The Benefit of Broad Horizons

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

Intellectual and Institutional Preconditions

for a Global Social Science

Festschrift for Bjrn Wittrock

on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday

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.

We gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Riksbankens

Jubileumsfond, Stockholm.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data

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

Copyright 2010 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints BRILL, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers,
Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, and VSP.

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Fees are subject to change.
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printed in the netherlands

 CONTENTS

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

Political Economy in Historical Context: The Case of

Malthus and Sweden ............................................................................... 125
Lars Magnusson
Professionalism as Ideology ........................................................................ 143
Rolf Torstendahl

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

Notes on Contributors ................................................................................. 415

Tabula Gratulatoria ...................................................................................... 423
Index .............................................................................................................. 429
 INTRODUCTION

Hans Joas and Barbro Klein

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.

This book contains contributions from twenty-six eminent scholars who

address or touch upon different aspects of Bjrn Wittrocks ambitious re-
search program as well as current trends in the social and human sciences.
The volume begins with an essay in which the cognitive scientist Peter
Grdenfors delineates the benefits of broad horizons. Such horizons, he
notes, are a key to a heightened ability to reflect upon ones own assump-
tions and to enter into critical thinking. They are a key to the capacity for
reflexivity. No metaphor, therefore, is more apt than broad horizons for
characterizing not only Bjrn Wittrocks numerous achievements, but also
his theoretical, reflexive, and critical powers.
Part One of this book is entitled The State and the Political and is
based on the premise that firm disciplinary roots are essential for the
opening up of broad horizons. At the beginning of his intellectual devel-
opment we find Bjrn Wittrock interested in fundamental questions of
political theory and their relevance for contemporary politics. This sec-
tion contains three contributions. One is by the leading historical sociolo-
gist, Shmuel Eisenstadt, with whom Bjrn Wittrock has collaborated on
numerous occasions. A second is by the young historian Max Edling, one
of Bjrn Wittrocks former doctoral students, and the third by the promi-
x hans joas & barbro klein

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

United States. Also included is a study by Peter Weingart, who examines

recent attempts to institutionalize performance measures in universities
and research institutions and highlights the detrimental consequences
that these attempts may have. Finally, in this section Helga Nowotny,
President of the European Research Council, addresses the compression
of research time in scholarship today and touches on the world-wide im-
portance of Institutes for Advanced Study. In a coda entitled Better to Be
Than Not to Be?, Gustaf Arrhenius and Wlodek Rabinowicz address an
old and challenging question which has been raised anew in contempo-
rary moral philosophy.

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

A few more of Bjrn Wittrocks numerous concerns and commitments

should be mentioned. These include deep interests in philosophy (early
in his career he taught the subject), psychology, mathematics, literature,
music, and the arts. He is a master at composing scholarly programs and
events in which he not only brings together scholars from different disci-
plines but also makes sure that they focus their conversation on essential
or foundational questions. His own comments and summaries are often
remarkably apposite and well formulated. These occasions tend to be of
particular benefit to the many young Swedish scholars Bjrn Wittrock has
brought into the world of Institutes for Advanced Study. One of his many
successful ideas is the Pro Futura Scientia Program designed for especially
promising young scholars, a program which, through the years, has been
generously funded by the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. As fellows at SCAS
these young scholars along with other fellows, colleagues, and friends
have the privilege to share with Bjrn Wittrock the joy of witty scholarly
conversation, many laughs, and excellent commensality.

At the same time as it pays homage to an inspiring scholar and intellec-

tual leader, this book constitutes a unique collection of contributions by
authors who have long played central roles in the development of the so-
cial and human sciences as well as by authors who are now emerging as
scholarly leaders. Readers will find that the contributions speak to one
another and that the papers are engaged in conversation on many impor-
tant issues. It is our hope that The Benefit of Broad Horizons will become
important reading for all who are concerned with the present challenges
and future potential in the shaping of a truly global social science. And we
do hope that this book will please our admired colleague and friend Bjrn
Wittrock himself.
 WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF BROAD HORIZONS?

Peter Grdenfors

Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?

Friedrich Nietzsche

1. Distances in real and mental spaces

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

More interestingly, spatial metaphors are also extremely common

when we describe emotional relations: My dog is closer to me than my
lover. We speak of close friends and close relations. Likewise there are
social distances: a sister is a closer relative than a second cousin. We are
closer than you, and they are further away. There are biological dis-
tances: a chimpanzee is closer to us than an elephant, while a tapeworm
is really distant. The degree of perceived emotional, social and biological
distances affects our morality: our behaviour is more considerate toward
those we perceive as close. The spatial metaphors of close and far come
so naturally that we do not perceive them as being about anything other
than real (physical) distances. It seems that we really consider these psy-
chological distances to be on a par with distance in physical space. As I
shall argue, this equivocation has far-reaching consequences for both our
rationality and our morality.
The ubiquity of psychological distances is tightly connected to how
we form categories. In my book Conceptual Spaces (Grdenfors 2000),
I use different kinds of dimensions (time, colour, size, kinship, etc.) as a
framework for modelling mental spaces. I argue that we form categories
by exploiting distances in such spaces. In particular, I propose that most
concepts (what I call the natural concepts) can be represented as convex
regions within conceptual spaces, whose distances along different dimen-
sions must often be compared. Such comparisons can be studied experi-
mentally.

2. Construal level theory

In their review article The psychology of transcending the here and

now, Nira Liberman and Yaacov Trope present what they call construal
level theory (Liberman and Trope 2008), according to which our cognitive
processes treat psychological distances temporal distances, social dis-
tances, etc. the same as they do physical distances. In other words, think-
ing about distances in the outer world functions the same way as thinking
about distances in the inner world.
A consequence of construal level theory is that these different kinds
of distances influence and are, to a high degree, interchangeable with one
another. So distance in time influences distance in space and vice versa. A
remarkable experiment illustrating this uses incomplete pictures such as
the two on the next page (Liberman and Trope 2008, p. 1203). The task for
the subjects in the experiment was to discover a Gestalt figure. An impor-
tant point about such pictures is that one perceives the Gestalt more easily
 what are the benefits of broad horizons? xv

if viewing them from a distance. In the left-hand picture is a rabbit (its

head facing left), and in the right-hand picture is a rider on a horse (also
facing left).

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

ined distances in the vertical dimension influencing the horizontal dis-

tances between the places represented on the map.

3. Morality from a perspective

Physical distance and the different psychological kinds of distance inter-

relate in many ways. So for example, certain emotions are downplayed
when a broader perspective is taken. Imagine that a close friend of yours
will move to a new flat three years from now. Will you help her move?
How do you feel about helping her? Next, change the scenario so that your
friend is moving next week. Will you help her move? Do you have the
same feelings toward this situation that is suddenly much closer in time?
Questions of this kind are raised by a series of experiments that Jens
Agerstrm has performed (Agerstrm 2008, Agerstrm and Bjrklund
2009). He argues that we behave more morally and less selfishly in de-
ciding about a distant future as opposed to a near future. We also have
stronger feelings of guilt when we imagine being selfish in a distant fu-
ture compared to acting selfishly e.g. next week. Likewise, the distance in
time is important when we judge the morality of acts by other people. For
example, one of Agerstrms experiments suggests that we judge abstain-
ing from blood donations thirty years from now to be more immoral than
abstaining today.
Agerstrms experiments are directly based on Liberman and Tropes
construal level theory, above all on the thesis that we use a more abstract
level of representation when judging future events. Most people consider
moral judgments to be of a fairly abstract nature. When we judge events
that are close in time, such details as our immediate motivations become
more important; our thinking is more concrete.
That our attitude to events in the distant future is less selfish can be
used in many practical ways. For relief organizations dependent on vol-
untary gifts, a good strategy is to exploit distance in time. Agerstrm pro-
poses that such organizations ask potential contributors not for an imme-
diate contribution but for one that will automatically be drawn from their
account in six months time.
Homo sapiens is the one species with the most developed ability to
envision the future. The downside is that humans become more ready
victims of the conflict between making a smaller short-term gain and
receiving a larger future reward. In a couple of experiments reported by
Liberman and Trope (2008), children who can be made to think more ab-
stractly exhibit greater self-control and can therefore delay gratification.
 what are the benefits of broad horizons? xvii

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 same line of argument can be extended beyond sociobiology. If

you can broaden your psychological horizons to take into account e.g.
that others in a group have essentially the same needs and motivations as
you but may hold superficially different values, you will find it easier to
cooperate with that group. The more you can imagine the thoughts and
feelings of another and relate them to your own, the more you will experi-
ence that person as being closer to you. You will act less egocentrically,
more altruistically; less with (only) your own needs in mind, more with
the others needs in mind. There is strong evidence that the capacity for
such mind reading has increased during human evolution. For example,
in all human cultures, food is shared with individuals that are not close
relatives. This does not occur among the apes, for all their intelligence
otherwise.

