. Particularly its Marxist varieties did not fulfil the high
expectations which they had nourished before. In the 1980s, the advocates
of Alltagsgeschichte (everyday history) criticized the structural preferences
of earlier social and economic history. They called for greater attention
to actions, perceptions, and experiences, i.e. subjective dimensions of his-
tory. They were supported by impulses from womens and gender history,
which had been marginal in previous decades. Increasingly, historians got
interested in the reconstruction of symbolic forms and the interpretation
of cultural practices. Different forms of cultural history carried the day
and the decade. Whereas in the 60s and 70s the focus had often been
on broad structures and processes, now the charm of micro-historical ap-
proaches was discovered. Sometimes this reorientation was accompanied
by sweeping mistrust of big concepts and analytic approaches. Why
questions were up-staged by how questions. New emphasis was placed
on narrativity. Language became more and more important, both as a
subject of research and as a medium of research and presentation. The
history of concepts (Begriffsgeschichte) served as a bridge between so-
cial and cultural history, increasingly in a constructivist spirit with much
sensitivity for the formative power of ideas, concepts, and categories both
in the past itself and in the act of investigating it.
However, all this did not mean that the preceding paradigm was sim-
ply displaced. Rather, numerous conflicts arose, and new combinations
were forged. Whereas in the past, Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Parsons, and
Habermas had lent social scientific force to historical studies, they were
now often succeeded by Geertz and Simmel, Foucault, Derrida, and other
post-modern thinkers. But frequently, theoretical orientations were dis-
pensed with altogether.
Certainly, social history did not disappear. It penetrated and trans-
formed general history, it survived in new combinations, particularly with
cultural history. At the same time it became more frequent and attractive
to study experiences and expectations, dispositions, ideas, and discourses,
actions and reactions, without tracing their (social, institutional, structur-
al) conditions, consequences, and contexts something that social histo-
rians had been eager to study.
These changes were related to a basic paradigmatic change: the domi-
nant reasons for studying history shifted. The main concern had once
been to learn from history. Now, history became interesting as a basis of
gaining identity or as a way of dealing with the Other. The study of his-
tory became not only less structural (and sometimes more voluntaristic),
but also less analytical. Interest in social-science concepts and methods
56 jrgen kocka
decreased among historians. The distance between history and the social
sciences became wider again.3
While changes within the discipline of history were most important
in accounting for the widening rift, there were not many developments
in the social sciences, which could have countered this trend. Certainly,
economics as a discipline has not been historicized over the last decades.
Something like an action and micro-theoretical turn may have taken
place within the field. But it focused on the claims and achievements of
an ahistorical theory of humanity. Economics has continued to be strong
in formalized models. It attributes its theoretical productivity to its ab-
straction from cultural factors and historical contexts and operates with a
timeless concept of man. It is thus in stark contradiction to the historical
and cultural sciences, which see human nature not as an anthropologi-
cal constant but as the outcome of historical processes. From the perspec-
tive of a historian, economists ahistorical ways of looking at human reali-
ty are under-complex and rather simplistic in spite of their sophisticated
theoretical apparatus that is hard to understand from the outside. Excep-
tions will be mentioned later.4
Political science has developed in different directions. Some of its prac-
titioners are interested in broadly based comparative research with an
historical depth, e.g. Theda Skocpol, Peter Hall, or Kathleen Thelen. The
Committee on History and Political Science established by the American
Political Science Association in 1990 soon had several hundred mem-
bers. Influential German political scientists, too, exercise their inter-
est in historical approaches, for example Klaus von Beyme and Manfred
Schmidt. On the other hand, Peter Hall recently criticized the growing
de-historicization of American political science, describing its increasing
3 Cf. Jrgen Kocka, Losses, Gains and Opportunities: Social History Today, in: Jour-
nal of Social History 37 (2003), 21-28; idem, Civil Society and Dictatorship in Modern Ger-
man History, Hanover/London 2010, 99-115, 152-157. From his particular perspective, Ge-
off Eley has reconstructed some of these changes as part of his intellectual autobiography.
See his A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society, Ann Arbor 2005,
chs. I-IV. Cf. Iggers/Wang/Mukherjee, Global History of Modern Historiography, 270-316,
368-380; Christoph Conrad, Social History, in: International Encyclopedia of the Social
and Behavioral Sciences, vol. 21, London 2001, 14299-14306.
4 Cf. Geoffrey M. Hodgson, How Economics Forgot History: The Problem of Histori-
cal Specificity in Social Science, Lon
don 2001; Jakob Tanner, Die konomische Handlungs-
theorie vor der kulturalistischen Wende? Perspektiven und Probleme einer interdiszi-
plinren Diskussion, in: Hartmut Berghoff/Jakob Vogel (eds.), Wirtschaftsgeschichte als
Kulturgeschichte. Dimensionen eines Perspektivenwechsels, Frankfurt/New York 2004, 69-98.
history and the social sciences today 57
5 Peter Hall, The Dilemmas of Contemporary Social Science, in: Boundary 2, vol. 34,
no. 3 (2007), 121-141, quote 127.
6 The Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS) is certainly such a place. It is
one of Bjrn Wittrocks many achievements to have made this possible and provided the
necessary guidance. In Germany the Max Planck Institute for Social Research in Cologne
must be mentioned as a place where social scientists produce important work sensitive to
and profiting from historical approaches. For a while the Social Science Research Centre
Berlin (WZB) was fertile ground for cooperation between social scientists and historians.
One should also mention the Graduate School in History and Sociology of the University
of Bielefeld. It is starting to edit a new electronic publication: Inter Disciplines. Journal of
History and Sociology. (An earlier version of this essay will be published in the first issue of
this journal, Summer 2010).
58 jrgen kocka
However, new opportunities for cooperation between history and the so-
cial sciences have emerged in recent time. I want to illustrate this with
respect to relations between economic history, economics, and economic
sociology.
First, a highly interesting discussion has been taking place between
economists and science theoreticians on the foundations of economics.8
The advance of game theory has meant that the economists influenced by
it have long since abandoned the notion of the individual as a utility-max-
imizing monad. Rather, they concern themselves with interactional rela-
tions and decision-making procedures, and hence, in principle at least,
with the changing world in which interactions take place and decisions
are made. This movement goes beyond the methodological individualism
that has marked traditional economics. Along similar lines, there is the
discussion on bounded rationality, which in its more radical manifesta-
tions is well on the way to denying the construct of the utility-maximiz-
ing individual. Insight into the often very limited ability of individuals to
weigh alternatives in fully informed fashion and to choose rationally be-
tween them and their opportunity costs has directed attention to the im-
portant role of stop rules and decision shortcuts, which in turn have to
do with habits, shared conventions, mental models, and with processes of
understanding and learning. These again are path dependent and have a
history. Neurobiological research appears to confirm this. In principle and
in the epistemological cogitations of certain economists and theorists at
least among a small, reflective minority in their field this would seem to
clear a broad path to history, to the cultural sciences, and to a reflective
economic history.
Second, I would like to mention another development in economics
that commends cooperation with economic history: the persistence and
further development of institutional economics. When Douglas North et
al. lent it new impetus around 1970, especially in addressing the property
rights paradigm, Knut Borchardt explicitly pointed out how much this
had been anticipated by such scholars as Gustav Schmoller and Werner
Sombart from the German Historical School of Economics in the late
19th and early 20th centuries. The New Institutional Economics addresses
the historical setting of economic processes. It asks about the rules and
norms of markets. Who draws them up and monitors them? What does it
cost to sanction breaches of the rules? When and why do the institution-
al arrangements of a society change? What are the consequences of, for
example, a shift from collective to individual rights of disposal? A broad
concept of institution is commonly used, covering all sorts of regulatory
systems from law to conventions, standards, and customs.
This opens the door wide to cooperation with historians who like
Werner Abelshauser and Volker Berghahn discuss the performance and
limits of the German (Rhenish) model of capitalism with its high degree
of organized coordination, in comparison to other more market-based
varieties of capitalism in England and the U.S. Business history, dealing
60 jrgen kocka
Their answer is to point to the need for a new link between economics
and sociology, and their argument has become even more urgent with the
recent financial and economic crisis. It should be added that this situation
offers an opportunity to connect with historical and economic history re-
search, as long as the economic historians involved do not adopt too nar-
row a perspective but argue on a broad front, addressing such questions as
trust, religion, family structures, networks, and the state.
Fourthly, changes have been taking place among historians that are
worth looking at. The cultural turns in the field have frequently led histo-
rians to neglect economic history and economic issues in general. But the
cultural turns have also opened new types of access to economic history
which may be of interest to economists and other social scientists. Here
are some examples.11
Scholars like Adam Tooze and Robert Salais, convinced of the forma-
tive power of language, address the history of concepts and examine the
categories used by social scientists and statisticians for mapping societies
of the past, concepts like workers and employees, labour and un-
employment. They not only try to find out which social realities were
reflected by the emergence and diffusion of such concepts. They also ex-
plore how such frequently used concepts helped to structure and shape
societies of the past: the semantic mapping of social reality as a contribu-
tion to forming social identities, groups, and classes. 12 This approach has
also been used to explore the history of civil society. 13
There are studies on the history of labour (or work), and how these
concepts were defined differently between countries and languages, in
theoretical treatises as well as in the language of collective bargaining or
social policy. Such studies explore work experiences and labour relations
in the interaction between tradition, markets, and government interven-
tion.14
There are other recent changes which seem to lead to intensified coop-
eration between historians and (other) social scientists. Bernhard Bailyn
recently identified as one of the deepest tendencies of late-twentieth-cen-
tury historiography: the impulse to expand the range of inquiry, to rescale
major events and trends into larger settings, and to seek heightened un-
derstanding at a more elevated and generalized plane. In every sphere of
historical study intellectual, cultural, political the scope of inquiry has
broadened. Large-scale comparisons and parallels are explored, national
stories become regional, and regional studies become global.19
Indeed, transnational, interregional, and global approaches are quickly
gaining ground: they are presently the single most important trend in the
discipline. With a certain necessity, this trend reinvigorates some basic
principles of Historische Sozialwissenschaft: attention to large-scale struc-
tures and comprehensive processes, the sharp definition of concepts and
analytical rigour, explicit reflections on the choice of concepts, on deci-
sions about space and time of investigation, and on epistemological impli-
ma der amerikanischen Geschichte, in: Historische Zeitschrift 264 (1997), 329-360; Thomas
L. Haskell/Richard F. Teichgraeber III (eds.), The Culture of the Market: Historical Essays,
Cambridge 1994. Most recently Joyce Appleby has demonstrated how a basically cultural
historical approach can be used for designing a broad history of capitalism. See her The
Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism, New York 2010.
18 Cf. Carmen Reinhart/Kenneth S. Rogoff, This Time is Different. Eight Centuries of
Financial Folly, Princeton 2009.
19 The New York Review of Books, Nov 19th, 2009, 44.
64 jrgen kocka
23 Cf. Charles Tilly, As Sociology Meets History: Studies in Social Discontinuity, New
York 1982; Jrgen Kocka, Sozialgeschichte. Begriff Entwicklung Probleme, 2nd edition,
Gttingen 1986, 83-89; id. (ed.), Theorien in der Praxis des Historikers (Geschichte und Ge-
sellschaft. Sonderheft 3), Gttingen 1977; J. Meran, Theorien in der Geschichtswissenschaft.
Die Diskussion ber die Wissenschaftlichkeit der Geschichte, Gttingen 1985; Thomas Wels-
kopp, Theorien in der Geschichtswissenschaft, in: Gunilla Budde et al. (eds.), Geschichte.
Studium Wissenschaft Beruf, Berlin 2008, 138-157.
24 With a similar thrust: William H. Sewell, Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and
Social Transformation, Chicago 2005.
25 Robert Solow, Economic History and Economics (1985), in: John A. Hall/Joseph
M. Bryant (eds.), Historical Methods in the Social Sciences, vol. 1, London 2006, 239-45,
quote 241, 242
66 jrgen kocka
Second, historians are interested in change over time. They tend to argue
in terms of before and after (stressing simultaneity is another aspect
of the same temporal logic). Historians know that new things emerge, but
that they are influenced by preceding constellations. Historians are aware
that observable structures of the present are going to change and will be
different in the future. It is this temporal pattern of understanding human
reality as a process which strongly influences the descriptions, explana-
tions, and interpretations of historians as much as they may differ from
one another in other respects. It can also enhance the analytical power
and the rhetorical effectiveness of social scientists if they adopt such per-
spectives for parts of their argumentation. This would mean to analyse
social systems as social processes. It would mean to perceive social phe-
nomena of the present time as products of preceding constellations, proc-
esses, and actions (in addition to analysing them according to the rules of
empirical social science). It would also mean not to expect that the future
will be a mere prolongation of the present, but something different, albeit
influenced by the present, and with an awareness that the limits of vari-
ability can be ascertained as well. For such a way of thinking, the dimen-
sion of time, the relation between past, present, and future, is central and
defines the way in which reality is perceived. What historians can offer to
social scientists are ways of temporalizing the social realities under inves-
tigation.26
This is an argument in favour of transfers across disciplinary lines, but
not in favour of levelling the differences between disciplines. Historians
can offer such impulses to economists and other social scientists only as
long as they do not fully yield to the methodological rules and customs of
their partners. To quote Robert Solow again:
As I inspect current work in economic history, I have the sinking feeling
that a lot of it looks exactly like the kind of economic analysis I have just fin-
ished caricaturing: the same integrals, the same regressions, the same substi-
tution of t-ratios for thought. Apart from anything else it is no fun reading
the stuff anymore. Far from offering the economic theorist a wide range of
perceptions, this sort of economic history gives back to the theorist the same
routine gruel that the economic theorist gives to the historian. Why should
I believe, when it is applied to thin eighteenth-century data, something that
This may be putting it a bit too strongly, but basically I find it convincing.
The point is that history is important for social scientists not only and
not primarily when it adopts their approaches and applies them to past
phenomena, but when it is self-assured enough to stick to basic principles
of the historical discipline. Interdisciplinary cooperation presupposes dis-
ciplinary differentiation.
Dietrich Rueschemeyer
A mid-twentieth-century debate
I begin by a look backwards into the middle of the past century. In 1947, at
the meetings of the American Sociological Society (as the ASA was then
1 Yet even here I focus on what is called in political science empirical theory. I do not
aim to enter into the discussions on meta-theory that constitute the bulk of sociological
work on theory. To review and critique these theories, which take their cues as much from
philosophical considerations as from empirical research findings, is not to be denigrated.
An outstanding recent example is Joas and Knbl (2009).
70 dietrich rueschemeyer
2 See Parsons (1945, 1948, and 1950); Merton (1945, 1949, and 1968a). They called
theirs a discussion of the present position and the prospects of sociological theory. I ad-
opted a slight variation of their formulation for the title of this essay.
3 If this is doubted about Parsons, it may pay to re-read early essays such as his The
Role of Ideas in Social Action (American Sociological Review, 1938, 3, 652-64). In this pa-
per he argued for asking more specific questions, turning away from philosophical prob-
lems, and moving the discussion into the forum of factual observations and theoretical
analysis on the empirical level (652).
social and political theory 71
4
Recent work on causal mechanisms has brought major advances in the interface be-
tween considerations of method and reflections on empirical theory. To take these matters
up is not possible within the confines of this essay. I cite only three items out of a large lit-
erature: Wendt (1999), Mahoney (2001), and Gorski (2009).
5 Let me preempt two widespread misunderstandings:
First, the generality of theoretical propositions is inherently subject to specified condi-
tions. Theoretical generality is not set off from specificity but from historical concreteness.
Second, successful theoretical propositions enable at least partial prediction. However,
prediction is not identical with forecasting. Prediction takes off from the specified condi-
tions of theoretical propositions. Nobody was able to forecast the collapse of East European
communism, except in vague terms that bordered on prophecy. But quite a few analysts
could have predicted that the East European regimes would fall if the Red Armys guaranty
for their existence were withdrawn.
72 dietrich rueschemeyer
misleading in the ideas they suggest about empirical reality. Here is what
theory frames typically do: they define a theoretical problem; they offer
estimates about which factors often causally relevant factors are most
important for understanding it; they propose conceptualizations of these
factors and of their interrelations; and they give reasons for the identifica-
tion of relevant factors and their conceptualization.
It is in my view not too strong a claim that it is in such theory frames
and not in fully developed and tested empirical theories that we find the
strongest advances in the social sciences over the last 150 years. A few ex-
amples will indicate the broad range of theory frames and may begin to
make the claim plausible.
I am thinking of the powerful ideas of Georg Simmel and Emile Durk-
heim about the relation between social structure and individuality. Durk-
heim (1893/1964) saw differences in individualization grounded in con-
trasting structures of society, in what he called solidarit mchanique and
solidarit organique (otherwise known as Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft or
status- and contract-based societies). The more specific account of Sim-
mel (1908/1955) points to an individuals location in concentric or over-
lapping social circles. A person at the intersection of different circles has
to deal with a great diversity of counterparts and that makes for a more
multifaceted and individualized outlook.
Another example, also dating back to the beginning of the twentieth
century, may well be the most influential theory frame in comparative
politics and macro-sociology: I speak of Webers set of contrasting ideal
(or pure) types of systems of rule traditional, rational legal, and charis-
matic which he offered as more fruitful than the typology of rule by one,
the few and the many. Weber was explicit about the criterion of utility
for theoretical advance: The choice of this rather than some other basis
of classification can only be justified by its results. At the same time, its
worth remembering that this typology has a theoretical thrust, relating
each pure type of rule to contrasting conditions and outcomes. Further-
more, it takes off from differences in legitimation but is not at all con-
fined to legitimating ideas: The type of obedience, the kind of admin-
istrative staff developed to guarantee it, and the mode of authority, will
all differ fundamentally. Equally fundamental is the variation in effect.
(1922/1978, 213)
More recent examples include developments in social movement anal-
ysis. When structural, cultural, and rational action ideas were brought to-
gether to focus movement studies at once on political opportunities, re-
74 dietrich rueschemeyer
6 Incidentally, for some problems this may vastly increase the number of theoretically
relevant empirical observations.
social and political theory 75
Fifth, theory frames are open to revision, based on the success or fail-
ure of their suggestions for hypothesis development. At least the va-
riety I have in mind is not used for shielding analytic work from cri-
tiques that have they basis outside the frame. That, indeed, would be an
abuse of theory frames. You cant play in our sandbox may be a way
of avoiding conflict. But thats a strategy perhaps suitable for children,
not for scholars.
And finally, sixth, theory frames help with the problem of induction.
We all know that empirical findings, even theoretically interesting find-
ings, do not automatically accumulate into broader sets of theoretical
knowledge. For one obstacle, there are always too many directions of
possible generalization. Theory frames represent an at least hypotheti-
cal context that gives meaning to the results of new research. Their
guidance, then, makes it possible to engage in reasonable, if tentative
analytic induction.
Together, these features suggest that theory frames are critical for the
development of empirical theory in ongoing research. Their typical con-
cern with major causal factors that are relevant for sharply defined prob-
lems makes for a particular link to hypotheses about causal mechanisms.
Building on previous research and its critique and being open to critical
revision, theory frames contribute significantly to the integration and ac-
cumulation of research results from the framing of projects, through the
feedback from research results back to frames, and finally to their guid-
ance in tentative analytic induction.
Theory frames therefore became a central element in the project of Us-
able Theory: Themselves often the object of do-it-yourself theory work,
they are critical tools for developing hypotheses in the course of local
research, and they can guide the interpretation of findings. This interac-
tion between theory frames and theoretically oriented empirical research
holds the promise of increasing the power and utility of frames and points
even to the possibility of creating effective, full-fledged theory.
When faced with the question of how to systematize and interrelate spe-
cific analytic tools, I made a second major move in my project. I chose ra-
tional action theory as well as the social action conceptions of the classics
as fundamental structuring devices.
Combining these century-old opponents was a pragmatic as well as a
tentative choice. Pragmatic, because I differentiate these positions from
76 dietrich rueschemeyer
I do not claim that the quartet of chapters in Usable Theory, which inquire
into the actors knowledge, their normative orientations, their changing
needs and wants, and their emotions, transforms the rationalist model
into a full-fledged theory. In fact, what I have to offer in these chapters
amounts in part to reasonable theory frames about knowledge and
norms and in part only to preliminary considerations for the building of
such frames about preferences and emotions. I am, however, convinced
that such inquiries vastly increase our ability to construct more realis-
tic theory frames, whether we build on rational choice models or other
premises.
Cognitive, normative, and preferential orientations as well as their
emotional underpinnings and linkages are significant elements of social
action as well as of wider social formations. They play two distinctive roles
in explorations of social causation.7 First, the four features of the internal
7
As Alexander Wendt has shown in his discussion of the interplay of cognitive prem-
ises and conceptions of the national interest (1999).
social and political theory 77
The larger and more comprehensive levels of social life display a number
of distinctive features that have important consequences for the chances
8
Our ways part radically if everything social becomes the subject of willful imagina-
tion. The retreat from causal argument often remains ambiguous. It may be merely implied
in critiques of positivistic social science. Thus, Seidman (1994, 120-1) seeks to replace a
sociological theory that articulate[s] a language of social action, conflict, and change in
general with a morally committed social theory, presented as diverse narratives that are
proud of their particularistic roots. But the retreat from causal analysis can also be explicit,
as in Clifford Geertzs substitution of interpretive understanding and thick description
for a dismissed laws-and-causes social physics (Geertz 1973, 5; 1983, 3; see also earlier
Winch 1958). The ideals of interpretive description and of social theory rooted in diverse
moral commitments are radicalized in claims that social reality itself is but a text and that
theoretically a given text is open to as many different interpretations as there are articu-
late readers (Brown 1994, 233; Brown 1987; see also Derrida 1981). Refraining from causal
argument is often inconsistent. It is not easy to sustain, especially when the primary im-
pulse is moral critique. It is hard to advance critical arguments about repression and eman-
cipation without making claims about the causal mechanisms involved in these issues of
domination and subordination.
80 dietrich rueschemeyer
9 When I discussed this with a friend who works in molecular biology, his response
was: Yes, of course: once contained within specific systems, the behavior of elements be-
comes less variable and more predictable. This cross-disciplinary argument may be of in-
terest to us, even if biology works with better integrated systems than social analysis does.
social and political theory 81
10
I focus in the following on macro-contexts, leaving the meso-level largely out of
consideration, even though there are some indications that meso-level analysis may hold
specific promises for advances in focused theory frames and delimited causal analysis (Rue-
schemeyer 2009, 245, 276, 298-299).
11
I think for instance of the equilibria which sustained the outstanding educational
institutions in the California of the nineteen-sixties as well as the equilibria that now seem
to make many urban educational systems doomed to fail apparently forever.
82 dietrich rueschemeyer
12
Furthermore, fundamental incompatibilities of social structures and normative ori-
entations make for divergent patterns across societies and cultures, a phenomenon that Isa-
iah Berlin has called value pluralism (Berlin 1997). He contrasted for instance the public
morality Machiavelli distilled from his understanding of ancient Rome with the Christian
moral views that came to see the teaching of Machiavelli as the ultimate in public immoral-
ity. Berlins view of value pluralism is, incidentally, not far from the conception of different
types of societies developed by Talcott Parsons in his Social System (1951).
13
On long-lasting developmental effects of colonialism, which were mediated by the
creation of ethno-racial boundaries, see Mahoney (2010). On long-term effects of state
structures and the difficulty of creating effective states purposefully in a relatively short
time see Lange and Rueschemeyer (2005).
social and political theory 83
and wide-spread support, they rarely come even close to creating a level
playing field for all interests. In theory, their broad support could rest on
Habermasian informed and uncoerced communication. In reality, con-
sent tends to rest on self-interest and successful accommodation, while
active opposition, though often present in some form, may be limited by
resignation, ignorance, and exposure to hegemonic cultural power.
Macro-social formations, then, have strong effects on micro- and
meso-structures and processes. As selecting and stabilizing mechanisms,
these effects enhance the analytic intelligibility of the behavior of indi-
viduals and smaller social units in differently structured contexts. Since at
the same time macro-social formations are themselves typically shaped by
long-term historical developments, this may ultimately tinge all social and
political analysis with historical contingency. Substantively, there are good
reasons to give prominence to long-lasting social, political, and cultural
power in the analysis of macro-social formations.
Conclusion
What, then, can we expect for the future of social and political theory, if
we take full-fledged empirical theory as the ultimate standard of assess-
ment? The obstacles to successful theory formation are daunting and well
known. A quick listing includes at least the following:
The subjective dimension of action (once more: individual perceptions
and interpretations; acceptance of norms and values; a persons needs and
wants; and calm as well as heated emotions) makes for tremendous vari-
ability of motivation, attitudes, and actions. Even sincere introspection
routinely fails to make sense of motivation. In addition, the subjective
definition of the situation trumps in its effects objective givens as the
observer sees them.
This variability is constrained by groups and organizations as well as
by institutions such as those regulating family relations or market behav-
ior; but we encounter a similar, if considerably reduced variability at the
meso- and macro-levels. Varieties of such causal agents as small groups
or to be more dramatic of states have divergent effects depending on
their particular shape as well as on varying structural and cultural condi-
tions.
To complicate things further, quite similar causal factors may counter-
balance each other, while others can substitute for one another. And the
same factor can have opposite effects depending on context, as can be il-
lustrated by small work groups resisting or enhancing cooperation with
84 dietrich rueschemeyer
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Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
Skocpol, Theda. 1979. States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France,
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Weber, Max. 1978. First published in 1922. Economy and Society. 2 vols. Berkeley and
Los Angeles: California University Press.
Wendt, Alexander. 1999. Social Theory of International Relations. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Winch, Peter. 1958. The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Wittrock, Bjrn. 2000. Modernity: One, None, or Many? European Origins and Mo-
dernity as a Global Condition. Daedalus 129, 31-60.
THE CONTINGENCY OF SECULARIZATION:
REFLECTIONS ON THE PROBLEM OF SECULARIZATION
IN THE WORK OF REINHART KOSELLECK1
Hans Joas
The empirical social sciences soon come up against their limits when
examining the topic of contemporary trends in secularization, and even
more so when discussing the links between secularization and mod-
ernization. It is true that the knowledge methodically compiled by these
sciences, on such things as membership figures for religious communities,
the distribution of religious attitudes or the frequency of religious prac-
tices, is wholly indispensable. So initiatives aimed at replacing the patch-
work quilt of individual surveys with a comparative international report
on religion are very welcome indeed.2 And it is equally essential to link
this knowledge of religion with indicators for other social developments,
such as modernization, if we wish not only to record how things stand at
a particular point in time, but also what changes are occurring and what
is causing them.
But such research comes up against its limits because it is confronted
with two questions which it is ill-equipped to tackle. First, those who re-
flect seriously upon their own experiences quickly realize that it is very
difficult for scholars of religion to make empirical statements that are not
moulded by specific underlying religious (or anti-religious) presupposi-
tions. Often, researchers acquire their ideas on practices and organiza-
tional forms from one tradition, mostly Christianity, which then have a
distorting effect when applied to other religious traditions. At times as-
sumptions relating to such things as transcendence, which apply only to
1 This essay started life as a lecture given on 24 August 2006 in Uppsala (Sweden) at a
conference of the International Conceptual History Association. My thanks to Lucian Hl-
scher, Christian Meier, Stephan Schleissing and Peter Vogt for suggested modifications.
2 I am referring to Bertelsmann Stiftung (ed.), What the World Believes. Analysis and
Commentary on the Religion Monitor 2008. Gtersloh 2009. See also my critical discussion
in: Hans Joas, The Religious Situation in the USA, ibid., p. 317-334, particularly p. 321 f.
88 hans joas
certain religions, slip unnoticed into the very definition of what religion
is. Beyond one-sided ideas about religions, the question also arises as to
how we might control methodologically for secularist assumptions about
religion and its development that may as well slip unnoticed into our
work.
Now it may seem that we can remedy this problem quite simply
through clear definitions of the terms used. It may be true that the term
secularization is used in a confusing variety of ways and that unfor-
tunately things are just as bad with the term modernization. But none
of this is inevitable, and the author of a given text could at least set out
clearly how she is using a given term. Nietzsche, however, already made
the profound observation that only concepts that have no history can be
pinned down clearly through definitions.3 Any serious definitional work
that hopes to get a hearing must consider the conceptual field as a whole
and pay attention to a terms history. Otherwise, we will inevitably experi-
ence the wide range of conceptual interpretations as mere confusion and
fail to bring order to the conceptual field. Thus a lack of experience with
conceptual history is the second limit which empirical research comes up
against both here and elsewhere.
From this perspective, conceptual history emerges as anything but an
irrelevant field pursued by esoteric historians of ideas, a field of no sig-
nificance to the practice of the empirical social sciences. Quite the reverse.
Terms such as secularization and modernization are neither value-
neutral nor can they be pinned down through acts of definition. They are
replete with historical assumptions or even those drawn from the philoso-
phy of history. It is especially important to recognize these assumptions if
constant innovations are occurring within a given conceptual field. One
need think only of the debate kicked off by Peter Berger on the desecu-
larization of the world or the debate on post-secularization, which de-
veloped in response to a talk by Jrgen Habermas,4 to see that the field of
secularization is particularly prone to such innovation.
The focus of the present essay, however, is not on the findings of re-
search in the conceptual history of secularization that we are so fortu-
nate to have at our disposal. Hermann Lbbe, Hermann Zabel and Giaco-
mo Marramao have long since completed the crucial work in this field.5
Instead, what I want to do is give the reflective screw a few more turns.
With all due respect to the project of conceptual history, I want to inves-
tigate whether specific religious or secularist premises have slipped un-
noticed into this project itself. Even research in conceptual history is not
free of presuppositions. I shall be exploring this issue with reference to the
lifes work of a historian who, in intellectual and organizational terms, had
no equals as a practitioner of conceptual history at least in the German-
speaking world. My focus is on Reinhart Kosellecks explicit and implicit
view of secularization and its consequences for the project of conceptual
history as a whole.
As already mentioned, the really comprehensive studies in the concep-
tual history of secularization were not carried out by Koselleck himself.
So when he set out his views, he was initially dependent entirely on the
results of others work. One of the findings of this work is that the great
extension in the meaning of the word secularization, from a legal term
for the change in the status of clergy or the expropriation of church prop-
erty, to a key term of general cultural analysis, took place from 1800 on.
Koselleck could easily have taken this as confirmation of his general ideas
on the significance of this historical era (Saddle Period or Sattelzeit). The
conceptual historians themselves did not take on the task of linking the
secularization of 1803 more closely with its intellectual prehistory, and
neither did Koselleck.6
Kosellecks only study explicitly devoted to the topic of secularization is
quite different in nature.7 But as we shall see, it is of tremendous relevance
to the issue of the religious presuppositions underpinning the project of
conceptual history.
8 Ibid., p. 194.
92 hans joas
9 Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Cambridge MA/London: MIT
1985, p. 92.
10 For a detailed discussion of the relationship between Koselleck and Carl Schmitt,
see: Reinhart Mehring, Begriffsgeschichte mit Carl Schmitt, in: Hans Joas/Peter Vogt
(eds.), Begriffene Geschichte. Beitrge zum Werk Reinhart Kosellecks. Frankfurt/Main 2011
(forthcoming). There is considerable controversy over this issue. In addition to the direct
influence we must also consider the indirect one, through Schmitts impact on Otto Brunner
and Brunners impact on the project of conceptual history for example. Emphasis on this in-
fluence is to be found in the work of James Van Horn Melton, Otto Brunner and the Ideo-
logical Origins of Begriffsgeschichte, in: Hartmut Lehmann and Melvin Richter (eds.), The
Meaning of Historical Terms and Concepts: New Studies on Begriffsgeschichte, Washington,
D.C.: German Historical Institute 1996, and that of Melvin Richter, The History of Politi-
cal and Social Concepts. A Critical Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1995, p.
26 ff. This influence is disputed by scholars such as Christof Dipper, Die Geschichtlichen
Grundbegriffe. Von der Begriffsgeschichte zur Theorie der historischen Zeiten, in: Histori-
sche Zeitschrift 270 (2000), p. 281-308.
11
An excellent set of arguments contra Schmitt in this connection is provided by
Horst Dreier, Kanonistik und Konfessionalisierung Marksteine auf dem Weg zum Staat,
in: Georg Siebeck (ed.), Artibus ingenuis. Tbingen: Mohr 2001, p. 133-169. For an impor-
tant recent take on this topic, see Jos Casanova, Das Problem der Religion und die ngste
der skularen europischen Demokratien, in: Casanova, Europas Angst vor der Religion.
Berlin: Berlin University Press 2009, p. 7-30.
12
Wilfried Nippel, Krieg als Erscheinungsform der Feindschaft, in: Reinhart Meh-
ring (ed.), Carl Schmitt. Der Begriff des Politischen: ein kooperativer Kommentar. Berlin:
Akademie 2003, p. 61-70.
the contingency of secularization 93
Throughout his life, Koselleck thought it highly unfair when his interest in
Schmitt was interpreted as political proximity as for example in an early
review by Jrgen Habermas.13 As his sympathetic analysis of leading Eng-
lish Christian historian Herbert Butterfield shows,14 Koselleck also drew
on other sources to articulate his own basic moral and political sense.
With respect to Butterfield, he underlines that because for him every war
is a sin, on the basis of Christian motives he vehemently rejects the idea
that one party alone can monopolize the law. Everyone shares in sin, even
the just. Should the roles of guilt and innocence be allocated in an over-
confident way, then what we are dealing with is extreme irresponsibility, a
particularly intractable sin of the holier-than-thou variety, the sin of un-
adulterated self-righteousness. The consequence is a moral simplification of
the complex historical reality. The enemy becomes a criminal, the self-right-
eous becomes at once party and judge. A clear case of utopian arrogance in
other words.15
13
Jrgen Habermas, Zur Kritik an der Geschichtsphilosophie (1960), in: Habermas,
Kultur und Kritik. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp 1973, p. 355-364.
Reinhart Koselleck, review of Herbert Butterfield, Christianity, Diplomacy and War,
14
in: Archiv fr Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie 41 (1955), p. 591-595.
15 Ibid., p. 592.
16 See Hans Joas, War and Modernity. Cambridge: Polity 2003, esp. p. 21-23 and 152-
157.
17
Mehring, loc. cit.
94 hans joas
But I believe Karl Lwith is far more important than Schmitt to un-
derstanding Kosellecks view of the topic of secularization. Lwith was
not only one of the examiners of Kosellecks doctoral thesis. Above all,
Lwiths book Meaning in History. The Theological Implications of the Phi-
losophy of History had a profound influence on Koselleck.18 The books key
aim is to interpret modern philosophy of history and notions of progress
as the secularization of the Christian view of history. It first appeared in
English in 1949. In an interview in 2002,19 Koselleck described how, as a
student, he translated significant portions of this book to his own ends;
he felt that the three months he spent on this endeavour amounted to
perhaps the most instructive bout of intellectual work of his entire life.
Lwiths influence on the third chapter of Critique and Crisis in particu-
lar is unmistakable. Lwiths own anthropological orientation against
Heidegger and Gadamer has also been correctly identified as one of the
reasons why Koselleck attempted to give his theory of history an anthro-
pological foundation.20 Koselleck wrote the foreword to Lwiths autobi-
ography21 and first published one of his most important and influential
essays (Historia Magistra Vitae) in the festschrift for Lwith.22 In the fa-
mous dispute between Karl Lwith and Hans Blumenberg he unambigu-
ously backed Lwith.23 Blumenberg in turn saw clearly how close Kosel-
leck was to his adversary and rejected Kosellecks view of the experience
of acceleration and the eschatological origins of political utopianism.24
So for all kinds of reasons, it seems likely that Lwiths theory of secu-
larization played a constitutive role for Koselleck. The link to Lwith is
soon apparent in Critique and Crisis. The beginning of the chapter The
Philosophy of Progress and its Prognosis of Revolution develops the
books key idea, namely that the gulf between the bourgeoisies sense of
25 Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis. Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Mod-
ern Society. Cambridge MA: MIT 1988, p. 130.
26 Ibid.
27 Jrgen Habermas, Karl Lwith: Stoic Retreat from Historical Consciousness
(1963), in: Habermas, Philosophical-Political Profiles. Cambridge MA: MIT Press 1983, p.
79-98.
96 hans joas
32
Jan Marco Sawilla, Geschichte und Geschichten zwischen Providenz und Mach-
barkeit. berlegungen zu Reinhart Kosellecks Semantik historischer Zeiten, in: Joas/Vogt
(eds.), Begriffene Geschichte, forthcoming.
33
Ibid.
34
Ibid.
zweites konfessionelles Zeitalter, in: Ge-
35
Olaf Blaschke, Das 19.
Jahrhundert. Ein
schichte und Gesellschaft 26 (2000), p. 38-75, esp. p. 46.
98 hans joas
It would be even more vital to make this distinction if we included the his-
tory of philosophy in America, especially American neo-Hegelianism and
the philosophy of time produced by pragmatism.36 Koselleck also makes
it clear that he believes there is common ground between his critique of
historical utopias and the critique of theological eschatologies. In one of
his programmatic statements, he went so far as to underline that it was
the aim of his studies on temporal structures to demonstrate the unreality
of both ways of understanding history: This would involve finding the
temporal structures which could define as unreal the empirical content of
both theological eschatology and historico-philosophical utopias.37 What
I want to highlight is that he makes no attempt to first argue the case for
the unreality of theological eschatology. All his efforts were directed to-
wards critiquing the utopias produced by philosophy of history; this other
critique was simply assumed as something long since completed. In this
sense we may state that his entire research programme was underpinned
at the very least by the assumption of secularization.
Kosellecks late studies on remembrance of the war dead, as nowhere
else in his work, vividly explored the loss of ideas and conceptions of the
beyond.38 Yet even here he views this loss as simple fact without even
beginning to seek an understanding of transcendence of contemporary
relevance, now that it is no longer presented through spatial metaphors.
All of Kosellecks studies on the 18th century are pervaded by statements
on advancing secularization. Yet Koselleck is familiar with the entire spec-
trum of attitudes towards religion in the age of Enlightenment from the
German Enlightenment, which remained essentially religious in nature,39
to predictions of the disappearance of Christianity, as found for example
in one of the political testaments of Frederick II of Prussia. Particularly
interesting in this connection is his 1982 study Aufklrung und die Gren-
zen ihrer Toleranz (Enlightenment and the Limits of its Tolerance).
36 See for example George Herbert Mead, The Philosophy of the Present. La Salle IL:
Open Court 1932; see also Hans Joas, Temporality and Intersubjectivity, in: Joas, G.H.
Mead. A Contemporary Re-Examination of his Thought. Cambridge: Polity 1985, p. 167-198.
37 Reinhart Koselleck, History, Histories and Formal Time Structures, in: Koselleck,
Futures Past. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004, p. 93-104, here p. 103.
See for example Reinhart Koselleck, Zur politischen Ikonologie des gewaltsamen To-
38
des. Ein deutsch-franzsischer Vergleich. Basel: Schwabe 1998.