4. Educating broad horizons

If broader horizons make humans more rational and more moral, an

important question becomes how education can be arranged to achieve
them. The idea of educating toward broader horizons is close to the clas-
sical ideal of Bildung (educational formation) put forward by Humboldt
and Nietzsche, among others. Such an ideal requires an unfettered curios-
ity and a freedom for individuals to choose their own roads to knowledge.
An important aspect of broadening your horizons is becoming aware of
the limitations of your own thinking, of your own perspective: the fish
does not realize that it swims in water. Similarly, you can only understand
your limitations to the extent that you can see alternatives. This fits well
with the Socratic position that the only real wisdom is knowing that you
know nothing.
Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that even if all individuals must be educated
to be able to support themselves, the educational system is founded on
narrow interests of power and materialism rather than on a broader ap-
preciation of culture. He called for a new type of educational institution
that focuses on Bildung. As individuals we need knowledge in the first
instance for our own personal development, while the servants of power
make us focus on what is deemed useful for the nation, for the church,
for the economy or for society. For Nietzsche, the individuals who have
the broadest horizons are the philosophers, the artists and the saints. They
are the ones who show us our limitations, who create the new metaphors,
and who push the culture forward. Culture is not the icing of societys
cake, it is the baking powder.
 what are the benefits of broad horizons? xix

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

Agerstrm, J. (2008). Temporal Distance and Morality, Department of Psychology,

Lund University, Lund.
Agerstrm, J. and Bjrklund, F. (2009). Temporal distance and moral concerns: Fu-
ture morally questionable behavior is perceived as more wrong and evokes stronger
prosocial intentions, Basic and Applied Social Psychology 31:1, 49-59.
Bruny, T., Mahoney, C.R., Gardony, A.L. and Taylor, H.A. (2010). North is up(hill):
Route planning heuristics in real-world environments, Memory and Cognition (in
press).
Dawkins, R. (1976). The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Grdenfors, P. (2000). Conceptual Spaces, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By, University of Chicago Press,
Chicago, IL.
Liberman, N. and Trope, Y. (2008). The psychology of transcending the here and
now, Science 322, 1201-1205.
Nietzsche, F. (2001). The Gay Science, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
 PART ONE

The State and the Political

 THE RECONSTITUTION OF THE REALM OF THE POLITICAL
AND THE PROBLEMATIQUE OF MODERN REGIMES

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

which should be regulated by political activities and agencies: usually (but

not only) by the state against the scope of the private (as was the case dur-
ing the initial age of modernity, in bourgeois societies), of family and
gender relations, or of economic ones.
The most important characteristic of this type of political struggle is
the combination of various concrete demands with the promulgation of a
distinctive social imaginaire, i.e. of a conception of the common good,
of a good society, together with the upholding of some distinct ways of
life along with the designation of such demands as objects and compo-
nents of open political action and contestation. It is indeed the designa-
tion of such concrete demands as being distinctly political, as being com-
ponents of broader political agendas and foci of open political struggle
and contestation, that has been the case with, for instance, most of the
contestations concerning the welfare state and its institutionalization and
limitations, or with many feminist movements. Such contestations consti-
tute a distinct characteristic of the modern political scene.
The institutional foci of such demands are the combination of, first,
specification of membership in collectivities or in distinctive social cat-
egories, and of their boundaries with, second, the regulation of major in-
stitutional arenas including major markets for different resources, and,
third, with the concomitant constitution of entitlements, which entails the
redefinition of range and contents of public goods, such as health services
or education, or of public distribution of private goods, for instance hous-
ing and its subsidization by the major political agencies usually by the
state and the specification of those entitled to them.
The promulgation and institutionalization of such demands entail also,
as Nancy Fraser1 and others, including Jrgen Habermas2, have shown,
the redefinition of what has hitherto been assumed to constitute the natu-
ral interests of different especially of weaker groups (such as work-
ers, minorities, and women), who were demanding inclusion in the po-
litical process and access to the centers of their respective societies. These
groups or sectors also claim the right to redefine their own interests be-
yond the ways in which they have been defined in the hitherto hegemonic
discourses of their respective societies. Hence they also claim the right to
redefine the various conceptions of rights or of interpretations of them.

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

The core of such a reconstitution of the realm of the political entails,

first, the reconstitution of boundaries between the realm of the social and
that of the political, between society and state. Second, it entails chang-
es in the distribution of power, in the relations between different centers
of power within society; third, it entails the constitution of boundaries of
inclusion of some social sectors in the major institutional frameworks and
exclusion of others; fourth, it entails the closely related definition of the
scope or autonomy of different sectors of society and of their access to the
centers thereof.

II

This type of political struggle focused on the reconstitution of the realm of

the political cannot be explained by traditional behaviorist, individualistic,
or rational choice approaches, which have been so closely interwoven
with many assumptions of liberal political theories. Indeed, this kind of
struggle has been neglected by liberal theories and their critics, includ-
ing communitarian approaches, and by large parts of the social science
literature devoted to the analysis of social movements. These approaches
cannot, as Alessandro Pizzorno showed long ago,3 even explain elec-
toral behavior a favorite topic among behavioral and rational choice
researchers rooted in individualistic conceptions. It is only explanations
that combine such demands with conceptions of identity of social imagi-
naires that can do justice to them. This is especially true as Martin Fuchs
has forcefully emphasized4 when it comes to particular components
of such demands, such as the promulgation of different conceptions of

3 Alessandro Pizzorno, Comunite e razionalicazione (Torino: Ginaudi, 1960); idem, Il

suggesti del plurallacie: classi pertiti vindacati (Torino: Ginaudi, 1960).
4 Martin Fuchs, Articulating the World: Social Movements, the Self-Transcendence of
Society and the Question of Culture, Thesis Eleven 61 (2000): 65-85; idem, Kampf um Dif-
ferenz: Reprsentation, Subjektivitt und soziale Bewegungen Das Beispiel Indien (Frank-
furt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999). It is interesting to note that in the vast literature on social
movements which burgeoned from the 1970s and 1980s, they were indeed seen as being
outside the usual, normal political framework that of parties, lobbies, and collective
leftists. It has been only lately that the continual close interweaving between such move-
ments and the normal frameworks of polities has been more and more recognized and
analyzed. See for instance: J.A. Goldstone, Ideology, Cultural Frameworks, and the Process
of Revolution, Theory and Society 20 (1991): 405-453; J.A. Goldstone, Is Revolution Indi-
vidually Rational? Groups and Individuals in Revolutionary Collective Action, Rationality
and Society 6 (1994): 139-166.
6 s.n. eisenstadt

the common good or of choices between different values, between dif-

ferent social imaginaires, which have barely been taken into account or
addressed in contemporary political theories. All such demands entailed
specific visions of the collectivity, specific conceptions of the common
good, of the good society, of inclusion in it and exclusion from it, and of
the nature of the others, all of which, of course, varied between different
modern societies.
Such demands for the reconstitution of the realm of the political entail
a continual combination of volont gnrale and volont de tous of the
general will and the will of all. It is indeed one of the most crucial character-
istics of modern political regimes not fully recognized even by Rousseau,
and even less so by later modern political theory that the constitution of
volont gnrale within them is not a static given, but constitutes a cease-
less component of political struggle, a struggle that is continually, even if
in different degrees in different situations, interwoven with different com-
binations of volonts de tous, of different concrete and discrete interests
of individuals and groups. Contrary to what is implied by the rational
choice, utilitarian approaches, volont gnrale is not just the sum total
of volonts de tous. At the same time and in contrast to many commu-
nitarian classes, it is not totally dissociated from them either. Rather, the
reconstitution of the realm of the political, especially but not only in so
far as it focuses on the macro-societal level, entails contestation around
different combinations of aspects of volont de tous, of the various discrete
interests of citizens with the redefinition of the components of volont
generale, of the conceptions of the common good, of the good society, of
the proper social order.