39 Reinhart Koselleck, The Status of the Enlightenment in German History, in: Hans
Joas/Klaus Wiegandt (eds.), The Cultural Values of Europe. Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press 2008, p. 253-264. See also the recent work by David Sorkin, The Religious Enlighten-
ment. Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna. Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press 2008.
the contingency of secularization 99
But the real point of his remarks is to demonstrate what a hard time the
Enlightenment had practising the tolerance it had demanded for itself .42
This begins with John Lockes exclusion of Catholics and atheists from tol-
erance and extends from the intolerant state religion that began to emerge
in the work of Rousseau to attempts to make the demand for freedom of
religion a vehicle for propagating a new social order while disregarding
the Christian religion.43 This actually meant tacitly setting new limits
of intolerance. So the basic thesis of Kosellecks highly multi-faceted di-
agnosis is that any kind of tolerance leads us back to aporetic situations
that cannot be resolved in any obvious way. () Even the paradigm shift
() of the 18th century, from the disputes over religious revelation to the
postulates of a new social order, entailed resulting costs which we are still
paying to this day.44
40
Reinhart Koselleck, Aufklrung und die Grenzen ihrer Toleranz, in: Trutz Rend-
torff (ed.), Glaube und Toleranz. Das theologische Erbe der Aufklrung. Gtersloh: Mohn
1982, reprinted in: Koselleck, Begriffsgeschichten. Studien zur Semantik und Pragmatik der
politischen und sozialen Sprache. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp 2006, p. 340-362, esp. p. 343.
Reference to Johannes Khn, Toleranz und Offenbarung. Leipzig: Meiner 1923.
41 Ibid., p. 343.
42 Ibid., p. 344.
43 Ibid., p. 352.
44 Ibid., p. 344 f.
100 hans joas
46 Bernard Yack, The Fetishism of Modernities. Notre Dame IN: University of Notre
Dame Press 1997; Herbert Schndelbach, Zur Rehabilitierung des Animal Rationale. Frank-
furt/Main: Suhrkamp 1990, p. 241.
47 Jos Casanova, Beyond European and American Exceptionalisms: toward a Global
Perspective, in: Grace Davie et al. (eds.), Predicting Religion. Christian, Secular and Alterna-
tive Futures. Aldershot: Ashgate 2003, p. 17-29.
48 David Martin, A General Theory of Secularization. Oxford: Blackwell 1978.
102 hans joas
49 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative. Vol. 3. Chicago: Chicago University Press 1988
(on Koselleck, see esp. p. 207-240).
50 Bo Strth, review of R. Koselleck, Zeitschichten, in European Journal of Social Theory
4 (2001), p. 531-535, p. 532.
See for example Reinhart Koselleck, Preuen zwischen Reform und Revolution. All-
51
gemeines Landrecht, Verwaltung und soziale Bewegung von 1791 bis 1848. Stuttgart: Klett
1967. For an important attempt to connect conceptual history and historical sociology see
Bjrn Wittrock, Cultural Crystallization and Conceptual Change, in: Jussi Kurunmki/
Kari Palonen (eds.), Zeit, Geschichte und Politik. Zum achtzigsten Geburtstag von Reinhart
Koselleck. Jyvskyl 2002, p. 105-134.
the contingency of secularization 103
52
Wolfhart Pannenberg, Weltgeschichte und Heilsgeschichte, in: Reinhart Koselleck/
Wolf-Dieter Stempel (eds.), Geschichte Ereignis und Erzhlung. Munich: Fink 1973 (Poetik
und Hermeneutik V), p. 307-323, esp. p. 315.
53
Pannenberg (see fn. 52). See also Erfordert die Einheit der Geschichte ein Sub-
jekt?, ibid., p. 478-490; Trutz Rendtorff, Geschichtstheologie, in: Joachim Ritter (ed.),
Historisches Wrterbuch der Philosophie. Vol. III. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchge-
sellschaft 1974, p. 439-441; Karl Rahner, Weltgeschichte und Heilsgeschichte, in: Rahner,
Schriften zur Theologie V. Einsiedeln: Benziger 1962, p. 115-135.
54 Pannenberg, ibid., p. 321.
104 hans joas
in historical theory open up the way for such studies though he himself
might not have joined us for the journey.
Wolf Lepenies
I want to draw the attention of the reader to the intersection of two intel-
lectual milieus that, as a rule, have not been seen as connected with each
other: the visual arts and the social sciences in mid-19th-century Paris.1
In the first part of this essay, I try to capture the moment when mo-
dernity became a catchword first in French and then in European in-
tellectual discourse. The mixture of the fugitive and the eternal, of pre-
cision and fantasy that for Charles Baudelaire was characteristic of what
he called la modernit, is a distinctive feature of the etchings of Charles
Meryon (18211868), who tried to preserve the remembrance of the fast-
disappearing architectural treasures of old Paris.
In the second part, I trace a network of relations in the time of Na-
poleon III that connects Meryon and a group of writers and artists close
to him with the circle around Auguste Comte. Comte regarded himself
as the founding father of sociology, a discipline he would have preferred
to call social physics had the name not already been used by the Bel-
gian statistician Alphonse Qutelet. Later in his non-career, Comte tried
to transform sociological science first into a social movement and then
into a religion to which he appointed himself High Priest. Positivism, as
he called it, was first a scientific program and then became a doctrine, a
utopian blueprint to change the world. The mixture of precision and fan-
tasy is as characteristic of Auguste Comtes work as it is of the writings of
Baudelaire and the etchings of Charles Meryon.
In the last part of my essay, I shall argue that we have to reframe the es-
tablished narrative about the origins of sociology. The experience of living
1 Given the title of this essay it is only appropriate to mention that I have seen the best
prints of Meryon in the Cambridge (Mass.) home of an eminent sociologist: Daniel Bell. I
can hardly see anything but a coincidence in this. Cf. my book Auguste Comte. Die Macht
der Zeichen, Munich (Hanser) 2010.
106 wolf lepenies
I.
In the middle of the 19th century, Paris, whose population reached a mil-
lion in 1846, was a city where the owner of a small shop could still feel
at ease; but members of the emerging upper middle classes the traders
and factory owners, the speculators and financiers felt increasingly re-
stricted in their activities by the governments conservative financial and
economic policy. The crowdedness of the city with its squalid streets and
dark alleys amplified this feeling. The July monarchy had contributed lit-
tle to the modernization of Paris. Its physiognomy did not really change
until Baron Haussmann was entrusted, as Prefect of the Dpartement of
the Seine, with the transformation of Paris in 1853, shortly after Louis Na-
poleons coup.
Haussmann had to carry out a political master plan that used the rhet-
oric of embellishment while aiming to get rid of pockets of poverty and
sedition. The reconstruction of Paris became the classic model of what
was later to be called the City Beautiful movement. Haussmanns con-
temporaries, however, were first confronted with unheard-of energies of
ugly destruction. At the very beginning of his memoirs, the baron boasts
that he did not hesitate for a moment to demolish even the building in
which he himself was born.
Paris had always been a self-centered city where modest lodging-
houses were called Htel de Paris et de lUnivers. For Parisian intellectuals,
Europe was the chosen continent, France the chosen people, and Paris
the mount from which the new gospel had to be delivered.2 Yet without
Haussmanns pitiless demolitions, the debate on modernity that shaped
European thought in the second half of the 19th century might have de-
veloped much later and perhaps in another place. Living in a city that was
proud of its past and at the same time was changing completely, Charles
Baudelaire could not but define modernity as the ephemeral, the fugitive,
2 Frank E. Manuel, The Prophets of Paris, Cambridge, Mass. (Harvard University Press)
1962, p. 5.
the missing sentence 107
the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the
immutable.3 Baudelaire was the first to turn the adjective modern into
a noun. But whenever he used the word modernity la modernit
he put it in quotation marks, as if he were trying something out. Living a
modern life meant living in sustained ambiguity.
When Baudelaire drew up a list of future projects, the first section was
called Choses parisiennes. The disappearance of the old Paris became a
leitmotif of Les Fleurs du Mal. Baudelaires experience of loss found its ex-
pression in city poems that, once we have seen Charles Meryons etchings,
make it virtually impossible for us to read these poems today without see-
ing the etchings in our minds eye once again:
To craft my eclogues in chaste, proper wise,
I want to lie, outspread against the skies
Like olden-day astrologers; and muse
Hard by church towers, rising high, and whose
Dour, solemn hymns waft on the wind. Here, in
My garret chamber will I sit, with chin
In hand, gaze at the workshops much ado;
The chimneys, steeples, reaching to the blue
Ship masts in city guise and somberly
Meditate on the heavens eternity.4
3 Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, in: Baudelaire, The Painter of Mod-
ern Life and Other Essays. Translated and edited by Jonathan Mayne, New York (Da Capo
Press) 1986, p. 13.
4 Charles Baudelaire, Paysage (Landscape), in: Selected Poems from Les Fleurs du
Mal. A Bilingual Edition, English renderings and notes by Norman R. Shapiro, Chicago/
London (The University of Chicago Press) 1998, p. 156/157. Illustrations of Meryons work
are based on prints in my possession.
5
Translation by Mitch Cohen. Cf. Charles Baudelaire, The Salon of 1859, in: Baude-
laire, Art in Paris 18451862. Salons and Other Exhibitions. Translated and edited by Jona-
than Mayne, London (Phaidon Press) 1965, p. 200-201.
108 wolf lepenies
Ill. 1. Meryon, Le Stryge (The Vampire). The print [1853] carries an inscription by
Meryon which I quote in translation: Lust, a foul vampire, insatiable and lewd, / Foreer oer
the great city covets its obscene food.6 (Insatiable vampire lternelle luxure / Sur la Grande
Cit convoite sa pature.)
Ill. 2. Meryon, La Tour de lHorloge. The print from 1852 shows parts of the Palace of
Justice.
Charles Meryon was born in 1821, the same year as Charles Baudelaire.
He was the illegitimate son of an English doctor and a French dancer at
the Paris Opera. The young Meryon spent part of his school days in Mar-
seille, where he soon discovered his love for mathematics and for the sea.
In 1837, he entered a naval academy and, beginning in 1841, sailed the
oceans as a midshipman for six years on the corvette Le Rhin on journeys
that took him as far as the South Seas with a long stay in New Zealand
and the Polynesian islands. He already began to draw as a seaman and fi-
nally resigned the service to become an artist. In 1850, he started work on
the Eaux-fortes sur Paris, gaining recognition from Baudelaire and Vic-
tor Hugo, but without any commercial success: he was unable to sell his
prints for the price of a single franc. A persecution mania and depressions
that had always plagued him grew stronger and stronger. He was finally
committed to the insane asylum in Charenton in 1866, where he died two
years later, one year before Charles Baudelaire.
Baudelaires poems seem as if permeated by Meryons etchings. When
Baudelaire describes homo duplex, the modern man, as always double,
action and intention, dream and reality, and detects a glimpse of human
perfection in the coming together of calculation and fantasy, he also char-
acterizes Meryon.
The affinity with Meryon becomes even more obvious in Baudelaires
studies of Edgar Allan Poe. Writing about Poe, Baudelaire could just as
110 wolf lepenies
well have been writing about Meryon: Poe is always correct. It is a very
remarkable fact that a man with such a bold and roving imagination
should at the same time be so fond of rules and capable of careful analyses
and patient research.7 Meryon, too, was always carried away by ideas be-
yond the bounds of common sense, yet even in the madhouse would not
give up his conviction that accuracy is a duty and not merely a virtue.
In 1860, Meryon showed Baudelaire one of the most impressive prints
of the Eaux-fortes sur Paris, La Morgue from 1854:
Ill. 4. Meryon, La Morgue. The morgue had been constructed on the Ile de la Cit in 1568
between the Pont Saint-Michel and the Petit Pont. It had previously been a slaughterhouse.
7 Baudelaire on Poe. Critical Papers, translated and edited by Lois and Francis E. Hys-
lop, Jr., State College, Pa. (Bald Eagle Press) 1952, p. 66.
8 That could be a risky business: An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly
primitive stage of reflection. Baudelaire thought him a profound philosopher, the neglect
of whose golden utterances stamped his native land with infamy. Nevertheless, Poe was
vastly the greater charlatan of the two, as well as the greater genius. Henry James, Charles
Baudelaire, in: James, Literary Criticism (French Writers/Other European Writers/The
Prefaces to the New York Edition), New York (The Library of America) 1984, p. 154.
the missing sentence 111
author? Meryon asked Baudelaire to tell him when and under exactly
what circumstances Edgar Allan Poes story about the murder in the Rue
Morgue had been written, so that he could compare it with his own expe-
riences. For Meryon, Poes story The Murder in the Rue Morgue was full of
frightening allusions to his, Meryons, own destiny; he felt akin to an au-
thor who throughout his life had also experienced the horror of the cor-
rect classes at his lack of respectability.9 At the same time, Meryon voiced
doubts whether Poe was really the name of an individual. And when the
astounded Baudelaire asked him who he thought had written Poes works,
Meryon whispered: A society of very skillful literary men, very powerful
and informed about everything.
In Meryons compulsion to give to even the minutest details of his etch-
ings a disturbing historical or metaphysical meaning, Baudelaire saw the
side effect of an everlasting system of delusions. After he met Meryon for
the first time, Baudelaire who not free of coquetry declared himself al-
ways close to insanity, thanked God like a Pharisee for his own health. It is
worth mentioning, in this respect, Henry Jamess verdict that Baudelaire,
on the whole, was passionless: He knew evil not by experience, not as
something within himself, but by contemplation and curiosity, as some-
thing outside of himself Evil for him consists primarily of a great deal
of lurid landscape and unclean furniture.10 That was not true of Meryon
who had experienced, as far as we can tell, evil as something within him-
self.
When Baudelaire asked Meryon why, in this etching, he had replaced
the hot air balloon in the upper left-hand corner in a later state of the
print with a swarm of birds of prey after all it was rather unusual that
so many eagles could be seen in the skies over Paris Meryon replied an-
grily that his depiction was indeed true to reality, for those people by
which he meant the imperial government had recently, as in ancient
Rome, released a swarm of eagles to obtain portents of the future. This, he
added, had even been reported in the official journal of the government.
Baudelaire saw in Meryons words nothing but delusion. Karl Marx, how-
ever, who in the Eighteenth Brumaire had poked fun at Napoleon IIIs imi-
tation of a Roman emperor, might well have judged Meryons phantasms
to reveal deep historical insight.
9 These are the words Thomas Hardy used on the occasion of Poes 100th birthday.
Cf. Thomas Hardys Public Voice. The Essays, Speeches and Miscellaneous Prose. Edited by
Michael Millgate, Oxford (Clarendon Press) 2001, p. 300.
10
Henry James, op. cit., p. 155.
112 wolf lepenies
Ill. 5. Meryon, Le Pont au Change. Fifth state. The etching dates from 1854.
In another print, Meryons first original etching from 1850, Le Petit Pont,
Meryon drew Baudelaires attention to the contours of a sphinx, a shadow
cast by the stonework on the side wall of the Pont Neuf, which he alleged
had appeared in the etching without his own intention. When he noticed
this peculiarity for the first time, he remembered that he had executed the
work shortly before Louis Napoleons coup. More than any other living
being, said Meryon, the deeds and physiognomy of the prince reminded
him of a sphinx. Even in the immediate entourage of the future emperor,
many would have agreed with this view. Meryons illusions tell us some-
thing about a sick person; but at the same time they point to pathological
elements of the Second Empire.
the missing sentence 113
11
Baudelaire repudiated with indignation the charge that he was what is called a re-
alist, and he was doubtless right in doing so. He had too much fancy to adhere strictly to
the real; he always embroiders and elaborates endeavours to impart that touch of strange-
ness and mystery which is the very raison dtre of poetry. Baudelaire was a poet, and for a
poet to be a realist is of course nonsense. Henry James, op. cit., p. 156.
114 wolf lepenies
II.
Thomas Mann, The Sufferings and Greatness of Richard Wagner, in: Past Masters
12
and Other Papers, New York (Alfred A. Knopf) 1933, p. 93.
the missing sentence 115
13
Illustrations 8, 9, 10, 11, 13 are taken from photographs and paintings in Auguste
Comtes last home in Paris, 10 rue Monsieur-le-Prince. I thank the Maison dAuguste Com-
te, especially Aurlia Giusti as well as the photographer Ella Charbon. All other illustrations
are based on prints in my possession.
116 wolf lepenies
Auguste Comtes mad yet serious life, in which fame was always attend-
ed by poverty, is painfully present in his well-preserved last apartment in
the rue Monsieur-le-Prince No. 10, near the Odon. One is taken aback
at how completely the spirit of Comte continues to dwell there. Comtes
egocentricity becomes evident. In his will he decreed that his apartment
was to be kept exactly as he had left it: his desk, the visitor is assured, still
stands where it stood when Comte used it, namely against a wall; upon
this wall, occupying the entire width of the table, there hangs a mirror.
While he was writing, Auguste Comte was always looking at himself.14
On the wall behind his desk is a gallery of predecessors of the positiv-
ist movement that has been arranged by Comtes followers. Kant, Leibniz,
Wolf Lepenies, Between Literature and Science. The Rise of Sociology, Cambridge
14
(Cambridge University Press/Editions de la Maison des Sciences de lHomme) 1988, p. 46.
the missing sentence 117
Descartes and others build the frame for the image in the center: the por-
trait of Auguste Comte himself.
Ill. 10. Joseph Guichard, Auguste Comte. Written by hand in the lower left-hand corner
of this drawing we read, and I translate: Portrait of Auguste Comte drawn in 1850, in my
presence, by Joseph Guichard. I have copied it for my etching. Bracquemond.
118 wolf lepenies
Ill. 12. Flix Bracquemond, Charles Meryon. The verse is by Meryon and reads, in
translation: Monsieur Bracquemond has depicted in this image the grotesque features of the
sombre Meryon. Translation by Richard S. Schneiderman, see footnote 6.
the missing sentence 119
The two portraits of Meryon and Comte were works of a very young art-
ist. Born in 1833, Flix Bracquemond lived into the first year of World
War One after having been involved in the great artistic movements of the
19th century. He was a friend of Manet, Pissaro, and Degas. Bracquemond
was also a friend of Meryon until Meryon fell out with him, as he did
with almost everyone. And just as the collaboration between Meryon and
Baudelaire failed to come about, a joint venture between Baudelaire and
Bracquemond also failed. Originally, Bracquemond was to create an al-
legorical frontispiece for the second edition of Les Fleurs du Mal (1861),
but Baudelaire was dissatisfied with what he called the horrible sketch.
He repudiated Bracquemond for his overdose of imagination in the same
manner as Meryon once had repudiated Baudelaire.
Flix Bracquemond grew up in a positivist microcosm. This micro-
cosm included the painter Joseph Guichard (18061880) who had studied
with Ingres and Delacroix, as well as the physician Horace de Montgre,
who took care of the ailing Auguste Comte in his final years. Converted
to positivism in 1847, de Montgre soon became a preacher of the new
creed, wandering through France to turn peasants and artisans, intellec-
tuals and engineers into pupils and disciples of his master. Comte later
appointed him a member of a small, influential group assigned the task
of reconstructing the French educational system after the final victory of
positivism.
This educational reformer raised the children of the painter Joseph
Guichard and along with them, Flix Bracquemond. On days when
Comte received guests, the doctor took the young Bracquemond to the
rue Monsieur-le-Prince to give him the opportunity to meet Frances
greatest thinker. Comte presented the 18-year-old with the first volumes
of his Systme de Politique positive, of which the young artist did not un-
derstand a word. Bracquemond did not understand the Catchisme positif
any better, but he still learned long passages of it by heart.15 Later he may
have regretted this chore, for a quarrel with Comte was not far away.
Comte knew other artists as well. Among those upon whom he be-
stowed the honorary title true positive artist was a well-known sculptor:
16
Whoever has been to Paris, has seen works by Antoine Etex. He is the sculptor of
two of the four large groups on the Arc de Triomphe: La Rsistance and La Paix.
Auguste Comte in a letter to Audiffrent, July 6, 1852; Comte, Correspondance Gn-
17
rale, Paris (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales / Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin)
1984, Vol. VI, p. 314.
the missing sentence 121
III.
Modernism grew out of the life experiences of a group of artists and writ-
ers who witnessed the transformation of a mostly still-medieval Paris into
a 19th-century metropolis. Flix Bracquemond, the portraitist of both
Auguste Comte and Charles Meryon, described his own positivist belief
122 wolf lepenies
as the unity of intelligence, culture, and passion. The striving for this unity
characterizes the milieu of modernism, a milieu of artists and intellectuals
whose lives and letters often display surprising parallels by transcending
the boundaries between art and science. The Systme de Politique positive,
the most important work by the late Comte, appeared in 1851, the year of
Louis Napoleons coup; at exactly the same time, Meryon began his work
on the Eaux-fortes sur Paris. Comtes sociology and Meryons etchings are
reactions to a traumatic social change that found its most vivid and to a
large degree painful expression in the destruction of the old Paris. It is not
hard to imagine Meryon capturing Comtes positivist metropolis in new
Eaux-fortes sur Paris.
Intellectual historians, however, have not paid enough attention to the
fact that disciplines like sociology and social movements like positivism
both originated in Paris. In his book The Prophets of Paris (1962), Frank
E. Manuel went so far as to accuse the adherents of Saint-Simon as well as
the followers of Comte of having lived in Paris without even being aware
of the city: The prophets lived in eternal philosophical negation of what
they were experiencing every day.18 The experience of living in a city like
Paris, however, was no less formative for Auguste Comte and his work
than it was for Meryon and Charles Baudelaire.
In October 1814, Comte left Montpellier for Paris to enter the Ecole
Polytechnique. Immediately upon his arrival, the 16-year-old who had
never been to Paris before wrote to a friend: The spirit of Paris has truly
changed.19 He would neither manage nor ever wish to dpariser him-
self, as he had once suggested to a friend.20 In the city, Comte moved from
apartment to apartment twelve times. Paris, cest la France, lOccident, la
Terre!, wrote Auguste Comte, among whose unfinished projects resem-
bling Baudelaires Choses parisiennes was a book about Paris. The found-
ing father of sociology never felt more flattered than on the day when a
letter from abroad reached him with no more address than M. Auguste
Comte, auteur du systme de politique positive, Paris though he did
note, with a touch of envy, that for Newton the address Europe once had
turned out to be sufficient.
For Baudelaire, modernism was a syndrome of personal mobility and
the acceleration of social life. He could have described his preferred activ-
18
Manuel, op. cit., p. 7.
Comte in a letter to Pouzin, November 26, 1814; Comte, Correspondance Gnrale,
19
op. cit., Vol. I, p. 4.
20
Comte in a letter to Valat, September 24, 1819, op. cit., p. 52.
the missing sentence 123
ity as courir isol les routes et les rues running all by himself through
the roads and the streets. But these are the words of Auguste Comte. In-
trieur, Spleen, Flanerie catchphrases of modernism, inseparable for us
today from Baudelaires uvre. Yet I am quoting them here from the let-
ters and works of Auguste Comte. Such similarities of vocabulary point to
formative life experiences in a comparable milieu. Auguste Comte even
resembles a flaneur when he seeks compensation for his sedentary way
of life in systematic wanderings through Paris. For him, who was always
pondering new projects, the city became one huge study.
Comte remained an outsider to the French educational system all his
life. He found no better position, tellingly enough, than that of an am-
bulant professor, an external entrance examiner for the Ecole Polytech-
nique. This job forced him to take long trips sometimes lasting months
through the provinces of France. His letters reporting on these journeys
are fascinating essays whose leitmotif is the traditionally tense relation-
ship between the French metropolis and the provinces. Provincial mores
led Comte to gladly accept what he called the dictatorship of Paris: in
Metz, for instance, the presence of the military bothered him; he didnt
even want to set foot in Angers; and Rennes was tolerable only by not go-
ing out, but reading Manzoni in his room instead. Later, Comte devised a
precise ranking for the cities of France, with Lyon, his ville chrie, sec-
ond only to Paris.
To realize his utopian dreams, Comte wanted first to appoint one hun-
dred significant European intellectuals to a central positivist committee.
Then, an alliance between philosophers and proletarians would have to
be formed. Both the committee and the alliance needed as their center
a metropolis that was at the same time an industrial city: Paris. Comte
developed a truly revolutionary housing policy that would have subverted
the reactionary goals of the urban renewal carried out by Napoleon III
and Baron Haussmann. In the future, the great Paris townhouses were to
be owned by the workers living in them. Those who had so far merely
camped in the city this is the expression Comte used and who were
at the absolute mercy of their landlords were now to receive the benefit
of secure housing. In Paris, positivism would create a true Habitat for
Humanity.
For Comte, Paris was not only the undisputed capital of France; it was
also to become the capital of the future occidental republic and finally the
holy city of the worldwide religion of humanity. Yet after the final victory
of the positivist movement, the city of Paris would restrict its ambition to
that of a religious center. Therefore Comte, the early propagandist of the
124 wolf lepenies
Lars Magnusson
1 For this connection and related topics see Donald Winch and Patrick OBrien (eds),
The Political Economy of British Historical Experience 16881914. Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press 2002.
2 See Lars Magnusson, The Tradition of Free Trade. London: Routledge 2004, ch. 1.
126 lars magnusson
3 Ibid. For the original see Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, Volume I: Regarding
Method. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002.
4 For this see Lars Magnusson, Nation, State and the Industrial Revolution. Abingdon:
Routledge 2009, pp. 75f.
5 Donald Winch, Wealth and Life. Essays on the Intellectual History of Political Econo-
my in Britain, 18481914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2009, p. 17.
political economy in a historical context 127
6 See Lars Magnusson, The Reception of a Political Economy of Free Trade The
Case of Sweden. In Andrew Marrison, Free Trade and its Reception 18151969: Freedom
and Trade, Volume I. London: Routledge 1998, p. 146f.
7 Joseph A Schumpeter, A History of Economic Analysis. London: George Allen & Un-
win 1972, p. 265.
8 Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People: England 17831846. Oxford: Oxford
University Press 2006.
128 lars magnusson
9 E.A. Wrigley, Continuity, Chance and Change. The Character of the Industrial Revolu-
tion in England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1988, p. 5.
10 Boyd Hilton, op. cit., p. 628f.
11 Asa Briggs, Victorian People, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1971, p. 23f.
12 Samuel Hollander, The Economics of John Stuart Mill, Volume II. Toronto: University
of Toronto Press 1985, p. 913f.
political economy in a historical context 129
13 See Lars Magnusson (ed), Free Trade and Protection in America. London: Routledge
2000 (4 volumes), especially volume 1, Introduction.
14 For a discussion on such translations, see Lars Magnusson, The Invention of Free
Trade. London: Routledge 2005, ch. 1.
130 lars magnusson
of subsistence, but that it makes a start forward at every temporary and oc-
casional increase of food, by which means it is continually going beyond the
average increase, and is repressed by periodical returns of severe want, and
the diseases arising from it.15
In this light, it is perhaps ironic that the influence of his theory of popula-
tion was limited in the Nordic countries, including Sweden. Neither his
Essay nor his other publications were translated into Swedish during the
nineteenth century. Moreover, his influence upon the actual development
of economics in the Nordic countries seems to have been slight indeed.
Around 1870, however, his ideas on population increase and its evil so-
cial effects began being used by a group of radical social reformers as an
argument for birth control; among them was the later famous economist
Knut Wicksell. In Sweden this group has been labelled neo-Malthusian.
But its gospel had little to do with economics proper,16 even though it is
true that David Davidson, professor of National Economy in Uppsala
and one of the introducers of modern marginal utility theory in Sweden,
was inspired by Ricardian theory (which also included some Malthusian
thought). However, the traces of Malthus in his theorizing at the end of
the nineteenth century are miniscule, to say the least.17
At least some readers were aware before 1870 that in addition to for-
mulating his population theory, Malthus had been involved in a princi-
pally important argument with Ricardo with regard to what later has
been named Says law, which concerned the question whether or not gluts
and under-consumption were possible in a commercial society. But due
to a number of circumstances, his population theory was not accepted
by scholarly economists or political debaters. Or, to speak perhaps more
precisely, overpopulation was acknowledged as a possible tendency, a ten-
dency which, however, could be countered by social improvement and the
education of the common folk. Moreover, the tendency for populations to
grow faster than food and other resources seemed less realistic in Sweden
with an abundance of land and a tiny population.
In 1799, the Swedish economy could very well be characterised (as
Malthus had done) as a typically agrarian one with low productivity en-
tangled in a crisis cycle of ups and downs determined by a delicate bal-
Heckscher Svenskt arbete och liv. Stockholm: Bonniers 1957, p. 153 and Lars Mag-
18
nusson, An Economic History of Sweden. London: Routledge 2000, p. 1f.
19 For full references see Magnusson, op. cit., ch. 1.
20 Nils Wohlin, Den svenska jordstyckningspolitiken i 18de och 19de rhundradet jmte
en versikt af jordstyckningens inverkan p bondeklassens besuttenhetsfrhllanden. Stock-
holm 1912, and Christer Winberg, Folkkning och proletarisering. Gothenburg: Historiska
institutionen 1975, p. 16f.
132 lars magnusson
mand for consumer goods and capital goods. As of the 1820s, increasing
agricultural income encouraged a rapid growth of proto-industry in tex-
tiles, wood working, metal handicrafts, tanning, tile making, shoe making
as well as the establishment of new process industries aimed for the con-
sumer market (breweries in particular).21 Hence, a stage of proto-industri-
alisation preceded full industrialisation in Sweden, and could be regarded
as a pivotal factor behind its emergence in the late nineteenth century.
Such industrial production, localised to the countryside, was a character-
istic feature of many regions in Sweden from the early nineteenth century
onwards.
With regard to Sweden we must acknowledge that up until 1850 the
economy was predominantly agricultural. Even so, we can still detect a
significant rise in per capita income combined with the development of
proto-industry, predominantly in the agrarian areas. Thus, Sweden consti-
tutes an example of an industrious economy which does not fall into any
Malthusian trap, at least not after 1800. Instead, production increased at
a faster rate than the population, due especially to a more extensive use
of land through land clearing. However, at the same time, productivity in
agriculture increased, due to the introduction of better cultivating meth-
ods, such as different forms of crop rotation, improved enclosures, better
use of manure, and the introduction of better ploughs and other tools.
Thus, Sweden is an example where both extensive and intensive methods
were combined in order to increase production and income. Against this
background we should not be surprised that Swedish economic writers
to whom we will return in the next section were sceptical of the theories
of Malthus and Ricardo.
In order to understand clearly how Swedish economists during the first
half of the nineteenth century made sense of their own period, we should
not overlook the importance of the ideologies and ambitions of the state.22
Hence, while Sweden was predominantly an agrarian economy, a dirigiste
ideology prevailed in favour of industry and in favour of establishing, with
the help of the visible hand of the state, mechanised forms of production
and a factory system. Consequently, the establishing of manufactures was
supported through a combination of privileges and financial means be-
ginning during the 1730s. While it is true that such open financial support
was diminished after the economic crisis in the 1760s and 1770s, any at-
tempt to interpret this as a consequence of more laissez-faire minded pol-
itics is to shoot high above the mark. Without doubt, some of the most
restrictive regulations in agriculture and industry were gradually lifted.
However, this did not imply that the state withdrew from all interference
in the evolving industrial market economy. On the contrary, the atmos-
phere was still interventional, and the political and administrative devel-
opment from 1840 onwards was very much characterised by the introduc-
tion of new ways to make public intervention more effective. To that end
the government was reorganised and separate departments with respon-
sible ministers in charge were established (the so-called departmental re-
form of 1840). This way, an old and inefficient state apparatus founded
on privilege and on independent collegiums, academies, and on locally
based county administrations was replaced by a more efficient and more
tightly knit state administration.23
Jrgen Kyle, Statliga utgifter i Sverige under 1800-talet. Historisk Tidskrift, no. 2, 1989.
23
24 For this see Lars Magnusson, Mercantilism and Reform-Mercantilism. The Rise
of Economic Discourse in Sweden during the Eighteenth Century. History of Political
Economy, vol. 19, no. 3, 1987; Eli F. Heckscher, Sveriges ekonomiska historia sedan Gustav
Vasa, II: 2. Stockholm: Bonniers 1949, p. 806f.; Karl Petander, De nationalekonomiska
skdningarna i Sverige under 1700-talet, I. Stockholm: P.A. Norstedts 1912.
134 lars magnusson
the ruling dirigiste policies and advocated more freedom of trade. Most
politically radical in this fashion was the vicar from the distant sterbot-
ten, Anders Chydenius, who in a small tract from 1767, Den nationalle
Winsten, developed a general model of a self-equilibrating economy reg-
ulated by the free forces of demand and supply; this has led at least some
interpreters to hail him as a predecessor of Adam Smith.25 At the same
time, especially Nordencrantz was highly influenced in his thinking not
only by such authorities as Mandeville and the French economistes, but
also by Scottish enlightenment writers, such as David Hume. Since many
Swedish writers on economic issues during this period regarded improve-
ment of agriculture as the singularly most important factor for Swedens
growth and wealth, the connection to the French Physiocrats seems obvi-
ous. However, Heckscher was able to detect only one real Physiocrat in
Sweden, the nobleman and tutor of crown prince Gustavus (the later king
Gustavus III), Carl Gustaf Scheffer. Other writers, such as Carl Leuhusen,
were clearly inspired by Mirabeau in their general promotion of agricul-
ture. But in all likelihood, they did not find the theoretical intricacies of
Dr Quesnay very helpful in their attempts to put forward their message of
agricultural reform.26
It can of course be debated to what extent it makes sense to try to
squeeze Swedish economic writers into such a grand scheme of doctri-
nal development. More interesting is perhaps the use which Swedish eco-
nomic writers made of foreign ideas and texts with which they had come
into contact. On the whole, it seems clear that many of them were well
aware of the economic literature published in German and French but less
familiar with the literature in English. While Professor Berch in Uppsala
sought inspiration among German academic economists and professors
who compiled vast cameralist treatises, others were clearly influenced by
the theologian and philosopher in Halle, Christian Wolff, and by his pupil
Christian Thomasius. Somewhat later, echoes both from the French en-
lightenment and from Scottish moral philosophy could be heard in Nor-
dencrantz and Chydenius texts. However, all these sources were trans-
lated into the specific Swedish context which we have briefly mentioned
above. Especially pertinent in this case is Carl Gustaf Scheffer who, in
1770, published a small volume Bref til Herrar Riksens rd, in which he
has translated parts of Quesnays Maximes gnrales as well as passages
from Du Pont de Nemours and Mirabeau. As Lars Herlitz has shown,
Scheffer did not only intend to translate abbreviations of the French texts.
On the contrary, his purpose was clearly to use the texts in order to prop-
agate for a tax reform which favoured the landowning nobility in Sweden.
Hence, his message runs directly in opposition to Quesnay who, after all,
had argued for reforms in order to maximise the investment of the large-
scale metayers. Such wealthy farmers did not exist in Sweden, of course.
But it would be nave not to see the political implications of Scheffers re-
placing them with traditional feudal landowners.27
The economic discussion in Sweden was very lively, in particular dur-
ing the 1750s and 1760s. But perhaps as a consequence of the introduc-
tion of a stricter censure after the coup of Gustavus III in 1771, there was
a decline in the amount of published material. Moreover, to the regret of
Heckscher and others, there were few signs of intellectual progress. The
half-way house between dirigisme and liberalism established around 1770
seems to have prevailed and become cemented well into the middle of the
nineteenth century. In 1799 and 1800, some sections of Adam Smiths Wealth
of Nations were published in the periodical Lsning i blandade mnen.
In a condensed version some passages were also translated in 1800, but
not from the original version but from a German abridgment by Georg
Sartorius. 28 No wonder then that the influences from Smith seem to have
been slight in Sweden during this period. Neither does there appear to
have been any great influence from the classical political economists, such
as Ricardo, Malthus, or others. Instead, political economy in Sweden dur-
ing the first half of the nineteenth century was dominated by academic
professors, such as Lars Georg Rabenius in Uppsala and C.A. Agardh in
Lund. In their opinions and stances they are characteristically cautious
and highly eclectic. They seem to pick and choose between different
schools and authors. Above all, they are most explicit about the context in
which they propose their theories and theses.
The first textbook in economics to appear after the publication, in
1747, of Anders Berchs book, was written by Lars Georg Rabenius, who
Rabenius was not alone at the time to view Smith and the classical econ-
omists as the fathers of a new industrial system of political economy,
different from the older schools. For example, Carl Adolph Agardh who
held the chair in economics and botany (!) in Lund (18121834) basically
shared the same view. In the year 1829, he published a comprehensive
treatise on economic science, Granskning af Stats-economiens Grundlror,
which is a compilation of three doctoral dissertations written by Agardh
but as was usual at this time defended by three of his students. In the
first of these dissertations he speaks about Smith as the founder of a new
system which is often referred to as the liberal system. According to
Agardh, this term has become popular also among many who have not
read Smith or understood him. Moreover, he treats Smith as a theoretician
whose principles so far have had little influence over practical men.35 It
is only in the Vatican state, Switzerland, and Poland that his liberal prin-
ciples have been followed faithfully, he insists. Like Rabenius, he makes
no distinction between Smith and the classical economists. Neither does
he to any extent refer to Malthus, although at one point he says that in
England Smiths principles have been taken up by Ricardo, Malthus, and
Say who do not seem to agree on how they should be used in practice.36
A closer reading of Agardh reveals that he was particularly influenced
33 Lars Magnusson, The Invention of Free Trade. London: Routledge 2005, p. 111, and
Margaret Hirst, Life of Friedrich List. London: Smith, Elder & Co 1909.
34 Rabenius, op. cit., p. 27 (my translation).
Carl Adolph Agardh, Granskning af Stats-Econominens Grundlror. Lund 1829, p.
35
10.
36
Agardh, op. cit., p. 8.
138 lars magnusson
by Say. This should probably not surprise us: in 1821 and 1822 he was in
Paris, where he regularly attended Says lectures. It is also probable that
Agardh played an important role when Says Traite dconomie politique
was translated into Swedish in 1823. This was in fact the only general
textbook in economics translated into Swedish during the nineteenth
century!37
Like Rabenius, Agardh approved of state intervention. Furthermore, he
strongly emphasised the necessity of establishing industry and trade as a
means for a state to grow stronger and wealthier. Only new states that
are aware of this fact, such as England and France, have been able to grow,
whereas old states, such as Holland and Sweden, have neglected this and
consequently declined in wealth and prosperity, he propounds. The rea-
son why the mercantile system still is popular among practical men is
that they instinctively understand that the state is needed to develop and
protect industry. And in his argument that only England can afford to up-
hold liberal principles such as free international trade he is very much in
agreement with Rabenius:
Many ask the question whether that which seems to be true for England,
which through its use of machines and capital can undersell the whole
world, also can be true for other countries; or to what extent the estab-
lishment of a original state of nature with regard to trade and industry re-
ally will imply that the profits from such activities will be evenly distributed
among all nations, and if that is not the case to what extent the nation which
receives the smallest piece of the pie will be as enthusiastic to adopt to the
liberal gospel as the nation which receives a larger slice.38
So far, we have seen how in Sweden Adam Smith and classical political
economy were regarded as the founders of an industrial system of politi-
cal economy. To some extent, this system seemed applicable to Sweden
but, as a whole, it was probably better suited to a developed, industrial
economy, such as Englands. In addition to underscoring the role of the
state in the development of industry in an underdeveloped country, it
was Ricardos and Malthus pessimistic outlook and their insistence upon
37
Eskil Wadensj, Carl Adolph Agardh. In Christina Jonung and Ann-Christin Sthl-
berg (eds), Ekonomiportrttet. Svenska ekonomer under 300 r. Stockholm: SNS frlag 1990.
38
Agardh, op. cit., p. 11 (my translation).
political economy in a historical context 139
Carl Arvid Hessler, Geijer som politiker, part II. Stockholm: Hugo Gebersg frlag
39
1947.
Erik Gustaf Geijer, Fattigvrdsfrgan [1839]. In Erik Gustaf Geijer, Erik Gustaf
40
Geijers samlade skrifter, Volume 11. Stockholm: P.A. Norstedt och sner 1853, p. 57.