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-

5 C. Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988).

 reconstitution of the realm of the political 7

quent contestation concerning how such political order was to be consti-

tuted to no small extent by human actors. This search is closely connected
in modern societies with continual contestations regarding the basic con-
tours of institutional formations and of collectivities, which includes the
tendency of the centers to permeate the periphery, and of the periphery to
impinge on the center, thus blurring the distinctions between center and
periphery and strongly emphasizing the potentially active participation
by the periphery of society, by all its members (however defined), in the
political arena. Consequently, symbols of protest become central compo-
nents and symbols of their respective regimes.6
The legitimacy of such contestation is rooted in the fact that protest,
themes of protest (be it no taxation without representation, or the fa-
mous trilogy of the French Revolution, Libert, Egalit, Fraternit, and
other social themes such as equality and freedom, justice and autonomy,
solidarity and identity) have become legitimate components of the basic
premises of their respective regimes, moving, as it were, from the margins
into the very centers. Indeed, it is this transformation of themes of protest
that epitomizes the central problematique of the modern political order.7

IV

The concrete contents of these demands for the reconstitution of the

realm of the political as they crystallized in different modern societies and
in different periods of their histories, developed out of the confrontations
and contradictions between, on the one hand, the basic premises of the
cultural and political program of modernity and, on the other hand, the
vicissitudes of their implementation in the constitution of collective iden-
tities and of the major institutional arenas, including the economic and
political ones. The most important demands for the reconstitution of the
realm of the political that developed in the modern political order were
generated by the problems arising from the processes of formation of the
new modern collectivities, of the development of new economic forces, of
new types of capitalistic political economy and by the continual tenden-
cies to democratization.

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.

These movements, organizations, and parties with their concrete aims

and demands for reconstitution of the realm of the political developed
 reconstitution of the realm of the political 9

in different constellations in various societies, and their relative impor-

tance, timing, and combinations varied greatly in different modern so-
cieties and in different periods in their histories. But in all of them they
were set within the general framework of the constitution of the modern
political and social order. Most, possibly all of the actors promulgating
these different demands addressed themselves critically to different com-
ponents of the political and cultural program of modernity, to the basic
tensions and antinomies inherent in this program and its institutionaliza-
tion. In particular, they criticized the development, in different historical
settings and contexts, of the capitalist system and the attendant new class
relations and the institutionalization of the modern political program in
the framework of the territorially based nation states. It was the abolition
of some of these tensions and contradictions, or the overcoming of them,
that constituted important components in the ideologies and programs
of these activists, movements, and organizations and in their demands
for the reconstitution of the realm of the political. Thus, for instance,
the criticism of the existing order of modernity promulgated by socialist
movements were mostly couched in terms of the non-completion of this
program, and were oriented toward its fuller implementation. The various
national and nationalistic movements emphasized the right of self-deter-
mination of a collectivity. They aimed above all at the reconstitution of
the boundaries of newly crystallizing collectivities, usually promulgating
highly particularistic primordial terms. They entailed the confrontation
between the universalistic and the different particularistic or ascriptive
components of legitimation of modern regimes, and their criticism of the
existing order could develop in the direction of a more extreme negation
of the universalistic components of the cultural program of modernity.
The extreme nationalist movements denied the universal and universalis-
tic orientations of these regimes and espoused, in an extreme ideological
way, various primordial, often racial orientations. Unlike the conservative
movements which were predominant throughout most of the nineteenth
century on the right-wing of the political spectrum, these new ex-
treme nationalist, fascist movements evinced strong Jacobin, mobilizatory
tendencies. On the contemporary scene, the fundamentalist movements
promulgated extreme anti-Enlightenment ideologies together with very
strong Jacobin participatory and mobilizatory orientations.
The distinctiveness of the modern political order is manifest in the
fact that these problems constitute not only foci of concrete demands
and struggle between different sectors of society or between such sec-
10 s.n. eisenstadt

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

threat as the cases of Weimar Germany, pre-fascist Italy, or many Latin

American countries demonstrate. It is the systematic analysis of the con-
ditions which facilitate or minimize the chances of the development of
such combinations that should constitute a central focus of comparative
research.
The centrality of this challenge is manifest in the fact that many such
demands for the reconstitution of the realm of the political can be inter-
preted following Ira Katznelsons challenge to Isaiah Berlin with respect
to Berlins attitude to the New Deal8 as manifestations of the institution-
alization of some conceptions of positive liberty, that such conceptions
may indeed develop in totalitarian direction. But at the same time they
may also indicate the direction of attempts to extend the range of freedom
and thus fully epitomize the basic problematique of the modern order
the continual tension between inclusive and exclusive tendencies inherent
in it, between monolithic, potentially totalitarian and pluralistic directions.

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

patterns of legitimation of regimes; second, in the direction of the imple-

mentation of policies aiming at the redistribution of resources and at the
setting up of different public entitlements; and third, in the constitution
of different social spaces in which different groups could develop distinct
patterns of social, cultural, or economic activities, and promulgate their
distinct identities including the possibility of establishing distinct new
political collectivities.

VIII

It is the demands for the reconstitution of the realm of the political, of

the continually reconstructed volont gnrale with different patterns of
volont de tous, that are distinctive of modern regimes and that epitomize
the tendency of modern societies toward self-regulation and the problem-
atics thereof, and that also constitute the more important challenges to
these regimes. Indeed, the demands for the reconstitution of the realm of
the political create, on the one hand, the possibility of breakdown; but on
the other hand, they also entail the possibility of relatively but indeed
only relatively peaceful transformations in a pluralistic direction or in
a totalistic one.
The on-going demand for a reconstitution of the realm of the politi-
cal indicates that all modern regimes face the challenge of maintaining,
reproducing, and reconstituting some common frameworks in which
different, and often changing, views of the common good can compete
without undermining the very possibility of the working of the system.
The extent and ways to which such challenges are taken up is of crucial
importance for the fate of these regimes influencing to a large extent
whether these regimes and the bases of their legitimation may become
transformed and their continuity maintained without questioning their
basic institutional frameworks or whether they might break down.

IX

These problems are inherent in all modern regimes. In authoritarian and

totalitarian regimes they have been suppressed, but not obliterated, and
it is in the democratic constitutional regimes that they become more vis-
ible and most fully articulated. Such potentialities of transformability are
indeed much greater in constitutional democratic regimes than in totali-
tarian ones, although even the latter as for instance the demise of the
 reconstitution of the realm of the political 13

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

ties, giving rise to the possibility of growing contestation between them. It

is also in these arenas that the problematique of the reconstitution of the
realm of the political is being played out in new ways. In the contempo-
rary world the major challenge of modern regimes has been transposed,
as it were, to the international global scene, to new types of international
and intercivilizational arenas, and to a different redefinition of the consti-
tution of the realm of the political.
 THE STRANGE HYBRID OF THE EARLY AMERICAN STATE

Max M. Edling

In his 1986 presidential address to the Organization of American Histo-

rians, William E. Leuchtenburg called upon his fellow historians to take
up the history of the national government, a topic which despite its great
importance he believed had been virtually ignored in American history.
Among students of the early American republic, Leuchtenburgs call fell
on deaf ears, however. John Murrins contemporary dismissal of the early
federal government as a midget institution in a giant land captured the
general mood of historians working in the field. A central state appara-
tus hardly existed in America in the first half of the nineteenth century,
Murrin said, and to the extent that it did, it was of no relevance to the de-
velopment of American society. The national government had almost no
internal functions and [i]ts role scarcely went beyond the use of port
duties and the revenue from land sales to meet its own expenses. Political
scientists and historical sociologists meanwhile encouraged this view by
dating the origins of the American state to the Civil War or the post-war
period. In bold statements they declared that the antebellum national gov-
ernment was a state of courts and parties and that the modern states
inheritance from the antebellum period was nil.1

1 William E. Leuchtenburg, The Pertinence of Political History: Reflections on the

Significance of the State in America, Journal of American History, vol. 73, no. 3 (Dec., 1986),
585-600 (quotation at 589); John M. Murrin, The Great Inversion, or Court versus Coun-
try: A Comparison of the Revolutionary Settlements in England (16881721) and America
(17761816), in J.G.A. Pocock, ed., Three British Revolutions: 1640, 1688, 1776 (Princeton,
1980), 425; Richard Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of State Authority in America,
18591877 (Cambridge, 1990), ix; Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The
Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 18771920 (Cambridge, 1982), 19. For
some correctives see Brian Balogh, A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National
Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009);
Richard R. John, Governmental Institutions as Agents of Change: Rethinking American
Political Development in the Early Republic, 17871835, Studies in American Political De-
velopment, vol. 11, no. 2 (1997), 347-80; Ira Katznelson and Martin Schefter, eds., Shaped
by War and Trade: International Influences on American Political Development (Princeton:
16 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

3 John Brooke, Cultures of Nationalism, Movements of Reform, and the Composite-

Federal Polity: From Revolutionary Settlement to Antebellum Crisis, Journal of the Early
Republic, vol. XXIX, no. 1 (Spring, 2009), 7.
4 Brooke, Cultures of Nationalism, 6.
5 Katznelson and Shefter, eds., Shaped by War and Trade; J. P. Nettl, The State as a
Conceptual Variable, World Politics, vol. XX, no. 4 (July, 1968), 559-52.
18 max m. edling