41 On this see Hessler, op. cit., part I, p. 329f.
140 lars magnusson
In the long run, the only remedy is the introduction of the factory system
and machinery, he suggests. He is well aware of the contemporary critique
of machinery as a creator of unemployment and distress but still draws
the conclusion that rising productivity is the only means for avoiding
Malthusian catastrophes in the future. The reason is that machines feed
more people and that the introduction of machinery in the long run in-
creases both workers wages and the factory-owners profit.
In general, such optimism regarding the long run effects of industri-
alisation, productivity improvement, and peoples ability to improve their
skills and knowledge in order to bolster production increase was a charac-
teristic feature of the Swedish discussion. However, the optimism was not
only focused on industrial improvement and growth. Also with regard to
agriculture there was a feeling that improvements could be introduced in
order to avoid population crises and widespread pauperism. As was the
case with many American political economists at the time, there was a
feeling that land was not at all a scarce factor preventing production in
Sweden. Instead, many were convinced that it could be utilised much bet-
ter both in an intensive and extensive manner. Returning to von Asp in
1801, we note his emphasis on further land clearing:
[M]uch new land could be cleared and come to use at the same time as the
population increases in countries where there is an abundance of land which
until now has been overgrown by forest or consists of worthless peat.44
42 P.O. von Asp, Frsk att utreda och p ett stlle sammanfra de Frsta Almnna
Grunderne i Stats Hushllningsmnen. Stockholm: J.A. Carlbom 1801, p. 100.
43 Geijer, op. cit., p. 61 (my translation).
44 von Asp, op. cit., p. 233 (my translation).
political economy in a historical context 141
By and large, this view remained the dominant one during the following
half a century.
The reason why neither Malthus population theory nor the general Ricardo-
Malthus model seems to have taken root in Sweden must undoubtedly be
explained against the backdrop of the contingencies of Swedish historical
and economic development. Hence, when presenting theories and draw-
ing conclusions, Swedes regarded the Classical School (including Smith)
as rooted in particularly British circumstances. The dismal view that eco-
nomic growth was held back, or made impossible, by the combination of
a rising population and decreasing returns on land could not be accepted
in a country with seemingly ample resources of land and a small popula-
tion. At the same time, economic writers in Sweden during the first half of
the nineteenth century seem to have been more optimistic about the pros-
pects of further industrial growth and transformation. In order to achieve
industrialisation, the Swedish economic writers were more willing than
their British colleagues to allow the visible hand of the state. As was the
case in America and, for example, with Friedrich List, they argued that
England had grown prosperous under a system of protection. That it now
propounded free trade as the workshop of the world was mainly a veil
for its own special interests.
It is perhaps paradoxical that when more laissez-faire and free-trade
views were introduced in Sweden in the 1840s, the main influence was not
British political economy. As pointed out by Heckscher and others, the
influence came from the French harmony economists, and it is clear that a
writer such as Richard Cobden was read and appreciated in many corners
of Sweden.45 The optimistic outlook regarding the prospects of further
economic developments and industrialisation was also emphasised by the
newer generation of economic writers. To Jacob Lundell, Agardhs succes-
sor in Lund, writing in 1846, it was evident that more freedom of trade in
general and the abolishment of the guild system in particular was a main
factor promoting economic prosperity in the future. Accordingly, Lundell
was eager to emphasise that political reform and fewer restrictions would
45 For example by the influential finance minister during the 1850s, Johan August
Gripenstedt. See Olle Gasslander, J A Gripenstedt, statsman och fretagare. Lund: Gleerups
1949.
142 lars magnusson
lead to less poverty and pauperism. Increased freedom would enable the
establishment of industrial enterprises in the countryside and would en-
large the employment of hands. Lack of employment was the main ex-
planation for poverty, he argued. Thus, Lundell was far removed from a
Malthusian world of depleted resources and from a (Darwinian) strug-
gle for survival. On the contrary, he said, the resources were ample and
unused (and this included the potential of a slumbering human capital).
The more important problem was how to make use of these resources by
means of political reform. In this case education of the working popula-
tion in order to increase its skills was most important, Lundell argued:
The recently established improvement societies and handicraft schools as
well as the general trend towards a better education system for the working
classes are pivotal starting points for further betterments.46
Rolf Torstendahl
Introduction
Barristers
One of the most important ways to uphold the good name of the pro-
fession, and to prevent interference from public authorities, was to imple-
ment a standard of conduct towards clients. This normative system was
essential, and organisations had to formulate a set of rules to which their
members were forced to conform. Thus, autonomy and community were
combined with punitive or exclusionary measures taken against disobe-
dient members. The system of exclusion could only be effective, however,
provided that the organisation had already been able to monopolise the
right to represent clients in court.
Interestingly enough, this ancient system has survived in its main char-
acteristics to the present day. The following quote can be found in the self-
presentation of the Swedish Society of Barristers.3
The Society of Barristers is regulated in the Rules of Court and the statutes
of the Society are confirmed by the Government. Only members of the So-
ciety are allowed to use the title of advokat. The Society is an association in
accordance with civil law.
The Society of Barristers whose full statutes can be found on the organi-
sations website as a downloadable file is organised as a representative
system with basic units situated locally around the country. Every third
year there is a plenary meeting (with debates and lectures) open to all bar-
risters in the country.
Through the Society a disciplinary committee is organised. The repre-
sentative body of the Society elects a chairperson, vice chairperson and six
members of the disciplinary committee. The remaining three members are
appointed by the Government. In its work the disciplinary committee is to-
tally independent.
3 All translations are by the author of this article. Quotations translated are all from
the summaries given by the Society itself on its website
www.advokatsamfundet.se
(refer-
ences from this site are from 14 Jan. 2009), not from the full text in the statutes, which are
also available at the website.
146 rolf torstendahl
Variations in formal structures cannot conceal the fact that the associa-
tions in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Sweden are quite
similar on a number of vital points: among these are autonomy, the pres-
ervation of a community of barristers, internal rules of good profession-
al conduct, internal penalties, and the cultivation of a good standard of
knowledge among the members.
The associations present themselves in ways that are quite similar. The
interference of the state (or governmental administration) is limited but
distinct: it authorises the monopolised use of barrister as an occupa-
tional title, it grants the barrister the right to represent clients in court,
and it provides a legal framework for the procedures of penalties and fees.
Yet the autonomy of the profession remains strong. In principle, it is still
based on the idea of a community of members, where an open internal
discussion is guaranteed. However, at a time when the number of mem-
bers is greater than in the past, this has become somewhat of a fiction.
4 For a presentation, see www.abanet.org/about/ and for standing committees see con-
stitution and byelaws, available through links from the website.
5 See www.barstandardsboard.org.uk/complaintsanddiscipline/ with links to earlier
and forthcoming cases (17 Mar. 2009).
professionalism as ideology 147
Academics
& Kocka 1985, introduction; Mommsen 1987). There are, however, some
dissenting voices who are unwilling to accept the lumping together of all
academics into one academic profession. In fact, Burton Clark himself
is quoted as saying that the academic profession is a holding company of
sorts and that it includes different disciplines with different traditions of
knowledge (Clark, as quoted in Becher 1987, 278).
A more outspoken critic of the idea of an academic profession is Don-
ald Light, who has said that the academic profession does not exist. In
the world of scholarship, the activities center on each discipline. The
Academic man is a myth (Light, as quoted in Becher 1987, 272f). Tony
Becher has developed the idea that disciplines actively shape profession-
al lives. It is not quite clear whether he thinks that different disciplines
have anything to do with specific types of professionalism. His cautious
conclusion is that Clark is right in contending that there is an identity, an
academic man, behind the particularities of disciplines and specialities
(Becher 1987).
Many academics have complained that recent developments have lim-
ited their autonomy in the selection of research topics. The discussion
about this development was sharpened through the publication of two
books edited and mostly authored by Michael Gibbons, Helga Nowotny,
and Peter Scott (Gibbons 1994; Nowotny 2001). They advocated a new
stage in science its Mode 2 where science had become so closely
intertwined with society that the two worked together in the formation
of science. This Mode 2 is shown in the diminishing role of the type
of research funding that is not specifically allocated for obtaining useful
knowledge but for projects based on the autonomous curiosity of indi-
vidual scientists. The Mode 2 debate has led to further efforts to define
the relation of science to society in other ways (Ziman 2000; Etzkowitz &
Leydesdorff 1997).
A related limitation to research autonomy is caused by the fact that
most project funding by research councils is given within pre-defined
limits. When such limitations have been set, autonomy cannot be guar-
anteed by the fact that some research councils (such as the European Re-
search Council) contend that scientific excellence is the sole criterion for
evaluation.6
Usually academic collectives (in the sense used here) are not based on
formal membership or organisation. A professor belongs to his profession
whether he wants to or not, and for the most part no fees are involved.
These vague collectives take for granted that the professional rationale is
to promote expertise in the sense of making advances in science/schol-
arship. In most disciplines, professionalism as it relates specifically to re-
search is not a debated issue. What characterises a professional researcher,
when this is debated, is dependent on epistemological rules that tend to
change over time. A discipline like history, for instance, has experienced
both intense debates and virtual turnabouts with regard to professional
criteria (Torstendahl 2009).
Physicians
7 On its website the BMA says now (23 Feb. 2009): We are a voluntary association
with over two-thirds of practising UK doctors in membership (www.bma.org.uk).
8 See its website www.svls.se (16 Feb. 2009).
9 Accessible at the website www.bma.org.uk.
professionalism as ideology 151
fession; look after the professional, social and economic interests of the
members; further the educational and scientific interests of the members;
promote the appropriate development of health and medical care.10
The statutes and bylaws of the two organisations do not say much
about the trade union aspect of their work. It is taken for granted that the
economic interests of the members are to be looked after. The professional
aspect stresses the need to support desire of the members to increase their
competences and specialities. Both the BMA and the SLF have clauses in
their statutes that make it possible for them to exclude members. Wrong-
ful professional conduct on the one hand and disloyalty to the organisa-
tion on the other are thus, for both associations, grounds for exclusion.
However, and this is important, nowhere in the statutes is it mentioned
that health care, including the conduct of doctors, is subjected to state in-
spection. The aim of these inspections (in the UK, the Healthcare Com-
mission, transformed in 2009 into Care Quality Commission, and in Swe-
den, the Social Care Administration11) is to guarantee good health care for
all citizens. If irregularities are discovered, the formal registration of the
doctor is at stake. And this, it should be added, is a much more powerful
threat to his or her standing as a professional than is the threat of exclu-
sion from the association. Inspections by state authorities take place in ac-
cordance with the law and the resultant criticism is to be tried in court if
the matter moves beyond mere rebuke.
In other countries, such as the United States, the usual procedure for
a patient who suspects wrongful professional conduct from his or her
doctor is to sue the doctor for compensation. This is something that the
AMA tries to prevent through the surveillance of doctors, the registering
of quacks, and the active promotion of courses for further education of
physicians (Freidson 1970a, 29-30). Even if the procedures are different,
the legal character of the scrutiny works as a unifying standard. It is also
beyond doubt that doctors have more to fear from such legal procedures
than from the punitive measures available to the professional organisa-
tions.
The specific character of the American legislation and (in cases of mal-
treatment) the accountability of individual doctors probably account for
10 Accessible at the website www.slf.se. In Swedish the usual expression for health care
is health and sick care.
11 Websites
at
www.nhs.uk/aboutnhs/Regulation/Pages/
Healthcare Commission.aspx
(16 Feb. 2009) and at www.socialstyrelsen.se/Om_Sos/organisation/Tillsyn (16 Feb. 2009).
The information on the NHS has been changed later, see www.nhs.uk/choiceintheNHS/
Rightsandpledges/NHSConstitution/Pages/Overview.aspx (24 Sept. 2009).
152 rolf torstendahl
the enormous interest in the AMA as well as its sub-organisations for pro-
fessional issues relating to specialities, refinement of treatment, and good
professional conduct. Early in its existence, the AMA, which was founded
in 1847, published a code of medical ethics. Likewise, an educational
policy for doctors was established from the start and gradually became a
cornerstone of the activities of the organisation.12 The licensing of doctors
is dependent on which colleges each state considers acceptable, but a
standard of education is also set through the joint efforts of the AMA and
the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) (Freidson 1970a).
Professionalism is thus a very forceful ideological instrument used by
the various organisations to inspire the public with confidence. Yet the
main object of the organisational propaganda seems to be the doctors
themselves. We are the specialists and we will make the utmost to keep
our specialised knowledge at a top level seems to be the constant message
promoted by the organisations. In their ideology, the physicians are model
professionals.
Nurses
There has been little doubt among researchers that doctors constitute a
group of professionals, but whether this applies also to nurses has been
and continues to be a topic of much discussion. Eliot Freidson, the well-
known specialist on American medical professionalism, has stressed the
importance of the division of labour in health service, where doctors are
dominant and nurses subordinate (Freidson 1970b, 136-7).
The relevant literature from the last three or four decades is rich and
takes a different approach to the work of nurses. Here, most of the exam-
ples will be taken from Sweden and Britain, but it is important to keep in
mind that it is easy to overlook the religious roots of nursing in Catholi-
cism through devoted nuns if the examples are drawn primarily from
Protestant countries. In France, radical politicians devoted a lot of energy
to the problem of turning hospital services into lay occupations in the
1870s and 1880s, but in the 1890s nuns were allowed to return (Knibiehler
& al. 1984, 41-54; Schultheiss 2001, 8-36).
British researchers have been occupied with showing not only that
nursing had a long history before Florence Nightingale started her nurs-
ing school after her return from the Crimean War, but also that the regis-
12 www.ama-assn.org
(24 Sept. 2009).
professionalism as ideology 153
tering of nurses from 1919 meant a new phase in the history of the profes-
sion, while also creating new problems concerning education and service
(Abel-Smith 1960; Davies, Maggs and Williams in Davies 1980a; Baly in
Maggs 1987). The last few decades of nursing history have partly pushed
into the background what was central for Abel-Smith, namely, how nursing
acquired the status of professionalism through registration, and concen-
trated on the changes of the work in nursing wards.
Professionalism has been an important question. As early as the late
1970s and early 1980s books and articles appeared in the United States
claiming a scientific status for nursing because of nursing theory or the
philosophy of nursing, often with a clear edge against technical medi-
cine (Leddy 1998; Watson 1979; Watson 1988; George 1985).13 Around
the turn of the century, textbooks on nursing theory the base for pro-
fessional nursing practice as the subtitle ran in one of them had grown
into an impressive number of volumes (George 2002; Alligod & Tomey
2002). In Britain, Celia Davies has argued that professionalism in general
has changed in a way that is quite relevant for nurses. A new model of
caring was required, taking into regard emotional aspects, or so one au-
thor argued (Davies 1995, 133-154). Alan Pearson and his collaborators
tried to show that nursing has developed an autonomous standing with
its own care practice, which is open to quality measurement through peer
review (Pearson 1983; Pearson 1987; Pearson 2007). Books like these con-
clude that nursing has become a profession, and that its professional sub-
ject matter is care, which requires empathy. Pearsons scientific argument
is rare.
The different types of analysis of nursing and the relation of nursing to
a profession of nurses in the American and British debate have analogues
in Scandinavia.14 There, some authors argue for the professionalism of
nurses using the same arguments as for other professions (Andersson
2002, Emanuelsson 1990, Lannerheim 1994). Pierre Bourdieus theories
of social fields and social capital have been used to clarify the academi-
sation of nursing care in Denmark and Sweden (Petersen 1998, Heyman
1995). Nurses use caring rationality a sort of tacit knowledge in Po-
lanyis sense based on empathy for and practical knowledge of the indi-
13 A great number of references to other books and articles with the same basic idea
are given in Watson 1988.
14 A
useful overview of ideas in nursing education is given in Erlv & Petersson 1998.
The elevation of the education to an academic level, decided in 1977 and carried through by
1982, is treated on pp. 99-102.
154 rolf torstendahl
Teachers
Teaching is an old occupation, and if one takes into regard the educa-
tion and organisation of teachers, the profession was established long ago.
American teachers had several different organisations from the middle
of the nineteenth century and onwards. On an organisational level, the
membership numbers rose gradually from 15 per cent in 1907 to more
than 70 per cent in 1937 (Elsbree 1939, 241-270, 499-522). In 2002 it was
reported that the National Education Association represented 60 per cent
of the countrys teachers and the American Federation of Teachers, another
national organisation, which had dominated in the 1960s and 1970s, 25 per
cent (Rousemaniere 2005). Yet sociologists and educational theorists who
dealt with the professionalism of teachers could not claim with any cer-
tainty that teaching was a profession (Lieberman 1956, 485; Wittlin 1965;
professionalism as ideology 155
Brookover & Gottlieb 1964, 299-320). The neo-Weberian theory from the
late 1970s stressed strategy and closure and thus gave a new perspective
on the claims to professionalism. Teachers did not guide the interests of
the American sociologists in this direction (Sarfatti Larson 1977; Collins
1979).
In 1987, a Swedish researcher, Christina Florin, published her dis-
sertation with the challenging title (in translation) The struggle for the
teachers desk. Florin analyses the parallel processes of feminisation and
professionalisation of Swedish elementary teachers in the period be-
tween 1860 and 1906. She points to the fact that the professionalisation
project, with its strategy of pure expertise, failed when womens salaries
were lowered and their career opportunities limited compared to those of
their male colleagues (Florin 1987). Later, Florin and a collaborator ex-
plored the situation of secondary school teachers in Sweden, and found a
different picture. There, female teachers encountered a male world (with
male pupils) and an established male professionalism (open only to men)
where gender closure soon became an ingredient (Florin & Johansson
1993, 105-203).
In spite of such analyses of professionalism among teachers in the early
20th century, in the late 20th and early 21st century teachers still seem
frustrated: We can call ourselves teaching professionals, but the words
themselves carry no more weight than hair care professionals (Flanagan
2007). In the 1980s, a feeling of despair among teachers was expressed.
Given the variety of threats and the particularly precarious situation of
segments of the profession, a reasonable question to ask may be: Should
the teaching profession be allowed to deteriorate further, and possibly
die? (Duke 1984, quote p. 120; Ackerman & Mackenzie 2007)
Two new approaches to the possible meaning of professionalism in
teaching have come into view. The first is rooted in a development that
first took place in Germany. Teachers must know not only the academic
disciplines which they are going to teach but also the specific ways of trans-
mitting their knowledge to others what in German is called Fachdidaktik.
The idea served as a basis for a new kind of professionalism (Terhart 2002,
9-21). In Germany, there arose already before 1990 specific professorships
in such didactic disciplines in many universities, a nationwide association
of Didaktiker of history was created in 1995,15 and an umbrella organisa-
tion of all associations of Didaktiker held its first congress in 2003.16
The idea spread to other countries, though normally not with the same
kind of academic success (Hudson 1999; cf. Stormbom 1992). A precur-
sor to this was a faith in pedagogy as a discipline with the ability to lead
teachers on their way and form the intellectual basis of teaching in general
(Turner-Bisset 2001). The second approach has been developed mainly in
a British discussion among educators, primarily by Linda Evans. She uses
the notion of professionality to denote the skill of teaching, while profes-
sionalism refers to the collective of teachers.17
The National Union of Teachers in Britain does not mention profes-
sionalism as a key issue on its website. Historically, though, the issue
seems to have been a problem, as the situation just after the First World
War illustrates: The strikes brought to a head an issue that bitterly di-
vided the Union at the time Should it be a professional organisation
seeking status or should it forge closer links with an increasingly so-
cialist trade union movement?18 On its website, the association of Swed-
ish secondary school teachers does not stress professionalism. Only under
the heading Vision 2012 does one encounter the words: We stand for
qualification, professionalism and pride of occupation.19
The conclusion seems to be unavoidable: at the present time profes-
sionalism is not perceived as a central notion for teachers in either Britain
or Sweden, though it does appear to be somewhat desirable. It also has a
weak background in the theoretical literature on the history of teachers
although some researchers have stressed its importance during certain
historical periods.
Engineers
17 The presentation is fetched from Evans 2008. The original idea seems to stem from
Hoyle 1975.
18 http://www.teachers.org.uk/node/8515 (3 Mar. 2010).
19
http://www.lr.se/lararnasriksforbund/organisationochverksamhet/vision2012
(3 Mar. 2010).
professionalism as ideology 157
Results
the most important aspect is that they charge the concept with different
positive values in addition to different meanings.
As a rule, sociological investigations into professionalism have started
with the idea that professionalism acts as a common element in the occu-
pations that are included. This may very well be a viable starting point for
certain kinds of analyses, regardless of the differences among professions
and professionals. Here another theme is stressed. The varying evaluative
content in the ideas fostered in the professional groups make them think
of professionalism as a basic or more or less desirable aspect of their oc-
cupational performance. Professional organisations have taken a deep in-
terest in and tried to influence the relation of the group to the notion of
professionalism. Thus, for each group an ideology of professionalism has
been formed. However, it should be added that it is not only professional
associations that have taken this interest, but researchers as well as influ-
ential individual members of different groups have contributed to the for-
mation of group-specific ideologies of professionalism.
The result is quite different in different groups, depending both on the
interest devoted to the formation of an ideology within the group and the
historical background of the profession. In regard to professionalism, bar-
risters and doctors have had a privileged position. Few have disputed it,
even in countries where professionalism has no equivalent in the vernac-
ular. Yet doctors and barristers have taken quite different attitudes to their
own professionalism. For barristers organisations (examples from Britain
and Sweden) professionalism is not a central point in their (very active)
dissemination of the advantages of using legal advice by real barristers.
This does not mean that they are indifferent to professionalism, only that
they take it for granted.
Physicians on the other hand hinge their occupational reputation on
their professionalism. Their professional associations (in Britain, Sweden,
Germany, and the United States) were early to organise doctors and plead
for their economic interests. Not only that, the associations also promoted
their professionalism.
The latter motive has become a cornerstone in the propaganda directed
towards the general public: doctors possess expert knowledge, their edu-
cation and training is of high quality, and when in treatment the patient
can rely on the professionalism of his or her doctor. The different associa-
tions also do their best to encourage doctors to improve their professional
competence, mainly their specialist knowledge, as part of their mission to
maintain a high level of professionalism.
professionalism as ideology 159
Nurses, who started at a low level compared to doctors and were sub-
ordinated to doctors during the formative phase of their profession, have
managed to change their standing within the medical world and in rela-
tion to the public. Their history makes it clear that they began early to
regard their occupation as a kind of special mission (Britain, Sweden). In
spite of their subordinate position in the division of labour, they were, for
a period of time, more eager to advance their standing than to maximise
their earning potential. In the eyes of the public, nurses certainly had some
success with this policy, but internally and in relation to doctors they re-
mained subordinate until the 1980s. At this time several individual nurses
and nursing researchers took a new approach to the question of profes-
sionalism (The United States, Britain, Norway, Sweden). They discarded
the argument that nurses had a special standing through registration and
instead advanced the idea that nursing was a speciality of its own, requir-
ing empathy rather than science. In close connection with this idea
which was only slowly taken up by nurses associations the standing of
nursing education was elevated in several countries in Europe as a result
of the activities of these associations. The combination of new ideas on the
nature of their work and associational lobbying led to the formation of a
new ideology of professionalism. It also brought with it a considerable in-
crease in the professional self-consciousness of nurses, reflected further-
more in the public view of both nursing and nurses.
Teachers have not fared as well. Early on, the associations of this old
profession were organised around the notion of professionalism. But as
the number of female teachers grew, this led to a struggle with a clear
gender slant, at least in Sweden. Male teachers made it clear that profes-
sionalism was not enough and that male teachers should have precedence
over their female colleagues, which also caught the ear of early twentieth-
century politicians.
In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century teachers from dif-
ferent countries have raised their voices in desperation in regard to their
so-called profession. When researchers and spokespersons tried to instil
the professionalism of the teaching occupation with new content (a recipe
that had proven successful with nurses) the response from the mass of
teachers was not forthcoming.
Without much effort, barristers and physicians have been successful
in maintaining their professionalism. Nurses were successful against all
odds and teachers were unsuccessful against better odds. Academics and
engineers are two groups in which different attitudes to professionalism
can be found. For academics, professionalism has not been a vital issue,
160 rolf torstendahl
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Los Angeles (U. of California P.), 1977.
Schelsky, Helmut, Einsamkeit und Freiheit. Idee und Gestalt der deutschen Universitt
und ihrer Reformen, Dsseldorf (Bertelsmann), 1971.
Schultheiss, Katrin, Bodies and Souls. Politics and the Professionalization of Nurses in
France, 18801922, Cambridge, Mass & London (Harvard U.P.), 2001.
Seymer, Lucy, A General History of Nursing, 4th ed., New York (Faber), 1957.
Siegrist, Hannes, Advokat, Brger und Staat: Sozialgeschichte der Rechtsanwlte in
Deutschland, Italien und der Schweiz (18.20. Jh.), Frankfurt am Main (Kloster-
mann), 1996.
Stormbom, Jarl, Lraren, professionen och didaktiken ngra observationer i ett bde teo-
retiskt och praktiskt problem, bo (Pedagogiska fakulteten vid bo akademi), 1992.
Terhart, Ewald, Standards fr die Lehrerbildung. Eine Expertise fr die Kultusminister-
konferenz, Mnster (Westflische Wilhelms-Universitt, ZKL-Texte 23), 2002.
164 rolf torstendahl
Civilizational Studies
and the Comparison of Civilizations
INTERPRETING HISTORY AND
UNDERSTANDING CIVILIZATIONS
Johann P. Arnason
The other paradigm transfer has, as Castoriadis sees it, taken two very
different forms. If the common denominator is a logicist preconception,
the alternatives reflect different understandings of the logic at work. Struc-
turalism in the strict and classic sense, i.e. primarily the work of Claude
Lvi-Strauss, exemplifies a narrow interpretation. The logic that it imputes
to social institutions and cultural patterns is an elementary kind of com-
binatorics, operating mainly with binary codes. This version of the logi-
cist view is doubly divorced from civilizational studies. Its field of appli-
cation is, to all intents and purposes, limited to stateless, non-urban and
non-literate societies, preceding or resisting the changes commonly taken
to mark the beginnings of civilization and/or civilizations. Secondly, the
structuralist search for a universal but unconscious human reason, sup-
posedly more accessible through the savage mind than through cultures
engulfed and disrupted by history, leads in the end to a radical rejection
of cultural and a fortiori civilizational pluralism. As for the other type
of the logicist approach to society, it presupposes a logic of self-organizing
reason, embodied in rational structures of social life. The classical version
of this totalizing rationalism is Hegels notion of the objective spirit. But
its subsequent adaptation by Marxist theories of society shows how easily
this variant of the logicist paradigm shades into a functionalist mode, and
thus towards the first paradigm transfer discussed above.
If we explore this line of interpretation beyond the field surveyed by
Castoriadis, further pointers to a convergence of the two paradigm trans-
fers will emerge. We can begin with the once widely accepted functional-
ist notion that culture is to society what the genetic code is to the organ-
ism. The links to the first paradigm transfer are obvious, but inasmuch as
the notion of a code shifts the focus towards structured information, it
also follows the logicist line of thought. Moreover, the particular emphasis
on a coding and programming function has a direct bearing on civiliza-
tional themes. The notion of a cultural programme, strongly reminiscent
of functionalist assumptions about the role of culture in social systems,
has figured in the work of civilizational analysts, but it is out of tune with
their otherwise clear intention to move away from cultural determinism,
and as I have argued elsewhere, it should be replaced by the more flexible
idea of a cultural problematic. However, this conceptual shift has yet to
be elaborated in detail; in that respect, the critique of the functionalist
persuasion (J. Alexander) and of its background imagery is still on the
agenda of civilizational studies.
If the first clarifying step was to invalidate the transfer of models from
extra-social contexts to a social one, the second affirms the unity of the
170 johann p. arnason
social and the historical. To situate this part of the argument, it should
be considered in connection with a broader trend. The rise of historical
sociology, especially when it is seen as an attempt to synthesize both dis-
ciplines rather than to add a new subdivision within one of them, leads
to reflections on ways of bringing the two domains of knowledge closer
to each other. Claims to that effect can be based on different approaches.
For authors working on or guided by conceptual history, the social and
the historical sphere, seen as dimensions of human experience and ex-
pectations, are interconnected aspects of a new conceptual world order
that took shape in close conjunction with the great transformations of
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century (Kosellecks Sattelzeit).
This shared intellectual genealogy then serves as a backdrop for debates
on closer integration and/or division of labour. Another bridging strat-
egy, developed by Philip Abrams in an important but somewhat neglect-
ed work, aims at the reunion of history and sociology around a com-
mon problematic: the paradox of human agency, also described as the
estranged symbiosis of action and structure.4 It is, in other words, the
puzzle of human agency becoming human bondage that constitutes the
shared and central theme of history and sociology. It is worth noting that
after a long survey of representative works by sociologists and historians,
Fernand Braudels writings are singled out as the most convincing exam-
ple of progress towards a unified discipline. This view does not entail a
strong connection to conceptual history, but it is taken for granted that
modern transformations in general have sensitized the human sciences
to the problem of agency. Compared to the model proposed by Abrams,
Castoriadiss line of argument also envisages a common denominator for
questions traditionally divided between two branches of knowledge, but
his way to establish it is to elaborate a unified ontology of the social-his-
torical.
If history is to be integrated into a new and enriched image of society,
the first task is to subject traditional visions of history to the same kind
of scrutiny as those of society: a questioning of unreflected assumptions
derived from other domains of experience. But the parallel must be quali-
fied. A critical reflection on inherited images of society can easily target
the theoretical paradigms of the social sciences and reveal their lim-
its; history is, notoriously, a less theoretical discipline and therefore not
4 Philip Abrams, Historical Sociology (West Compton House, Open Books, 1982), p.
XIV.
interpreting history and understanding civilizations 171
ing emergence. Moreover, time goes together with space, both because of
their intertwining at the level of perception and because the meaning of
time can as Castoriadis argues at some length only be grasped in ex-
plicit contrast to traditional ways of assimilating it to space. If the aim is
to demonstrate the indistinguishability of the social and the historical,9
we have to rethink each aspect as an integral part of the other.
The historical is self-alteration of the specific mode of coexistence that
constitutes the social, and nothing apart from that ; the historical is, for
example, the emergence of an institution and the emergence of another in-
stitution.10
At the same time, the social-historical is, or rather makes itself be as, a
figure, i.e. spacing (espacement), and otherness-alteration of the figure, i.e.
temporality.11 This view will affect our understanding of institutions.
The institution, in and through which the social figures itself and makes it-
self be, is what it is inasmuch as its grounding in the past serves to make
possible the acceptance of that which has yet to happen; for the institution
is nothing if it is not itself a form, a rule and a condition for that which does
not yet exist.12
13
S.N. Eisenstadt, The civilizational dimension, p. 34.
interpreting history and understanding civilizations 175
See Suzi Adams, Castoriadiss Ontology: Being and Creation (New York, Fordham
14
University Press, forthcoming in 2011).
176 johann p. arnason
in the making under Roman domination, from the early Principate on-
wards it was the obverse of the clash between Rome and Jerusalem. The
existence of the diaspora facilitated the diffusion of the Christian heresy
that became a new religion. Similarly, the presence of a Jewish diaspora
in Arabia was an important part of the background to early Islam. The di-
asporic civilization seems, in short, to have been an enabling precondition
for more far-reaching civilizational change.
Would the Jewish reorientation of religious life during the Axial Age
be seen as a civilizational landmark, were it not for the genealogical link
to monotheistic world religions and to the civilizations formed around
them? The reconstructive understanding of historical transformations is
always influenced by their sequels. But it is also useful to compare the tra-
jectory of Judaism to cases of cultural self-redefinition that seem striking
enough to suggest civilizational potential, even if they did not translate
into effective change on that scale. Historical instances would include
the Etruscan version of Mediterranean antiquity, the Axumite-Ethiopian
branch of Christianity, and the Tibetan transformation of Buddhism.
Civilizational analysis still lacks the conceptual tools required to deal with
experiences and traditions of this type. Toynbees notions of abortive, sat-
ellite, arrested, and fossilized civilizations are not in use, and their main
weakness is too obvious to be ignored: they presuppose an idea of normal
growth that would be hard to square with the ontological perspective pro-
posed here. But then it must be admitted that more adequate substitutes
have yet to be invented.
The above reflections give some indication of the variety that unfolds
within the civilizational dimension. To round off the discussion, a related
issue should at least be mentioned. By admitting a plurality of civilization-
al formations, both in the historical and the typological sense, we implic-
itly pose the question of criteria for drawing boundaries and demarcating
units. If we accept the idea of history as creative emergence, it follows that
dividing lines can never claim self-evident objective validity; they are al-
ways imposed on processes, transitions, and ambiguous trends. Neverthe-
less, some changes are more radical than others, and some boundaries less
arbitrary than others. It is a basic fact of history that cultures and tradi-
tions demarcate themselves in spatial and temporal terms corresponding
to the civilizational level. This does not mean that historical and theoreti-
cal analyses have to take such self-demarcations for granted. But critical
interpretations must engage with them, and in the more significant cases,
that tends to result in prolonged debates. For example, the Chinese tradi-
tion claimed a historical continuity reaching back to the Shang and (more
184 johann p. arnason
Sheldon Pollock
his earlier work, he wrote not a word about it. Wolfgang Schluchter, one of
the great Weber scholars of our time and an editor of the Gesamtausgabe,
assured me that the fault lay not with me, and at the same time sought
to provide the methodological gloss that Weber himself did not: Indeed,
you are looking in vain. There is no essay on the comparative method
written by Weber. He practiced it, with the self-imposed qualification
that only dilettantes compare (a famous statement in a letter to von Below
written in 1914). He practiced it in order to identify the distinctive fea-
tures of a phenomenon, not to explain it. For explanation, we need nomo-
logical knowledge, not only in sociology, but also in historiography.2
Schluchters judgment finds support in a recent study by Fritz Ringer, who
goes a bit further but in a way that might puzzle us yet more: In the ma-
jor works of his later years, in his comparative sociology of the world re-
ligions and in the handbook that eventually came to be entitled Economy
and Society, [Weber] moved away from the study of particular historical
topics and toward systematic and comparative investigations of aggregate
structures. Yet it would be wrong to suppose that as his emphasis changed,
his methodology changed as well.3 How is it the case that something so
fundamental to Webers new mode of scholarship, and to exploring his
new emphasisthe historical emergence of capitalism examined across
culturesdid not require fundamental and new methodological reflec-
tion?
This unconcern with the theory of comparativism is not unique to We-
ber. I was privileged to collaborate with Bjrn Wittrock on several com-
parative historical projects, and in none do I recall any of the assembled
scholars, myself included, raising questions about the nature of the com-
parisons we were engaged in drawing, about the potential risks (for risks
there are, as we shall see) or about the particular varieties of knowledge
(because there are indeed varieties) that we thought our comparisons
were going to produce. Nor is this broad unconcern peculiar to Europe-
an comparative historical sociology. For whereas other kinds of so-called
harder comparative social science have turned methodological reflection
into something of a subdiscipline (comparative politics offers a case in
point),4 this has decidedly not been so in humanistic inquiry, particularly
II
5 A special issue of New Literary History devoted to the problem of comparison (40, 3,
2009, which came to my attention too late to be digested for this article) suggests this may
be changing.
6 Hacking 2002: 2. Kaelble 1999 offers something of the logic but ignores the historical
ontology.
188 sheldon pollock
7 These questions have emerged for me from several comparative projects, including
Sanskrit Knowledge Systems on the Eve of Colonialism (http://www.columbia.edu/itc/
mealac/pollock/sks/), New Directions in the Study of Early Modern Asia (http://www.
princeton.edu/~piirs/projects/newdirection.html), and Pollock 2010. Some of the following
discussion is adapted from Pollock 2007.
8 Lieberman 1997: 452, 453, 459; see also 2003.
9 Scheidel 2009: 6.
10
Kocka 2003: 42, and more generally Werner and Zimmermann 2003.
comparison without hegemony 189
11
See e.g., Subrahmanyam 2005.
12
Werner and Zimmermann 2006: 31 and 38.
13
Pollock 2005, 2006.
14
For references see Pollock 2009: 534, from which some of the present discussion is
adapted.
190 sheldon pollock
15
Pollock 2008: 533-542.
16
Lieberman 1997: 451 (citing Kren Wigen).
comparison without hegemony 191
sort. This is the source of unease some have felt with the Axial hypoth-
esis, which is concerned not just with synchronicity, but presupposes (or
at least started out presupposing) a particular content. This was based on
Karl Jaspers vision of an elaboration of cosmologies based on a separa-
tion of a transcendental from a mundane sphere and the codification of
these cosmologies in textual form and their diffusion by intellectual elites
which (so the theory runs) manifested itself across Eurasia in the mid-
first millennium bceand which later scholars then tried hard to find
or if necessary to invent.17 We can make no assumption of unidirectional
change and should not look for it; for early modern Eurasia we make no
assumption of a uniform world system of intellectual modernity in which
everyone participated, as we (or at least some) believe was the case with
the world system of capitalism. Indeed, economic and intellectual history
are not necessarily isomorphic; we might set out to write a history of early
modern capitalism but it would be wrong-headed to set out to write a glo-
bal history of early modern thought as if we knew in advance what that
singular entity was, and as if the adjective early modern were not just a
temporal but also a conceptual marker unproblematically translatable
like numbersacross the worlds conceptual languages.
When comparing the intellectual histories of the early modern world,
then, we are not attempting to validate a hypothesis over N cases. That is
the goal of comparative history. Nor are we attempting to develop causal
accounts of big structures and processes. This is the goal of comparative
sociology (though this cannot always be separated from the preceding).
The most effective comparative intellectual histories are going to seek to
differentiate cases; they ignore generalization and aim toward capturing
similarities and differences across a limited number of instances in order
to understand the cases under discussion, to isolate from the incidental
what is crucial and possibly, though less likely, what is causal.18 There
must, of course, also be a moment of composition for comparative in-
tellectual history, though what this precisely entails remains perhaps our
most serious challenge.
17
Wagner 2005. The Jaspers problematic was extended in Arnason and Wittrock
2004. My contribution there raises methodological cautions related to those offered here
(Pollock 2004).
18
See Baldwin 2004: 11, from whom the above characterization is adapted. Agendas
of historical comparative studies are of course historically situated. Comparative mythol-
ogy and comparative philology today have different objects (structure vs. history, sets vs.
processes, patterns vs. laws); in their origins their purpose was the same: to understand the
unity of the Indo-European race.
192 sheldon pollock
III
How does the logic of comparison look in our second domain of study,
comparative literature? As noted earlier, the discipline with the most pro-
nounced methodological commitment to comparison seems to have done
the least to conceptualize what it is. What one skilled comparativist wrote
thirty years ago remains true: Perhaps the least studied issue in compara-
tive literature is what is meant by comparative and, more precisely, what
are the principles or canons of comparability.19 I find no large assess-
ments, accordingly, but only attempts to piece together the historical de-
velopment. These recount how, as the disciplinary identity of comparative
literature began to stabilize in the post-World War II period, a consensus
emerged that comparison was to engage in analysis of at least two nation-
al literary and linguistic traditions between which actual rapports de faits,
i.e., factual relations or historical contact, could be demonstrated. Within
a few decades this consensus was supplemented and often supplanted by
comparison based on affinity, what one scholar defined as resemblances
in style, structure, mood, or idea between two works which have no other
connection.20
Comparison in literature continues to cultivate both these types. In a
forthcoming anthology of world literature, for example, two classical dra-
mas are juxtaposed, Oedipus and Shakuntala, to prompt either thematic
analysis (the guilty king who doesnt know hes the guilty one) or formal
analysis (Greek unities versus Kalidasas much larger cast of characters
and shifting scenes), and two early modern dramatists of Japan and Eu-
rope, Chikamatsu and Molire, to recover symmetrical responses to the
emergent world system of capitalism (with merchant heroes who em-
body stalled upward-mobility narratives, and characters who are self-
consciously metatheatrical, with characters announcing that they feel
like actors in their unfamiliar situation and costumes).21 A fascinating if
disparate quest, then, in the one case for the kind of enduring ahistorical
structures sought by, say, comparative mythology, in the other, for the ro-
bust processes of comparative history, as rapports de faits represent con-
nected if not crossed history.
19
Miner 1987: 135.
20
See for example Yu 2006: 43-46 (quoting A.O. Aldridge).
D. Damrosch (personal communication; Gateways to World Literature is forthcom-
21
ing from Longman). See also Damrosch 2008: 46-64.
comparison without hegemony 193
Indeed, comparative literature offers not just this, but what is perhaps
the richest set of comparative possibilities. Consider only the following
first sketch of a possible typology:22
1a. Unconnective non-historical, or achronic, comparison: two completely
unrelated texts at completely different chronological times, though not
necessarily at different social times (e.g., Homers Iliad and Hgen
Monogatari c. 1320);
1b. Unconnective historical, or synchronic, comparison: two unrelated
texts at the same time (e.g., the short stories of James Joyce and Ichiy
Higuchi);
2a. Connective achronic comparison: two related texts at different times
(e.g., Homers Odyssey and Joyces Ulysses);
2b. Connective synchronic comparison: two related texts at the same time
(e.g., Joyces Ulysses and Andr Gides La Symphonie pastorale);
3. Comparison that differentiates among multiple types of textual relat-
edness: within a single linguistic tradition where one of the pair is
known to the other (e.g., Homer and Euripides); within different lin-
guistic traditions where one of the pair is known to the other (Homer
and Joyce); within different linguistic traditions where neither of the
pair is known to the other but who are related through some putative
linkage (Homer and Vlmki).23
In addition to addressing individual works in these multiple ways, com-
parison can be directed toward not just texts but a variety of literary
things: a verse form, a story motif, a literary genre; a social fact (e. g., pa-
triarchy); a political event (e. g., revolution); modes of translation across
time and space; large-scale literary processes such as the constitution of
transregional literary publics in, say, seventeenth-century Europe and
seventeenth-century India; the problem of vernacularization in India and
Europe (and its absence in East Asia). And one can easily envision other
kinds of comparison, of a metaliterary, or literary-cultural, or metacritical
sort, all of which comparisons can themselves be divided according to the
above typology (unconnective achronic, unconnective synchronic, con-
nective achronic, and so on). For example:
1. Comparison of literary theories and their (universalist or other) claims
and the effective history of those claims (e.g., Aristotles Poetics and
22
Some of these types were explored in a 2006 Columbia seminar co-taught with D.
Damrosch.
Here again comparison recapitulates connection: aside from the possibility of an In-
23
dogermanische Dichtersprache, epic motifs undoubtedly circulated across the archaic world.
194 sheldon pollock
IV
I noted earlier that not only do we lack a logic of comparison for human-
istic inquiry but we lack a historical ontology of the comparative method.
At least I have never seen a history of the epistemology of comparativ-
ism as practiced that is itself comparative, let alone globally so. Were an
historical ontology of comparison ever to be written, it would almost cer-
tainly have to be written about the West, and would need to take into ac-
count two key components of Western experience. The first is Christian-
ity, which had built into it from its inception a comparative project with
the earlier dispensation of the Jews. Indeed, some of our earliest schol-
arship in the comparative modethe comparison of religions (or rather
their conformit)comes from the early-modern Christian world.24
The first comparative histories of early modern Europe, such as Meiners Historische
25
Vergleichung der Sitten des Mittelalters mit denen unsers Jahrhunderts (1793), argued the
superiority of the present to the past and other forms of not-now/not-us (see Kelley 2001:
5). It is no doubt tactless to note that the first systematic account of comparativism was
produced by the East India Company employee John Stuart Mill (Two Methods of Com-
parison, 1843).
26
See also below n. 31. Apparently comparativist projectsthe doxographies of me-
dieval Sanskrit philosophy; the Dabistn-i Mazhib (c. 1670), a text on religious differences
(see Behl 2010), or the correspondence (tavafuq) between Persian and Sanskrit perceived
by Ali Khan Arzu (d. 1756, Delhi)aimed not at systematic elaboration, and compare less
than juxtapose.
27
A study of comparison in the larger Islamic world (Ibn Khaldun and Al-Biruni, for
example) would usefully complicate the global problematic.
196 sheldon pollock
largest sense) politically. For some intellectual historians, the very project
seems incoherent: Comparative history is either an oxymoron or a mis-
nomer (as well as poor grammar). Either it proposes to compare the sto-
ries of different phenomena by assuming common elements and terms,
in which case it is not history; or else it juxtaposes different phenomena
described in their own terms and contexts, in which case it cannot ven-
ture significant comparisons.28 Literary comparatists find crippling defi-
ciencies when we compare across cultures, as globalization prompts us to
do, for comparison is likely to generate a standard, or ideal type, of which
the texts compared come to function as variants. The only way out is to
retreat to a comparability based on specific intellectual norms or mod-
elsgeneric, thematic, historical, that is, those developed within a single
culture.29 (I ignore for now the so-called postmodern critique that finds
comparison per se to be meaninglesson the grounds that post-modern
epistemology holds it impossible to define adequately the elements to be
contrasted or likenedsince I find that critique to be meaningless.)30
I return to some of these important criticisms, but want to ask first
whether or not a choice is even possible. Isnt comparison something of
a cognitive inevitability, making all intellectual history of necessity com-
parative intellectual history and all literary study comparative literary
study? There is a complex philosophical grounding to this proposition, as
well as a more accessible sociological one. I do not pretend to have a deep
grasp of the former. But there are very suggestive hints in major European
thought that comparison is fundamental to how we perceive the world.31
For Kant cognition as such seems to be a comparative activity. Here is
how one recent commentator characterizes the theory: To be acquaint-
ed with something is to represent something in comparison with other
things, both as to sameness and difference. [As Kant puts it,] The logi-
28
Kelley 2001: 3. And yet as he goes on to show, comparativism has been practiced in
historical studies in the West for three centuries.
29
Culler 2006: 92, who goes on to make the rather odd argument that the more so-
phisticated ones understanding of discourse, the harder it is to compare Western and non-
Western texts, for each depends for its meaning and identity on its place within a discursive
system.
30
Cited in Kelley 2001: 17.
31
I must omit discussion of comparison and epistemology in Indian philosophy,
though the question extends at least from Praastapda (fl. 530), for whom true awareness
of a thing derives from its similarity/dissimilarity with other things (sdharmyavaidharm-
yatattvajna; a reference for which I thank Karin Preisandanz) to Bhoja (fl. 1050), who
(for different reasons) grounds all valid means of cognition in comparison (r grapraka
chapter 25, called sdharmyavaidharmyapraka).
comparison without hegemony 197
32
Okrent 2006: 100-101.
33
McTaggart 1910: 25-26. I owe the Hegel reference to Sudipta Kaviraj.
34
I learned much about both Kant and Marx from conversations with Rebecca Gould
of Columbia University.
198 sheldon pollock
35
For methodological nationalism see Brubaker 2003: 4; Baldwin 2004. For addi-
tional problems of comparativism see Espagne 1994. For the quote see Fodor 2008: 4.
comparison without hegemony 199
While only implicitly comparative (as with its Aristotelian review of politi-
cal forms), the Idea is overtly committed to the dominance of one pole
of the submerged comparative pair: all other histories are deficient in
respect of Greek history, and all other continents in respect of the Euro-
pean political constitution.
A richer because more explicit example is Hegels Vorlesungen ber
die Aesthetik (182329; published posthumously in 1835). The work as a
whole is in fact a comparison of the five arts (painting, sculpture, archi-
tecture, music, literature) according to the degree to which they embody
Geist. But the propriety and logic of the comparative method are again
entirely unthematized, not only the cross-disciplinary comparison but,
more awkwardly so, also the comparisons that operate within the discus-
sion of each art, both across time and especially across space.
As an example consider Hegels treatment of the epic. We can only
compare epics when (as just noted) we have decided that some one thing
is an epic, and that other things can be considered epics as well by the
fact of their sharing certain traits (or what we decide after the fact are rel-
evant traits) with that some one thing. This procedure seems to be a cog-
nitively necessary one. But the necessary gives way to the arbitrary when
that some one thing, in this case Homers works, becomes not just a type
of a token but a norm:
After these preliminary observations we must now survey the particular re-
quirements which can be deduced from the nature of the epic work of art.
In this connection we are at once met by the difficulty that little can be said
in general terms on this more detailed topic, and consequently we would
have to enter upon historical ground at once and consider the national ep-
36
Kant 1991: 52.
200 sheldon pollock
ics singly; but in view of the difference of periods and nations this proce-
dure would give us little hope of producing corresponding results. Yet this
difficulty can be removed if we pick out from the many epic bibles one in
which we acquire a proof of what can be established as the true fundamental
character of the epic proper [was sich als den wahrhaften Grundcharakter des
eigentlichen Epos feststellen lt]. This one consists of the Homeric poems.37
What makes the epic proper the epic proper is its universality (the uni-
versally human [Allgemeinmenschliche] [must be] firmly impressed at the
same time on the particular nation described).38 But how the universally
human is known to Hegel, and more, how it can be known a priori, be-
fore comparison begins, is never explainedbecause it cannot be.
In Hegel, comparison construes with a larger philosophy of history. If
history is the unfolding of a single Weltgeist, if there is one world-histor-
ical process, not a plurality of independent processes, then, in the case of
literature or philosophy or the state, the various epics or doctrines or poli-
ties cannot be equated with each other and so cannot be compared in
the full sense of the word. Such comparison would only be the night in
which all cows are blackthat is, comparability is only a consequence of
ignorance of historical developmental difference.39 Overcoming such ig-
norance leads us not to comparison of equal instances but to the arrange-
ment of unequal instances along a developmental arc, as stages of Geists
realization: there is the epic proper and then a range of incomplete or
failed instances, and comparison here is more the deductive ordering of
what is known than an inductive search through what is unknown.
One can see how this conceptual orientation played out a century lat-
erto return finally to Weberin the account of the miracle of the West
from the celebrated introduction to The Protestant Ethic:
Only in the West does science exist at a stage of development which we
recognize to-day as valid. The Indian natural sciences, though well
developed in observation, lacked the method of experiment The highly
developed historical scholarship of China did not have the method of Thu-
cydides All Indian political thought was lacking in a systematic method
comparable to that of Aristotle. Not all the anticipations in India (School
of Mimamsa) nor all the Indian and other books of law had the strictly
systematic forms of thought, so essential to a rational jurisprudence, of the
Roman law
37
Hegel 1970: 1051.
38
Hegel 1970: 1057-58.
39
Halbfass 1985.
comparison without hegemony 201
40
Weber 1958: 14-17. Parsons omitted the inverted quotes, which like the parentheti-
cal remark that precedes (wie wenigstens wir uns gern vorstellen) render Webers argu-
ment somewhat incoherent.
41
As the letter to von Below makes clear: I will treat the form of political asso-
ciations comparatively and systematically, even risking incurring the anathema Dilettantes
compare. I think what is specifically characteristic of the medieval citythat is, what pre-
cisely history should present us with can really be developed only through determining
what was lacking in the other (ancient, Chinese, Islamic) cities. And thusly with everything.
It is then the business of history to causally explain this specificity (cited in Bendix 1946:
522; translation slightly modified, and emphasis added).
42
Mitchell 2003: 20.
202 sheldon pollock
***
As the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States of America put it. See also
43
Tipps 1973: 219-220.
I am deeply grateful to Arjun Appadurai and Sudipta Kaviraj for their patience with my
ideas.
comparison without hegemony 203
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DEVELOPMENTAL PATTERNS AND PROCESSES
IN ISLAMICATE CIVILIZATION AND
THE IMPACT OF MODERNIZATION
Said A. Arjomand
Max Webers seminal idea of the world religions of salvation as the core
around which civilizations grow implies a type of institutional evolution
of fundamental significance. The Weberian concept of developmental
pattern captures this evolution and will here be used to define imper-
sonal social and cultural dynamics in the longue dure in such a way as to
trace cultural specificity and civilizational diversity.
My current study of developmental patterns in Islamicate civilization
is part of the collective project in rethinking civilizational analysis to
which Bjrn Wittrock is a leading contributor. (Arnason, Eisenstadt and
Wittrock 2004) I have traced the intellectual genealogy of the field from
Weber, Durkheim and Mauss to Eisenstadt elsewhere, suggesting that Ei-
senstadts seminal idea captures the dynamics of what he calls axial civili-
zations, or more specifically the crystallization of basic premises and core
ideas and ideals of a civilization in the course of its history. I have also
argued for Robert Redfields conceptualization of the relationship between
the Great Tradition and the Little Tradition as a paradigm of intracivili-
zational processes in preference to Eliass much better known conceptu-
alization of the civilizing process, which is, however, Eurocentric and
pseudo-universal. (Arjomand 2010b) Redfields dynamic approximation
of Little Traditions to the Great Tradition could be used to replace Eliass
unitary conception by a pluralistic one that would compare culturally spe-
cific developmental patterns in different civilizations.
S.N. Eisenstadt (2003) and Johann Arnason (2003) have done much to ex-
plicate the idea of an axial breakthrough that Karl Jaspers drew from We-
206 said a. arjomand
1 The third major institutional differentiation, which gathered real momentum in the
eleventh century but cannot be discussed here, was the emergence of Sufism or Islamic
mysticism. Sufism was firmly and explicitly based on the fundamental premises of Islam
as selected from the Qurn and the hadith (sayings and deeds of the Prophet), and the
Sufi orders derived their religious authority ultimately from the Prophet through a putative
chain of spiritual masters. In sharp contrast to Troeltschs mysticism as an individual form,
Sufism is a fully congregational religion; it places the mystic virtuosi at the head of the Sufi
congregations with institutionalized links to the Sufi hermits and world-renouncing ascet-
ics, and with provisions for pastoral care as well as elaborate rites. In fact, it is the first fully
congregational form of Islam as a religion of the masses. If anything, popular Sufi orders come
sociologically closer to the monastic orders of the Catholic church than to mysticism.
208 said a. arjomand
2
Arnason (2006) is right to deplore Webers neglect of empires in his analysis of dom-
ination by making them vanish into patrimonialism.
210 said a. arjomand
ideas and the Sharia thus furthered the differentiation of the Islamicate
normative order. (Arjomand 2001)
Furthermore, the differentiation between monarchy and the ethico-le-
gal order was sharpened by the emergence of the Sultanate under the Ab-
basid caliphs in the mid-tenth century, and sharpened still further when
Sultanate replaced the Caliphate altogether after the overthrow of the
Abbasids by the Mongols in 1258. Rather than focusing on the Caliphate
and the sacred law (sharia), the typical conception of political order, es-
pecially as found in the Persian literature of the medieval period on state-
craft and political ethics that spread to Central Asia and India, was that of
a world order constituted by the two powers of prophecy (nobovvat) and
monarchy (saltanat). From the end of the twelfth century onward, this
idea of the two powers constitutive of order was developed into a type of
political theory that I have called Islamic royalism. (Arjomand 2005a) I
have offered a typology of post-Mongol regimes, including the early mod-
ern empires in terms of variations in the relation between the two powers,
but these are variations within the above-mentioned basic dual structure.
(Arjomand 2010a)
My typology of Muslim regimes on the basis of their distinctive politi-
cal culture can be reconciled with the structural typologies proposed by
Weber and Hodgson. Weber defined the ideal type of patrimonial state
as a form of political organization in which authority is personal and the
administration of the kingdom is an extension of the management of the
household of the ruler. He applied the model to medieval Muslim king-
doms, and discussed the mamluk army, as developed by the Abbasid
caliphs and by other Muslim patrimonial rulers and consisting of Turk-
ish military slaves, among patrimonial armies. This type of military force
could be the source of chronic political instability which made the Near
East the classic location of what he called sultanism. (Weber 1978, 2:
1020)
The polity evolved under the Samanids in Khurasan and Central Asia
(Transoxiana) in the ninth and tenth centuries fits this typification, but
to bring out its cultural distinctiveness, I have called it the Persianate
polity. (Arjomand 2009c) The corps of military slaves (mamluks) was
created by the founder of the Samanid state and remained the most im-
portant element in its military organization. Just as in Webers ideal type,
the policing of the cities was considered an extension of the duties of the
guards that served at the court and protected the person of the king. The
Ghaznavid state was founded by one of the Samanid Turkish mamluks.
The Ghaznavids modelled it on that of the Samanids in the eleventh and
islamicate civilization 213
5 This claim, however, was far from exclusive, and its major proponents, al-Mwardi
(d. 1058) and al-Ghazli (d. 1111) in the second half of the fifth/eleventh century, had no
hesitation in supplementing their Islamic jurisprudence with writing on statecraft and ethi-
cal advice for kings.
islamicate civilization 217
6 The Taliban, for instance, enforced some of the cruel punishments of tribal custom
against homosexuals as part of the Sharia, as they did tribal exchange of women instead
of blood money. Another example is female genital mutilation, which has no basis in the
Sharia and is not practiced in the great majority of Muslim countries. It had become very
islamicate civilization 219
or just an end point, but also the beginning of a new process of evolution
and differentiation along a different path.
The Islamicate pattern of differentiation of the religious and politi-
cal spheres in the Ottoman empire, with imperial monarchy as the key
element of the circle of justice and the protector of the ethico-legal or-
der based on the Sharia, differs very significantly from the delineation of
the two powers in the Christian West. We should therefore not be sur-
prised to find that the Christianity-based idea of secularism does not fit
the modernization trajectory of the Islamicate civilization any more than
Troeltschs churchsect distinction. The classic treatment of secularization
in the Ottoman empire by Niyazi Berkes (1964) thus traces a developmen-
tal pattern set in motion by the defensive modernization of the state that
bears little resemblance to the evolution of secularism in the West. (Taylor
2007)
Talal Asad (2003) similarly shows that the decisive stage of state-build-
ing in Egypt involved secularization in intimate connection between the
late nineteenth-century Islamic reform movement and state-building.
Muhammad Abduh (d. 1905) took over the leadership of the legal reform
movement as Chief Mufti of Egypt and his legal reform project, carried
out in the decade following his death. The Sharia came to be equated with
legal rules for marriage, divorce and inheritancethe substantive fields
historically under its exclusive jurisdiction. The result was the reconfigu-
ration of law, ethics and religious authority, not simply abridgement but
a re-articulation of the concepts of law and morality. (Asad 2003: 248)
Law became the domain of the state and religious courts incorporated
into its judiciary hierarchy until they were abolished by Nasser in 1955,
while morality was relegated to the private, religious sphere.
Asad puts the current resurgence of Islam in the context of the nation-
state created by Abduhs generation in Egypt and in other Muslim coun-
tries since. Categories of politics and religion come to implicate each
other profoundly in the contemporary resurgence of political Islam be-
cause Islamisms preoccupation with state power is the result of the
modern nation-states enforced claim to constitute legitimate social iden-
tities and arenas. (Asad 2003: 200) The revolutionary transformation of
Shiite Islam in the context of this cultural impact of the modern state
came with the Islamic revolution of 1979 in Iran. The fact that the last of
rare in Upper Egypt until a film broadcast during the Cairo Population Conference of 1994
prompted the Shaykh al-Azhar to issue a fatwa to the effect that genital mutilation is Is-
lamic and any good Muslim should practice it.
220 said a. arjomand
the modern great revolutions, the Islamic revolution in Iran, turned out to
have the goal of establishing a theocracy is surely as big a surprise as the
collapse of communism a decade later. Yet it fits the developmental pattern
of religious and political authority in Iran discussed earlier (both in the pre-
Islamic and Islamic periods). Needless to say, however, there is a century of
civilizational encounter with the West and modernization in between.
The spirit that set in motion the process of rationalization in the twen-
tieth century was not endogenous but came from the West. I refer to the
grand project of political reform by the constitution of 19061907 which
required reconciliation of modern constitutionalism with the principle of
order in Shiite Islam. Contrary to anachronistic misreadings, this recon-
ciliation was neither impossible nor particularly difficult. It goes without
saying that there were serious conflicts of interest between the constitu-
tional state and the Shiite hierocracy, especially concerning the judiciary
organization and education, but there was no major conceptual problem
of the kind we find later in the century. To be more precise, there was no
talk of the Islamic state or Islamic government. Such talk did arise
with the development of an Islamic political ideology in the 1970s, and
resulted in a major revolutionary break with monarchy in 1979. The revo-
lution then set in motion a new process of rationalization of the structure
of authority along a very different path.
The central feature of this new process of post-revolutionary rationali-
zation has consisted of the harmonization of Khomeinis theory of theo-
cratic government on the basis of the mandate of the religious jurist, and
the rational-legal legitimacy of parliamentary legislation and bureaucratic
administration. In order to trace this process of value-rationalization,
the current constitutional politics of Iran can be analyzed with reference
to the value-ideas or principles incorporated into the 1979 Constitution
of the Islamic Republic. The contradictions among the heterogene-
ous principles of the Constitutionnamely, the Mandate of the Jurist or
theocratic government, the rule of law and participatory representative
government, and populismcan, I claim, exhaustively account for the
confrontation between the Leader, or clerical monarch, and the reformist
President Khatami (19972005) on the one hand, and the current hard-
line President Ahmadinejad, the reformists and the Majles (Parliament),
the Council of Guardians and/or the Leader, on the other. (Arjomand
1988; 2009a)
Islamicization as a current intracivilizational process in the context of
the modern nation-states, finally, brings us to a developmental pattern in
Islamic multiple modernities which can be subsumed under Eisenstadts
islamicate civilization 221
from South Asia, the Middle East and the West to fight it, the interna-
tional use of violence was widely legitimized. The globalization of po-
litical violence and Islamic transnational terrorism gathered momentum
with the disintegration of Yugoslavia, which drew the Jihad militants from
Afghanistan and elsewhere to Bosnia from 1992 to 1996, and with the
anti-Russian rebellion in Chechnya after the break-up of the Soviet Un-
ion, which continued into the new century. In the latter half of the 1990s,
Usma bin Ldin returned to Afghanistan and formed the World Islamic
Front for Jihad against Jews and Crusaders, in which he was joined by
Zawhiri, and applied Sayyid Qutbs idea of the vanguard of the Islamic
movement to a global counter-elite who would be methodical and follow
a set of rules or the principle (al-qaida) in waging Jihadnow a global
Jihad against the far enemy, the United States of America. (Gerges 2005:
6-11) In short, Islamic terrorism shows the interpenetration of intra- and
intercivilizational processes, and demonstrates that there can be clashes of
civilizational elements within each and every world civilization and with-
in the composite civilization of modernity.
Under the impact of globalization, Islamicization thus becomes en-
twined with a powerful new intercivilizational process, which is unjustifi-
ably generalized into a global clash of civilizations by Samuel Huntington
(1996). It is true that the inter- and intracivilizational processes inter-
mingle in the global context and set in motion Islamic global terrorism
discussed above, but globalization also stimulates what I would call defen-
sive counter-universalismmeaning the attempt to appropriate universal-
ist institutions by Islamic cloning. We thus hear about Islamic science,
Islamic Human Rights, Islamic international system and a variety of
organizations modelled after the United Nations and its offshoots, most
notably the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which was founded
in 1969 and has fifty-seven countries as its members. The cloning is un-
mistakable and I would argue that the assimilative character of defensive
counter-globalization or counter-universalism is quite pronounced. It has
already resulted in the assimilation of universal organizational forms, and
albeit restrictively, of universal ideas such as human rights and rights of
women. (Arjomand 2004b) It is difficult to escape the conclusion that,
despite its intent, defensive counter-universalism is inevitably a step toward
the modernization of the Islamic tradition. It is thus a part of the global
civilization of multiple modernities.
224 said a. arjomand
References
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. 2007 The Times of History: Universal Topics in Islamic Historiography, Budapest:
Central European University Press.
Arjomand, S.A. 1984 The Shadow of God and the Hidden Imam: Religion, Political Or-
ganization and Societal Change in Shiite Iran from the Beginning to 1890, The Uni-
versity of Chicago Press.
. 1988 The Turban for the Crown: The Islamic Revolution in Iran, Oxford Univer-
sity Press.
. 1994 Abd Allah ibn al-Muqaffa and the Abbasid Revolution, Journal of Iranian
Studies, 27.1-4: 9-36.
. 1999 The Law, Agency and Policy in Medieval Islamic Society: Development of
the Institutions of Learning from the Tenth to the Fifteenth Century, Comparative
Studies in Society and History, 41.2: 263-93.
. 2001 Perso-Indian Statecraft, Greek Political Science and the Muslim Idea of
Government, International Sociology, 16.3: 461-80.
. 2003 Conceptions of Authority and the Transition of Shiism from Sectarian to
National Religion in Iran, in F. Daftary & J.W. Meri, eds., Culture and Memory in
Medieval Islam, London: I.B. Tauris, pp. 388-409.
. 2004a Rationalization, the Constitution of Meaning and Institutional Develop-
ment, in C. Camic & H. Joas, eds., The Dialogical Turn: New Roles for Sociology in
the Post-Disciplinary Age, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 247-74.
. 2004b Islam, Political Change and Globalization, Thesis Eleven, 76: 8-28.
. 2005a Political Culture in the Islamicate Civilization, in E. Ben-Rafael and Y.
Sternberg, eds., Comparing Modernity, Pluralism and Hegemony, Leiden: Brill, pp.
309-26.
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cieties, 3: 44-65.
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. 2009b The Constitution of Medina: A Socio-legal Interpretation of Muham-
mads Acts of Foundation of the Umma, International Journal of Middle East Stud-
ies, 41.4: 555-75.
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of Persianate Studies, 2.2: 115-36.
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R. Irwin & M. Cook, eds., The New Cambridge History of Islam, 4: 225-73.
. 2010b Three Generations of Comparative Sociologies, Archives europennes de
sociologie (forthcoming).
Arjomand, S.A. & Tiryakian, E.A. 2004 Introduction to Arjomand & Tiryakian, eds.,
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islamicate civilization 225
Peter Wagner
Space (1): Multiple Modernities and Our Relation to the Axial Age
In a most general sense, and keeping the limits of our knowledge in mind,
the axial-age transformations can be seen as a period of profound self-
questioning and as the conscious introduction of new ways of interpreting
the world at a moment of crisis (Wagner 2005).2 It is not common par-
lance to refer to the social configurations that emerged from these trans-
1 Bearing in mind that such proximity of problmatiques does not warrant a return to
the idea of universal perennial problems for which straightforward conceptual solutions are
to be sought, rightly criticized by Quentin Skinner (1969).
2 The history of the link between crisis and critique (Koselleck 1959) begins, as far as
our relatively solid knowledge extends, with the axial-age period in its Greek expression,
230 peter wagner
The years around 1800 are often considered as the period of the origins of
European modernity. Unlike some postcolonial authors and critics of eu-
rocentrism, I do not see any need to deny or downplay the crucial impact
of European developments during this period on socio-cultural transfor-
mations worldwide. This is very different from saying, though, that mo-
dernity began in Europe and then diffused across the world. The latter
argument is normally sustained by one of three explanations, or a combi-
nation of them, that require a brief review.
the simultaneous invention of politics and of philosophy (Castoriadis 1990; Maier 1990;
Ober 1998; Raaflaub 2004). For a recent, stimulating return to this theme see Boltanski
2009.
3 For Europe, such a closer look will lead to identifying a major transformation in the
early second millennium, as long argued by Wittrock 2004; see now also Wagner 2010b.
towards a world sociology of modernity 231
for a considerable time, and historians do not detect any economic supe-
riority of the colonizers that determined the outcome of the encounters.
Western occupation and the subsequent destruction or transformation of
African societies were determined by military power (Thompson 2000).
Finally, the diffusion of European modernity can be seen as being due
to the normative attractiveness of the principles of individual and col-
lective self-determination. Under the long reign of more materialist ex-
planations of history, including modernization theory, during the latter
half of the twentieth century, such views were rarely heard, but they are
coming more strongly to the fore now that the language of human rights
and democracy has returned to the core of the contemporary self-under-
standing. Indeed, many occurrences in the late eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries can be interpreted in this light as assertions of the principle of
collective self-determination, most significantly in the Americas with first
the American and Haitian declarations of independence and subsequently
the creation of independent states in South America. Such a founding of
new societies (Hartz 1964) against the background of earlier colonization
was clearly inspired by the modern imaginary as it had been developed in
Europe, but again we cannot speak of a case of simple diffusion. The new-
ly founded societies displayed a breadth of interpretations of modernity
that again needs to be understood by the encounter of already different
European fragments, to use Hartzs term, with various native populations.
Current studies of varieties of such non-European modernities can build
on the presence of the modern imaginary from those founding moments
onwards and will then need to reconstruct the subsequent historical tra-
jectories as re-interpretations of the form of that imaginary adopted at the
outset (see, e.g., Larrain 2007).
In sum, the moment of 1800 is in a global perspective not the begin-
ning of the diffusion of European modernity, but rather the onset of par-
allel processes of world-making, inspired by the modern imaginary but
pursued under conditions of considerable power differentials.
The particularity of the United States of America resides in the fact that
their foundations are rather symmetrically erected on both individual and
collective autonomy. The latter principle strongly informed all founding
of new societies as a move towards independence from the colonial pow-
ers, but the commitment to, and interpretation of, the principle of indi-
vidual autonomy varied highly, both in terms of its inclusiveness and the
towards a world sociology of modernity 233
We may just note here, pending deeper analysis, that European organ-
ized modernity faced gradual de-conventionalization from the late 1960s
onwards that ended in a more or less negotiated collapse of a partial world
order between 1989 and 1992 and maybe 2010, if the current financial
turmoil turns out to have the deep institutional impact that some observ-
ers now expect. Described in this way, European history during the past
half century looks less dissimilar from South African history than we are
used to thinking.
post-war period and to the early novels by Lars Gustafsson, which play with autobiographi-
cal references to the Sweden of the 1950s and 1960s.
236 peter wagner
be achieved, but only at the price of losing all significance and relevance
(Wagner 2008, chs. 2 and 11). Globalization spells the weakening of
meaning-providing contexts, and as such it may create new spaces for in-
dividualization. But such an apparent normative gain may occur against
the background of the weakening of inclusion-providing institutions and
their accompanying modes of recognition.6
These inclusion-providing institutions of organized modernity oper-
ated and arguably needed to operate with clear and strong boundaries
of eligibility or membership. Organized modernity showed some achieve-
ments in terms of domestic justice and equality, but it had no means to
address the global situation beyond the boundaries of a given state. To
phrase the issue of equality and justice in a slightly provocative way, we
may ask, secondly, under what conditions a theory of separate develop-
ment, the justificatory pillar of the apartheid regime, is justifiable. The
separate organization of modern nations in the name of self-determina-
tion is not as far removed from separate development as defenders of
modernity are inclined to think. The nation-state model was built implic-
itly on the assumption that those states were equal and were also equally
providers of justice to their members. In practice, though, this was clearly
not always the case. Inside nation-states, the relations between the English
and the Scottish, or between North and South Italians, were relations of
inequality and domination. Between nation-states, this was similarly the
case between, for instance, Sweden and Finland, or Great Britain and Por-
tugal or Argentina.
We have to recognize that normative separation is at best justifiable in
the pronounced absence or thinness, to use a common metaphor of
economic, political, and cultural ties between the members of the respec-
tive entities. Whenever there are such significant ties, considerations of
justice need to cross the boundaries separating these entities. Coming
back to our example, the apartheid notion of separate development was
at most somewhat defensible before gold and diamond mining drew large
numbers of black Africans into the economy and society of the dominant
white groups and this means before any such notions had even been
formulated. Once such a hierarchical division of labour on highly unequal
terms had emerged and been consolidated, no justification of separateness
was any longer defensible. In turn, we have to ask whether the current
global division of labour has not created a density of economic ties across
6
See Wagner (2010c) for a discussion of progress under conditions of varieties of mo-
dernity.
towards a world sociology of modernity 237
the world that requires the urgent development of concepts and practices
of global justice (see Ypi 2008 for a constructive proposal).
The latter development will need to be underpinned by a novel under-
standing of the ties that make human beings commit themselves to the
fate and destiny of other human beings. Re-interpreting older under-
standings that referred to such ties as friendship, pity, or brotherhood, the
early nineteenth-century socio-cultural transformations in Europe wit-
nessed the emergence of the novel term solidarity for which claims of
superiority over the older terms soon emerged. Solidarity was supposedly
built on equality, not paternalistic hierarchy; on abstraction, not proxim-
ity; and on reason, not passion. Despite those claims, though, the term
found its transposition into concrete historical forms in concretised ver-
sions of national solidarity and class solidarity as well as its institutional
translation into the welfare state. Thus, it came to refer too closely to the
social configuration of organized modernity to be of unmodified use in
the global present. The current de-structuring of organized modernity re-
quires anew a re-specification of the social bond with a political view of
the kind that was achieved during the nineteenth century but capable of
creating and maintaining a world in the face of the current risk of world-
lessness (the above draws strongly on Karagiannis 2007 from which the
quote stems).
238 peter wagner
References
Arnason, Johann P., Shmuel Eisenstadt and Bjrn Wittrock, eds., Axial civilizations
and world history, Leiden: Brill, 2005.
Asad, Talal, Anthropology and the colonial encounter, New York: Prometheus, 1995.
Boltanski, Luc, De la critique, Paris: Gallimard, 2009.
Boltanski, Luc, and Laurent Thvenot, De la justification, Paris: Gallimard, 1991.
Castoriadis, Cornelius, Le monde morcel. Les carrefours du labyrinthe III. Paris: Seuil,
1990.
Dlamini, Jacob, Native nostalgia, Johannesburg: Jacana, 2009.
Eisenstadt, Shmuel Noah, Comparative civilizations and multiple modernities, Leiden:
Brill, 2003.
, Multiple modernities, Piscataway, NJ: Transaction, 2002.
Hartz, Louis, The founding of new societies. Studies in the history of the United States,
Latin America, South Africa, Canada, and Australia, San Diego: Harcourt, Brace,
Jovanovich, 1964.
Harvey, David,The condition of post-modernity,Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990.
Karagiannis, Nathalie, Multiple solidarities, in Nathalie Karagiannis and Peter Wagner,
eds., Varieties of world-making. Beyond globalization, Liverpool: Liverpool Univer-
sity Press, 2007.
, Avoiding responsibility. The politics and discourse of EU development policy, Lon-
don: Pluto, 2004.
Karagiannis, Nathalie, and Peter Wagner, The liberty of the moderns compared to the
liberty of the ancients, in Johann P. Arnason, Kurt Raaflaub and Peter Wagner, eds.,
The Greek polis and the invention of democracy. A politico-cultural transformation
and its interpretations, Oxford: Blackwell, forthcoming, 2011.
Kaya, Ibrahim, Social theory and later modernities. The Turkish experience, Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press, 2004.
Koselleck, Reinhart, Kritik und Krise, Freiburg: Alber, 1959.
, Vergangene Zukunft, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1979.
Larrain, Jorge, Latin American varieties of modernity, in Nathalie Karagiannis and
Peter Wagner, eds., Varieties of world-making. Beyond globalization, Liverpool: Liv-
erpool University Press, 2007.
Maier, Christian, The Greek discovery of politics, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1990.
Ober, Josaiah, Political dissent in democratic Athens, Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1998.
Parsons, Talcott, Evolutionary universals in society, American sociological review, vol.
29, June, 1964.
Raaflaub, Kurt A., The discovery of freedom in ancient Greece, Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press, 2004.
Schiavone, Aldo, La storia spezzata, Rome/Bari: Laterza, 1996.
Skinner, Quentin, Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas (1969), now in:
James Tully, ed., Meaning and context. Quentin Skinner and his critics, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988, 29-67.
towards a world sociology of modernity 239
Ulf Hannerz
horror of the event.1 Changing this sentiment, however, was not really a
task Braudel himself took on, despite his interest in building bridges be-
tween history and social science. On the contrary, he would find scope for
his own transdisciplinary curiosity in the history of the longue dure a
history of a slower tempo, which sometimes almost borders on the mo-
tionless.
It seems there has been an enduring tendency toward an intellectual
division of labor here. Even when anthropologists, frequently more like
historians in their attraction to concrete descriptive accounts, have fo-
cused on particular moments of social life, they have often as in Gluck-
mans (1940) analysis of a bridge opening in Zululand, or in Geertz
(1972) interpretation of the Balinese cockfight employed them to show,
not dramatic change, but the complexity or the essence of an existing
social order, revealed in a particularly temporally and spatially compact
instance. On the whole, their inclination, like that of other social scien-
tists, may have been to look for recurrences and regularities. If temporal-
ity must be involved, the time perspective more congenial to social sci-
ence may have been that of a variety of history which Braudel identified
between the histoire vnementielle and the longue dure: a medium-term
conjunctural history. Precisely the sense of drama and surprise that draws
the journalist and the historian to the event, it has been suggested, could
repel the social scientist in search of orderly understandings.2
But some reconsideration of the nature of events and their place in
change seems to have gone on here and there in the social sciences relat-
ing to a theoretical interest in questions of structure and agency (which I
and several other contributors to this volume share with Bjrn Wittrock).
Yet perhaps it also has to do with ways in which our more raw under-
standings of human life and society are no longer quite the same. The
world seems less certain, more chaotic; or at least uncertainty and cha-
os draw more of our attention. Chernobyl, Tiananmen Square, the Ber-
lin Wall, September 11, the 2004 tsunami, and the 2008 financial crisis in
Wall Street are examples of places and dates that fit into the parachutists
view of history.
1
While the reference is to a volume of translations of Braudels essays, the article re-
ferred to here was originally published in Annales in 1958.
2
See also Der Derian (2001: 672), who argues for a study of accidents: As a pre-
cipitous, unforeseeable break from normal events and behaviour, the accident as object of
study does not render great returns for an academic discipline in pursuit of long-term ra-
tional explanation and prediction of normal behaviour in the positivist world, the acci-
dent by definition exists only as spill-over, an externality, an exception to the rule.
the first draft of history 245
3 I have described them before (Hannerz [1969] 2004: 159-176; 1996: 2-3). When I
first discussed the 1968 Washington riot in a monograph on black neighborhood life, in a
chapter titled Waiting for the burning to begin, one reviewer voiced the opinion that it did
not fit into the format of an ethnography. I believe such an view would be less likely now.
246 ulf hannerz
riots were going on that was too dangerous for my taste, and a curfew
had been declared. Instead I followed the local media, and when a sem-
blance of order had returned, I got the view of neighborhood people of
what had occurred.
Some of them had, like me, mostly stayed home. Those who had been
in the streets had primarily been younger people, and some of the most-
ly unemployed men who usually spent much time at the streetcorners.
Along major ghetto streets, shops had mostly closed as news of the as-
sassination spread. As store doors and windows were broken and looting
started, people who had at first been bystanders felt they could as well get
into the action. What had begun as a demonstration of anger seemed to
shift toward a sense of euphoria. The relatively few black-owned busi-
nesses were mostly spared, especially if they had had the foresight to place
soul brother or soul sister signs in their windows.