Constitution is described as simply a treaty among sovereign states.6 The

critical word here is simply, which suggests that the Constitution created a
political organization that was less than a real state. There is no possibility
here that the creation of the federal union was in fact the desired outcome
of the Philadelphia Conventions endeavors at state building and therefore
not a failure. Nor is there any appreciation of the fact that the Conven-
tions creation was anything but simple, and that both conceptually and
practically the creation of the federal republic posed great challenges.
The second aspect worthy of notice is the tendency to belittle the ac-
tions of the national government. Although Brooke points to the use of
national power in the Barbary Wars, the Louisiana Purchase, and the War
of 1812, he hastens to stress that these fundamentally involved external,
international matters.7 The implicit assumption is that the exercise of
power to influence external, international matters is not the real stuff of
American history for the simple reason that such matters did not affect the
development of the United States to any significant degree. Brooke reveals
what the truly important government actions were in his discussion of the
state governments, which he believes were the significant locus of formal
authority and real power, vigorously exercised in the early republic. The
powers exercised by the states were the internal police powers, including
the power to incorporate transportation companies, banking houses, and
charitable associations, the power to regulate and control slave property,
and other forms of property, principally land.8 These were the powers that
could shape society. In other words, government mattered when it regu-
lated economic and social interaction between individuals and collectives
within the nations borders. But what the federal government did outside
the nations borders was of limited importance to its citizens.
As Brookes address makes evident, the slighting of the national gov-
ernment stems largely from the slighting of the international in main-
stream accounts of American history. Like most national histories, Amer-
ican history is structured by an over-arching grand narrative of political
and economic modernization. Discrete historical events acquire signifi-
cance to the extent that they further or prevent the transition to liberal
democracy and market economy. The primary concern of American his-
torians in recent decades has been to show how this transition process
was neither preordained nor universally beneficial, but full of conflict and

6 Brooke, Cultures of Nationalism, 5.

7 Brooke, Cultures of Nationalism, 7.
8 Brooke, Cultures of Nationalism, 8-9, quoting Harry N. Scheiber.
 the strange hybrid of the early american state 19

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.

As a consequence, the powers over foreign affairs and inter-state rela-

tionspowers that had previously belonged to the British imperial gov-
ernmentwere vested in a Congress of state delegations. But the states
did not give up their sovereignty and independence. The second article
stated that each state retained its sovereignty, freedom, and independ-
ence, and every Power, Jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this confed-
eration expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.
For this reason all powers over domestic affairs remained in the states.10
The division of government functions into domestic and foreign con-
cerns was a common one in the early modern period. John Locke distin-
guished between executive and federative power and Montesquieu be-
tween two forms of executive power, over the things depending on the
civil rights and over the things depending on the rights of nations. By
the latter form of executive power the magistrate makes peace or war,
sends or receives embassies, establishes security, and prevents invasions.
A homegrown American expression of this typology of state power can
be found in the so-called Essex Results, which reported the reactions of
the Essex town meeting to Massachusetts new Constitution of 1780. The
executive power is sometimes divided into the external executive, and in-
ternal executive, the Essex townspeople wrote.

9 Committee Report on Carrying the Confederation Into Effect and On Additional

Powers Needed by Congress, August 22, 1781, in Merrill Jensen, John P. Kaminski, and
Gaspare J. Saladino, eds., The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, 21
vols. to date (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1976) I, 145.
10 Act of Confederation of the United States of America, November 15, 1777, Doc.
Hist. I, 86.
 the strange hybrid of the early american state 21

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

In contrast to what many historians have claimed, the principal pro-

tagonists in the struggle between Federalists and Jeffersonian Republi-
cans both saw the national government as an institution designed to deal
with foreign and inter-union affairs. In The Federalist Hamilton defined
the principal purpose of the union to be [t]he common defence of the
membersthe preservation of the public peace as well against internal
convulsions as external attacksthe regulation of commerce with other
nations and between the Statesthe superintendence of our intercourse,
political and commercial, with foreign countries. In the election year of
1800, Jefferson defined [t]he true theory of our constitution to be that
the states are independant as to every thing within themselves, & united
as to every thing respecting foreign nations. In his first annual message to

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

Congress, he repeated this view, declaring that the national government

was charged with the external and mutual relations only of these States.
The state governments, in contrast, had principal care of our persons,
our property, and our reputation, constituting the great field of human
concerns.13
Jeffersons message drew an angry response from Hamilton. Not be-
cause he disagreed with Jeffersons definition of the national governments
brief, but because he did not share his nemesis dismissive attitude to its
tasks. Again Hamilton defined the duties of the national government to
be defense and foreign relations; the maintenance of peace between the
member states; the regulation of international and intra-union commerce;
and the guarantee of a republican form of government in the states. He
also added three concerns that had not been part of his declaration in The
Federalist: the establishment of a common currency; the safeguarding of
contract; and the prevention of state-issued paper money, all of which
are listed among the powers of the national government in the eighth
and ninth sections of the first article of the Constitution. He did not sug-
gest that the national government should exercise internal police powers
and he fully accepted that the state governments were extremely useful
in their proper spheres. What Hamilton could not accept was Jeffersons
suggestion that the concerns of the national government were of less im-
portance than those of the states. To Hamilton, the long-term fate of the
United States depended on the preservation of internal harmony within
the union and the successful interaction with the international system of
states in the spheres of commerce and power politics.14

III

Careful attention to the words of Hamilton and Jefferson casts doubt on

the assertions that the Federalists hoped to create a centralized unitary
state and that Jeffersons Revolution of 1800 was such a transformative
event in the history of American government. Hamilton was active in sev-

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

eral economic ventures that promised to modernize the American econ-

omy. Although they required the legal recognition of government to be-
gin operations, he did not turn to the national government to ensure this.
The Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures was incorporated by the
state of New Jersey. Similarly, the Bank of New York, of which Hamilton
was both a founder and director, received its charter from the state of New
York. The support of the state governments therefore appears to have been
quite sufficient to realize the Federalists program of economic moderni-
zation without assistance from the national government. The real impor-
tance of the latter was not to promote the economy, it lay elsewhere. On
the basis of this insight it is possible to take a new and unprejudiced look
at the kind of state that was created by the Philadelphia Convention in
1787 and to revisit the question of the Conventions long-term success or
failure.
A fundamental reason why it has proved difficult to come to terms
with the American state is that it was a dual organization. Independence
and union created both a union of semi-sovereign state-republics and a
sovereign nation in the international system of states. The national gov-
ernment was simultaneously a forum for the negotiation and settlement
of member-state interests and conflicts in Congress and a central govern-
ment equipped with executive departments and field agencies. With re-
gard to the administrative structure, the national government existed
independently from the member-states. Its legitimacy rested on popular
sovereignty, on the decision by the People of the United States to ordain
and establish the Constitution of 1787. The President and House of Rep-
resentatives were appointed through popular election and not by the state
governments. Congress legislated directly on the citizens and not on the
states, and the administrative agencies of the national government ensured
the implementation of federal legislation. This was what Madison had in
mind when he said that the fundamental difference between the Articles
of Confederation and the Constitution was that the latter provided for a
more effectual mode of administration. Although the Treasury Depart-
ment, the consular establishment, the army, and the Indian Department
differed in some respects from equivalent governmental institutions
found in contemporary European states, these differences were differenc-
es of degree rather than kind.
Union created a two-tiered structure of government that made both a
functional and a spatial distinction between the national government and
the state governments. As originally envisioned, it fell to the national gov-
ernment to look after foreign affairs and intra-union relations. Foreign
24 max m. edling

relations included activities such as defense and war-making, the acquisi-

tion of territory, international trade regulations, and commercial treaty-
making. The most important task in intra-union relations was the pres-
ervation of peace between the member-states through the settlement of
state conflicts, such as territorial disputes or disputes over slavery. It also
fell to the national government to create and maintain a common market
by means of a customs union, a common currency, and protection of con-
tracts in inter-state and international transactions. Internal affairs such
as the regulation of property rights, education and transportation, health
and welfare, and religion and public morality were left to the state govern-
ments.
The distinction between the national government and the states also
existed in space. With important legislation passed in the mid 1780s, the
national domain was divided into states and federal territories. The lat-
ter were administrated directly by the national government and the state-
republics had no jurisdiction there. Because of the stupendous territorial
growth of the United States in the nineteenth century, a significant part
of the nation was governed directly by Washington, D.C. In conceptual
terms there is no problem in comparing the administration of the territo-
ries to the administration of the extra-European colonies and settlements
of European empires in the nineteenth century. There were soldiers, law
enforcement officers, courts, land offices, and representative assemblies
subservient to Congress and the President.15 Rather, the challenge lies in
understanding that in contrast to European empires the American fed-
eral union had no core, heartland, or imperial center. The national gov-
ernment remained the instrument of the state-republics despite its ad-
ministrative independence from them, and the national government was
always secondary to the state governments as the object of the citizens
allegiance. For this reason it has sometimes been remarked that the state
was not an ideal reified in American culture, and this lack of a sense of
the national state as the embodiment of the nation led Hegel and other
European commentators to deny the existence of a state in nineteenth-
century America.16 Yet such an assertion rests on a failure to recognize the