Few policemen were in the area when the looting began. When more
arrived, bottles and bricks were thrown at them. Greatly outnumbered
still, and apparently advised not to act in a way which could worsen the
situation, they did little to stop the action. When a heavy rain began to
fall, someone in the crowd shouted out the first lines of a recently popular
James Brown tune: We all get together, in any kind of weather Still,
the number of people in the streets decreased. When the police moved in
with teargas, that was more or less the end of the first night. The next day,
however, looting and burning began again, partly in other areas. James
Brown, known as Soul Brother Number One, came into town, went into
the streets and called for an end to the riot, but this must have been one of
the few times when many young people responded to him only with deri-
sion. On the second night, federal troops as well as the National Guard
were called into Washington, and put an end to the riot more through a
massive presence than through a use of force. In my neighborhood, dur-
ing the following days, the riot received mixed reviews. Some felt that it
had been foolish, and would turn out to have damaged the black com-
munity. But there was also joking and bantering, not least when people
turned up in new outfits, or tried to give away or exchange items of cloth-
ing that had turned out to be the wrong size. Meanwhile, on some street
corners a few blocks away, only ruins were left after the fires.
The second experience that I want to recall briefly is from early 1989;
I was in New York not as a field worker but as a visiting professor at one
of the citys universities, yet still attending to the local scene. There I was,
then, standing in line on a lower Broadway sidewalk, hoping to get into a
public meeting where several of the most famous American writers would
the first draft of history 247
express their support for Salman Rushdie, author of the recently pub-
lished Satanic Verses, and under a death threat as Ayatollah Khomeini, in
Tehran, had just issued his fatwa.
There were too many of us out there under our umbrellas in the rain,
and too small a venue for the meeting, so most of us did not get in. In-
stead we became the observers, not to say participants, in what happened
outside. On my side of Broadway were the people who had wanted to get
into the meeting, mostly members of an educated middle class, shouting
Free speech! Free speech! or even Hey hey, ho ho, Hizbollah has got to
go! (One woman passing by marveled that this was really like in 68.) On
the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street was a gathering of Muslim
immigrants, with their posters, and their choruses. One of the posters de-
clared that Islam promotes dialogue.
After a couple of hours, as the manifestation inside the building was
over, both crowds dissolved, the members melting into the New York traf-
fic again.
4 Sewell does not discuss the media engagement with the Bastille event in any detail.
For an account of the media situation in France a few decades earlier (and its part in the
subversion of the ancien rgime), however, by a historian with journalistic experience of his
own, see Darnton (2000).
250 ulf hannerz
5 I am among those writers who have in recent years used the flow metaphor in
conceptualizing cultural and social processes. This usage has sometimes been criticized as
suggesting only smoothness and regularity. As Rosenaus imagery shows, flow takes many
shapes.
the first draft of history 253
tions for television interviews. Meanwhile, at the center of the entire affair,
there was a kind of void, as Rushdie had gone underground. Hardly any-
body knew where he was.
The Rushdie case exemplifies the internal heterogeneity of the category
of events. To begin with, certainly, there is just the writer, typically alone
at his desk, struggling with words; but then as he draws on his experience
and imagines an audience, that can be held as a social act as well. Then in
what sense is a publishing event (whether involving a novel or a fatwa) an
event? The triggering event in itself does not seem much like the kind of
thing Sewell has in mind.
Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz (1992: 1) have developed the notion of
media events, to denote a new narrative genre that employs the unique
potential of the electronic media to command attention universally and
simultaneously in order to tell a primordial story about current affairs.
Clearly, however, Dayan and Katz take these events to be planned and
regulated performances, preferably predictable in outcome, with a clear
separation between actors and audiences: royal weddings, state funerals,
opening ceremonies of parliaments or Olympic games.6 Perhaps in a small
way that parade of American authors demonstrating their solidarity with
Rushdie in a hall inside the building was such an event, insofar as the mi-
crophones and cameras were also there.
That rather minor symbolic confrontation which I witnessed on Low-
er Broadway, a confrontation of posters and loud voices, may not have
amounted to much of an event in its own right, but may in some ways
fit more closely into Sewells conception, as would no doubt some of the
more real riots over the book in Muslim communities in various places
(although there were undoubtedly some affairs organized more like me-
dia events as well). And so certainly would the riots in Washington and
elsewhere in American cities in April, 1968. We are referring in these in-
stances obviously to a category of occurrences where a central ingredient
is an open public gathering, made up of people who come together on the
basis of some issue or set of issues, but not following any clearly defined,
predetermined agenda, and not recruited exclusively along any particular
planned lines. This is the sort of moment of flux (and there can certainly
be a whole series of them) where onlookers can turn into active parti-
cipants, attracting more onlookers and again more participants, where
their mutual understandings of backgrounds, motives, and intentions may
6 Here Dayan and Katz come close to Boorstins (1964) concept of pseudo-events.
the first draft of history 255
References
Boorstin, Daniel J. 1964. The Image. New York: Harper and Row.
Braudel, Fernand. 1980. On History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Cohen, Stanley. 1972. Folk Devils and Moral Panics. London: MacGibbon and Kee.
Darnton, Robert. 2000. An early information society: news and the media in eight-
eenth-century Paris. American Historical Review, 105: 1-35.
Dayan, Daniel, and Elihu Katz. 1992. Media Events. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press.
Der Derian, James. 2001. Global events, national security, and virtual theory. Millen-
nium, 30: 669-690.
Geertz, Clifford. 1972. Deep play: notes on the Balinese cockfight. Daedalus, 101: 1-37.
Gluckman, Max. 1940. Analysis of a social situation in modern Zululand. Bantu Stud-
ies, 14: 1-30, 147-174.
Hannerz, Ulf. 1996. Transnational Connections. London: Routledge.
. 2004a. Foreign News. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
. 2004b. Soulside. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Second edition; first
published by Columbia University Press, 1969.)
Rosenau, James N. 1990. Turbulence in World Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press.
Sewell, William H., Jr. 1996a. Historical events as transformations of structures: in-
venting revolution at the Bastille. Theory and Society, 25: 841-881.
. 1996b. Three temporalities: toward an eventful sociology. In Terence J. McDon-
ald (ed.), The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences. Ann Arbor: University of Mich-
igan Press.
Tambiah, Stanley J. 1996. Leveling Crowds. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process. Chicago: Aldine.
CULTURAL LOSS AND CULTURAL RESCUE: LILLI
ZICKERMAN, OTTILIA ADELBORG, AND THE PROMISES OF
THE SWEDISH HOMECRAFT MOVEMENT1
Barbro Klein
The years around 1900 vibrated with intellectual, artistic, and scholarly
energies all around Europe. Many people worked to bring about social,
pedagogical, and cultural improvements, not least in the lives of women,
and reform movements acted as catalysts for each other. On the follow-
ing pages I will look at one of these movements, the homecraft movement
(hemsljdsrrelsen), in Sweden which aimed to rescue the disappearing
traditional arts of the rural population. I will study the homecraft move-
ment as it affected and was affected by two fascinating and very different
members of it: Lilli Zickerman and Ottilia Adelborg. What was impor-
tant to them in their involvement with the movement, and what inspired
them to go on? How do they depict their relationship to the country peo-
ple whose arts and crafts they worked to resuscitate? What do readers and
viewers in our own time make of their efforts?
Of the many figures of thought and sets of ideas that were current around
1900, two were central to the homecraft movement. First, there are ideas
that had endured for more than one hundred years after Herder published
his works and had come to take on an aura of self-evidence. In essence,
preservation movements had come to take it for granted that a countrys
uneducated rural inhabitants were carriers of remnants of an ancient na-
1
For their willingness to share with me their knowledge about the homecraft move-
ment and for help in locating sources, I thank Sune Bjrklf, Kersti Jobs-Bjrklf, Gunilla
Lundahl, Gunilla Mattsson, Lena Nordesj, and Eva Olsson. For their careful reading of
this text, I thank Maria Leimar and Marie-Christine Skuncke. Almost all translations from
Swedish are mine.
262 barbro klein
tional culture. But the simple people were unaware of the treasures they
harbored and, therefore, unable to protect themselves from the onslaught
of modernization and industrialization. Many educated people came to
regard it as their duty to assist the defenseless rural folk in collecting and
reviving the arts and crafts that were about to be lost forever. Indeed, in-
tervention from the educated was the only thing that could lead to a re-
constitution of the genuine arts of a nation (Bauman and Briggs 2003).
To rescue cultural forms under duress was the basic aim of many schol-
arly and literary efforts during the nineteenth century, such as those of the
Grimm Brothers and those of the founders of folk-life museums and of
such fields as ethnology and cultural anthropology.
Other ideas that were more or less clearly articulated within the Swed-
ish homecraft movement emanate from various arts movements in conti-
nental Europe and perhaps even more from England, where thinkers and
artists linked to the Arts and Crafts Movement, such as John Ruskin, Wil-
liam Morris, and Walter Crane, were interested in both the lesser arts
and economic rehabilitation (Glassie 1972). Some of the thinking of the
Arts and Crafts Movement reached Swedish readers via the Norwegian
art historian Lorentz Dietrichson, to whom beauty was a moral force and
poor taste a symptom of social and moral decline. To him art, science,
morality, and utility were conjoined as inevitably as beauty, truth, and
goodness (Glambek 1988). But Swedish thinkers, such as Ellen Key, also
came to influence the Swedish homecraft movement. Art is for all, said
Key (1916), and in order not to become slaves to drudgery all people must
be taught to appreciate genuinely beautiful art. Even though neither Lilli
Zickerman nor Ottilia Adelborg shared Keys ideas about socialist politics
or sexual equality (1909), thoughts similar to hers were deeply entrenched
in their lives and work.
During the latter half of the nineteenth century, many ideas regard-
ing cultural preservation and rural improvements had already been put
into practice. Agricultural societies (hushllningssllskap) had long been
at work to improve and diversify rural economies, and the influence from
arts movements in continental Europe and England had yielded several
results. One of these was the founding, in 1874, by Sophie Leijonhufvud-
Adlersparre of the Association of Friends of Textile Art (Freningen
Handarbetets Vnner), a Stockholm-based organization that produced
textiles that were partially inspired by folk traditions and, in addition,
managed a school devoted to textile arts (Danielson 1991). There were
also efforts to establish mandatory instruction in crafts (sljd) in public
schools. Furthermore, in a gigantic project to document and preserve
cultural loss and cultural rescue 263
traditional artifacts and the skills to make them, Artur Hazelius, the
founder of the Nordic Museum (Nordiska museet) in Stockholm (1873)
and its open-air pendant Skansen (1891), and other museum builders col-
laborated with social, economic, and aesthetic reformers. Together, mu-
seums, artists, scholars in ethnology and adjacent fields, the homecraft
movement, and the local history movement (hembygdsrrelsen) laid the
foundation for a heritage canon of folk objects with a recognizably Swed-
ish flavor.
Lilli Zickerman (18581949) was one of the many people engaged in these
developments. Her father was a wealthy pharmacist in the south-western
town of Skvde who went bankrupt early in her adult life, leaving her with
financial and other responsibilities for her mother. She studied sewing
and weaving in Stockholm at the school managed by the Association of
Friends of Textile Art and, during 18871897, she owned an embroidery
shop in Skvde where she sold her own patterns and compositions. In
1896, she studied at the South Kensington Museum (later the Victoria and
Albert Museum) in London and, in 1897, she showed some of her work
at the Stockholm Exhibition. She was deeply impressed by the Swedish
peasant textiles that were shown at the Nordic Museum at the same time.
In 1899, she took the initiative to forming the Swedish Handicraft Asso-
ciation (Freningen fr svensk hemsljd). Single-handedly she gathered
together an initial executive board which was chaired by the artist Prince
Eugen and, in addition to Zickerman herself, was composed of the artist
Ottilia Adelborg, the engineer C.R. Lamm, the baroness Ebba Tamm
and other well-known Swedes. One issue was terminology, and at its first
meeting the board unanimously accepted the term hemsljd (literally,
home craft).2
Although Lilli Zickerman is said to have doubted herself and her abili-
ties, she comes across as determined and highly accomplished. She was
a skilled writer, prone to drastic expressions; she is said to have been an
outstanding speaker, and her publications and printed speeches make
2 The word hemsljd is most often translated as handicraft or handcraft and the of-
ficial translation into English of Freningen fr svensk hemsljd is the Swedish Handicraft
Association (cf. Nyln 1976). However, some early translators used the term home craft,
and in my view this translation constitutes a handy way to distinguish crafts associated with
the homecraft movement from other kinds of arts and crafts.
264 barbro klein
3 Several of the quotes from Lilli Zickermans writings are from a valuable anthology
edited by Elisabet Stavenow-Hidemark (1999). Part of the presentation of Zickerman is
adapted from Klein 2000.
cultural loss and cultural rescue 265
Fig. 1. In 1909, on the tenth anniversary of the founding of the first homecraft shop
in Stockholm, Lilli Zickerman and her associates were portrayed. Seated in the lower
left corner is Zickerman herself. Standing behind her is textile artist Mrta Gahn.
In the middle is a young woman from Dalarna in folk dress. The presence of rural
women was important to the success of the city shops.
Photo by A. Blombergs Studio, Svensk hemsljds arkiv, Riksarkivet, Stockholm.
266 barbro klein
Ideally, the shops were to serve as centers for many kinds of activities.
They would provide space for exhibitions and for the courses that were
essential to Zickermans educational program. In conjunction with the
classes, patterns and instruction manuals were to be sold. As a shrewd
businesswoman, she emphasized that the shops ought to produce their
own patterns and manuals. These would serve as inspiration, teach quality
and beauty, and produce a steady cash flow. But first-rate instruction re-
quired first-rate teachers, and Zickerman worked hard to find the skilled
carpenters, weavers, lace makers and shop managers who could train and
supervise others. All the people she hired had to learn to differentiate
the good and the beautiful from the bad and the ugly. She herself never
doubted her ability to make the proper distinctions. Among the tradi-
tional artifacts she liked best were the early nineteenth century carriage
cushions, embroidered or in Flemish weave, from southern Skne, the
painted molded splint boxes from Dalarna and Hlsingland, and bobbin
lace from Skne and Dalarna. And she was not alone in appreciating these
particular forms; the artists Anders Zorn and Carl Larsson, for example,
were fond of carriage cushions from Skne and collected them. Indeed,
the people associated with the homecraft movement jointly developed a
distinct esthetic canon highlighting beauty and high quality and criticiz-
ing the ugly and the badly made.
It is on the subject of ugliness and low quality that Lilli Zickermans
writing comes truly alive; she now excels in her use of dialogues and quot-
ed speech. Like other crafts reformers she detested modern aniline dyes as
particularly noxious forms of industrial degeneration (frflackning). They
produced sharp and gaudy colors, the very opposite of the soft and beauti-
ful nuances that were the hallmark of genuine traditional textile art. Zick-
erman also lashed out when women wasted time making useless luxuries,
superfluous decorations, and false finery. A favorite target was crochet-
ing, the very antithesis of the fine art of bobbin lace making. In a speech
from 1901, she cites a conversation with young women in a northern vil-
lage who were asked what they did all evening: We do nothing, they an-
swered. But you cant do nothing all night long? Well, we crochet. And
Zickerman continues:
they couldnt have given a more truthful answer; people certainly cro-
chet, in Sweden, in Norway, wherever you go, they crochet. There isnt a
hovel, no matter how small and disorderly, that lacks a crocheted bedspread.
Crocheting, she writes, is a truly weakening activity. One does not even
have to sit up to do it, one can do it practically lying down. And work
cultural loss and cultural rescue 267
Yet, she emphasizes, you did not give up altogether. In the end you have
not disappointed your country: Leksand in Dalarna has remained one of
the few regions in Sweden that gives hope for the future. With regard to
rag rugs, however, she shared a widespread opinion. Representatives of
cultural historical museums and craft schools did not look upon rag rugs
as ways to be thrifty but as destruction of valuable old materials.4
In 1914, Lilli Zickerman left the directorate of the Swedish Homecraft
Association in Stockholm and resigned from managing the homecraft
shop there. She moved to Vittsj in Skne in the south where her brother,
Tage Zickerman, was a furniture designer and where there was a flourish-
ing school of weaving. She never returned to Stockholm to live. From this
time on, she turned to a task that was to occupy her up through most of
the 1930s: a gigantic inventory of the traditional textiles of Sweden. In the
course of her work she took close to 25,000 black and white photographs,
many of which she colored by hand. She intended to publish the entire
inventory, but only one book appeared; it concerns rugs in the rlakan
technique (Zickerman 1937). But also many other activities occupied her.
She taught courses in weaving and other subjects and, in 1917, she com-
missioned the making of a now unique film featuring folk artists at work
4 Well into the late nineteenth century, Swedish textile experts disregarded rag rugs,
despite the fact that they were, and still are, an important form of craft among Swedish
women.
268 barbro klein
(Lundahl 2001: 265). Throughout her life she collected handmade bobbin
lace; she donated at least 1,000 pieces to the Nordic Museum in Stock-
holm.
Lilli Zickerman was quite successful both economically and in resur-
recting disappearing art forms. On the whole, the homecraft shops re-
mained economically viable well into the 1970s. They played an important
role not only as sales outlets, but also in providing employment for shop
managers and salespeople, most of whom were rural women. She laid the
foundation for a homecraft movement that is alive also in the twenty-first
century and, in some ways, continues to define and guard a specifically
Swedish esthetic profile (Klein 2000, Lundahl 2001).
Although Lilli Zickerman and Ottilia Adelborg shared basic ideas and ob-
jectives and although their lives intersected via the homecraft movement,
the two were remarkably different. If a great deal has been written about
Lilli Zickerman as ideologue and spokesperson for the movement, much
less has been said about Ottilia Adelborgs role within it. Instead, most of
that which has been written about her concerns her role as a pioneering
illustrator and author of childrens books.
Eva Ottilia Adelborg (18551936) was born in Karlskrona in southern
Sweden as the youngest daughter of a naval officer, Bror Jakob Adelborg,
and his wife Hedvig, ne af Uhr.5 Both parents were socially well con-
nected and came from aristocratic families; the Adelborgs stemmed from
Finland. In 1865, Bror Jakob Adelborg died suddenly, just after he had
been appointed commander. Two years later, Hedvig Adelborg moved
to relatives in Uppsala with her daughters Maria, Gertrud, and Ottilia.
Although the three sisters were allowed to matriculate from secondary
school, their further education was uncertain. Money was tight, and Hed-
vig Adelborg does not appear to have been convinced that they needed
advanced education. Nevertheless the three turned into professional
women. The eldest, Maria (born 1849), became a textile artist and leading
designer for the Association of Friends of Textile Art. Gertrud, who was
5
My sketch of Ottilia Adelborgs life and work is partially based on a brief but engag-
ing biography by Anne Marie Rdstrm (1980). In addition, I rely on Adelborgs own diary
(7 volumes, 18991936). My sketches of Zickermans and Adelborgs life and work are not
truly comparable in so far as they are based on different kinds of sources. In writing about
Zickerman I have not had access to diaries or other personal materials.
cultural loss and cultural rescue 269
6 Named after the Swedish author and feminist Fredrika Bremer (18011865), the
Fredrika-Bremer-Association (Fredrika-Bremer-Frbundet) was formed in 1884 by Sophie
Leijonhufvud-Adlersparre who had also founded The Friends of Textile Art (see above).
This association remains central to promoting gender equality in Sweden.
270 barbro klein
and Holland at least twice each, and she spent considerable amounts of
time in England, where she frequently visited the South Kensington Mu-
seum in London. On March 20, 1901, she set out on the most important
trip of her life. She traveled to Italy with a friend, all thanks to a relative
who had given her 1,000 kronor for that very purpose. By this time she
was keeping the diary which she had begun in 1899 and was to contin-
ue keeping, with varying energy, for the rest of her life. During her three
months in Italy she filled many pages with sketches of architectural de-
tails and with descriptions of meetings with artists and intellectuals and
of other experiences. In Florence she picked up John Ruskins Mornings in
Florence, and in Venice she bought at least one volume of his The Stones
of Venice (185153). She used her friend Ruskin to understand the art
works she saw but, although he is one of the few thinkers she seems to
have read with some thoroughness, she does not really reveal what aspects
of his thinking she appreciated. From her later work, it could be surmised
that she was inspired by his thoughts on the social value of art and on the
artists role in working together with others.
After her return to Stockholm, Ottilia Adelborg resumed many duties.
She seems to have taken upon herself a great deal of the responsibility for
her mothers welfare, both economically and socially. Her diary entries
from this time are full of descriptions of visits back and forth with aris-
tocratic and bourgeois families in the city. Repeatedly, she complains of
lack of time for her art work. She longs for solitude and occasionally she
sneaks off to the open-air museum of Skansen to sketch people and hous-
es. But increasingly she is burdened by her mothers ill health. On March
12, 1903, her mother dies, and Ottilia writes in her diary:
My heart is full of gratitude my grief almost gives way to my gratitude.
Mother is no longer in pain she was in a great deal of pain during the last
few days and I have my freedom! Will I be able to use it constructively? I
have my freedom and my own time and I can become an artist once again!
These lines are said to have shocked a reader of Ottilia Adelborgs diary
(Rdstrm 1980: 29). But she herself, now 48 years old, lost no time in
acting on her new freedom. After a trip to Holland in the spring of 1903,
she rented a summer home in Gagnef in Dalarna for herself and her sis-
ters. This was not her first visit to Dalarna: she had visited artist friends in
the province many times, and she was particularly fond of Rttvik. In the
summer of 1902, a friend had encouraged her to come to Gagnef, where
she found that all is naive and that a fairy-tale style is everywhere
(September 7, 1902). The visit to Gagnef, which she had spent walking
cultural loss and cultural rescue 271
and drawing, had been magical to her. And now a year later, she rented a
summer house there.
Fig. 2. Ottilia Adelborg, around 1905, standing in the home she and her sisters
rented during the first few years they lived in Gagnef.
Photo by Hans Per Persson, Lars Liss collections, Gagnef.
When the summer holidays of 1903 were over, Maria and Gertrud re-
turned to Stockholm. But Ottilia stayed. From now on Gagnef was her
home, and after some time her sisters joined her. At first all three rented
a school teachers apartment but, in 1908, they moved into a newly built
house of their own. Apparently money was still tight, but one help in fi-
nancing the house was the Idun Prize of 1,000 kronor which Gertrud had
received earlier that year.7 However, it is not certain that Ottilia Adelborg
had actually found the calm and solitude she sought. Her diary from Gag-
nef is full of descriptions of a social life as intensive as that in Stockholm.
Not only was the Adelborg home open to local people who constant-
ly visited, but a stream of notables were also guests there. Many were
7 Nya Idun is a Stockholm association which was formed in 1885 in order to bring
together women active within the sciences, literature, and art. Ellen Key was one of the
founders, and both Lilli Zickerman and Ottilia Adelborg were inducted as members. Nya
Idun was a counterpart to the association, Idun, which was founded in 1862 and was domi-
nated by men. Idun (the Old Norse goddess of eternal youth) was also the name of a maga-
zine for the woman and the home, which began publication in 1877.
272 barbro klein
intellectuals and artists who, like the Adelborg sisters, had made Dalarna
their home (or summer home): the court physician Axel Munthe and his
family, the poet Erik Axel Karlfelt, the artist Anders Zorn and his wife
Emma Zorn, the art historian Gerda Bothius, the artists Carl and Karin
Larsson and Gustaf Ankarcrona, the composer Hugo Alfvn, and many
others, from acquaintances to close friends such as Emma Zorn. However,
one person who never came to visit was Ellen Key. Although she shared
many ideas with Key, Ottilia Adelborgs diary is full of statements in which
she expresses her dislike of Key and her radicalism. Also, Adelborg herself
made numerous social calls. In 1911, she visited Selma Lagerlf in Falun.
In a letter to her friend Sophie Elkan, Selma Lagerlf later wondered what
had prompted Adelborg to settle out there among peasants in the wilder-
ness (Sundstrm 2009: 41).
In Gagnef Ottilia Adelborg lost no time re-kindling her engagement
in handicraft and in the homecraft movement. The local art tradition that
fascinated her the most was bobbin lace making which had a long history
in several parishes in Dalarna where kerchiefs or hats with bobbin lace
decorations were essential to female dress. In Dalarna bobbin lace making
had developed an inventive originality as a folk art very different from
the stricter forms practiced in Vadstena Nunnery. To her sorrow, Ottilia
Adelborg observed that this art form was disappearing quickly; she deeply
deplored the habit of cutting up old pieces of lace and using them in rag
rugs. As soon as she could, just a few weeks after settling in Gagnef, she
started a school in the making of bobbin lace. She found an old teacher
in nearby Mockfjrd, where The Friends of Textile Art had worked for
some time to revitalize bobbin lace making. She herself sat down with the
young pupils to learn. As time went on, former students were able to in-
struct new pupils. The school continued for many years and Ottilia Adel-
borg herself became accomplished in the art of bobbin lace making. She
designed several patterns and, like Lilli Zickerman, she became an avid
collector of old lace.
Ottilia Adelborgs fondness for bobbin lace was in part based on a dis-
dain for crocheting, which she shared with Lilli Zickerman and others
within the homecraft movement. But as time went on, Adelborg became
interested in revitalizing other traditional art forms as well, among them
the making of root baskets. There can be no doubt that, like Lilli Zicker-
man and others, she was driven by a righteous sense of the great value and
beauty of traditional homecraft and by a burning desire to prevent it from
being lost. But by the same token she could look at her engagement in
the homecraft movement with a certain distance. While she did attend the
cultural loss and cultural rescue 273
meeting in Leksand in 1904, the one in which Zickerman held her famous
speech (cited above), she was not at all sure about her role as a member
of an organization with broad economic objectives. On the twenty-fifth
anniversary of the Swedish Homecraft Association, she declined to par-
ticipate in the festivities in Stockholm. Instead she stayed in Gagnef, and
many years later she noted in her diary that she was happy not to have
allowed herself to be paraded about as a former member of the executive
board: I didnt do much good there, but I learned a lot (October 7, 1924).
But also in other contexts she depicts both homecraft ideology and her
own involvement in the movement with reflection and humor. In her last
book, Dalritningar (Dalarna Drawings), published in 1920, she includes
a brief, seemingly artless, essay entitled Hemsljden (Homecraft). She
begins by noting the small talk that often goes on between model and
artist and that once this talk turned to homecraft. She describes how the
woman she was drawing seemed attentive and how she herself became
more and more involved with her subject, heaping fancy words over
her listener and ending up with a resounding speech about dying crafts,
destructive industrial dyes, and the need to improve sheep-breeding. The
274 barbro klein
Fig. 4. Ottilia Adelborg making bobbin lace together with young pupils.
Photo circa 1915 by Hans Per Persson, Lars Liss collections, Gagnef.
upshot was, she notes, that I told this woman that it was her unquestion-
able duty to revitalize all this disappearing knowledge. Eventually, Adel-
borg writes, the woman lost her patience and spoke up:
Did I really think that she had time for homecraft and that sort of thing!
Didnt she have enough work as it was? Didnt she have to spin and weave
cloth for the men and the children? And didnt she have to weave sheets
and table-cloths, blankets, and rugs? Didnt she have enough to do without
bothering with homecraft and vegetable dyes and other modernities? Those
kinds of things were for people who had nothing better to do! (1920: 101-
102).8
In this essay and in all the three books for adults that Ottilia Adelborg
published while living in Gagnef, she demonstrates not only her capacity
for reflection and humor, but also her ability to understand how the peo-
ple she portrayed reasoned and how they reacted to her (Adelborg 1909,
1918, 1920). She came to realize that rural people often thought that the
8 Ottilia Adelborg seems to have told different versions of this story (see Rdstrm
1984: 85).
cultural loss and cultural rescue 275
Ottilia Adelborgs three late books for adults stand out in their portrayals
of children. The children we meet in these three works differ profoundly
from those she drew both in her early Crane-inspired illustrations and in
the more Swedish stylizations in such books as Pelle Snygg. While in her
early books the children are often drawn in profile, in her late works they
tend to look straight at the artist, often with sad faces. These children are
seldom shown as laughing. Rather, they often look withdrawn or over-
whelmed by the presence of adults, adults who are drawn slightly too long
or over-sized. Ottilia Adelborg catches something important about the
vulnerability of children. Her late drawings and water-colors are hardly
276 barbro klein
stylized depictions of folk-life. Like Zorn she comes close to her subjects
and touches nerves.
Of all her works, one appears to have become particularly significant
to Ottilia Adelborg and eventually also to the people of Gagnef, namely
Minnesstugan (The Memory House) in Gagnef which, like Zorns Gam-
melgrden in Mora and other local museums, consists of several build-
ings. She is said to have begun planning for this museum as early as 1904.
Since that time, she received economic help for it from friends. Through
the years, she gathered together in Minnesstugan some of the most inter-
esting buildings and objects that she had come upon on her many walks
in and around Gagnef. Minnesstugan opened in 1909 and has remained
a gathering spot and a place of remembrance ever since (Nordesj 2009).
Ottilia Adelborg often brought her lace making pupils there. But just as
often she went there alone: it was a place where she sought solitude and
reflection.
Concluding remarks
Hazelius and the other museum builders. Also, while maintaining social
distance they both approached common people with respect even
though Zickermans rhetoric sometimes gives a different impression. But
Adelborg went much further than merely treating people with respect.
For one thing, she communicates a close understanding of some of their
attitudes. She realized that people were not always enthusiastic about re-
suscitating old things and old techniques which to them meant nothing
more than a great deal of hard work. But even more, in her nuanced and
sensitive portraits, particularly of children, Adelborg also communicates
insights into peoples inner selves, insights of a kind that many ethno-
graphers today try to communicate but seldom do. Perhaps she is able to
do so because of her wish to preserve their fairy-tale style qualities. In
exoticizing people she gives them inner depth.
Today, opinions differ regarding Lilli Zickerman, Ottilia Adelborg, and
their sisters and brothers in the homecraft movement and other preserva-
tional and educational movements. Many students of culture in our own
time, not least ethnologists and other scholars who are fearful of exoti-
cizing or essentializing other people and who are influenced by post-co-
lonial thought, do not quite know what to make of a Zickerman or an
Adelborg (Klein 2000, cf. Hyltn-Cavallius 2007). To these scholars in
the twenty-first century it is not easy to disregard the colonialism and the
class-marked efforts of these women. Regardless of Adelborgs friendly re-
lationships to the people of Gagnef, she also wants to preserve their exotic
qualities in her texts and sketch-books. The moralism and esthetic convic-
tions of Zickerman and Adelborg can be forbidding to people today and
the same is true of the roles the two assumed as educators. It is not diffi-
cult to make fun of Lilli Zickerman and her rhetoric, even though Ottilia
Adelborg comes forward with more redeeming qualities to a contempo-
rary audience.
Having noted this, even todays uneasy scholars of culture would prob-
ably also feel compelled to ask themselves where we would be in our time
without Zickerman, Adelborg, and the others in the homecraft move-
ment. Certainly Swedish culture would be much poorer without their
work to rescue textiles, textile techniques, and a host of other forms of
material culture. Indeed, it would be necessary to ask if a field of ethnolo-
gy would have developed at all without the artifacts they and their friends
and colleagues collected and preserved, without the craft skills they saved
from oblivion, without their sketches of peoples lives, and without the
museum awareness they helped establish in smaller communities as well
as nationally.
278 barbro klein
In many circles Lilli Zickerman, Ottilia Adelborg, and their friends and
colleagues actually cause admiration and applause today. Not surprisingly,
this is so within the modern homecraft movement itself, where especially
Zickermans pioneering contributions are repeatedly hailed as founda-
tional. But beyond the homecraft movement, Zickerman, Adelborg, and
others in the wide and overlapping social and intellectual circles in which
they moved are admired because they participated in formulating dreams
for the future. They stood in the cross-roads of ideas, ideas which they
themselves did not always articulate or could not always grasp. This is
particularly true about their involvement in womens issues and womens
rights, an involvement which neither of them spelled out clearly in their
written texts or artistic work. Nevertheless the two were a part of this
movement, often listening to those who were more closely engaged than
they themselves or, at other times, disapproving of those within the move-
ment whose views they disliked. In this way, both were among the many
aristocratic and middle-class women in the late nineteenth century who
were now stepping out into public life (sterberg and Wetterberg 2002).
Zickerman did so perhaps more forcefully and certainly more loudly than
Adelborg, who had made her career as an artist but was reluctant to come
forward in other ways as a public intellectual. But to a great extent it was
their engagement in the homecraft movement, in particular their interest
in textiles, that contributed to their (albeit somewhat peripheral) partici-
pation in the womens movement. It is intriguing, indeed, to reflect on the
extent to which the womens movement in Sweden is linked to textiles and
work with textiles (Svensson and Waldn 2005).
But if their commitment to the homecraft movement contributed to
making Lilli Zickerman and Ottilia Adelborg public figures, their work to
rescue and preserve the arts and crafts of rural communities also made it
possible for the women of these communities women who were much
less educated and privileged than they were to take steps towards more
public or professional roles, not least through employment in the shops
and the museums. In this way Zickerman, Adelborg, and their colleagues
contributed to shaping for many people a greater awareness of worlds
beyond their own. In its efforts to preserve and revitalize, the homecraft
movement actually opened up the world and introduced novelties. In that
sense the movement carried promises not only for leaders such as Zicker-
man and Adelborg, but also for many others.
cultural loss and cultural rescue 279
References
Wang Bangwei
1 This article is partly created within the framework of the project Mythology and
legendaries in Buddhist literature of the Research Centre of Eastern Literature at Peking
University. Project number: 07JJD752087.
282 wang bangwei
3 Gunabhadra is a Buddhist master scholar from Central India. His biography can be
seen in Gaoseng Zhuan (The Biographies of the Prominent Monks), Taisho Tripitaka, No.
2059, pp. 344a-355a.
4 Taisho Tripitaka, No. 2060, p. 426a-b.
Through this we know that Mandra arrived in China a little later than
Sam ghapla and cooperated with the latter when he started the translat-
ing work. The texts translated by Mandra can now be found in the Chi-
nese Buddhist Tripitaka. Daoxuan also edited a bibliography called Da-
tang Neidian Lu (The Buddhist Text Catalogue of the Great Tang). In the
forth scroll of this book we find the same account with some more details.
The texts Mandra produced are listed as follows:
The Stra of Ratanmegha, in seven scrolls.
Fajie tixing wufenbie jing, in two scrolls.
The Prajpramitstra of Majuri, in two scrolls.5
In the fourth scroll of another bibliography, Gujin Yijing Tuji (The Pictures
and Records of Texts Translated in Ancient Times and Today) by another
Buddhist monk-scholar, Jingmai, the date, the second year of Tianjian, in
which Mandra arrived at Jiankang, the capital of Liang China, is provided.6
The second year of Tianjian of the Liang is 503 C.E. This therefore hap-
pened before Emperor Wudi of the Liang ordered Sam ghapla to trans-
late Buddhist texts in the fifth year of Tianjian (508 C.E.). It appears that
at that time Mandra did not know Chinese well and therefore needed
Sam ghapla to help him. Daoxuans information is very likely to have
come from Lidai Sanbao Ji (The Three Jewels in History), a book by Fei
Changfang of Sui times, i.e. just before the Tang. Fei Changfang again
says that Mandra finished the translation together with Sam ghapla and
that the source texts were brought to China from Funan by Mandra. He
also says that while Sam ghapla translated in the Hall of Shouguang, the
Monastery of Zhengguan and the House of Zhanyun, all the source texts
Sam ghapla used were brought to China by Mandra from Funan.7 One
of the prominent points that we have to pay attention to is that the Bud-
dhist texts that Sam ghapla translated all belong to the Mahyna tradi-
tion, and are not related to the southern Buddhist tradition, excepting the
text of Vimuttimagga. The origin and the nikya affiliation of these texts
are definitely worth closer examination. As far as I know, this problem has
almost totally been neglected by scholars.
How do we know this? This was said by Dhyna Master Mandra. The
words of Mandra are as follows: The Kunlun people in the remote sea area
do not understand this but studied under the influence of trthakas so that
the Hnayna scholars of that country do the same. So we should not add
the last four graphs to make it complete. Let us explain the four graphs: In
(Fanxians) translation of Mahparinirvn astra in six scrolls, they are l
(r), li (r), lou (l), l (l ). Here in the translation of Mahparinirvn astra (by
Dharmaksema) they are lu (r), liu (r), lu (l, l ), lou (l ). Both are criticized by
Emperor Wudi. Of these two versions, the latter is a little bit better. The ex-
planation is this: To add these four graphs in showing the fourteen svaras is
that the trthaka scholar arvavarman taught the King of tavhana. Why
has he taught him in this way? It is said that it is because the tongue of the
King was so stiff that he asked the King to recite them.10
11 The so-called fourteen svaras are a very interesting topic; see Wang Bangwei, Xie
Linyun Shisi Yin Jikao (Xie Linyun and his Sishi Yin Xunxu: The Earliest Approach to In-
dian Phonology in Mediaeval China), in Guoxue Yanjiu (Chinese Classic Studies), Vol. III,
Beijing: Peking University Press, 1995, pp. 275-300. Revised version in Ershi Shiji Wenshi
Kaoju Wenlu (The Collection of Papers of Historical and Literary Evidential Studies in Twen-
tieth Century China), Vol. II, Kunming: Yunan Peoples Publisher, 2001, pp. 1966-1980.
12 Kathsaritsgara and Br hatkathmajari both are based on another well-known
Indian story collection Br hatkath though the last one had been lost quite long ago. See
the sixth taram ga of the first lambaka of Kathsaritsgara, Sanskrit version in Devana-
gari scripts published by Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, 1977, pp. 18-19. The English transla-
286 wang bangwei
In this context Mandra says that the Kunlun people in the remote sea
area do not understand this but studied under the influence of trthakas
so that the Hnayna scholars of that country do the same. Here the sea
means the South Sea and Kunlun was the name in ancient China for the
aboriginal people in the South Sea area. We find in Jiu Tangshu, The Old
History of Tang Dynasty, this account: Living to the south of the country
of Linyi, the people are black and with curly hair on their heads. They all
are called the Kunlun.13 The words of Mandra show that the area during
that time was not only under the influence of Buddhism, but also under
trthakas, that is, Brahmanism. The Buddhism in the area included both
Mahyna and Hnayna, of course, and both these were from India.
About the kingdom of Funan we can also find other accounts in Chi-
nese literature. The most detailed is from Liangshu, The History of Liang
Dynasty. It talks about the diplomatic relation between Funan and China:
After that the King of Funan was Kaundinya. He was originally from a
Brhmana family of India. As God said he would become king of Funan, he
was happy and went to the country of Panpan in the south. When the peo-
ple of Funan heard this, the whole of country was happy to support him to
become king. They welcomed him and crowned him as their king. Then the
new king changed the administrative system and adopted Indian laws. After
Kaundinya died, King Dhrtavarman (?) succeeded. In the time of Emperor
Wendi of the Song (424453 C.E.), King Dhrtavarman dispatched an en-
voy to China to present gifts. During the reign of Yongming (483493 C.E.)
King Jayavarman sent an envoy and presented tribute. In the second year of
Tianjian (503 C.E.), he sent an envoy to present corals, an image of Buddha
and other aboriginal products. The Chinese Emperor issued an edict saying:
Kaundinya Jayavarman, the King of Funan, living in the far sea area and rul-
tion of the story can be found in The Ocean of Story, being C.H. Tawneys Translation of
Somadevas Kth Sarit Sgara, by N.M. Penzer, London: Privately printed for subscribers
only by Chas. J. Sawyer LTD., 1926, Vol. I, pp. 68-75. Some scholars mentioned this story
while they discussed Ktantra. See B. Liebich, Zur Einfhrung in die indische einheimische
Sprachwissenschaft, I. Das Ktantra, Heidelberg, 1919, pp. 3-4 and H. Scharfe, Grammatical
Literature: A History of Indian Literature, ed. by J. Gonda, Vol. V, Fasc. 2, Wiesbaden: Otto
Harrassowitz, 1977, pp. 162-163. The story can also be found in the fifteenth chapter of
Tranthas rGya gar chos byung, though with some revisions. The teacher was Vararuci,
not arvavarman. See History of Indian Buddhism, the English translation by Lama Chimpa
and Alaka Chattopadhyaya, Calcutta: K.P. Bagchi & Company, 1980, p. 111.
13 Zhonghua edition, Fasc. 16, p. 5270.
Liyi is the Chinese name for Champa, an an-
cient country in todays South Vietnam. For more conferences of Kunlun, see Wang Bang-
wei, Datang Xiyu Qiufa Gaoseng Zhuan Jiaozhu (Biographies of the Prominent Monks Who
Went in Search of the Law in the Western Regions during the Great Tang), by Yijing, with a
newly collated and annotated text, Beijing: Zhonghua Book Company, 1988, Note 2, pp. 82-
83.
ramana mandras visit to jiankang 287
ing the South area for some generations, with great loyalty known far away,
now presents tributes, through several times of translation. It should be ac-
cepted and he should be given the honour of the title of General Annan and
the King of Funan.14
During the years of Datong (535546 C.E.), the Emperor dispatched Zhang
Fan, an officer of Zhihou, together with others to send the envoys of Fu-
nan back to their country. One of the delegations tasks was to invite well-
known Buddhist scholars who knew the Tripitaka, the Mahyna texts and
Zahua Jing and others. Paramrtha was widely known and his behavior was
that of a saint. When the Chinese delegation searched for excellent schol-
ars, wishing to benefit the people, Paramrtha was advised by the people of
that country to come to China, bringing along Buddhist texts, in accord-
ance with the Emperors order. Since Paramrtha already intended to do
this anyway, he happily accepted the advice. He arrived at Nanhai (todays
Guangzhou), on the fifth day of the eighth month of the twelfth year of Da-
tong (546 C.E.). After that he spent two years before he arrived in the capi-
tal (of China) in the intercalary eighth month of the second year of Taiqing
(548 C.E.).16
the southeast of this is the country of Langjiashu. To the east of this is the
country of Dvrapat. At the extreme east is the country of Linyi. The people
of these countries greatly rever the Three Jewels. Many of them hold firmly
to the precepts of vinaya. The way of dhta, that is begging, is a custom (for
Buddhists monks) in these countries.18
now a wicked king has expelled and exterminated Buddhists and there are
no Buddhist monks left at all. The adherents of trthaka (heretics) live inter-
mingled. This area is the south corner of Jambudvpa, not the islands at the
sea.20
What Yijing describes is the situation he knew in the early time of Tang,
about a hundred and thirty years later than the time of Liang. While the
geographic condition was not of much difference from earlier times, the
situation of Buddhism in Funan had changed a lot. That is, at about the
middle of the seventh century the newly established Zhenla (Chenla)
conquered and substituted Funan as a new Mon-Khmer country in Cam-
bodia. The new king of Zhenla appears to have been unfriendly towards
Buddhism and to have suppressed it. Yijings reports reflect this historical
fact.
20 Ibid.
References
Christoph Harbsmeier
pher, Chinas first great anthologiser of popular erotic poetry, the sublime
late Ming dynasty scholar Fng Mnglng (15741646).
Nothing introduces Fng Mnglngs bent of mind better than his in-
troduction to Xiof Store-House of Laughter, perhaps the most
famous piece of joculography, or jestbook in China. And nothing can
serve better as an introduction to the present offering than this precious
short text imbued with humorous scholarly self-awareness:
From ancient times to the present nothing is
not mere talk,
and mere talk is never anything other than a
laughing matter.
The undifferentiated mass of Yin and Yang di-
viding when the world began, the assorted sag-
es bowing profusely and executing each other,
who of us was witnessing this?
They surely just give us mere talk about these
things, that is all.
When future generations tell their mere talk
about our present
that too is just like us telling empty tales about
the past.
If, when they tell these empty tales, one is
suspicious about them
one is laughable.
If, when they tell these empty tales, one be-
lieves them
then one is even more laughable.
The classics, the documents, the philosophers,
the histories,
are just so many weird empty tales,
and yet people compete to transmit them.
Lyrics, rhyme prose, and essays
are just so many insipid empty tales,
and yet people compete to work at these
forms.
Praise and ridicule, promotion and dismissal
are just so many empty tales of an age of con-
fusion,
and yet people compete in going for the one
and avoiding the other.
Some laugh at others,
others are laughed at by others.
Those who laugh at others
are in turn laughed at by still others;
the emotional engagement qng 295
Fng Mnglng did think that we were all a bit of a joke, and that one
can only take intellectually seriously those who recognise the unserious
nature of the exercise that is the conduct of human life in this bizarrely
contingent world.
Various forms of emotional and especially amorous infatuation, serious
as they are for the infatuated, serious as they are also for defining the ends
of human life, are naturally the subject of much light-hearted and jocular
narrative banter. They are ludicrously contingent in all too many manifest
ways. It is the ludicrous contingency of what is so crucial to human life
that captured the romantic imagination of Heinrich Heine: Ein Jngling
liebte ein Mdchen, das hatt einen andern erwhlt Fng Mnglng was,
in the end, less romantically inclined than Heinrich Heine, as we shall
see. And his scientific interest in emotions and amorous entanglements
certainly did not pass over in silence those varieties of homophile experi-
ence where Ein Jngling liebte nen Jngling, der hatt einen andern erwhlt.
More on this below.
Fng Mnglngs sensibilites are perhaps nowhere more intimately in-
timated than in the Preface to his anthology of the peculiar genre erotic
296 christoph harbsmeier
folk poetry, the genre of Shn g . This Preface really a postface, but
US editors tend to insist that this word does not exist so we must thank
the lord if this parenthesis slips through editorial scrutiny of a European
press, for the time being this Postface, I say, is too long to be presented
in full, but the following extract from its autobiographic beginning will
give a fair idea of the way in which Fng Mnglngs literary mind was
carved. At points one is indeed at a loss with Fng Mnglng, just as he
was with some of his sources. At times one sympathises with him when
he merrily complains on the occasion of some ditties in his Postface:
I dont really know what it means, but the wording is
fascinating. This seems to me to be a very fine way of speaking of delicate
lyrical poetry. Here, in any case, is the general part of his introduction,
translated as best I can:
Writing a Postface for the Mountain Songs
Since there have been written records
in every period of time there have been folk
songs.
As the Grand Historian (Sma Qin) has
pointed out,
this includes both the fng songs and the ya
songs,
and these are the most important (in the
Book of Songs).
Since the Lso from Chu and the regulated
verse from Tng dynasty
there has been competition regarding
beauty and its displays,
but as for the echos from the emotions
among the people
these did not get to be ranked on altar of
lyrical poetry.
For this reason single such poems out and
call them Mountain songs.
The point is that what peasants and country
layabouts produce, untrammelled and with
literary gusto,
this is something that spruced-up gentle-
men and scholars do not speak of.
It is true enough that these are not lined up
on the literary altars,
and these are literary things that spruced-
up gentlemen and scholars do not speak of,
but the less the influence of the songs,
the emotional engagement qng 297
Respectable scholarly life, to Fng Mnglng was not just boring. It was
factitious, mendacious, presumptuous, pretentious, emotionally anaemic,
and intellectually desiccated. Above all, scholarly life appeared to him dis-
astrously devoid of that lifeline of any honest and true aesthetic as well as
philosophical spirit, that indispensable catalyst of authenticity which he
called qng , and which one might try to gloss preliminarily as emo-
tional engagement in English until one finds a better rendering. Fngs
interest in qng , it becomes very clear in his writings, was almost path-
ological: nothing whatsoever seemed to matter to him without an inner
glow of qng in it. Nothing was likeable or dislikable without this ele-
ment of qng , of course! But really, nothing whatsoever deserved any
serious attention anyway insofar as it was without qng . For without
qng he found there was none of that crucial quality zhn authentic-
ity.
Instead of expatiating now on how far this is romanticism or Sturm
und Drang la chinoise, that is, instead of merely subsuming what I feel
I ought to try to understand, instead of that, I say, I shall look at the char-
acteristicaly autobiographic way in which Fng Mnglng introduces the
major encyclopaedic work he has devoted to this all-important matter of
qng . Fngs ideal was indeed to be, in this sense, a zhn rn an
authentic person.
As it happens, Fng Mnglng proves pretty indifferent in the defini-
tion of this qng that mattered so much to him. He did not discourse
extensively upon the subjet the concept of qng . His passion was for
the very thing: Nothing is more impor-
tant under Heaven than qng , nothing is less important than material
wealth!, he expostulates in the final short general comment on volume 18
of his encyclopaedia qng sh li l Classified Summary of the
Records on qng .
Fng Mnglng thought he could best get an intellectual handle on this
thing qng by writing a comprehensive encyclopaedia about it in the
form of a reasoned, sub-classified narrative encyclopaedia, and that idea
of a narrative encyclopaedia deserves our close attention. His interest was
not in how the word qng might be defined, but how the thing enters
concrete narratives of human lives. To be sure, he was not interested in
the rhetoric of emotions in narrative either. Nor was he ultimately con-
cerned with these narratives as such at all! He was not in any business
of mere literary history. His thought was that the narratives of human
lives recorded in China throughout the ages might indeed have important
things to illustrate about the role of the thing qng in human life.
the emotional engagement qng 299
Here again, I feel I can do no better than to let Fng Mnglng speak
for himself in the introduction to his historical narrative encyclopaedia
which he called qng sh li l Classified Summary of the
Records on qng :
Postface to Classified Records of qng
The (writing of) history of qng has (long) been
my aspiration.
Since I was young I bore a craziness for qng.
When I meet my friends I was sure to pour out
my innermost thoughts with them,
and the fortunate things as well as the unfortunate
I suffer together with them.
When I hear that someone else is in extraordinary
distress or suffers extraordinary injustice,
even if I am not acquainted with him
I seek something I might do to help him. [I sus-
pect the is corrupt.]
When, for some reason, my strength is insuffi-
cient (to help)
then I would be sighing for days,
in the middle of the night I will toss and turn and
be unable to sleep.
When I see someone who has qng
I invariably feel the urge to bow deep before him.
And if by chance someone is devoid of qng
and his aspirations and speech are at variance,
I am bound to guide him in subtle indirect ways,
and only if he will not follow me after innumer-
able attempts will I give up.
I have once said in jest:
Even after I die I will be unable to forget the men
of qng in this world.
I am sure to become a Buddha to deliver the
world.
My Buddhist name will be The Joyful Tathgatha
of Much qng.
There will be those who sing the praise of my
name,
and who will faithfully support me.
And then there will be innumerable Spirits of Joy
who will guard me from in front and behind.
Even if I run into bad enemies or those who feel
they have suffered injustice from me
in every case I will turn their grievances to joy:
300 christoph harbsmeier
These are strong words of introduction. I want to turn, now, to a brief sys-
tematic survey of the organisation of Fng Mnglngs narrative encyclo-
paedia in which he has tried to realise his ambitions.
Fng Mnglng divided it into the numerologically pleasing number
of twenty-four small volumes. I shall present all of them in their proper
order, with what I hope are some useful excerpts from Fngs comments
on his systematic collection of narrative material.
302 christoph harbsmeier
We can see that such impeccable virtuous behaviour will have to occur
in the social and institutional context of marriage, concubinage, or of the
regular patronage of courtesans. And we have learnt why Fng Mnglng
found such moral purity is less important to dwell on narratively in hus-
bands than in their wives.
Needless to say, the encyclopaedist does not moralise on the rights and
wrongs of these traditional social institutions. (The enlightenment has yet
to arrive in China.)
The second chapter is devoted to the category of preordained strokes of
emotional good luck.
Here again, there is no question of Fng Mnglng disapproving of the
outrageous practice of women choosing husbands, and the equally devi-
ant cases of dissolution of marriage and remarriage. His concern is to lay
out the narrative categories as he finds them in his society, almost but not
quite in the spirit of Stith Thompson, Motif Index. Fng Mnglng com-
ments:
The histo-
rian of qng comments: Even a one-night meeting needs to be a fated
serendipity, how much more in the case of husband and wife!
the emotional engagement qng 303
The sixth category singles out the element of affection which I do not
think one should confuse with sexual infatuation. Here again, in true en-
cyclopaedic form, Fng Mnglng subdivides the field quite logically, but
leaves out the cases of mens affection for men and womens affection for
women because the latter are culturally marked as restricted to the sphere
of the s private and illicit. Fng Mnglng needs to be quoted at some
length on this sensitive matter:
The eighth category is one that is related to what in ancient China was a
theory of cosmic resonance that was the explicit subject of a whole chap-
ter gan yng xn in the book Huinnz . (See Charles Le
the emotional engagement qng 305
The ninth category is one that is openly inspired not by Taoist thought, but
by Buddhist theory: the theory of illusion, the delusoriness of all worldly
features is a common subject of Buddhist discourse. Fng Mnglng con-
centrates on the way such illusoriness becomes narratively relevant to the
world of qng . Fng Mnglng comments:
What is never there in
the facts, dreams can create it; what is never there in conscious thought,
dreams can open it up.
VOL. 9: The category of emotional delusion
Delusory dreams
(Delusory) separations of soul from body
(Delusory) reincarnation in a new body
(Delusory) summoning of souls
Delusory paintings
Delusory anecdotes
Delusory magic
The tenth category remains in the realm of what western scholars are wont
to regard as that of the religious, the supernatural efficacy of emotions in
various ways. Fng Mnglng comments in his Postface:
Calligraphy as matchmakers
Poetry as matchmakers
Lyrics as matchmakers
Ghosts as matchmakers
Wind as matchmakers
Red leaves as matchmakers
Tigers as matchmakers
Foxes as matchmakers
Ants as matchmakers
The host of qng says: When plants have the elan vital they move
308 christoph harbsmeier
and produce sprouts. The qng are surely the elan vital of humans. Who
could be without such sprouts? He continues at the end:
And
yet, when they insist on saying that plants do not necessarily have sprouts
that is like making the universe end with any winter, and I do not see how
this is an acceptable thing to say.
VOL. 15: The category of emotional inspirations
Great sages
Notable worthies
Distinguished monks
Talented ladies
The qng are like water, when you are careful in your defence
against it, then no matter how much they flow over, even if there is a flood
like the Yangtse River or the sea, the disgrace will always remain bounded
within canals and channels. Later, he even goes on:
Those who show extra-
ordinary licentiousness will inevitably suffer extraordinary disasters.
From Hn to Tng times our teeth get cold, so much we laugh at them.
VOL. 17: The category of emotional debasement
Debasement within the imperial palace
Debasement among the imperial relatives
the emotional engagement qng 309
The eighteenth category is concerned with the ill effects concomitant with
emotional attachment. One of these, very interestingly, is the inherent
lewdness of the women involved. Fng Mnglng notes in his postface:
A person who is stingy with his material wealth
is bound to be shallow in his emotional attachments.
VOL. 18: The category of emotional entanglements
Entanglements of financial loss
Entanglements of getting things wrong
Entanglements of defamation
Entanglements of encountering dangers
Entanglements of false accusations
Entanglements of bodily harm
Entanglements of loss of life
Entanglements as a result of the lewdness of women
The twentieth category is concerned with the qng as felt and acted on
by the world of spirits and ghosts. Fng Mnglng comments:
When the emotional at-
tachment of men and that of ghosts merge, they are as if mad, like in a
dream, they know not what they are doing.
310 christoph harbsmeier
Sisters and brothers both loved by emperors, that love being unlasting
Homophile retribution
Homophile debasement
Homophile entanglement
Evil spirits
Supernatural efficacious ghosts
Man just occupies one place among the myriad kinds of crea-
tures. Just because he can speak, dress up, bow down then one considers
him superior. But in fact his enlightened nature is no different from that
of the other creatures. He goes on to summarise:
Where there
is life there is qng . Therefore if a man does not have qng , they may
call him a living man, but I shall simply declare him dead!
VOL. 23: The category of emotional transfer
Birds
Beasts
Fish and Insects
Plants
The twenty-fourth and last category is concerned with the properly liter-
ary traces left by qng , which Fng Mnglng places firmly into an en-
cyclopaedic context:
When the birds sing for the spring, and when the insects sing for
the autumn, that is a matter of qng . They are pressed to do this by the
seasons and will not cease of themselves. When the season is gone, the
qng is also gone. Man is not like that. He sets things to rhymes so as to
make sh poetry, they harmonise things so as to make free c poetry. The
humming and declaiming of one day will be handed down uninterrupt-
edly to millions of generations without being abandoned. He goes on to
finish his last volume along these lines:
The herit-
age of men is transmitted because of qng . The qng will never fail a
man. qng may be obscured by others. But why should anyone himself
fail his own qng ?
312 christoph harbsmeier
1. Introduction
Actions taking place in the economic realm of society typically have been
analyzed as if they were performed in a social vacuum where social inter-
actions and social norms play little or no role whatsoever. It has become
increasingly obvious, however, that many types of economic behavior
are social in the sense that the probability of an individual performing a
given act depends upon how many others have already performed it. The
mechanisms creating these interdependencies include normative pres-
sure, strategic complementarities, imitation, and learning from others.
This new line of work has drawn attention to the self-enforcing macro-
level dynamics these social mechanisms can give rise to (e.g., Durlauf and
Young 2001; Granovetter 1985; Manski 2000; Podolny 2005).
In this paper we focus on a type of social mechanism which despite
its importance has not received much attention in the literature. The core
idea is the following: We have two types of actions, A1 and A2. A2 is con-
tagious in the sense that the probability that an individual will do A2 in-
creases with the number of others who already have done A2. The prob-
ability that an individual will do A1 is not influenced by the number of
others doing A1, however, either because A1 is genuinely non-contagious
or because information about the number doing A1 is unavailable. But
the probability of an individual doing A1 increases if he/she has done A2,
and since A2 is contagious, A1 is parasitically contagious on A2. As will
be discussed below, this parasitically-contagious-behavior mechanism,
or PCB mechanism for short, operates in many different social situations.
Hence, it is a potentially important social mechanism that deserves a
more central place in our theoretical toolbox.
316 peter hedstrm & rebeca ibarra
Space does not allow for a detailed presentation of DBO theory, but as
suggested by von Wright (1989), a particular combination of desires and
beliefs constitutes a compelling reason for performing an action. Desires
and beliefs have a motivational force that allows us to understand and, in
this respect, explain the actions. The (proximate) cause of an action is a
constellation of desires, beliefs, and opportunities in the light of which the
action appears reasonable.
The following everyday example illustrates the logic of a DBO explana-
tion. If we want to explain why Mr. Smith brought an umbrella today, we
can point to a specific set of desires, beliefs, and opportunities such as (1)
he believed that it would rain today, (2) he desired not to get wet, and (3)
there was an umbrella for him to bring. Given this set of desires, beliefs,
and opportunities, we have made the action intelligible and thereby ex-
plained it.
The causal efficacy of beliefs, desires, and opportunities can be illustrat-
ed by the following set of examples focusing on the action complementary
to the one just described, namely, on the reasons why Mr. Smith did not
bring an umbrella today. There are three ideal-typical explanations:
1. Belief-based explanation: Mr. Smith desires not to get wet and he had
an umbrella that he could have brought, but by mistake he read yester-
days weather column in the newspaper which made him believe that it
would not rain today. Therefore he did not bring an umbrella today.
2. Desire-based explanation: Mr. Smith believed that it would rain today
and he had an umbrella that he could have brought, but he has some-
what unusual desires: walking in heavy rain always makes him feel like
Gene Kelly in Singing in the Rain, and feeling like Gene Kelly is some-
thing he really desires. Therefore he did not bring an umbrella today.
3. Opportunity-based explanation: Mr. Smith believed that it would rain
today and he had a strong desire not to get wet, but when he was leav-
318 peter hedstrm & rebeca ibarra
ing for work in the morning he found that his son had, once again, tak-
en his umbrella and there were no other umbrellas in the house. There-
fore he did not bring an umbrella today.
Thus, by explicating the relevant desires, beliefs, and opportunities of ac-
tors, we identify the proximate causes of action and provide an explana-
tion for why individuals do what they do.
Figure 2. Dyadic interaction between actor i and actor j according to the DBO theory.
When the actions of i and j refer to the same type of action, we have an ex-
ample of social contagion. For instance, to use a classic example of Cole-
man, Katz, and Menzel (1957), the action of j may refer to a specific physi-
cians tendency to prescribe a new drug, and action of i may refer to the
number of other physicians who already have prescribed the drug. The
mechanism linking the two may be belief-based: if many others prescribe
the drug, a physicians belief in its efficacy is likely to increase; it may be
the case of tax avoidance and tax evasion 319
2
During the last fifteen years social norms and social interactions have attracted sig-
nificant attention from those seeking to explain tax behavior. See Myles and Naylor (1996)
and Kahan (1997).
322 peter hedstrm & rebeca ibarra
Let us then turn to causal leakage at the level of the proximate causes, i.e.,
direct linkages between the avoidance-relevant desires, beliefs, and op-
portunities, on the one hand, and the evasion-relevant desires, beliefs, and
opportunities, on the other. One type of causal leakage links the opportu-
nities for avoidance to the desires for evading (see Figure 10).
Figure 10. Opportunity-desire influence relevant for explaining Egos tax evasion (A1j ).
3 This conclusion assumes that actions at least in part are influenced by the subjective
expected value of the action, and that the subjective expected value is approximated by the
value of evading times the probability of not getting caught, minus the cost of being caught
times the probability of being caught.
326 peter hedstrm & rebeca ibarra
Figure 11. Belief-belief influence relevant for explaining Egos tax evasion (A1j ).
Despite the legalistic distinction between tax evasion and tax avoidance,
they are not clearly demarcated types of activities. Instead they form part
of a continuous set of activities ranging from tax planning to outright
fraud. The fact that they are closely related activities means that knowl-
edge gained in one domain can be useful also in the other domain, and
this sort of knowledge transfer is what is illustrated in Figure 11. For ex-
ample, individuals who are engaged in tax avoidance learn a lot about the
blurred line between legal and illegal tax behavior, and this knowledge can
be of direct relevance for their ability to successfully engage in tax evasion.
the social outcomes they do. As illustrated most clearly by Schelling in his
classic segregation model (Schelling 1971), trying to base explanations
on macro-level patterns alone is highly error prone. Following Coleman
(1986), we must link macro properties at one point in time to micro-level
actions at the next point in time, and then examine the macro-level out-
comes these actions bring about (see Figure 12).
In the previous section we discussed in some detail the first two links in
Figure 12, i.e., how various aspects of the environments in which individ-
uals are embedded influence their beliefs and desires, and how these ac-
tion orientations influence tax behavior. The focus of this section is on the
third link, between micro and macro, which details how the tax behaviors
of a large number of individuals bring about different levels and patterns
of tax avoidance and evasion in society at large.
In order to accomplish this, we use a so-called agent-based simulation
model. That is to say, we construct a virtual society composed of agents
who act and interact according to the theoretical principles we are inter-
ested in examining, and then we examine what kind of macro-level out-
comes they are likely to bring about (for more information on the use
of agent-based models in the social sciences see Epstein 2006; Macy and
Willer 2002).
Based on the DBO theory discussed above, we assume that each agent
has a set of desires, beliefs, and opportunities that explains why they act
as they do, and we assume that these desires, beliefs, and opportunities
are formed in interaction with other agents. More specifically, we assume
that desires, beliefs, and opportunities can take values between 0 and 1,
and the higher an agents values are, the more likely the agent is to act. We
328 peter hedstrm & rebeca ibarra
assign these values on the basis of random draws from a uniform prob-
ability distribution, and for each agent we calculate an action tendency as
follows:
ATi = Di Bi Oi
and pt-1 is the proportion of agent is alters (i.e., those who sent links to i)
who acted at time t-1. We thus assume that an agents desires, beliefs, and
opportunities will change as a result of an agents alters changing their tax
avoidance.
In line with the discussion in the previous section we assume that the
probability of an agent engaging in tax evasion is not directly influenced
by the evasion behavior of other agents, but only by the agents own avoid-
ance behavior. In this chapter we focus exclusively on the type of belief-
belief influence shown in Figure 11. That is, we assume that an agents
evasion-relevant beliefs are influenced by the agents avoidance-relevant
beliefs, and we use the same broad definition of beliefs as used above,
which includes knowledge as a subset of beliefs. When an agent acquires
new avoidance-relevant knowledge, some of this knowledge also is rele-
vant for evasion. More specifically we assume the following relationship
between the two sets of beliefs:
BEit = BEit-1 + 0.3 (BAit-1 BEit-1).
Each agent is allowed to act 100 times, and at that time point we record
the proportion of avoiders and evaders in each group. We then run the
simulation five times and the results shown below are the average propor-
tions based on these five simulations. All simulations were done using
Stata version 11, and the main results are displayed in Figure 13.
Figure 13. Extent and dynamics of tax avoidance and tax evasion.
330 peter hedstrm & rebeca ibarra
Let us start with the basic simulation (Model 1). In this simulation we as-
sume that the high- and the low-income agents are almost identical to one
another. The only difference between the two groups is that the avoidance
opportunities of the low-income agents are somewhat lower than that of
the high-income agents (their average is 90 percent of the average of the
high-income group). As a consequence, the between group differences
are negligible: the pattern of development is the same in both groups and
the equilibrium levels are more or less the same (the difference in eva-
sion levels between the two groups is simply a result of random noise).
The growth trajectories have the characteristic s-shapes typically associ-
ated with social interaction-driven contagion. Although tax evasion is not
contagious in and of itself, this also is true for tax avoidance, albeit on a
much smaller scale.
Model 2 in Figure 13 shows what happens when the avoidance op-
portunities for the low-income agents are reduced. This simulation is
identical to the previous simulation with the exception that the average
opportunity of a low-income agent now only is 20 percent of that of a
high-income agent. This change in opportunities has no impact on the
levels of tax avoidance and evasion once they have stabilized, but it leads
to a delay in the avoidance take-up in the low-income group.
Model 3 examines the impact of a change in the network structure.
Everything remains the same as in Model 2 with the exception that the
probability of a link being formed to another agent of the same group here
is assumed to be equal to 0.2 and the probability of a link to an agent of
the other group is assumed to be equal to 0.05. Comparing the trajectories
in Model 2 and Model 3 shows that the main effect of this change in the
communication networks is a reduction in the differences in the take-off
points for avoidance between the two groups.
The fourth and final model reported in Figure 13 is identical to Model
3 with one important exception. In line with the opportunity-desire-ac-
tion mechanism discussed above (see Figure 10), which makes those who
are unable to reduce their tax liabilities with legal means, more inclined to
engage in illegal tax evasion, we assume that the lack of avoidance oppor-
tunities among the low-income agents makes illegal tax evasion a more
desirable alternative for them. We assume that
DEit = DEit-1 + 0.2 (1 OAit-1),
and as can bee seen in the graph, this considerably influences the equi-
librium level of tax evasion among low-income agents; it increases from
about 20 percent to close to 50 percent.
the case of tax avoidance and tax evasion 331
4 See Hedstrm and Udhn (2009) for a detailed discussion of middle-range theory
and its relation to the other types of theories referred to in Figure 14.
the case of tax avoidance and tax evasion 333
References
Sheldon Rothblatt
Eleven years before his death, Clark Kerr, the 12th President of the multi-
campus University of California and sometime Chancellor of the Berke-
ley campus, composed a fascinating personal account of the making of
the California Master Plan for Higher Education (1960), in which he had
been intimately involved. Some would say he was the seminal participant.
We were not on the Acropolis looking back on events, he wrote about
the difficult negotiations, but down in the Agora, the marketplace, mak-
ing deals under the discipline of time deadlines. No doubt that was an ac-
curate description, but mere problem-solving hardly constitutes the sum
total of Kerrs efforts. He called himself a pragmatist, a favorite self-de-
scription, but what are we then to make of his vision of a higher education
system underpinned by a quartet of philosophical preconceptions?1 First
was Thomas Jeffersons argument that democratic access was compatible
with the production of an aristocracy of talent, what today we would call
a meritocracy. On the same theme, Kerr cited the philosopher John Rawls,
whose theory of justice supplied Kerr with confirmation that under con-
ditions of equal opportunity, it was not unjust to expect that some people
would excel above others.
From Benjamin Franklin Kerr took the conclusion that useful knowl-
edge was necessary, but whether useful or theoretical, all knowledge
should be taught at a level of quality. From the economist John Maynard
Keynes Kerr derived the position that a modern economy ought to be
1 Clark Kerr, The California Master Plan of 1960 for Higher Education: An Ex Ante
View, in The OECD, the Master Plan and the California Dream, edited and introduced by
Sheldon Rothblatt (Center for Studies in Higher Education, University of California Berke-
ley, 1992): 48, 55-56. This essay is reprinted in Clark Kerr, Higher Education Cannot Es-
cape History: Issues for the Twenty-First Century (Albany, NY: State University of New York
Press, 1994): 111-126. As always, I am grateful for the advice of Marian Gade and Maureen
Kawaoka.
340 sheldon rothblatt
mixed, decisions emanating from above but also from below. In the Mar-
shall Lectures delivered at Cambridge University in 1968, he offered what
he called a sketch of a third world of modern times that lies between the
free market of [Alfred] Marshall and the social plan of Marx. As there
were drawbacks to each, a middle way was preferable.
Kerrs fourth preconception was that in any planning endeavor in-
volving higher education, the essential decisions were best made by in-
stitutions, or as it would happen, by higher education federations, rather
than by governments. Although in the third way he assigned a consider-
able role to government participation, he continued to fear its intrusion
into higher education. Nevertheless, the independence of higher educa-
tion institutions was not a right but the result of a pact with society. In-
dependence could only be justified if colleges and universities addressed
the needs of society.2 These sentiments accorded with the familiar posi-
tion that academic freedom and institutional autonomy were essential to
university activity, but Kerr made it a point to stress the obligations, a less
defensive position than commonly held.
It is one thing to have ideas and beliefs, to support democratic access to
higher education and at the same time believe in the importance of iden-
tifying talent, or to express support for both centralized and decentralized
decision-making. It is quite another to move from the realm of ideas and
ideals to the actual systems and structures that embody timeless contra-
dictions and somehow resolve them. But this was precisely Kerrs particu-
lar talent, and this is precisely what most confused supporters and detrac-
tors, those who applauded his democratic objectives, those who praised
his commitment to quality, those who excoriated his elitism (in the pe-
jorative sense), and those who found him to be a representative of and a
spokesman for capitalism and the industrial-military complex.3
The two reasons for Kerrs search for solutions to contradictions were
his professional work as a labor arbitrator and mediator and his Hicksite
Quakerism, a particularly liberal variant. The first gave him a commit-
ment to negotiation, which always involves compromise. The second fur-
nished a body of ideals and provided an avowal of the basic good of man-
2 Ex Ante: 57.
3 Nicholas Leman, The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), in conspiratorial language, calls the Master Plan
a successful bureaucratic power play by the university against the state colleges, and de-
nounces the newly rigid educational class system. For attacks from the far left, see the
notes by Mary Soo and Cathryn Carson, Managing the Research University: Clark Kerr
and the University of California, in Minerva, 42 (2004): 234n.
views from the acropolis and the agora 341
kind. In the second, he was tried and tested more than in the first, and he
admitted that he had doubts from time to time.4 No matter how tortuous
were industrial relations and how intractable they initially appeared, they
occurred within a context that Kerr understood and which he explained
in early work on the coming of industrial society. From a non-Marxian
perspective, labor disputes have an end in view, somewhere between two
opposing positions announced at the outset as part of a strategy of nego-
tiation. But grander beliefs such as Kerrs Quakerism are not subject to ra-
tional negotiation. They are vaguer and depend upon problematical read-
ings of history and human character.
As Kerrs religious outlook was basically optimistic, he was deeply sur-
prised and puzzled by the affective politics of campus radicals at Ber-
keley and Santa Barbara in the 1960s. How to position students within
the framework of his conception of contemporary society was therefore
something of a social science assignment. In the Marshall Lectures, he
depicted them as a fluid body, unattached to any of the anchoring insti-
tutions of society and therefore prone to ideological or existential posi-
tions.5 Earlier he remarked that undergraduates tended to see themselves
as a class or lumpenproletariat.6 He was never comfortable with beliefs
that were engendered by emotional commitments to a deeply-felt or even
cynically held truth. His sad experiences during the student activism of
the 1960s did not exactly undue his belief that in the long run reasonable
solutions to problems would emerge, but it is certainly the case that the
older Kerr was not nearly so optimistic as the younger version.
His thinking about universities needs to be set against the background
of his early work on the global transformations that he called industrial
society.7 In the 1950s he, and a number of other colleagues, embarked
upon a massive study of the process of industrialization. The project re-
sulted in specific national studies and various other subsidiary publica-
tions. Two summaries were provided by the team, the first in 1960 and
the second in 1975. Similar views were expressed by Kerr in the Marshall
Lectures.
4 Clark Kerr, The Gold and the Blue, I (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University
of California Press, 2001): 13-14.
5 Marshall, Marx and Modern Times: 90. For affective politics, see Seymour Martin
Lipset, Rebellion in the University (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers,
1993).
6 Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University (New York: Harper & Row, 1963): 104.
7 Mary Soo and Kathy Carson, in the work cited, have provided a fine overview of
Kerrs role as academic leader in relation to his understanding of the nature of industrial
society.
342 sheldon rothblatt
The phrase industrial society, which sounds archaic given the long pri-
or history of the development of factory economies, was probably chosen
because many of the reigning theories about society derived from Marxi-
an analysis, especially those relating to class conflict. Therefore the leitmo-
tiv running through many of Kerrs writings is a refutation of the Marxist
interpretation of capitalism and its relation to industrialism, which is a re-
minder that Kerr was very much a Cold Warrior. He had grown up in the
Great Depression of the 1930s when criticism of American capitalism was
rife, and Marxist intellectuals prominent in debate. Marx, Kerr thought,
was thinking more about capitalism than industrial society, the two being
different. From Kerrs perspective, industrial society was far more revolu-
tionary than even the communist radicals understood. But he noted with
displeasure and probably fear that communists were in power in a third of
the countries of the world in 1960.8 However, he lived long enough to see
the Berlin Wall torn down and the Soviet Empire dismantled.
Yet however much Kerr rejected Marxian determinism, it is surpris-
ing to consider that his general method of reading history resembled that
of Marx, his philosophical forebears and other brands of historical de-
terminism. History followed a logic. Kerr was a whig historian, as that
word has been used, believing that history moved inexorably forward
and towards a goal, and he was also a whig in essentially regarding the
transformations as superior to what came before.9 The benefits were sub-
stantial. They included education and a higher standard of living for most
people. Governments had learned how to manage depressions, and by
and large the transition to an industrial economy was peaceful. But he re-
peatedly qualified his teleological leanings, throwing them into the shade
and stressing his objectivity. Not every change was for the better in all re-
spects. To describe a situation realistically, he said, was not necessarily to
approve of it. There was now perhaps a greater degree of alienation owing
to the disintegration of primary affiliations and the rise of large corpora-
tions and institutions. And an underclass was conspicuous, an underclass
largely racial in composition.10 Towards the end of his life he was even
more troubled about social evolution, voicing his concerns in terms of
what had been lost as well as what had been gained.11
8 Clark Kerr, John T. Dunlop, Frederick H. Harbison and Charles A. Myers, Industrial-
ism and Industrial Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960): 22.
9 Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London: G. Bell and Sons,
1931).
10 Marshall, Marx and Modern Times: 31, 37.
See for example Clark Kerr, Troubled Times for American Higher Education: The
11
1990s and Beyond (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994).
views from the acropolis and the agora 343
12 Marshall, Marx and Modern Times: 80. As a journalist covering the revolution of
1848 in France, Marx noticed the many sub-divisions existing within classes, but his theo-
ry of dialectical materialism saw this as only a preliminary stage. When the conditions for
revolutionary change had advanced, such intra-class sub-divisions would disappear. This
analysis appears in the greatly confusing The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis-Napoleon.
13 Industrialism and Industrial Man: 2, 28, 266.
John T. Dunlop, Frederick H. Harbison, Clark Kerr and Charles A. Myers, Industri-
14
alism and Industrial Man Reconsidered: Some Perspectives on a Study over Two Decades of
the Problems of Labor and Management in Economic Growth (1975): 29. Later designated as
the Inter-University Study of Human Resources in National Development.
344 sheldon rothblatt
force. The extended family had disintegrated and labor relations were al-
tered, as was the balance between urban and rural areas. In the industrial
economy, even agriculture was industrialized. Kerr and company pointed
to other changes, most notably a greater degree of personal liberty and
individualism, summarized as a new bohemianism.15 Yet even in that
world, incomplete combustion existed, residues of past habits and prac-
tices, older attitudes not yet eroded by the industrial process. Some con-
ventional national traits were still noticeable, and they might even remain
when the process was finished: German discipline and energy, French in-
dividualism, Indonesian easy-going.16
Of the pressures transforming society and urging planning efforts for-
ward, population increase appears to have been a critical dimension for
Kerr, although this is hardly unusual for urban planners. During the ne-
gotiations over the Master Plan, he noted that the compelling narrative
was explosive demographic growth, the coming tidal wave of students in
a phrase he made famous.17
He often used words expressing urgency. For a planner of reserved
temperament who made a point of controlling his emotions, the language
of the summaries of the coming of industrial society is uncommonly
strong, apocalyptic almost. For a man who believed in temperate negotia-
tions, in clear-headed approaches to difficulties, the depiction of a logic
of history seems almost out of place, prophetic, a warning or a message
stressing preparedness. At first glance, the statements are uncompromis-
ing, but they are then continually qualified, a peculiar stylistic approach,
very nearly confusing. How much of this was instrumental, a means of
stressing the urgency of the situation and the need to mentally accommo-
date to what was occurring? Kerr was to make a reputation as a planner of
higher education systems. There can be no planning without an anticipa-
tion of the future. Therein lies its strength, but also its weakness, for what
if the future should prove to be qualitatively different from initial projec-
tions? And what if the framework of industrial society should prove to be
different from what was expected? The many qualifications were possibly
a rhetorical means of accounting for existing contradictions, perhaps a
way of disarming critics by acknowledging shortcomings in the analysis.
Planning is risky business, both because the future is unknown and be-
cause exaggeration is a temptation.
The logic of history led to industrial society. Industrial society was plu-
ral and competitive. Past arrangements went by the board. Class align-
ments were no longer helpful and class relations no longer a key to a sta-
ble and productive career. The world of industrialism was one in which
education replaced all other modes of social allocation. Personal liberty,
individualism, the new bohemianism all of these pointed to an increased
demand for education. The future lay with those who were educated for
it. What if schools and universities were unprepared to receive the un-
precedented numbers pounding on their doors? The immediacy of this
scenario pressed in upon Kerr. He was concerned about schools, as well
he should have been, but his first assignment was higher education. An
answer the answer lay within the framework established by industrial
society, which constituted the boundaries of a planning approach. New
structures would arise within those boundaries. The planning assignment
required structures.
This was stated, but not clearly spelled out in the first summary. The
authors appear to mean that new mechanisms for resolving conflicts, or
new forms of negotiation between contending parties had to be embed-
ded in a range of conventions regarding outcomes. An industrial socie-
ty was not one in which there were winners and losers. In the Marxist
scenario, there were indeed class winners and losers. Conflicts were not
resolved until the entire historical process was completed, and thereafter,
under the utopian conditions that prevailed (for such they were), conflicts
would no longer exist. But in the model of an industrial society that Kerr
and his collaborators formulated, disagreements were perennial. Indus-
trial society was dynamic, always in movement, always changing in some
ways, always developing new forms of authority, and Kerr could have add-
ed, legitimacy. Critically, the contending parties agreed to accept a stand-
ard of negotiation, a process towards conflict resolution that produced
short-term solutions, followed thereafter by other short-term solutions,
but nothing grand or final. A new structure of thinking was required,
more open, more accommodating, more geared to problem-solving than
perfect solutions to contradictions. If the true nature of industrial soci-
ety was understood by all participants, then it would be appreciated how
much flexibility of mind and willingness to compromise contributed to
successful outcomes.