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

fundamental aims of the federal union. The national government was an

institution designed to safeguard and promote the interests of the mem-
ber states, which in turn were institutions designed to realize the individ-
ual liberty of the citizens. To anyone willing to take an unprejudiced look
at the early United States it is readily apparent that there is an equivalent
to the nineteenth-century European celebration of Crown and state in the
American antebellum celebration of liberty and union.
Political scientists and sociologists have traditionally defined the state
as an institution that seeks to monopolize power within its territorial bor-
ders. The federal union was clearly a different kind of political organiza-
tion. One of the most important developments in the Philadelphia Con-
vention was the process whereby the nationalists who met at Philadelphia
became federalists as they sought to translate their vision of national
power and prosperity into a politically acceptable constitutional design.
The outcome was therefore not the destruction of the state governments,
which had been on some nationalists agenda before the convention, but a
reaffirmation of their centrality as the only institutions capable of guaran-
teeing liberty. For this reason we find that the finished Constitution guar-
anteed a republican form of government in the states.17
The founders were not adverse to the idea of extending republican rule
beyond the narrow geographic boundaries within which classical writers
and moderns such as Montesquieu had confined it. Rather, their affirma-
tion of the state governments rested on a realization that fundamental
social, economic, and cultural differences between the different localities
in the union required the preservation of state sovereignty to safeguard
citizen rights and privileges. Conceptually and institutionally, American
citizenship was therefore not national, but a status regulated by the state
governments.18 What prevented the disintegration of the United States
into thirteen republics was the conviction that union was a prerequisite
to the preservation of republican rule in the states. Disunion was certain
to lead to war between the American state-republics, and war was certain

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

to lead to the destruction of republican rule through the centralization

of power and the strengthening of the executive.19 The survival of repub-
lican rights and liberties therefore depended on the careful balancing of
the need for central government action, on the one hand, and recognition
of state interests, on the other hand. Too much centralization of power
would destroy republican rule in the states and thereby individual rights
and liberties. But if state interests were taken too far, such action might
lead to war and thereby to the centralization of power and the destruction
of individual rights and liberties. Hence, liberty depended on the preser-
vation of both the state-republics and the union.
The interdependence of liberty, state sovereignty, and union explains
a number of distinctive features of the early American political order.
Principles and institutions such as federalism, constitutionalism, the Bill
of Rights, state representation in the Senate, and the separation of power
were designed to prevent the national government and, in particular, the
President from monopolizing power. Contrary to what many historians
have argued, the national government was intended to be a complement
to the state governments, not their competitor. For this reason its legiti-
macy rested on its ability to act in accordance with the wishes of the citi-
zens and the governments of the member-states. Because its sovereignty
was interpreted by the central government as contingent on the consent
of individual states, the national government typically scores low on state
autonomy, a conventional measure of state strength among politologists.20
Unquestionably, in this regard the antebellum national government stands
guilty as charged. It formed part of a fundamentally liberal political order,
the basic principles of which were containment of government power and
popular accountability. But it would be a serious mistake to conclude that
the national governments lack of autonomy equaled a lack of state capacity.
Conceptually, the relationship between liberty and union is the hard-
est aspect of American governmental arrangements to recover in the
twenty-first century. At the time of the founding it was a common claim
that republics were inherently peaceful. American state builders denied
this, however. They believed that the actions of states were governed by
their interest and ambitions irrespective of their form of rule. They also
believed that the economic and social differences between the American
republics gave them different and potentially conflicting interests. For this

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

reason their natural relationship in a state of disunion would be competi-

tion and war.21
To classical republican thinkers, war and republican liberty was by no
means incompatible. This held true as late as the renaissance. Theorists
like Machiavelli believed that republican liberty thrived on war and would
wither and die as a consequence of peace. Military service was one of the
principal ways in which the republican citizen experienced liberty. By the
late eighteenth century, this positive link between war and liberty had
been severed, however, to be replaced by a much more negative view of
the impact of war on liberty. It was a change caused by the altered na-
ture of war-making. In the modern era, war was no longer carried out by
citizen-soldiers but by professional armies raised and maintained by pro-
fessional bureaucrats. Eighteenth-century political writers talked about
the war system, by which they meant the long and expensive wars that
had been the defining feature of international relations on the European
continent since the late fifteenth century. The war system had given rise
to growing armies and navies, swollen government administrations, enor-
mous debts, and oppressive taxation. Taxation was the key issue. Oppres-
sive taxes had deprived the European peoples of their property, the ma-
terial precondition for their liberty, and thereby reduced them from the
status of free citizens to that of powerless subjects.22 Today, of course, such
arguments make little sense. Much more than a threat to liberty, taxation
is regarded as the means to give real content to civic rights and entitle-
ments in areas such as education and health care.
American state builders feared that disunion between the states-repub-
lics would introduce the European war system on North American soil.
Disunion would mean constant competition and frequent war. Disunion
would mean the creation of armies and the forging of alliances between
American states and European great powers as the former jockeyed for
advantage and strove to protect themselves from the aggressions of their
neighbors. Disunion would also mean oppressive taxation and the loss of
liberty. Thus individual liberty depended on the union of the American

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

Although the nineteenth-century national government was small com-

pared to contemporary European great powers, and although the United
States was organized as a fundamentally liberal polity, the United States
was a political organization that habitually employed state-organized and
-directed violence of quite brutal dimensions against people outside the
nations pale. Such actions were not exceptional, occasional, or atypical,
but a primary activity of the national government. This explains the para-
dox that it was statesmen in the American anti-statist tradition who were
most eager to make use of the national government in the antebellum
period. It was Thomas Jefferson who purchased Louisiana, James Madi-
son who led the country to war with Britain, Andrew Jackson who ex-
panded the navy, opened foreign markets, and cleansed the land of Native
Americans, and James Polk who conquered Mexico. These officials and
their supporters opposed the creation of a large and oppressive govern-
ment that would meddle in the internal police of the state-republics. But
they were all for the vigorous use of national government power to reach
republican ends such as territorial expansion and commercial advantage.
In the activity of war-making the American national government can
be meaningfully compared to contemporary European states and empires.
The U.S. Army was certainly small, but it was technologically advanced,
professional, and efficient. Despite its limited size it was far more power-
ful than any of its competitors. Only Britain in the War of 1812 and the
renegade Confederacy during the Civil War could offer serious resist-
ance to U.S. arms on North American soil. The armys achievements were
grudgingly recognized also in Europe. British army officers and diplo-
mats were impressed by Winfield Scotts conquest of Mexico City, struck
by the mobilization of men and materiel in the Civil War, and envious of
the U.S. Armys efficiency in fighting the savage wars of imperialism.26 The
U.S. Navy also began as a small operation but was soon successful. In the
sphere of war finance, U.S. governmental institutions were again advanced
and highly efficient.

(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

Sectional divisions caused the downfall of the early American state.

The Civil War led to a re-conceptualization of the American polity from
a union of state-republics to a nation.27 But the war also demonstrated the
capacity of the national government to mobilize resources on a truly enor-
mous scale. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers and sailors were recruited,
clothed, equipped, and maintained.28 The national debt rose from virtual-
ly nothing to the third greatest in the world. War on such enormous scale
caused considerable stress to existing governmental institutions, but the
mode of raising men and money nevertheless followed the pattern from
earlier wars. Clearly, the mobilization for, and management of, the Civil
War was an achievement that challenged the notion of the United States
as a polity possessing only limited state capacity.