This was the general attitude that Kerr brought to his two great edu-
cational undertakings of the 1960s. The first involved what is generally
considered the prototypical planning document in the long history of the
university, resulting in a new higher education structure for the state of
346 sheldon rothblatt
California, and the second was a statement of how industrial society had
restructured the research university and the implications of that restruc-
turing.
Kerrs role in the formulation of the Master Plan for Higher Education
for the State of California (1960) has often been described by himself and
by many others. Space does not allow for an extended discussion of its
basic provisions, which in any case are readily available.18 The Plan was
the result of many decades of inquiry and recommendations on the part
of legislators and planners. Negotiations were often taut and occasionally
broke down. Its basic purpose was to reorganize public higher education
in the State of California in order to call a halt to the rivalries between
public educational institutions that had arisen in the preceding half centu-
ry. Higher education institutions are almost inherently imperialistic, con-
tinually seeking prestige and resources and outgrowing earlier missions.
Mission creep is a well-known phenomenon, but missions obviously can-
not creep until they are closely defined. California legislators found them-
selves unable to distinguish between the demands of an existing array of
different kinds of public educational institutions, each of which had ambi-
tious aspirations. All aspirations were costly.
The Master Plan, adopted at a time when the resources of the state were
ample, provided what Kerr called a framework for financing and growth
by defining the functions or mission assigned to each kind of higher edu-
cation institution. He wanted a framework rather than a more confining
solution in order to maintain the flexibility and freedom that were con-
comitant parts of industrial society. Three public segments were recog-
nized, starting with community colleges (the first dated back to 1910).
Four-year state colleges followed, later to be called state universities with
the ability to award master degrees. And the third, and de facto the most
privileged of the segments, was the University of California with its mo-
nopoly on professional schools (excepting education), research and the
John Douglass, The California Idea and American Higher Education: 18501960
18
Master Plan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); Neil J. Smelser, Reflections on the
University of California: From the Free Speech Movement to the Global University (Berkeley,
Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2010); Public Higher Education in
California, ed. Neil J. Smelser and Gabriel Almond (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London,
1974); David Pierpont Gardner, Earning My Degree: Memoirs of an American University
President (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2005); Sheldon
Rothblatt, Educations Abiding Moral Dilemma: Merit and Worth in the Cross-Atlantic De-
mocracies, 18002006 (Didcot, Oxford: Symposium Books, 2007); and Kerr, The Blue and
the Gold, 2 vols. The Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California,
Berkeley maintains a web site of materials pertinent to the history of the Master Plan.
views from the acropolis and the agora 347
and the details of curricula determination were left to the segments. Fur-
thermore, while a state-level coordinating council was given overall re-
sponsibility, it was advisory only, the object being to prevent significant
bureaucratic intrusion. The Plan therefore stood midway between central
governmental direction and the operation of market discipline, carefully
but not slavishly allocating areas in which both might operate. The Plan
is ironically anti-American. Praise for unfettered market solutions is con-
spicuously absent. Yet another irony is that no matter how much Ameri-
cans may resent government intrusion into ordinary life, state legislatures
and governors in the United States have not been especially noted for
their reluctance to intervene in virtually every aspect of higher education.
Three years after the adoption of the Master Plan, Kerr turned his at-
tention to the restructuring of the university and renaming it, in an oft-
used phrase, the multiversity. Once again he invoked the plural nature of
industrial society and the remaking of inherited institutions that such a
society demanded. In this case, the transformation had already occurred.
Why therefore was it necessary to call attention to a fait accompli? Sev-
eral reasons suggest themselves. The first is that the metamorphosis was
still under way, and not all universities had been affected. But a more im-
portant and dominant reason was that a general academic consciousness
or understanding of what had transpired was not yet common. Actions,
activities and decisions were being undertaken as if the transformation
had never occurred. Without that clarity, without a solid grasp of the new
world of decision-making, many leaders of academic communities and
the academic baroni would adhere to traditional modes of performance
that were out of date. Or as the author of a recent book on the American
university has phrased the issue: All organisms must adapt to their envi-
ronments if they are to survive and prosper. Kerr used similar language.
Great universities adjusted, rapidly and effectively.19
The multiversity, he said, was a new type of institution without histori-
cal precedent, and whereas he did not refer to any one institution in par-
ticular as an example, Harvard may well have been the archetype.20 The
multiversity was a conglomerate, a collection of disparate units and sub-
units departments, programs, institutes, laboratories, service agencies.
Actually, universities had been subdividing and acquiring new responsi-
Jonathan Cole, The Great American University: 130, 134. Uses of the University: 35,
19
108, 124.
Apparently Kerr said as much. Morton Keller and Phyllis Keller, Making Harvard
20
Modern, The Rise of Americas University (New York: Oxford University Press): 178.
views from the acropolis and the agora 349
bilities almost since their inception.21 But undoubtedly the pace of inter-
nal fragmenting had increased at a rapid rate in more recent decades. As
a conglomerate, the multiversity was in fact a reflection of industrial soci-
ety, locked into supply and demand relationships and responding some-
what freely to external pressures. A plurality of purposes required the uni-
versity to continually engage in seeking resources, and one consequence
was a much greater reliance than ever before upon federal sources of rev-
enue. The process had gone so far that Kerr labeled the research university
as the federal grant university.
The principle of the differentiation of institutions, a natural conse-
quence of the plural world of industrial society and embedded in the
Master Plan, extended to the interior of the multiversity. For just as the
external world was composed of varying standards and values, so was the
inner world of the multiversity. The unanswered question was how such
a fractured institution could be bonded. Kerrs witty answer was that it
was held together by faculty united in a grievance over parking, a varia-
tion on a theme used by another famous university leader, Robert May-
nard Hutchins of the University of Chicago, who suggested that in a cold
climate it was the central heating system that integrated the campus. Es-
sentially, however, the academic glue was money and administrative rules,
just as in industrial society itself.22
But what about academic leaders? Surely their role was to maintain the
integrity of the university and restrain its natural centrifugal impulses.
Kerr and his colleagues had stressed the importance for an industrial so-
ciety of managerial leadership. As industrialization proceeds, the number
of persons in management increases, both absolutely and relatively in the
economy. Managers would make the decisions hitherto assigned to the
family, the tribe, the village. Yet however much authority managers ac-
quired, they were subject to checks and balances, the checks and balances
that arose from within a society of multiple interests and a society of indi-
vidual likes and dislikes. No single dominant managerial elite exists. The
authors took issue with John Kenneth Galbraiths depiction of a manage-
rial technostructure.23 The manager was central, but the manager was still
a mediator, or a conciliator, or a moderator Kerr used all of these words;
21
Sheldon Rothblatt, Amalgamation and Meiosis in the History of Universities, in
Les transformations des universits du XIIIe au XXIXe sicle, ed. Yves Gingras and Lyse Roy
(Quebec: Presses de lUniversit du Qubec, 2006): 223-245.
22Uses of the University, 20; Industrialism and Industrial Man: 18.
23Industrialism and Industrial Man: 14.
350 sheldon rothblatt
but at one point, speaking about quality and academic freedom, he sug-
gested gladiator.24
If the logic of history created a society whose leaders were managers,
not, as Kerr expressed, the builders of the great universities of the past,
then the university, now renamed a multiversity because it was intercon-
nected to all aspects of contemporary society, would also have leaders
who were managers. In the last decade considerable debate has occurred
over exactly how academic leaders are supposed to manage, and whether
this implies bureaucratic governance, decision-making dependent upon
income streams or leaders without a commitment to the ideals and tradi-
tions of the university. Such leaders, say critics, are more akin to corporate
executives, and indeed today one commonly hears chancellors and presi-
dents described in those terms. They are CEOs with chiefs of staff. The
late Burton R. Clark, in his discussion of new entrepreneurial universities,
saw the manager-academic in a more positive light as someone who could
initiate projects, form decision-making teams, move outside traditional
departmental boundaries and direct academic attention to new tasks and
opportunities.25 One key was not autocratic or even oligarchic decision-
making but what in the University of California came to be called shared
governance, cooperation between academic senates and central adminis-
tration. But in practice this has meant mainly that senates really only exer-
cise veto authority rather than taking the lead in devising new initiatives.
Kerr tried to manage the University of California on the model of a third
way, allowing the federated campuses more authority than had his pred-
ecessor and persuading the Board of Regents to delegate more respon-
sibility to academic senates. In a plural, industrial economy, there were
numerous poles of activity that required managing. The fragility of this
arrangement became apparent during the student activism of the 1960s.
The radical students learned to take advantage of leadership gaps in the
fault lines that lay between central and decentralized governance, between
departments whose inhabitants, in obedience to the logic of the multiver-
sity, embraced different values about teaching or research or governance.
It was not clear whether the multiversity could manage crises. But this
may be a special feature of educational institutions, which are antagonistic
to strong leadership unless it moves along lines congenial to the faculty.
Sheldon Rothblatt, The Modern University and Its Discontents: The Fate of Newmans
26
Legacy in Britain and America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, chapters 1
and 2. According to Bjrn Wittrock, an idea is not a free-floating abstraction but a guiding
conception, rooted in the experiences, traditions, and life-worlds of individuals who have
memories and hopes and attachments. See his The Modern University: The Three Trans-
352 sheldon rothblatt
Therefore his task was to articulate a new way of discussing the func-
tions and purposes of a university. The new way would not be altogether
congenial. After all, it embodied the contradictions, the tensions and the
quarrels over authority that characterized the larger society. Dismayed ob-
servers thought Kerrs multiversity was the epitome of an industrial or-
ganization, a traison des clercs in the celebrated phrase of Julien Benda.
Kerr did not line up with the Bendas of this world, but he acknowledged
that elements of an industrial society were present within the multiver-
sity. Yes, the lofty ideals were missing, the appeal to a higher cause, the
soaring phrases that derived from the belief that a university had an es-
sence, a soul even.27 What Kerr proposed seemed so pedestrian, and as he
remarked, in a sense it was, or at least it was prosaic. The multiversity, he
wrote, had no bard to sing of its achievements.28
The multiversity, he explained, could not be based on an idea or an es-
sence. It was part and parcel of industrial society, responsive to it, depend-
ent upon it for support, and mischief would follow if the reality of the
universitys position was not grasped. The multiversity was, in fact, com-
pounded of all ideas of a university that had ever existed; one differentiat-
ed part responded to one kind of idea, another to a different idea. Leaders
needed to understand these differences, and one way of managing them
was to respond to each difference in a way agreeable to it. As he amusingly
observed, a university head must provide athletics for the alumni, sex for
the undergraduates and, of course, parking for the faculty.29
The Marshall Lectures delivered in April 1968 and published the next
year closed the period in Kerrs life that began with the work on industrial
society and segued to a discussion of the multiversity. By then the Master
Plan was in full operation, receiving praise for having brought structure
and planning into the hitherto chaotic world of colleges and universities
springing up like dragons teeth in the dynamic atmosphere of post-war
California. The multiversity had been named; and while it had been chal-
lenged by the student activists of the 1960s, it proved to be a juggernaut,
formations, in The European and American University since 1800: Historical and Sociologi-
cal Essays, ed. Sheldon Rothblatt and Bjrn Wittrock (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993): 347.
George M. Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establish-
27
ment to Established Nonbelief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). Kerr referred of-
ten to soul in the Godkin Lectures. The Uses of the University (New York: Harper & Row,
1963): 1, 19, 45.
28Uses of the University: 6.
29The Gold and the Blue, I: 126.
views from the acropolis and the agora 353
moving forward into industrial society, then into what came to be called
post-industrial society and even spilling beyond its nation-state borders
to take on additional responsibilities and features in the global economy.
Kerr had intimated that this would happen, if, with respect to globaliza-
tion, not so directly. But once the university had been restructured into
the multiversity, and once academics accepted that structure, globaliza-
tion was almost inevitable. The competition for resources and prestige
that had governed the earlier phase, intense then, was possibly more in-
tense as the multiversity came of age in the twenty-first century.30
Kerrs Godkin Lectures looked far ahead. They were an extraordinary
anticipation of what the future might be, the Future of the City of Intel-
lect as he entitled one lecture. Had the view from the Acropolis really dis-
appeared, leaving only the Agora? It seemed so in 1963, in 2001, in 2010,
industrial society, post-industrial society moving inexorably forward.
Centuries before, an angry Jonathan Swift had denounced the Moderns
who, to improve their view to the east (from whence legitimacy came),
proposed to level Mount Parnassus at the expense of the Ancients who
were on top.31 The engineers, the technocrats, the bottom-liners, the man-
agers and the makers of modernity moved ruthlessly forward. They had
no patience with the past.
The historian, accustomed to a constant flow of ironies, expecting the
unexpected yet never certain of its nature, wonders if the logic of histo-
ry may depart from the paths predicted by Kerr. But forthright language
notwithstanding, Kerr was always ambivalent about what he described as
reality. As early as 1963 he wondered whether the university had been a
better place before the subject of its uses became so paramount.32 In dif-
ferent ways, he continued to ponder the same issues until the end of his
life. He came to see that the story was hardly over.
30
In the course of the nineteenth century the university became an agent of national-
ization. George Fallis, Multiversities, Ideas and Democracy (Toronto, Buffalo, London: Uni-
versity of Toronto Press, 2007): 331, correctly raises the issue of how globalization affects
the conception of national citizenship once so closely tied to undergraduate education. Is
one to be a citizen of the world?
In The Battle of the Books.
31
32The Uses of the University: viii.
THE GROWING CONFUSION BETWEEN PRIVATE AND
PUBLIC IN AMERICAN HIGHER EDUCATION
Neil J. Smelser
Once upon a time, say in the 1930s in the United States, the lines between
public and private higher education could be fairly neatly drawn. The pri-
vates were institutions dependent largely on student fees, sometimes high,
and private donations. They included universities, four-year private col-
leges, and religious colleges, all of which varied by quality and prestige.
Almost none (the University of Pennsylvania was an exception) received
money from the public purse. Almost none (the University of Chicago
was an exception) received large sums from foundations. Their student
clientele also varied, but private secondary institutions supplied high
percentages. Most public institutions were financed exclusively by public
money from the individual states and localities, and a few received private
support, mainly from financially successful and loyal alumni. Their tui-
tion costs were very low, sometimes non-existent (as in the University of
California). They included state universities, which housed post-graduate
356 neil j. smelser
terest in the institution, especially its athletic fortunes. One of the fre-
quent orientations of loyal alumni is that they want the campus to re-
main as they remember itor think they rememberit. They can also
resist change, including diversification students and faculty.
Legislative and executive state officials, who supply public institutions
with funds and take a continued interest in their missions, especially
the undergraduate education of the states young people.
Economic interests (for example, agriculture, business) that have his-
torically pushed higher education in vocational and professional direc-
tions.
Political constituencies, mainly from the right (anti-Communism, Mc-
Carthyism) that attack the professoriate for their presumed political bi-
ases but more recently from the left (student activists, anti-war groups)
that have criticized colleges and universities for their cozy relationship
with the business and political establishments.
All of these constituencies have varied greatly according to type of uni-
versity or college, according to the salience of their interests and feelings,
according to whether they remain latent or become active, and according
to their level of militancy.
If one compares this pattern of inherited external constituencies with
what has happened in the past half-century, it appears simple and man-
ageable. Within that pattern, colleges and universities could still live in
a situation of relative innocence, outside ignorance, and good will. They
were regarded as basically moral and valuable institutions, carrying out
their charge to prepare the youth of the community, state, and nation ef-
fectively and responsibly for the future, and to be called into question only
if they appeared to be incompetent, immoral, or radical in some groups
eyes.
What, then, are the new forces and new constituencies that have blis-
tered onto the long-standing ones, thus altering the political scene?
First, I mentioned the increased salience of the philanthropic founda-
tions and the federal government in the environment of universities and
colleges. What made these significant constituencies? First, the very act
of generous external support made them meaningful, because educational
institutions came to be more dependent on them for research initiatives
and maintaining research installations. This is a symbiotic relationship,
the foundations and governments relying on institutions of higher educa-
tion to realize their own missions and policies, and institutions of higher
education depending on these agencies for an increasing percentage of
their budgets. In addition, two further changes emerged:
private and public in american higher education 361
ling industrial secrecy and conflict of interestare not yet fully appreciat-
ed. However, the change is significant, and some spokespersons for high-
er education have expressed apprehension that corporate interests and a
commercial mentality on the part of administrators are undermining, in
yet another way, the integrity of traditional values of higher education.
Fourth, those political movements and groups that have influenced fed-
eral and state agencies to monitor their relations with colleges and univer-
sities have also taken a direct interest in colleges and universities, oper-
ating as watchdogs, sentinels and protesters from their respective points
of view. I refer to the whole range of ethnic, racial, gender, gay-lesbian,
environmental protection, human rights and animal rights movements
precipitated by the politics of the 1960s and 1970s. These groups are ex-
tremely sensitive to the policies, plans, and initiatives of institutions of
higher education, eager to point out their mischief and atrocities, and to
engage in political and legal struggles with them. As a single, extreme ex-
ample, I point to a recent squall on my home campus at Berkeley. About
two years ago the campus announced plans to retrofit the campus football
stadium and construct adjacent athletic training facilities. This precipitat-
ed a hailstorm of protest, including legal action, emanating from environ-
mentalists protesting the intended removal of oak trees (and a long season
of climbing and occupying those trees); from the city of Berkeley, appre-
hensive about seismic complications (the stadium sits on an earthquake
fault), and an association of hill-dwellers living above the stadium, with a
long history of protesting all nearby university developments. This protest
combined with (a) opposition to plans of the School of Business Adminis-
tration to convert a long-standing student residential building into a con-
ference center and (b) disgruntlement with the campus administrations
interest in receiving several hundred million dollars from and entering
into a gigantic cooperative research enterprise with British Petroleum on
alternative sources of energyin many ways an unobjectionable enterprise
in the eyes of the green Berkeley culture. I mention this example because
of its intensity, its spread, its unlikely combination of bedfellows, and the
magnitude of the headaches created for the campus. It also illustrates the
unpredictability of consequences of campus plans for innovating and im-
plementing.
Finally, over the past several decades the mass media have discovered
and rediscovered that political conflicts in and about colleges and univer-
sities make news. Reporting this news magnifies the presence and impact
of the four sets of forces just enumerated, and augments the fish-bowl as-
pect of those institutions lives. I am not certain why the involvement of
private and public in american higher education 363
the media has intensified. Part of the answer lies in the educational in-
stitutions themselves; they have experienced more dramatic conflicts
and political troubles than in the past. Part of it stems from the fact that,
historically, colleges and universities have been regardedand have ad-
vertised themselvesas centers of calm, civility, consensus, and the re-
flective life; this perhaps gives both reporters and readers a subterranean
glee when these presumably apolitical communities are dragged into the
rough-and-tumble of politics. And finally, as a kind of historical holdover,
colleges and universities are still regarded as object of sacred trust, and
should be held to a higher morality than in business and political institu-
tions. We should never forget that the historical origins of universities are
religious, and that many quasi-religious rituals and representations (such
as formal commencements, endowment with honors through honorary
degrees and citations, and inaugurations) survive. The public wants and
likes this element of sanctity, and, correspondingly, holds out expectations
that representatives of colleges and universities (both faculty and admin-
istrators) should be bound by a special morality. Such expectations lend
salience and electricity to the issue of high salaries and perks for admin-
istrators and to issues of conflict of interest and dishonesty in research
for faculty.
To bring this discussion of constituencies back to the central issue: The
impacts of the changes in political constituencies have been differential
in their impact. They have been of less consequence for four-year colleges
(both public and private) and for community colleges for several reasons:
first, these institutions are not as centrally involved in research activities
that involve foundations and funding; and second, in line with general
contours of stratification in higher education these institutions are, for
better or for worse, not as visible, consequential, or gossip-worthy as the
heaviesthe large, research-oriented, prestige institutions. As for the
major publics and privates, both have been affected by the more conspicu-
ous presence of foundation, federal, and corporate funding. These chang-
es, affecting the political environments of both, have made them more
similar with respect to institutional circumstances and their external con-
stituencies. Yet there are residual differences. Public institutions remain
more vulnerable to external pressures because they remain public in the
eyes of relevant publics and thus inherit a stronger view of representing
the public trust and continuing to receive support (though in diminishing
percentages) from taxpayer dollars.
364 neil j. smelser
An Inherited Disability:
The Myth of Institutional Isolation and Serenity
All the developments I have traced point to the conclusion that institu-
tions of higher education are increasingly exposed to critical attention
from interested constituencies and the public at large. A corollary is that
these institutions have becomeand promise to becomemore involved
in dealing with unanticipated surprises and conflicts. Yet they have inher-
ited a special vulnerability in dealing with these phenomena. Here is my
reasoning on this topic:
Many organizations are geared to the occurrence of unanticipated
events as a routine part of their daily functioning. The most notable of
these are military and police organizations, which are culturally and or-
ganizationally programmed to respond to violence, crime, protest, and
other threats to the society and community. They are frequently taken by
surprise, to be sure, but the expectation that they have to deal with the
ever-present possibility of surprising situations is part of their culture. A
polity, too, is in the business of dealing with unanticipated conflicts in the
community, and has at its disposal many resources to deal with them
channels to hear about and air citizen concerns, machinery to strike polit-
ical compromises, and the political authority to make settlements stick,
once made. Business firmseffective ones, at any ratealso expect as a
matter of routine that unanticipated market conditions will continually
appear, and that they should be prepared to adapt to them.
Historically, universities and colleges have lived under a different set of
cultural expectations. Deriving partly from their monastic origins, univer-
sities have expected to enjoy a peculiar insularity from society and com-
munity, even though they are regarded as a cultural and social resource
for them. The classroom as a microcosm is sealed off from the daily affairs
of administering the organizational side of the university. Scholarship and
teaching are protected by academic freedom (which at bottom is a series
of prohibitions against external intervention). Other devices are also in-
sulating, such as the taboo against external funding agencies managing
the research they support. The principle of the faculty as a company of
equals is a denial of politics and authority and an affirmation of the prin-
ciple of a voluntary and cohesive community, which carries out its affairs
on the basis of collegial influence and consensus. The university is thus
regarded as a protected haven for scholars and teachers and a relatively
insulated moratorium for youth before they take on the occupational, fa-
milial, and community responsibilities of adults. The university culture
private and public in american higher education 365
includes insulation from external politics as well; the Organic Act of 1868,
for example, specified that the University of California would be shielded
from sectarian, political or partisan influence.
The flow of history, however, has evidently given the lie to this ideal-
ized cultural image. Totalitarian governments have ravaged universities
through direct political intervention and control. In the United States,
where universities have been relatively protected in comparison with
many other countries, they have nevertheless experienced periodic rage
from religious constituencies for their godlessness, from the right for their
radicalism, and from the left for their establishment ties and loyalties. Ef-
forts to compromise academic freedom have always been latent and fre-
quently manifest. Legislatures are forever tempted to meddle in the name
of citizen and parental outrage and in the name of public accountability.
Town-gown tensions continue to be running sores for many colleges and
universities.
Despite the historical reality, the idealized image of the university as a
communityas opposed to being a polity within a larger politypersists.
The norm is the pursuit and transmission of knowledge in relative peace
and insulation, and political crises are regarded as rare, ugly events which,
once they have occurred, are seen as abnormal eruptions and disturbanc-
es to the community, which is blessed when it is able to return to normal-
ity after they occur. The situation is a bit analogous to the public attitude
toward earthquakes. They are rare events, not the norm; when they occur
they are terrible and frightening, but after a short time people begin to
believe they will not recur and that normal life can move on. This fea-
ture of community culture also probably accounts in part for the fact that
campuses over the years have not built up a full or systematic apparatus of
readiness for crisesa structure of roles and responsibilities for anticipat-
ing and responding. The image of any kind of garrison state is dissonant
with the inherited cultural mentality
A final point to be made about the culture of colleges and universities
is their special concentration on individual persons. Faculty members are
expected to strive for individual recognition in their careers, and they are
rewarded for this recognition. These institutions admit individual stu-
dents, give instruction to and grade them as individuals, graduate indi-
viduals, and prepare individuals for and place them in occupational po-
sitions. Correspondingly, they have not been very well equipped to deal
with collective conflict and crises, because they, too, are not part of their
cultural expectations and normal expected functioning.
366 neil j. smelser
In one respect I have been talking about the future in all the foregoing
remarks, because all the trends identified show no evident signs of abate-
ment. Nevertheless, it is helpful to be explicit with respect to several likely
directions:
There will be a continuing development of the new managerial class of
university and college administrators, with emphasis on organizational
savvy, political and foreign-relations skills, carefulness if not timidity,
fund-raising charm and persuasiveness, and expertise in crisis man-
agement. Rhetorical effectiveness will also be valued, but not necessar-
ily circumstantial vision and commitment to high academic and social
values. The name of the game wilt likely be more circumspection, be-
cause resounding statements on social, political, and moral issues risk
being ground up in disagreements among pleased and angered constit-
uencies, and resulting in unwanted criticism of the institutions leaders.
This formula seems inevitable, because all who are responsible will be
awareor should be awarethat attending to the good will of constit-
uent groups is the key to moral, political, and financial support of the
institution.
Largely because of the increased and probably increasing complexity of
organizational life in universities and colleges, those involved in their
affairs will have to spend more of their time in organization-sustaining
activitiesin full-time and part-time administration, in staff and fac-
ulty committee work, in securing consensus, in conflict-management,
and in the unruffling of ruffled feathers. Academics and administrators
already bemoan the intrusion of committees, service work on behalf of
the institution, hassling, and endless meetings on their lives; this side
of academic life will no doubt expand in significance.
A likely cost of these increased organization-sustaining activities is a fur-
ther intrusion into the main traditional activities in colleges and univer-
sities, which are (a) conscientiously teaching and attending to the intel-
lectual, personal, and developmental sides of student life and (b) excel-
ling in research, publication, and creative activity. Not that the pressure
to continue to attend to these basic commitments will be diminished;
in particular, the demand for published research and creative activity
private and public in american higher education 369
Peter Weingart
1. Introduction
Much has been written about the new governance of science, about the
glorious invasion of new public management into the higher education
systems, and about the implementation of market mechanisms and biblio-
metric indicators to manage more efficiently institutions of higher learn-
ing and research. The reasons for this dramatic development are manifold:
The exponential growth of science and the democratization of higher
education have for some time pointed beyond the professional-collegial
control of universities, research institutions, and research councils and
called for the expansion of professionalized management techniques to
the knowledge-production sector. An increased sensitivity among publics
and the media in the Western societies for the risks of scientific and tech-
nological advances as a result of spectacular accidents called the authority
of scientific and political elites into question.
The decline of trust in institutions that has afflicted all modern societies
has given rise to an auditing craze (Power) that assumes the form of ritu-
alistic self-flagellation. It is articulated in the ubiquitous call for account-
ability, implemented by quality assurance practices like evaluation and
accreditation, which, in turn, lead to standardized techniques of counting
and accounting. The depth and inescapability of this movement is best il-
lustrated by the fact that those who are subjected to its consequences and
whose interests are negatively affected welcome it nevertheless. The ma-
jor impact upon academic science of performance measurement systems
has come not externally from new government requirements but inter-
nally from the independent adoption of these techniques by universities
initially in the name of rational management and increasingly as devices
to foster reputational enhancement (Feller 2009, 323). The same applies
372 peter weingart
to department chairs and deans, especially in the natural and medical sci-
ences who enthusiastically rely on citation statistics and impact factors
when making decisions about recruiting new staff or adjusting salaries.
Here the motive appears to be simplification and objectification of de-
cisions which are usually contentious. Also, it cannot be precluded that,
apart from policymakers outside academia, some groups from within
also stand to gain from the implementation of quantitative indicators.
The administrative staff within universities has gained influence not only
because of the managerial changes in universities but also because it has
been given a powerful technology, and, as Martin and Whitley point out,
disciplinary scientific elites have gained influence as well, i.e. the regula-
tory process intended to weaken their control has actually been captured
by these elites (Martin and Whitley 2009).
On the other hand, although that judgment is based on impressions
only, the critical voices seem to become more numerous and better heard.
Most damaging to policymakers and science administrators alike must be
the devastating critique of the use of bibliometric indicators launched by
the International Mathematical Union and its affiliates which rightfully
claim for mathematicians and statisticians the professionally supreme
competence to deal with numbers. The IMU points out: [C]itation data
provide only a limited and incomplete view of research quality, and the
statistics derived from citation data are sometimes poorly understood and
misused. Research is too important to measure its value with only a single
coarse tool (IMU 2008). Equally ominous is the critique from those who
profit from widespread use of the indicators: Thomson Reuters and Else-
vier. Thus, Amin and Mabe of Elsevier, while claiming the usefulness of
ISIs database, caution: [C]itation measures are not a direct measure of
quality and must be used with considerable care and extending the use
of impact factor from the journal to the authors of papers in the journal is
highly suspect (Amin and Mabe 2007, 6). Not an indication of mounting
criticism but a sort of ironical prediction is Norman Birnbaums observa-
tion that any of the management techniques were adopted in the higher
education systems just about the time they were discredited or displaced
in the private sector where they had been first propagated and implement-
ed (Birnbaum 2000, 198).
I will not join in the chorus of these analyses, however interesting and
justified they are. Instead, I will focus much more modestly on one partic-
ular aspect: the inadvertent unintended consequences of the introduction
of bibliometric indicators in the management of scientists, of scientific in-
stitutions (the communication system), and organizations (universities).
quantitative measures in the management of science 373
That explains why from the perspective of the regulators surrogates are
needed. They are supposed to replace the lack of knowledge about the in-
ner workings of the social system of science on the part of the regulators
and at the same time provide a handle to manipulate the system. More
concretely, the surrogates are indicators, i.e. quantitative measures that re-
flect certain aspects of the system deemed important to the manipulation.
The construction of such indicators presupposes a theory or at least a very
good understanding of the aspects of the system that are supposed to be
represented. Also, indicators are by definition only partial representations
of much more complex phenomena. Both combined point to the risk of
indicator construction. If, as in the case of the application of bibliometric
indicators to the management of research, the objective is to influence in-
dividual, collective, or organizational behaviour, there are several kinds of
possible failures. The indicator may not have any incentive function and
remain without effect, or it may induce overreactions due to its selective
focus. Most problematic of all, however, is the induction of behaviour that
is antithetical to that which was intended (Feller 2009, 25). The causa-
tion of such unintended consequences is a well-known phenomenon in
the management of complex social systems and results from the applica-
tion of simple measures that prove to be reactive. Because people are re-
flexive beings who continually monitor and interpret the world and adjust
their actions accordingly, measures are reactive. Measures elicit responses
from people who intervene in the objects they measure. Understanding
the character and consequences of this reflexivity is important (Espeland
and Sauder 2007, 2). In sociology and ethnography reflexivity is seen as a
methodological problem typically arising in the study of human behav-
iour. In economics the implementation of reflexive incentives leading to
unintended outcomes is seen as goal displacement: when the actors fo-
cus on the motives suggested by the indicators rather than on the qualities
they are supposed to measure.
In the case of the application of bibliometric indicators in the regulation
of science this is commonly observed as playing the game, i.e. research-
ers, university administrations, and journal editors to take those ac-
tors affected most by them and dealt with here all try to circumvent the
measures or manipulate them to their own advantage. This may be with-
out further consequences and just result in the diversion of regulatory ef-
forts and useless expense of energy. But it may also result in outcomes that
are damaging to the individuals and organizations concerned, and thus to
the institution of science as a whole. For that very reason scholars knowl-
edgeable in the construction and application of bibliometric indicators
quantitative measures in the management of science 375
who also study these effects warn against their isolated use and urge to
complement them with the traditional mechanism of peer review. In fact,
the most far reaching evaluation system of higher education, the British
Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), has combined peer review with
quantitative measures, and so have the Dutch and the German evalua-
tions. However, the reliance on peer review makes evaluations extremely
time-consuming, costly, and cumbersome and, in addition, the procedure
is prone to being criticized as subjective. That was an important reason
for the introduction of bibliometric measures, namely to objectify judge-
ments and eliminate old boy networks.
The conclusion to all this is that the original expectations attached to
these measures have not been met, that the most serious danger is posed
by the mindless application of these measures, and that the expertise of
the scientific profession is crucial as in the involvement of peer judge-
ments. Since no one would go so far as to discard the indicators altogeth-
er, the relevant question is which of them are useful, which are harmful,
why, and how.
Although some of the measures interact, I will first deal with the use of
publication and citation counts and their influence on individual behav-
iour, i.e. the reactions of researchers to them. Obviously, the crucial ques-
tion is to what purpose bibliometric measures are used. Here, I am only
interested in their application as performance measures in the context
of evaluations of individual researchers or groups of researchers that are
mostly organized in research units. It is now quite common that publica-
tion and citation measures are part of the evaluations of both, individual
researchers and research organizations. Thus, the indicator is used to de-
termine the allocation of funds. In universities in some countries a certain
percentage of the funds allocated to each working unit is linked to publi-
cation output. Evaluations of entire universities or research institutes also
commonly include publication and citation measures as one indicator
among several. In rare cases, such as in Spain, the National Commission
for the Evaluation of Research Activity (CNEAI) rewards researchers with
salary bonuses for publishing in prestigious journals.
In all these cases the underlying expectation is that individuals or or-
ganizations will change their behaviour, namely to produce more publi-
cations and to attempt to produce better publications in order to obtain
376 peter weingart
2007). In fact, the danger of the impact factor being applied in evaluat-
ing individuals and departments in formal evaluation processes increases
because it is now understood as a concentrated measure of citation counts
which seems to facilitate time-consuming citation analyses.
Monastersky mentions examples: In several countries in Europe and
Asia, administrators openly use impact factors to evaluate researchers or
allocate money: In England, hiring panels routinely consider impact fac-
tors According to Spanish law, researchers are rewarded for publishing
in journals defined by ISI as prestigious, which in practice has meant in
the upper third of the impact-factor listings. In China, scientists get cash
bonuses for publishing in high-impact journals, and graduate students
in physics at some universities must place at least two articles in jour-
nals with a combined impact factor of 4 to get their Ph.D.s, Monastersky
quotes Martin Blume, editor in chief of the American Physical Society.
The obsession with impact factors has also seeped into the United States,
although less openly. Thus, the executive director of the American Physi-
ological Society, Martin Frank, quoted a young faculty member who was
informed by her department chair that in order to get tenure, scientists
should publish in journals with an impact factor above 5 (Monastersky
2005).
One immediate consequence of the use of impact factors is the rush
to high-impact journals. The concentration of demand for journal space,
in turn, results in a clogging of channels. As particular journals become
overburdened and are not able to find reviewers, their rejection rate goes
up, in extreme cases to 90 percent plus. Grisly stories of papers that have
been bounced down a cascade of journals from high impact factor to lower
and lower ones are now the main dish of scientific discourse The idea
that one should treat publication as some kind of all-comers boxing chal-
lenge is relatively recent (Lawrence 2007, R584). As a further result, the
objective presentation of work, the accessibility of articles and the quality
of research itself are being compromised (Lawrence 2003a, 259).
The impact factor has not only changed the publication behaviour of in-
dividual scientists but also the behaviour of editors of scientific journals,
and this has repercussions for the whole communication system of sci-
ence, none of which had been foreseen when the impact factor was first
introduced. In the early 1960s Eugene Garfield and Irving Sher created
the journal impact factor to help select journals for the new Science Cita-
quantitative measures in the management of science 379
tion Index (SCI) (Garfield 2005, 1). Now a journal like Nature advertises
its IF of 29 with the slogan No Nature, no Impact. The slogan seems to
attract so many scientists papers that its acceptance rate has gone down
to 8 percent. In several countries journals are now ranked according to
IF, usually into three categories, A, B, and C. These are linked to the eval-
uation of publications of individuals and departments in universities. If
there is a direct connection between the classification of literature output
according to IF and financial rewards, it does not take much imagination
to predict how scientists will react. But journal editors and publishers react
according to a similar logic. For example, the publisher links the remu-
neration for the editor, small as it usually is, to the improvement of the
IF. The legitimate expectation is that editors will try to attract more re-
nowned authors. However, in reality something else has happened. Pub-
lishers and editors have found ways to manipulate the indicator itself, and
this affects the communication system proper. One well-known method
already mentioned is to publish more review articles as they attract more
citations than original research articles. The editorial board of the Journal
of Environmental Quality decided in 2003 to emphasize review articles
in order to shore up the journals slipping impact factor. Henk F. Moeds
analysis of the high-impact journal The Lancet showed that free citations
from news articles and similar material buoyed the British medical jour-
nals impact factor by 16 percent in 2002 (Monastersky 2005).
Another practice which borders on being unethical is self-citation. This
comes in at least two different ways. One is that journals run editorials
that cite numerous articles from previous issues. Jan Reedijk and Henk
Moed found that a significant number of journals get a noticeable jump
in their impact factors from such self-citations in editorials (Monastersky
2005). Another is that journal editors ask authors to cite articles in the
same journal in order to boost its IF. After provisionally accepting an ar-
ticle the associate editor of the journal asked an author that the journal
presently requests that several references to Shock are incorporated in the
reference list. After receiving the manuscript with the required revisions
the editor insisted that it would be greatly appreciated if you could incor-
porate 46 references of appropriate articles that have been published in
Shock in your revised manuscript urgently. This would be of tremendous
help to the journal. Upon publication of the article the author was re-
quested to send copies to colleagues and urge them to cite it. The journal
Leukemia was accused of manipulation for the same editorial policy. ISI
detected that practice at the World Journal of Gastroenterology. Although
ISI stopped listing that journal because 85 percent of the citations to the
380 peter weingart
publication were coming from its own pages, the journals Web site still
advertised its 2003 impact factor. The Journal of Applied Ecology has been
found to follow the same practice (Monastersky 2005). It must now be as-
sumed that this has become a widespread pattern. This impression is sup-
ported by the fact that Thomson Reuters reacted to it, saying that self-cita-
tion is reviewed and journals are removed from Journal Citation Reports
until the problem of excessive self-citation resolves and we can publish
an accurate impact factor (Testa cited in Brumback 2009, 260). However,
how in future real self-citations are to be distinguished from engineered
ones remains Thomson Reuters secret.
There are indirect and unintended consequences beyond the petty ma-
nipulation of the IF. Several of the high impact journals like Science, Na-
ture, and Cell have established the practice of announcing articles which
they consider to be of popular interest in press campaigns even before
they go into print. This alerts the media worldwide and contributes not
only to the visibility of the journals but also the visibility of the respec-
tive authors. Such a concentration of attention brings the culture of me-
dia hype to scientific communication. In a meticulous study of the pub-
lication practices of these journals and of Science and Nature Franzen has
found that they are also the ones with the greatest number of retractions
and corrections (Franzen 2009). In other words: short-term sensational-
izing evidently overrides the careful scrutiny to which research findings
used to be subjected by editors and reviewers, i.e. before the age of mass
media hypes. Global visibility comes at a high price, namely the threat to
the credibility of science.
odologies of the different rankings were and still are cast aside although
they are a good predictor of the reactions to circumvent or avoid the in-
tended behavioural changes. They would deserve a much longer treat-
ment but I can only select a few examples which are particularly pertinent
to the topic of unintended consequences (for more extensive treatment cf.