IV

The American founding created a political organization that was simulta-

neously a union of state-republics and a unitary state in the international
state system. Its raison dtre was the safeguarding of citizenship rights
and entitlements as defined by the state-republics. Success in this mission
required a careful balancing act. On the one hand, it was necessary to pre-
vent the national government from expanding into an exploitative state.
On the other hand, a central government possessing considerable state ca-
pacity was necessary to defend and promote national interest against for-
eign powers. The principal functions of the national government were the
management of international affairs, the administration of the territories,
and the regulation of relations between the member states within the un-
ion. Federal exercise of police powers is of a much later date, in most cases
developing only in the twentieth century. Because the national govern-
ment was designed to deal with foreign affairs and the federal territories,
the exercise of coercive power and war-making were key activities. The in-
ability of historians to recognize the antebellum national government as a

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

novel political organization adapted to American conditions and distinct

from the European unitary state has led them to deny the existence of a
state in early America or to dismiss it as a failure. But the existence of an
American state in the antebellum period cannot be questioned. Nor can it
be questioned that this state was capable on occasion, but always within
its delimited sphere, to project considerable power. The question that re-
mains to be addressed is whether or not the exertion of national govern-
ment power in the nineteenth century made any difference to the course
of United States history.
Paradoxically, it is precisely because it played such a fundamental role
in the development of the United States that it has been possible to exor-
cise the early national government from American history. Overall, the
national government was successful in promoting American commerce
and expanding American territory; in defending political independence
and national interests against competitors; and, for seven decades, in pre-
serving the union. These achievements have been ignored because they
form the parameters rather than the objects of historical inquiries into the
nations history. We are too used to the idea of the early republic as an
independent state, a federal union, a flourishing commercial society, and
a rapidly expanding nation to see these features of American history as
anything but inevitable.
The achievement of the founders becomes visible by paying attention
to the fate of other non-European polities in the nineteenth century and
in particular to the trajectories of the dependencies and sovereign states
of the Americas. The Republic of Mexico and the many Native American
nations are reminders that territorial expansion created victims as well as
victors. The history of Mexico demonstrates that there can be a consid-
erable gap between political independence as a formal status and as real
power of self-determination. Mexico also shows that the preservation of
peace and union was not automatic or inevitable in the federal repub-
lics of North America. Finally, the experience of Latin America generally
and of British North America show that commercial regulations could be
structured very unevenly even in an age thought of as a free trade era.
By defending and promoting American interests in a world of hostile
nation states, above all by promoting trade and acquiring and disposing
of land, and by preserving the peace between the states and preventing
the rise of a competitive state system in North America, the national gov-
ernment upheld and expanded a republican social order. It was a regime
highly conducive to rapid economic and demographic growth. As the
nineteenth century drew to a close, this growth in wealth and popula-
32 max m. edling

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 economic roots of governance reforms

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

mands and expectations emerged. Entitlement programmes constructed

in the heyday of economic expansion had to be funded also in periods of
slower growth, maturing benefits and changing demographic pyramids.
There were strong requests for investments in physical infrastructure and
multiple forms of care. The build-up of secondary schools led to mount-
ing requests for tertiary education. Many such demands for public inter-
ventions have conspired to put increasing pressure on governments and
legislatures. At the same time, the various processes linked to globalisa-
tion have widened the horizon of political perspectives, opportunities and
obligations.
These are some of the trends figuring behind a clutch of governance re-
forms that have been introduced in different OECD countries in recent
decades and that are often described as expressions of NPM. While there
is no commonly accepted definition of this notion, a number of character-
istic elements recur frequently:
1. Inspiration from the private sector: public functions are privatised, pub-
lic agencies are transformed into companies, and market mechanisms
are brought into the practices of public administration. Fresh capital
and commercial know-how is mobilised for the provision of utilities
through different forms of private-public partnership (PPP).
2. Separation of functions: in areas where the articulation of demand, pro-
duction, evaluation and control have previously been concentrated in
one single ministry or agency, they are now often differentiated and en-
trusted to autonomous units. A measure of vertical specialisation is at-
tained through the separation of implementation from policy-making
(agencification). Separate units of evaluation, impact assessment and
supervision have been set up.
3. Decentralisation of decisions: through framework budgeting and frame-
work regulations, policy-makers seek to abstain from micro-managing
the modes and technicalities of implementation. Within government
machineries, there are attempts to grant greater autonomy to subordi-
nate levels. Some countries have developed their patterns of multi-level
governance by entrusting more tasks to local and regional bodies. Citi-
zens are also empowered through various mechanisms for individual
choice, such as vouchers or opportunities for opt-outs and opt-ins.
4. Increased use of contracts: on the one hand, rights and entitlements are
increasingly defined in semi-contractual terms (Citizens Charter in the
UK 1991, Charte des services publics in France 1992, het Handvest van
de Gebruiker in Belgium 1993, etc.). On the other hand, contractual ar-
rangements are employed to transform hierarchical organisational re-
 policy metrics under scrutiny 35

lations into partnerships. Contracts have become frequent in budget-

ary as well as regulatory contexts. Sometimes moves in this direction
seem more symbolic than practical; in spite of a contractual terminol-
ogy obligations and commitments are not always linked to follow-up
and control. There is also a wide use of informal or implicit contracts
in managerial relations, sometimes characterised by tensions between
prescribed rules and actual expectations.
5. Emphasis on goals and targets: a premium is put on clearly defined ob-
jectives and precise targets, preferably corresponding to the SMART
formula (specific, measurable, agreed upon, realistic and time-based;
other interpretations of the acronym occur). Attaining such precision
has turned out to be easier at operational levels than in political deci-
sion-making where majorities can often be forged only through a cer-
tain degree of ambivalence and vagueness.
6. Emphasis on performance and results: where classical public adminis-
tration tended to put much weight on inputs and procedures, recent
reforms are more oriented towards outputs, outcomes and impacts. Be-
sides compliance auditing there is increased stress on efficiency and ef-
fectiveness. Performance measures have been developed particularly in
such areas as education and health care. The prevalence of multiple ob-
jectives is taken into account through such techniques as the balanced
scorecard. Impact assessment (IA) has emerged as an important proc-
ess in the preparation of policy decisions, with the sub-species regula-
tory impact assessment (RIA) employed especially in efforts to reduce
the administrative burden on enterprises and citizens. In the NPM dis-
course there are frequent references to a result culture or perform-
ance culture.
7. Emphasis on reporting and evaluation: following early ventures in
management by objectives, an important part of new public manage-
ment is the grand bargain in which more autonomy for implementing
agencies and agents is granted in exchange for a stronger accent on ac-
countability and assessment. This has given a boost to both internal
and external evaluation. New forms of evaluation have also been devel-
oped to shed light on particular types of impact (job creation, sustain-
ability, carbon footprints, etc.).
8. Value for money: achievements are intermittently tested against aspira-
tions and objectives. Besides traditional auditing geared towards hon-
esty, legality and precision in public disbursements, there have evolved
new forms of auditing with a focus on efficiency, productivity and per-
formance.
36 daniel tarschys

9. Diffusion of best practices: the scope for steering as a managerial

method is reduced in favour of learning, and much attention is paid
to the methods and approaches of top-achievers. Such emulation is
furthermore stimulated through benchmarking, rating, ranking and
league tables.
These ingredients in NPM reforms did not come out of the blue in the
1980s and 1990s. Many of them have deeper roots in the past and a gen-
eral ideological background reflecting the rationalist traditions of our
societies. They also owe much to a series of managerial innovations that
paved the way, first for the industrial revolution and then for the various
periods of economic expansion in the last century. Other precedents were
the experiments in programme budgeting (PPBS, ZBB, Rationalisation
des choix budgtaires) that were carried out in the 1960s and 1970s. But
with the extensive growth of the first three post-war decades the need for
efficiency reforms was long modest, and it was only towards the end of
the previous century that the slow-down in economic expansion and the
mounting pressure of already adopted programmes put it squarely on the
political agenda.

Some centres of the NPM movement

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

nicipalities in many countries. Another clear trend at sub-national levels

is the outsourcing of public functions and transformation of public au-
thorities into publicly owned private companies.
Multilateral organisations have not only been affected by NPM, but
have even taken the lead. Some reform centres stand out as particularly
influential:
First of all the World Bank, which has inspired and promoted many
public sector reforms in the developing world. Different key terms have
been used to define this effort. When the concept of structural adjust-
ment lost its lustre in the 1980s, it was soon replaced by governance or
good governance. This concept was given a much broader sense than
government and was also employed to avoid resource flows being in-
tercepted by rent-seeking bureaucracies. To support its struggle against
corruption, the World Bank has developed quality indicators of gov-
ernance. While it has seldom employed the NPM acronym, it has fre-
quently used its tool-box in its recommendations and prescriptions to
borrowers and grant recipients.
Second the OECD, which, through several of its branches, has been
a powerful node for exchange of experience in policy development.
Besides applying NPM in various policy sectors, the OECD has also
served as a strategic meeting-place for reform-minded ministers and
civil servants, and several of its units (PUMA for public management,
SIGMA for Support for Improvement in Governance and Manage-
ment and the Directorate for Governance and Territorial Coopera-
tion) have played a key role in the diffusion of innovation in govern-
ance. Through its individual country reports, the OECD also seeks to
enrich domestic policy discussions by contributions of external exper-
tise.
Third the European Commission, whose involvement in public manage-
ment issues started with the build-up of its own major programmes in
agricultural policy, structural policy, research and development coop-
eration. Each of these has been accompanied by gradually revised eval-
uation requirements and related NPM-type mechanisms. The arrival of
the governance concept to Brussels can be dated with some precision.
In 2000, the final draft of Nigel Kinnocks overview of management
methods in the Commission was still called Reforming the Commis-
sion, but when the White Paper was released one year later the title had
changed to Governance in the European Union. As a result of this initia-
tive, several steps have been taken to develop the internal functioning
of the work of the Commission. Of particular importance is the intro-
38 daniel tarschys

duction of Regulatory Impact Assessment (RIA) and Impact Assess-

ment (IA), the latter made compulsory through guidelines issued in
2003 and now overseen by a central Impact Assessment Board (IAB).
Fourth, there is an informal network of the Directors-General respon-
sible for public administration in the member states of the European
Union and the European Commission (EUPAN), which has engaged in
comparative studies of public administration reforms. While not com-
parable to the three previously mentioned centres, this is a meeting-
place where centrally placed leaders in the field of administrative re-
form compare their experience. Various governments have undertaken
to coordinate questionnaire-based studies conducted by academic
experts. The working method is similar to that of the senior officials
committees at the OECD and some other international organisations.
There are obvious differences in the ways that these four centres have
contributed to the diffusion process of NPM-type reforms. As a financial
institution with considerable leverage on borrowers, the World Bank can
impose conditions and extract commitments, though the actual imple-
mentation of such undertakings will often fall short of the pledges given.
The Bank also has a significant research programme. The strength of the
OECD lies both in its qualified staff and its access to member state min-
istries, many of which take active part in the comparative work carried
out by the organisation. It can inspire but does not have the clout con-
nected with the disbursement of funds. The European Commission is bet-
ter endowed in that respect. Its espousal of NPM principles is partly due
to requests from the two other major institutions in the EU, the Council
and the Parliament. The latter often put the European Commission under
pressure to improve its mechanisms for service delivery, control and ac-
countability. EUPAN is more of a network for exchange of experience, but
has also come up with some very interesting ideas in the field of perform-
ance measurement and success indicators.

Doubts and ruminations at the headquarters

A common feature in the strategic centres is a certain measure of institu-

tional ambivalence towards the legacy of NPM. On the one hand, they all
continue to practise and preach various chapters of the NPM gospel. Gov-
ernance reform, impact analysis, improved accountability and evaluation
remain key elements in their policy recommendations, and in the case of
the European Union in its own policies. But in all four there is also a keen
 policy metrics under scrutiny 39

recognition of the obstacles encountered and a sophisticated appraisal of

the problems inherent in NPM approaches.
In its crusade for good governance and anti-corruption, the World
Bank is very much aware of the weak preconditions and responses in
many developing countries (Stone & Wright 2006, World Bank 2007).
NPM is a slippery label and success seems relatively rare, writes one of
its experts (Manning 2001). One explanation is that many NPM contracts
are intrinsically flimsy, another one is that old public service disciplines,
including a public service ethos, remains vital in the NPM era. A third
reason for the apparent under-performance of NPM in developing coun-
tries is their marginal scope and impact.
The OECD has been particularly active in examining the difficulties
and dilemmas inherent in NPM approaches (OECD 2007, 2008, 2009a,
2009b, 2009c). It has paid considerable attention to measurement prob-
lems, gaming, and the construction of composite indicators. Assembling
experience from several member states, OECD analyses have dwelt ex-
tensively on the risk of neglecting unmeasured and unmeasurable dimen-
sions in public service policy provision. On the one hand, there may be
a loss of quality in the output; on the other, a loss of quality in the data.
Several OECD studies have discussed how performance information may
be manipulated by aggregating and disaggregating data.
Interview studies carried out at the European Commission (Bcklund
2007, Renda 2006 and 2009) confirm the prevalence of lively internal
discussions on the merits of different appraisal mechanisms. The evalu-
ation system of the European Commission has traditionally been ambi-
tious, with requirements of ex-ante, mid-term and ex-post inquiries, more
recently supplemented with the notion of continuous evaluation and a
mandatory impact assessment for all new initiatives. Though explicitly fo-
cusing on results, a main function of the compulsory impact assessment
appears to be procedural: two intended effects are to ensure internal coor-
dination within the Commission and a satisfactory involvement of exter-
nal stakeholders in the policy process (Bcklund 2007).
EUPAN reports have come up with some quite pointed remarks on the
weaknesses in performance assessment. One study qualifies the measure-
ment of quality in public administration as the least developed area at
European level, noting also that it is intimately connected with the jus-
tification of results (urga 2008). Overall, managers level of satisfaction
with the existing performance assessment systems is only moderate, ob-
serves another rapporteur (Demmke 2007).
40 daniel tarschys

Some principal criticisms of NPM

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?

NPM under scrutiny

Public administration and governance are major research fields in politi-

cal science and attract scholars from many other disciplines as well. In-
ternational cooperation is well developed through such bodies as the
International Institute on Administrative Sciences (IIAS), active since
1930, the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) and the
International Political Science Association (IPSA), the latter with special
research committees on public policy and administration (RC 32) and ad-
ministrative culture (RC 48). In Europe, the European Institute of Public
Administration in Maastricht serves as a centre for EUPAN and EPAN,
a European network among civil servants. The European Group on Pub-
lic Administration (EGPA) has study groups on various topics, includ-
ing performance. The European Evaluation Society purports to promote
theory, practice and utilisation of high quality evaluation especially, but
not exclusively, within the European countries. The European Group on
Public Law highlights developments in administrative legislation and
case-law.
Many aspects of the NPM reforms are dealt with in this broad stream
of research. The specific problem of performance measurement and its
utilisation has attracted considerable attention, not least in EGPA. Fol-
lowing the seminal work of Weiss (1977), it is widely recognised that
new knowledge has many ways of creeping into the consciousness of ac-
tors even when no immediate impact of the fresh information can be ob-
served. Performance measurement also fulfils many different functions in
organisations. Behn (2003) distinguishes eight: evaluate, control, budget,
motivate, promote, celebrate, learn, and improve. Since no measure is ide-
al to achieve all these ends, managers need to think seriously about their
mix of motives in assessing performance. In a valuable new volume, Van
Dooren & Van de Walle (2008) have assembled recent European studies
in this field.
One line in the NPM-related research is concerned with the construc-
tion, employment and critical evaluation of quality measures. Drawing
on the Total Quality Management (TQM) movement with its particular
 policy metrics under scrutiny 43

emphasis on consumer satisfaction, scholars and practitioners in this fold

have worked out various models for comparing the quality of output in
different organisations. A body formed in 1997, the Innovative Public
Services Group, developed a Common Assessment Framework (CAF),
launched first in 2000 and then revised in 2002. The main purpose of the
CAF is to provide a fairly simple, free and easy to use framework which is
suitable for self-assessment of public sector organisations across Europe
and which would also allow for the sharing of best practices and bench-
marking activities, writes one of its authors (Engel 2002, p. 35).

Linear vs. confluence theories of policy-making

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

gued that literature was essentially a product of an authors environment

and that a close scrutiny of this milieu would explain most elements of
his oeuvre. But in addition to that, attention must also be paid to race,
by which he meant the specific cultural dispositions that govern everyone
without his knowledge or consent. A third element was the accumulated
experiences of the author, which he subsumed under the concept of mo-
ment or momentum. Taine shared the view of several predecessors that
aesthetic works were social products but added to that an emphasis on the
intersection between time and space, tracing literary and artistic creation
to the crossroads of Zeitgeist and genius loci.
A second example of confluence theories is the garbage can model
developed in 1972 by Michael D. Cohen, James G. March and Johan P.
Olsen. Instead of treating solutions as responses to problems, they sug-
gested that solutions have a life of their own and may be looking for
questions rather than the other way around. Stressing the anarchic, un-
predictable and irrational character of decision processes, they attached
considerable importance to ambiguity, opportunities and coincidence.
They derived policy outcomes from four relatively independent streams:
problems, solutions, choice opportunities, and participants.
Cohen, March & Olsen do not contest that problems may trigger deci-
sion processes if they are sufficiently grave, but a different pattern is more
prevalent. Organisation man will have a number of standard recipes on
his shelf, and whenever there is a challenge he will go through the gar-
bage to find a suitable fix. Many solutions lie around waiting to meet an
appropriate problem. Choice opportunities are occasions when organisa-
tions are expected to produce a behaviour that can be called a decision.
Just like politicians cherish photo opportunities, organisation man needs
occasional decision opportunities for reasons unrelated to the decision
itself. As for participants, the authors emphasise their erratic involvement
in various decision processes. Some have favourite prescriptions that they
try to apply to all kinds of emerging problems; others have favourite prob-
lems that they seek to address by a variety of measures.
The garbage can idea was further developed in the multiple streams
model suggested by Kingdon (1984). In this view, policy decisions come
about through the convergence of three distinct but complementary proc-
esses. First, there is a stream of problems. To be converted into a policy
a situation must first be defined as an issue. In the underlying diagnosis
a particular societal deficiency or challenge must be attributed to causes
within human control. Second, there is a stream of policies. In any organ-
isation there is a range of recipes or solutions floating around and sus-
46 daniel tarschys

ceptible of being matched with smaller or bigger problems. Some of these

resemble what Allison (1971) called standard operating procedures. A
final stream of politics contains impulses generated by changes of govern-
ment, impending elections, external shocks and other such events. Politi-
cal competition plays a great role in determining what is feasible. In many
cases, policy decisions come about easier if included in particular pack-
ages or supported by particular sets of actors.