Feller 2009; Maasen and Weingart 2007).
Rankings and evaluations are supposed to engage universities interna-
tionally in a competition to achieve several objectives. The RAE was sup-
posed to force the British universities to operate more efficiently, to save
money, and in order to achieve that, to concentrate on their respective
strengths and to specialize.
In these cases the incentives operate in a way that encourages universi-
ties to play games to manipulate single indicators. This has indirect struc-
tural effects that are caused on different levels. On the level of the individ-
ual researchers Martin and Whitley have observed for the RAE that they
tend to improve their and their universitys position if they focus on basic
rather than applied research, shorter-term rather than longer-term re-
search, incremental rather than more ambitious or open-ended pioneer-
ing research, mainstream rather than alternative research, mono-disci-
plinary rather than inter- or multi-disciplinary research, academic rather
than professional research, research that yields journal articles rather
than books, and research where the results can be published in top jour-
nals rather than more specialist (and generally lower status) ones (Martin
and Whitley 2009, 23). On the department level they see a widening split
between teaching and research, with deleterious effects on the former be-
cause some RAE stars may be able to negotiate research-only contracts,
enabling them to concentrate exclusively on research while strengthening
the institutions chances in the competitive research market (ibid., 24).
This effect is already apparent in the German so-called Excellence Ini-
tiative as well. It is also designed to initiate competition among the uni-
versities which before were all considered equal, even in their systemati-
cally created poverty due to insufficient funding. In contrast to the RAE,
funds allocated in the EI framework come on top of what the universi-
ties receive already. Thus, the objective is to obtain funds for high-level
research and for various activities which would otherwise be impossible.
In this case the incentive for the universities is not to evade evaluations
but more to impress reviewers. The danger of unintended consequences
appears primarily on the structural level, e.g. the prioritizing of research
over teaching. Although it is too early to judge, the first signs of this effect
are being seen already: especially good scientists try to buy themselves out
382 peter weingart
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THE COMPRESSION OF RESEARCH TIME AND THE
TEMPORALIZATION OF THE FUTURE
Helga Nowotny
Time becoming a scarce resource, die Verknappung der Zeit, is not a spe-
cificity of the academic world. Beginning with industrialization, time has
been transformed into the ultimate scarcity, in a tight coupling with its
efficient use. It became a commodity that can be bought and sold, saved
and spent. It can accumulate interest. It penetrates all economic activities
and those that have acquired an economic dimension. As Marx already
stated, all economics is the economics of time. To the extent that research
is valued above all in terms of its potential and actual contributions to
economic growth and global competitiveness, it too is subject to the proc-
esses that govern the scarcity of time.
The manifestations of this trend vary. In the academic world it takes
two distinct but related forms: the compression of research time that is
experienced on the individual level and the temporalization of the fu-
ture that takes place on the level of the system. Researchers and scholars
have observed the strategic use of time in terms of balancing the input of
efforts and the output of results all along. One of the considerations in
choosing the model organism in the laboratories of the life sciences, for
instance, has been the life cycle of these organisms and hence the speed
with which they reproduce. The use of short-cuts and of time-saving de-
vices is part of the tacit know-how not only of those who work in the lab,
but also of those whose working habits consist mainly in reading and
writing books. Yet, like other creative activities, research needs time, its
Eigenzeit,1 for ideas to emerge and mature. But we seem to have reached
an unprecedented level in the compression of time felt on the level of the
individual as an acute state of temporal deprivation, if not starvation. This
is largely due to the enormous pressure that has been added to reach not
only high-quality output, but also maximum output of measurable quan-
tity. In scope and scale, this was unknown to previous generations.
The present predicament was still far away and perhaps unimagina-
ble when the Swedish Council for Planning and Coordination of Re-
search (FRN), through its Committee for Future-Oriented Research,
organized a small international meeting in May 1983. Backed by the con-
fidence of those years and coupled with a sense of civic obligation, par-
ticipants were asked to engage in studies of a fundamental nature that
will increase our understanding of long-term changes in society and the
environment, and lead to comprehensive knowledge that could be used to
shape the future. The task ahead of us was to discuss the problem of Sci-
ence as a commodity: Threats to the open community of scholars?
The answers were brought together in a collection of essays edited by
Michael Gibbons and Bjrn Wittrock.2 They provided a nuanced assess-
ment of the situation as it presented itself almost thirty years ago. Neatly
summarized by Bjrn in his postscript, one part clearly stated: Science
has not become a commodity; it always was. Commoditization does not
threaten the scientific community; it has consistently served as the basis
for science as a professional and thus autonomous enterprise.3 Our
overall debate was still framed in the classical mode, oscillating between
the Baconian vision of usefulness that so fruitfully was at the origin of
modern science in the 17th century and the Faustian bargain that so ir-
reversibly shaped developments from the mid-20th century on. The pres-
ence of historians in our midst, in tune with our own outlook, ensured
that participants took a long-term perspective.
Perhaps with more self-assurance than warranted, we viewed the situ-
ation we had been asked to survey and comprehend as a kind of trans-
formative turning point. To use a metaphor that gained sociological
prominence, we saw ourselves as standing on the shoulders of giants.4 But
we were also convinced that we were part of a continuing, dynamic proc-
ess that some time in the future would produce Tomorrows Giants.5 In
the meantime, we affirmed a role for the open community of scientists
2 Michael Gibbons, Bjrn Wittrock, eds. (1985) Science as a Commodity. Threats to the
Open Community of Scholars. Harlow: Longman Group Limited.
3 Bjrn Wittrock (1985) Postscript, in: M. Gibbons and B. Wittrock, fn.1, p. 156.
4 Robert K. Merton (1965/1985/1993) On the Shoulders of Giants. A Shandean Post-
script. NY: The Free Press.
5 Royal Society and Nature (2010) www.nature.com/natureconferences/tomorrowsgi-
ants.
the compression of research time 389
and scholars, but also for what we described, but left largely unanalyzed,
as a role for science policy. In Michael Gibbons words, the contemporary
scientific ideal as currently articulated leaves science with no other value
than its function with respect to social process. Because of this, the only
role for the academic research system lies in creating the knowledge and
supplying the manpower necessary to keep society functioning smoothly
and efficiently which today means via the continuous process of techno-
logical innovation.6
A transformative turning point it was indeed. In the 1980s, the rela-
tionship between the state and universities started to change dramatically,
first in Great Britain. Thatchers government did not hesitate to extend
deregulation in the economic and financial sphere to universities. Tenure
was abolished, students became consumers, and the idea of an academic
market was warmly embraced. Universities on the European continent
were buffered by their different national trajectories before eventually
catching up. In Germany, it took the unique political event of German
unification to ensure that the existing research and university system in
the West would have to undergo processes of evaluation similar to those
applied in the former East Germany.7
Developments that have occurred since, and their transformative con-
sequences, continue to be analyzed and are only too well known. The au-
dit society took full possession of academia and ensured that all scientific
and scholarly activities were to be rendered in a form that made them au-
ditable. According to Michael Power, constant self-observation and self-
monitoring of ones performance became the norm under the relentless
pressure of competition. Individual researchers and scholars were held ac-
countable to a system that, in the name of its own efficiency, insisted on
quantifiable performance indicators.8
In the UK under its REA and its designated successor, the Research
Excellence Framework or REF, it became obligatory to demonstrate im-
pact, however crudely conceived as a concept and whatever the content,
scope, and methodology of the scientific and scholarly activities to be as-
sessed. The description of who is doing what shifted from the outside to
6 Michael Gibbons (1985) The Changing Role of the Academic Research Systems, in:
M. Gibbons and B. Wittrock, fn. 1, p. 17.
7 Wilhelm Krull (2009) Wissenschaft und Wiedervereinigung, Impulsreferat in der
Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, November 25, 2009.
8 Michael Power (1997) The Audit Society. Rituals of Verification. Oxford University
Press.
390 helga nowotny
9 Keith Thomas (2010) What are universities for?, Times Literary Supplement, May 7,
p. 13-15.
10
http://erc.europa.eu/.
the compression of research time 391
sion of higher education and the research system, the rapid production
and circulation of ideas and data has been greatly enhanced by the ubiqui-
tous use of computers, simulation models, and electronic means of com-
munication. Add to this the mobility expected especially from younger
researchers. They are the carriers of the latest knowledge, techniques, and
skills and are part of expanding networks. In the life sciences a kind of
superorganism is emerging. Its organizational structure mirrors and seeks
to match the scientific advances and the voluminous generation of data by
resorting to modeling, standardization, and engineering techniques.11
Acceleration is closely linked to density. It takes a critical mass and
appropriate infrastructures to be able to speed up the rate at which new
knowledge is produced. The second related development therefore comes
from the expansion of research activities. By now, all academics have be-
come multi-taskers. Organizational routines and efficient adaptations
may ease the burden, but it still takes time to integrate and repackage ever
new demands added to science as an already overloaded activity. Time
pressure in preparing the next grant while having an increasing part of
ones time committed to reviewing the grants of colleagues has become
the norm. And while public engagement with society becomes a matter
of professional and partly enthusiastic scientific commitment more firmly
than in the past, the already over-stretched job description of most work-
ing scientists puts them into a quandary, since it is also seen to be poten-
tially detrimental to their scientific career.12
In a more subtle and more consequential way, the emergent triad of
practices around accountability (audit), ethics, and policy, i.e., the in-
ception of plans and aims, lead to the intrinsic entanglement of research
practices mirroring the changing features of social life. Each of these three
components has implications for the other two, thus constituting mutual
reference points. Hence perhaps the sense that protocols to do with ethics,
audit and policy have displaced other objects (autonomous institutions,
responsible citizens, the rule of law, professional duty the list is endless)
which pointed to themselves as endorsing a relationship with society.13
Helga Nowotny and Giuseppe Testa (2011) Naked Genes. Reinventing the Human
11
in the Molecular Age. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press; German (2009) Die glsernen
Gene. Die Erfindung des Individuums im molekularen Zeitalter. Frankfurt am Main: Edition
Unseld, Suhrkamp.
Kevin Burchell, Sarah Franklin, and Kerry Holden (2009) SCOPE, Public Culture
12
as Professional Science. London: BIOS, London School of Economics and Political Science.
Marilyn Strathern, ed. (2000) Audit Cultures. Anthropological Studies in Account-
13
ability, Ethics and the Academy. London and New York: Routledge, p. 282.
392 helga nowotny
Ulrike Felt, ed. (2009) Knowing and Living in Academic Research. Convergence and
14
Heterogeneity in Research Cultures in the European Context. Prague: Institute of Sociology
of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.
the compression of research time 393
mark of economic growth and knowledge rivalry. If the aim is the selec-
tion of the very best, the precondition for any competition is abundance
with sufficient variety. Time compression and deprivation are therefore
thrust upon the individual and not attributed to the system. The individ-
ual, hard pressed for time, is pushed to use more time-efficient measures
and to improve his or her time-management skills. Insidiously, the com-
petitive game offers time-saving incentives. The winner in a merit-based
competition can buy time and be released from teaching duties in order to
devote more time to research. Success favors those who have already suc-
cessfully mastered the rules.
Managing time as a scarce resource also on the system level thus be-
comes a formidable challenge. Science is committed to follow its own,
powerful dynamics. It consists in the accelerated generation of new
knowledge, new discoveries and breakthroughs, and the spawning of new
technologies that will give rise to further innovation. The enormous po-
tential generated by the production of new knowledge waits to be trans-
lated into economic prosperity and societal well-being. The coping mech-
anism devised at the system level therefore consists in the temporalization
of the future. This is why the public discourse on the promises that re-
search holds for tomorrow has taken on such paramount importance. It is
accompanied by the pronounced shift from value creation in the present
to value creation in the future. It plays on and with the collective imagina-
tion; it lures citizens into the belief that they too can shape their future.
It transforms researchers into epistemic entrepreneurs, whose high per-
formance will result in higher profits for science, for their own careers,
and for the future benefit of society. While trust in science has its ups and
downs depending on the issues of concern for citizens, the credit drawn
from the belief that science and technology will provide future solutions
to our problems is still huge.
The temporalization of the future permeates the science system as a
whole. It trickles down and receives input from the bottom up. Implicitly
or explicitly it asks for an ex ante assessment of the impact of a given re-
search activity or project. It insists on a well-structured planning horizon,
with the setting of temporal milestones and deliverables. Early in the ca-
reer of young researchers it instills awareness of what matters in the build-
ing of a successful career with the right kind of curriculum at its core.
The aims are the highest possible performance indicators, from publica-
tions in high-ranking journals to the choice of the next career position of
post-docs. The institution or research group is assessed as to whether it
provides the right institutional productivity context for ones career. The
394 helga nowotny
15
Ulrike Felt, Maximilian Fochler (2010) Riskante Verwicklungen des Epistemi-
schen, Strukturellen und Biographischen. Governance-Strukturen und deren mikropoliti-
sche Implikationen fr das akademische Leben, in: Peter Biegelbauer (ed.) Steuerung von
Wissenschaft? Die Governance des sterreichischen Innovationssystems. Innsbruck: Studien
Verlag, p. 297-328.
Marc Torka (2009) Die Projektfrmigkeit der Forschung. Bielefeld: Nomos.
16
Pierre-Michel Menger (2003) Portrait de lartiste en travailleur. Paris: Le Seuil.
17
Franoise Waquet (2003) Parler comme un livre. Loralit et le savoir (XVIeXXe
18
sicle). Paris: Editions Albin Michel.
the compression of research time 395
Anthony Grafton (2009) Codex in Crisis. The Book Dematerializes, in: Worlds
19
Made by Words. Scholarship and Community in the Modern West. Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard University Press, p. 310.
Coda
BETTER TO BE THAN NOT TO BE?
I. Introduction
Can it be better or worse for a person to be than not to be, that is, can it
be better or worse to exist than not to exist at all? This old and challeng-
ing philosophical question, which we can call the existential question, has
been raised anew in contemporary moral philosophy. There are roughly
two reasons for this renewed interest. Firstly, traditional so-called imper-
sonal ethical theories, such as utilitarianism, have paradoxical and very
counterintuitive implications in regard to questions concerning procrea-
tion and our moral duties to future, not yet existing people. Secondly, it
has seemed evident to many that an outcome can only be better than an-
other if it is better for someone, and that only moral theories that are in
this sense person affecting can be correct. The implications of this so-
called Person Affecting Restriction will differ radically, however, depending
on which answer one gives to the existential question.
Hence, many of the problems regarding our moral duties to future gen-
erations turn around the issue of whether existence can be better or worse
for a person than non-existence. Some think so, others adamantly deny
it. Sigmund Freud, for instance, described the Jewish saying above as a
2 Freud (1960), p. 57 (quoted after Benatar 2006, p. 3). Freud tried to account for the
nonsensicality of the joke by this observation: who is not born is not a mortal man at all,
and there is no good and no best for him. (ibid.) His suggestion thus seems to be that the
existential question requires a negative answer. However, the joke would still of course be
nonsensical (and for that reason funny) even if the existential question were answerable in
the affirmative.
3 See Temkin (1993ab). The term Person Affecting Restriction was introduced by
Glover (1977), p. 66, but see also Narveson (1967).
4 See Parfit (1984), p. 388. For an overview of these counterintuitive implications, see
Arrhenius et al. (2006) and Arrhenius (2000, 2010). The Repugnant Conclusion is the claim
that for any world inhabited by people with very high welfare, there is a possible world
in which everyone has a life that is barely worth living which is better, other things being
better to be than not to be? 401
This is the principle that we shall henceforth refer to as the Person Affect-
ing Restriction (or the restriction for short). In cases involving only the
same people in the compared outcomes, this view is quite straightforward
and, we surmise, widely accepted.7
equal. Imposing the Person Affecting Restriction can block the derivation of the Repugnant
Conclusion only if it is conjoined with a negative answer to the existential question. Then
it is arguable that a world in which everyone has a life barely worth living cannot be bet-
ter than a world consisting of individuals with very high quality of life, since the former
is not better for anyone, not even for the people who exist in the former but not in the lat-
ter world. Since we are going to argue that the existential question should be answered in
the affirmative, however, we are sceptical about this manoeuvre. Making population ethics
more person affecting, so to speak, does not suffice to save it from counterintuitive impli-
cations (see Arrhenius 2009a, 2010).
5 See Arrhenius (2003, 2009, 2010).
6 An interesting question is whether the restriction should be supplemented with a
person affecting necessary condition for outcomes being equally good. We would sug-
gest the following condition: If outcome A is equally as good as B, then either A and B are
equally as good for at least one individual, or A is better (worse) for at least one individual
and B is better (worse) for at least one individual. What if both A and B are empty worlds?
We think that it is in the spirit of the person affecting idea that such worlds are not ranked
as equally good but rather that they completely lack value from a person affecting perspec-
tive.
7 The term Person Affecting Restriction might be misleading, since many theorists
would, sensibly we think, weaken the restriction to also include other sentient beings. Cf.
Holtug (1996). Notice that since the Person Affecting Restriction is formulated without any
ceteris paribus clause, value pluralists are not likely to accept it since it leaves little room
for other values apart from welfarist ones. For instance, one might believe in some non-
welfarist values such as virtue, reward in accordance to desert (cf., for example, Feldman
1995a, b, 1997), beauty (cf. Moore 1903, section 50), variety of natural species, or what have
you (for a general discussion of value pluralism, see Rabinowicz & Rnnow-Rasmussen
402 gustaf arrhenius & wlodek rabinowicz
(2004); for a discussion of this issue in connection with the Person Affecting Restriction,
see Arrhenius (2003, 2009a, 2010). Moreover, certain welfarist theories might also be ruled
out by the restriction, such as some versions of welfarist egalitarianism (Arrhenius 2003,
2009, 2010). However, we shall only discuss implications of the restriction in cases where
one can assume that other values are not at stake. Hence, the arguments below also apply to
a ceteris paribus version of the restriction.
8 Heyd (1988), p. 161. See also Heyd (1992), pp. 124-5. Heyd states that his view is
grounded in an anthropocentric conception of value according to which value is neces-
sarily related to human interests, welfare, expectations, desires and wishes that is to say to
human volitions (1988, p. 164).
better to be than not to be? 403
Diagram 1
outcome B). Assume further that these two possible futures consist of dif-
ferent but the same number of people and that these two outcomes are
equally good for us, the present x-people.
Most people, we presume, would consider outcome A clearly superior
to outcome B and agree that we ought to realize A rather than B. However,
since the y- and z-people are uniquely realizable (i.e. exist in just one of
the two outcomes), the negative answer to the existential question implies
that outcome A is neither better nor worse for the y- and z-people as com-
pared to B. Moreover, the two outcomes are equally good for the x-people.
Hence, according to the Person Affecting Restriction, A cannot be better
than B since it is not better for any individual. Nor is of course B better
than A. Consequently, if combined with the negative answer to the exis-
tential question, the Person Affecting Restriction ranks these outcomes as
either equally good or as incomparable in value.12 But that is clearly the
wrong diagnosis of the Future Bliss or Hell Case.
This and other counterintuitive implications of the Person Affecting
Restriction in combination with the negative answer to the existential
question have led philosophers to abandon the restriction (the majority)
or to accept not only that existence can be better or worse for a person
than non-existence but also that a non-existent person has a certain wel-
fare level (namely, zero welfare) and that, consequently, non-existence can
be better or worse for that non-existent person than a life at some speci-
fied level of welfare. As we shall show, both of these moves are uncalled for.
What is the reason behind the negative answer to the existential question?
Well, one worry seems to be that if we give an affirmative answer to the
12 The Person Affecting Restriction coupled with a negative answer to the existential
question yields a position close to what we call Strict Comparativism: When comparing out-
comes, one should only count the welfare of people who exist in both of the outcomes that
are being compared and completely disregard the welfare of people who only exist in one of
them. This seems to be, for example, Broomes take on the restriction: Suppose [an alterna-
tive X] contains a certain number of people, and [an alternative Y] contains all the same
people, and some more as well Then [the person-affecting view] is that [X] is at least as
good as [Y] if and only if it is at least as good for the people who exist in both (Broome
(1992), p. 124). Broome rejects the restriction understood in this way but Heyd seems to
accept it since he argues that [e]xcluding the welfare and interest of future merely pos-
sible person is a necessary consequence of a coherent person-regarding theory of value
(Heyd 1988, p. 161; see also Heyd 1992, pp. 124-5). See Arrhenius (2003, 2009a, 2010) for a
discussion of different versions of Comparativism.
better to be than not to be? 405
However, this Absurd Conclusion (italicized above) does not follow. A tri-
adic relation consisting in one state (having a certain life) being better for
a person p than another state (non-existence) cannot hold unless all its
three relata exist. Now, the states in question are abstract objects and thus
can be assumed to exist even if they do not actually obtain. Consequently,
the triadic relation in question can indeed hold as long as p exists. Howev-
er, if a person is a concrete object, which is the received view (and, we sur-
mise, the correct one), then this relation could not hold if p werent alive,
since the third relatum, p, would then be missing.15 Consequently, even
if it is better for p to exist than not to exist, assuming she has a life worth
13 Rabinowicz (2009), fn. 2, ascribes this worry to Derek Parfit (1984), who writes:
Causing someone to exist is a special case [of benefiting someone] because the alternative
would not have been worse for this person. We may admit that, for this reason, causing
someone to exist cannot be better for this person (p. 489; cf. also p. 395). Parfit continues,
however, with an argument that causing someone to exist still may be good for the person
in question. Good, but not better. It seems to us, however, that Parfit neednt have been so
cautious. His discussion of the matter contains all that is needed for the bolder betterness
claim (see below).
14 Broome (1999), ch. 10, p. 168 (emphasis in original). Notice that this argument,
if correct, would also work equally well against the idea that existence could be worse for
someone than non-existence: If it were worse for a person that she exists than that she
should never have existed, then it would have been better for her if she had never existed. If
she had never existed, then there would have been no her for it to be better for, so it could
not have been better for her. Thus, it cannot be true that it could be worse for a person to
exist than not to exist.
15 On the other hand, if, contrary to the received view, a person were itself construct-
ed as a collection of (abstract) states of affairs, then it would be correct to say that she would
exist, as an abstract object, even if she didnt obtain, so to speak. Hence, one might then
say that there is nothing absurd in claiming that, if she didnt obtain, this state could have
been worse for her than her actual state, since all three relata would then exist as abstract
objects. However, this interpretation of persons as abstract objects is a view that few phi-
losophers would be prepared to accept.
406 gustaf arrhenius & wlodek rabinowicz
living, it doesnt follow that it would have been worse for p if she did not
exist, since one of the relata, p, would then be absent. What does follow is
only that non-existence is worse for her than existence (since worse is
just the converse of better), but not that it would have been worse if she
didnt exist. Hence, Broomes argument is a non-sequitur and the Absurd
Conclusion doesnt follow from the idea that existence can be better or
worse for a person than non-existence.16
It might be that Broome assumes that the following general principle is
true:
Subjunctive Connection 1 (SC1): An outcome A is better (worse, equally as
good) for p than (as) another outcome B if and only if outcome B would be
worse (better, equally as good) for p than (as) A if B came about.17
Of course, one might find SC1 more attractive than SC2, perhaps because
one finds it more in line with common language use: If we consider one
outcome as being better for someone than another outcome, then we are
normally prepared to conclude that the other outcome would be worse
for that person (and not just that it is worse). If SC1 is accepted, then one
would have to give up the idea that existence can be better or worse than
non-existence for a person, since with SC1 as an extra premise, Broomes
argument would be valid and the Absurd Conclusion would follow from
an affirmative answer to the existential question. So we acknowledge that
there might be a price to pay here, in terms of departure from common
usage, for our preferred answer to the existential question. However, as
long as no other reason for SC1 has been brought forward, we find the
price worth paying.
Notice that our argument is not based on any revision of the logic of
better for and worse for. In one of his earlier contributions to this topic,
Nils Holtug seems to suggest such a revision to avoid the Absurd Conclu-
sion:
There is a clear sense in which existence can be better for a person than non-
existence, even if nonexistence is not worse for her (a person can have no
properties in a possible world in which she does not exist).20
Holtug thus seems to suggest that one can avoid the Absurd Conclusion
by revising the logic of better for: One can hold that it can be better for
a person to exist than not to exist, but deny that the opposite is worse for
her. It is clear that a state X is better than a state Y if and only if state Y
is worse than state X (this seems to us to be a conceptual truth, if any).
Holtug seems to deny that this logic also holds for better for, that is, that
a state X is better for a person than another state Y if and only if state Y
is worse for the person than state X. His reason is that better for and
worse for are only applicable when a person to which the for refers to
exists.
See also his (1996), p. 77:
When saying that a person has been benefited by coming into existence, I
mean that this person is better off than if he had never existed. Of course,
normally, if a person is better (worse) off in a situation X than in a situation
Y, he is worse (better) off in situation Y. While this is normally true, it is
not true when Y involves his nonexistence. And there is a perfectly natural
explanation for that. The property of being worse off , like other properties,
does not apply to people in worlds in which they do not exist.21
In our view, there is no need for a revision of the logic of value compari-
sons. If A is better for p than B, then it trivially follows that B is worse for
p than A. What does not follow is that B would be worse for p if it ob-
tained, for p might then be missing. On this reading, then, Holtug seems
to conflate worse for with would be worse for. As we have pointed out
above, it doesnt follow from A is better for p than B that B would be
worse for p if B came about. Hence, there is no need for revising the logic
of better and worse to reach this result.22
To save the Person Affecting Restriction from cases like the Future Bliss or
Hell case, Melinda Roberts has suggested that we should accept not only
that existence can be better or worse for a person than non-existence, but
also the apparently absurd conclusion that non-existence can be better or
21 On another reading of this passage, which is closer to its actual wording, Holtug
here only denies that being better off in X than in Y entails being worse off in Y than in X.
However, even this suggestion seems to us unmotivated: It is strictly incorrect to say that a
person who in X has a life worth living is better off in that state than she is in the state Y in
which she does not exist (it is another matter that X is better for her than Y). Comparisons
of how well off a person is in two different states do seem to presuppose that she exists in
both states that are being compared. See next section for a further discussion of this point.
22 It should be mentioned that in his (2001), Holtug gives up on this his earlier pro-
posal and instead moves to a position similar to the one defended here, referring to per-
sonal communication with Rabinowicz.
better to be than not to be? 409
come in which she does not exist.26 The idea is that there is a necessary
connection between better for and has a higher welfare than:
Welfare Level Connection (WLC): An outcome A is better for a person p than
another outcome B if and only if p has higher welfare in A as compared to B.
But again, p would not have any welfare level at all in a state in which she
did not exist.27 However, it seems to us that better for comparisons can
be made without comparisons of welfare levels. Consequently, one should
reject the suggested tight connection between better for and compari-
sons of welfare levels as expressed by WLC.
For example, one might explicate better for in terms of what a benev-
olent impartial observer or a guardian angel would choose for a person
when he is only considering what is in the interests of the person under
consideration (as the guardian angel is supposed to do).28 According to
this view, an outcome A is better for a person than another outcome B if
and only if this is what her guardian angel would choose for her sake. If
a person exists in the two compared outcomes, then trivially the guard-
ian angel will choose the state in which her charge has the highest welfare
level. However, if the guardian angel has a choice between bringing her
charge into existence with negative welfare or not bringing her into exist-
ence at all, she would choose the latter. Moreover, if the guardian angel
had the choice between bringing her charge into existence with a positive
welfare or not bringing her into existence, she would choose the former.
Or so it may seem, at least.
We can think of this idea of a guardian angel as just a criterion for the
better for-relation. On this criterial interpretation, we can determine
what is better for a person by putting ourselves in her guardian angels
shoes and then trying to decide what our preferences would be in that
hypothetical position. On another interpretation, which is philosophically
26 See Bykvist (2007), p. 348. Adler (2009), p. 1503, considers a similar conceptual
connection between worse for and worse off than. However, unlike Bykvist, Adlers dis-
cussion leads him to reject, at least tentatively, such a conceptual connection.
27 This seems to hold even if we were to construct persons as abstract objects that can
obtain or not obtain. A specific welfare level is something an abstract person can possess
only in a world in which she obtains.
28 Rabinowicz suggested the guardian angel approach in 2000 (see fn. 16) and Arrhe-
nius (2003) proposes the benevolent impartial observer approach. See also Bykvist (2006).
Broome (2004), p. 63, credits Rabinowicz with a suggestion that is simpler but less plausi-
ble: a history (or a world) X is better for p than a history Y if and only if p prefers X to Y. As
Broome points out: A person may prefer one history to another even if she does not exist
in both of them (ibid.). Obviously, however, this simple proposal is not satisfactory as it
stands.
better to be than not to be? 411
more far-reaching and radical, the idea of a guardian angel should instead
be seen as a metaphor for a certain analytical proposal. More precisely, on
this reading, we should take it as an application to better for of the so-
called fitting-attitudes analysis of value. Along the lines of this format of
analysis, we could say that
A is better for p than B if and only if one ought to prefer A to B for ps sake.29
This analytic proposal could be made to work provided we can make some
sense of locutions such as preferring A to B for ps sake.30 Again, it seems
reasonable to say that in the choice between bringing p into existence with
negative welfare or not bringing her into existence at all, one ought to pre-
fer the latter for ps sake. Likewise, in the choice between bringing p into
existence with positive welfare or not bringing her into existence at all,
one ought to prefer the former for ps sake.
On both these interpretations, the criterial and the analytic one, if a
person p has higher welfare in an outcome A as compared to another out-
come B, then A is better for p than B, but the reverse doesnt always hold.
Hence, there is a connection between better for and has higher welfare
than but this connection isnt as tight as WLC would have it.
As for the connection between better and better for, the Person Af-
fecting Restriction remains an attractive option. It does seem plausible to
claim that, to the extent we focus on welfare, an outcome cannot be bet-
ter than another outcome without being better for someone. While this
restriction would lead to counterintuitive implications if combined with
the negative answer to the existential question (see the case of Future Bliss
29 Cf. Darwall (2002) for this proposal. As Darwall puts it: [W]hat it is for something
to be good for someone just is for it to be something one should desire for him for his sake,
that is, insofar as one cares for him (p. 8). See also Toni Rnnow-Rasmussen (2007), where
this fitting-attitudes account of value-for is elaborated and defended. That this account can
be used to clarify comparisons between existence and non-existence has been suggested in
Rabinowicz (2009), fn. 2.
30 The challenge here is whether the for ps sake-locution can be independently un-
derstood, without presupposing the notion of better for as already given. If preferring
something for ps sake just means preferring it insofar as one only cares for what is better
for p, then the analysis becomes circular. Still, even circular analyses can be instructive to
some extent: They can used to exhibit structural connections between concepts appearing
in the analysans and the analysandum. Thereby, they can provide relevant information to
those who already possess the concepts involved but are not clear about their mutual rela-
tionships. Thus, to take an example, David Wiggins adheres to the sentimentalist version
of the fitting-attitudes account even though he explicitly recognizes the charge of circular-
ity. Still, as he argues, the account is informative in its detour through sentiments. See
Wiggins (1987), p. 189. Cf. Rabinowicz & Rnnow-Rasmussen (2004, 2006). The circularity
412 gustaf arrhenius & wlodek rabinowicz
or Hell above), we have argued in this paper that the existential question
should be answered in the affirmative.31
VI. Summary
Wiggins has in mind is different from the one mentioned here, though. He thinks that it
might be essential to the fitting sentiments with regard to objects that these attitudes them-
selves already involve evaluations.
31 It should be noted, however, that even coupled with the affirmative answer to the
existential question, the Person Affecting Restriction, as we have stated it above, leads to
counterintuitive implications, unless it is somewhat weakened. Consider a version of the
Future Bliss or Hell Case above in which only the x-people exist in the actually obtaining
outcome A (thus, in this version, outcome A does not contain any future y-people). The
Person Affecting Restriction implies, counterintuitively, that A is not better than B, since
as things actually are there exists no one for whom A is better than B. Remember that
the added people in the hypothetical outcome B, for whom A would have been better, do
not actually exist. To solve problems like this, Holtug (2004) has argued that we should
replace the restriction with a weaker variant, which in our formulation runs as follows:
The Wide Person Affecting Restriction: If an outcome A is better than B, then A would be
better than B for at least one individual if either A or B would obtain.
In the example above, it is the second disjunct of this weaker restriction that is applicable.
32 We would like to thank Matthew Adler and Krister Bykvist for their helpful com-
ments. We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary
Foundation, Swedish Research Council, and Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study.
better to be than not to be? 413
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
ocratic theory, and the measurement and fair distribution of power. His
publications have appeared in such journals as Philosophical Studies and
Economics and Philosophy, and his book, Population Ethics, is forthcom-
ing with Oxford University Press.
Max M. Edling is a Research Fellow and Lecturer in history at Upp-
sala University. He has been a Fellow at SCAS and a Visiting Scholar at
Cornell University, the Rothemere American Institute in Oxford, the In-
ternational Center for Jefferson Studies in Charlottesville, and the Library
Company in Philadelphia. He will spend 201011 as Visiting Scholar at
the Stanford Humanities Center. An expert on the American founding
and on the United States government in the period of the early republic,
Edling is the author of A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of the
U.S. Constitution and the Making of the American State (Oxford University
Press, 2003).
Shmuel N. Eisenstadt was born in Warsaw in 1923 and received
his Ph.D. in Jerusalem in 1947. He is Professor Emeritus at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem and Senior Research Fellow at the Jerusalem Van
Leer Institute. He is a member of many academies and recipient of several
honorary doctoral degrees. His areas of interest are: comparative research
of modernities and civilizations; the historical experience of Japan from a
comparative perspective; patterns of civil society and democracy in differ-
ent societies and cultures; changing movements and heterodoxy in civi-
lizatory dynamics; sociological and macro-sociological theory. His main
publications include The Political Systems of Empires, 1993; Comparative
Civilizations and Multiple Modernities 2 volumes of collected essays,
2003; Explorations in Jewish Historical Experience: The Civilizational Di-
mension, 2004.
Peter Grdenfors is Professor of Cognitive Science at Lund Univer-
sity. His earlier research focussed on belief revision. Currently he mainly
works on models of concept formation, cognitive semantics, and the evo-
lution of thinking. His main publications are Knowledge in Flux: Model-
ing the Dynamics of Epistemic States (Bradford Books, MIT Press, 1988);
Conceptual Spaces: The Geometry of Thought (Bradford Books, MIT Press,
2000); How Homo Became Sapiens: On the Evolution of Thinking (Oxford
University Press, 2003); The Dynamics of Thought (Springer Verlag, 2005).
Ulf Hannerz is Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology at Stock-
holm University. He is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sci-
ences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and former Chair
of the European Association of Social Anthropologists. His main research
areas are in urban and transnational anthropology, media studies, and
notes on contributors 417
ern University and Its Discontents: The Fate of Newmans Legacies in Brit-
ain and America (1997); and Educations Abiding Moral Dilemma: Merit
and Worth in the Cross-Atlantic Democracies, 18002006 (2007). He was
recently honored by His Majesty Carl Gustaf XVI by appointment to the
rank of Commander of the Royal Order of the Polar Star.
Dietrich Rueschemeyer is Professor of Sociology and Charles C.
Tillinghast Professor Emeritus of International Studies at Brown University.
Among his publications are Power and the Division of Labour (1986), Cap-
italist Development and Democracy (with J.D. Stephens and E.H. Stephens,
1992), and Usable Theory: Analytic Tools for Social and Political Research
(2009).
Neil J. Smelser is University Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Univer-
sity of California, Berkeley, and Director Emeritus, Center for Advanced
Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. His main areas of research
are social theory, social movements, terrorism, social change, sociology of
education, and psychoanalysis. Among his publications are Theory of Col-
lective Behavior (1962), Social Paralysis and Social Change: British Working
Class Education in the Nineteenth Century (1991), and The Odyssey Experi-
ence: Physical, Social, Psychological, and Spiritual Journeys (2009). Smelser
is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philo-
sophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He
was elected President of the American Sociological Association in 1996.
Daniel Tarschys is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Stock-
holm University. He has been Secretary General of the Council of Europe,
Member of the Swedish Parliament, where he chaired the Standing Com-
mittees on Social Affairs and Foreign Affairs, Secretary of State, and Vice-
President of the International Political Science Association (IPSA). He
chairs the Board of Riksbankens Jubileumsfond and the Swedish Council
on Medical Ethics. His research deals with public policy and evolutionary
trends in government. Some recent publications are Reinventing Cohesion:
The Future of EU Structural Policy (2003), The Enigma of European Added
Value: Setting Priorities for the European Union (2005) and Autonomous
Universities (2008, in Swedish).
Rolf Torstendahl is Professor Emeritus of History at Uppsala Uni-
versity and a Founding Director of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced
Study, Uppsala. He has written extensively on the history and theory of
historiography. He has also developed two other main fields of research:
the relation between administration and politics in a historical perspec-
tive over the last 200 years, and professional groups and their cohesion.
His books include The Formation of Professions (London, 1989); Bureau-
notes on contributors 421
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 24, 97, Khomeini, Ruhollah Moosavi, 220, 247,
169, 194, 197, 199200, 221, 235 253
Heidegger, Martin, 94 King, Martin Luther, 245, 247, 253, 255
Heine, Heinrich, 295, 399400 Kingdon, John W., 45
Herder, Johann Gottfried, 261 Kinnock, Nigel, 37
Herlitz, Lars, 135 Klempt, Adalbert, 96
Herodotus, 194 Koselleck, Reinhart, 87, 89100,
Heyd, David, 402, 408 102103, 170, 228
Higuchi, Ichiy, 193 Khn, Johannes, 99
Hilton, Boyd, 128
Hobsbawm, Eric, 53 Lagerlf, Selma, 272
Hodgson, Marshall, 207208, 211215 Lamm, Carl Robert, 263
Hlscher, Lucian, 87 Laplace, Pierre-Simon, 44
Holtug, Nils, 407408, 412 Larsson, Carl, 266, 269, 272
Homans, Georg C., 77 Larsson, Karin, 272. See also Berg,
Homer, 193194, 199 Karin
Hood, Christopher, 36, 40 Le Bon, Gustave, 249250, 257
Horkheimer, Max, 101 Lefort, Claude, 6
Huber Stephens, Evelyne, 74 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 116
Hugo, Victor, 109 Leijonhufvud-Adlersparre, Sophie, 262,
Huiguan / Master Guan, 284285 269
Humboldt, Wilhelm von, xviii Leimar, Maria, 261
Hume, David, 134 Lepsius, M. Rainer, 57
Huntington, Samuel, 218, 223, 256 Leuchtenburg, William E., 15
Hutchins, Robert Maynard, 349, 367 Leuhusen, Carl, 133134
Levi, Giovanni, 62
Iggers, Georg G., 54 Lvi-Strauss, Claude, 169
Ingres, Jean Auguste Dominique, 119 Liberman, Nira, xivxvii
Ismil I, Shah of Iran, 216 Lieberman, Victor, 188
Light, Donald, 148
Jackson, Andrew, 29 List, Friedrich, 136, 141
James, Henry, 111, 124 Locke, John, 20, 99
Jaspers, Karl, 96, 191, 205 Lovejoy, Arthur, 125
Jefferson, Thomas, 17, 2122, 29, 339 Lwith, Karl, 92, 9495, 97, 102103
Jingmai, 283 Lbbe, Hermann, 89, 95
Joas, Hans, 57 Lundahl, Gunilla, 261
Jobs-Bjrklf, Kersti, 261 Lundell, Jacob, 141142
Joyce, James, 193194 Luther, Martin, 99
ISSN 1568-4474