From macro-metrics to micro-metrics:

Measuring policy outputs and outcomes

Measurement has always been a key element in public administration.

Some of the oldest preserved written messages in human history are bu-
reaucratic accounts. Both fiscal registers (such as the Domesday book)
and reporting on outlays were crucial to the consolidation of the modern
state. With Kameralwissenschaft launched as a separate branch of knowl-
edge and statistics emerging as a new craft in the service of government,
quantitative data paved the way for radically increased opportunities for
public intervention and control.
The central position of measurement in economics is obvious. At the
level of macro-metrics, GDP estimates have long been used to trace the
accumulation of material wealth. But the central position of this measure
has also been challenged and several more composite indices have been
suggested. The UNDP Human Development Index deserves particular
mention, but there have also been many other attempts to capture the
multiple dimensions of social and economic change (Osberg & Sharpe
2002). The growing concern about green issues has spawned many at-
tempts to integrate natural resources and environmental impacts into the
calculus (Gadrey & Jany-Catrice 2007).
In an important new report, Stiglitz, Sen & Fitoussi (2009) have sum-
marised the present discussion and suggested some remedies. They point
out that statistical indicators are important for designing and assessing
policies aiming at advancing the progress of society, as well as for assess-
ing and influencing the functioning of economic markets. The role of such
measures has also increased significantly in recent decades. More and
more people look at statistics to be better informed or to make decisions.
To respond to the growing demand for information, the supply of statis-
tics has expanded considerably, covering new domains and phenomena.
What we measure affects what we do; and if our measurements are
flawed, decisions may be distorted. The authors conclude: To focus spe-
 policy metrics under scrutiny 47

cifically on the enhancement of inanimate objects of convenience (for ex-

ample in the GNP or GDP which have been the focus of a myriad of eco-
nomic studies of progress), could be ultimately justified to the extent it
could be only through what these objects do to the human lives they can
directly or indirectly influence. Moreover, it has long been clear that GDP
is an inadequate metric to gauge well-being over time particularly in its
economic, environmental, and social dimensions, some aspects of which
are often referred to as sustainability. (ibid., p. 8)
What the economists encounter at the macro-level is likewise a daily
predicament lower down in the system. Policy-makers and managers in
public administration wrestle with a flood of evaluation data and success
indicators. Measuring is omnipresent in modern governance and is indis-
pensable for many reasons, motivational no less than informational. But
it is also fraught with many dangers and may seriously distort incentives
and perspectives. Problems occur at different stages of the process, both
in the very measurement and in the interpretation of the data collected.
Flaws in indices and indicators may easily impair the performance of pub-
lic sector organisations.
This makes it important to take a deeper look at micro-metrics that
we meet in public policy and public administration. The Soviet experi-
ence contains some useful lessons in this respect, as noted also in a recent
OECD publication (OECD 2009b). Composite measures are now being
developed in many policy contexts to mitigate the various risks involved
and balance between different objectives. But such measures frequently
imply a heavier reporting burden and can thus collide with the simplifica-
tion agenda.
Many prescriptions are built on the injection of qualitative dimensions
into quantitative indicators, and this may work up to a point. But there
is also a well-known down-side to the reliance on bench-marking, rat-
ings, rankings and league-tables. When quantitative measures are used
to capture qualitative dimensions, there will often be an illusion of exact-
ness that is in fact based on the limitation of verdicts to a few dimensions,
while others are disregarded. Another facet in this form of measurement
is the competitive perspective. The performance of one actor or unit is in-
cessantly compared to that of many others, which may have merits but
also some disadvantages.
48 daniel tarschys

Conclusion

Radical rationalism, as presented in early enthusiastic pleas for pro-

gramme budgeting (PPBS), long term planning, technology assessment
and future studies, was early on submitted to sceptical scrutiny in the
wide-ranging oeuvre of Aaron Wildavsky. Swedish tendencies in this di-
rection were noted by Tarschys & Eduards (1975) and later submitted to a
much more thorough analysis by Wittrock & Lindstrm (1984) and Witt-
rock (1980).
The basic tenets of NPM, now increasingly integrated into the main-
stream of policy-making methodology, will not go away. Quantification
along many dimensions is indispensable in modern governance. But the
risks of perverted incentives, tunnel vision and myopia will not go away
either, so many of the limitations of NPM prescriptions remain to wrestle
with.
 policy metrics under scrutiny 49

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 PART TWO

History and the Social Sciences

 HISTORY AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES TODAY

Jrgen Kocka

When Eric Hobsbawm, 91 years old, received Honorary Citizenship status

from the City of Vienna, he looked back on his record and commented:
I had the luck of belonging to a worldwide generation of historians who rev-
olutionised historiography between the 1930s and the historiographical turn
of the 1970s, mainly through new links between history and the social sci-
ences. It was not simply a matter of a single ideological school. It was about
the struggle of historical modernity against the old, conventional histori-
ography of Ranke, whether under the banner of economic history, French
sociology and geography as in the Annales, of Marxism or of Max Weber.1

Not everybody will agree with Hobsbawms description and evaluation.

But there is much truth in his observation that new forms of cooperation
between historians and social scientists helped to transform historical
studies in the West between the interwar period and the 1970s. It is equal-
ly true that in the last quarter of the 20th century the distance between
history and the social sciences grew again. This article will argue that in
the meantime we have entered a third period in which new potentials for
cooperation between history and the social sciences are visible and in-
creasingly put into practice.

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-

2 Georg G. Iggers described and shared the mood of these historiographical

changes. See his New Directions in European Historiography. Revised edition, Middletown,
Conn. 1984. A shorter and more distanced account in: Georg G. Iggers/Q. Edward Wang/
Supriya Mukherjee, A Global History of Modern Historiography, Harlow 2008, 250-270. Cf.
Rolf Torstendahl, Assessing Professional Developments. Historiography in a Comparative
Perspective, in: idem (ed.), An Assessment of Twentieth-Century Historiography, Stockholm
2000, 9-30.
 history and the social sciences today 55

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

preoccupation with the rational choice paradigm, which is more interest-

ed in the effects of preferences than in their origin, change, and volatility.
Over the past twenty-five years, social science has changed dramatically. The
most striking development, especially in America, has been a bifurcation,
separating scholars interested in culture from those concerned with mate-
rial forces. On one side of the yard, history and anthropology have moved
closer to cultural studies. On the other, political science has edged toward
economics. Like the kid left to play alone, American sociology has flirted
with the others without being able to draw them into a game of its own.5

As far as developments in sociology are concerned, it is even more diffi-

cult to generalize. Without a doubt, many sociologists have contributed
greatly to developing the programme of Historische Sozialwissenschaft in
Germany, among them Max Weber and C. Wright Mills, Ralf Dahrendorf
and Charles Tilly, M. Rainer Lepsius and Wolfgang Schluchter, to mention
only a few. Historians have continued to benefit greatly from the work of
sociologists who take an interest in history or are at least open to history,
from comparative historical sociology in the social sciences (e.g. Shmuel
Eisenstadt, Bjrn Wittrock, Dietrich Rueschemeyer) to impressive contri-
butions by historical sociologists (Michael Mann and, in a different way,
Hans Joas) and influential theoreticians like Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony
Giddens, who are frequently quoted by social historians. Recently, the so-
ciologist Wolfgang Streeck published a study on capitalism in Germany
in which he advocated and practised a close combination of the social
sciences and history. On the other hand, the places where historians and
sociologists work together in more than sporadic fashion are few6 and far
between, far more so than 30 or 40 years ago. Without a doubt, there has
been no general historicization of sociology. Historians and social scien-
tists, not least sociologists, continue to differ greatly in their interests, lan-
guages, footnote methods, and forms of presentation. Nor has the vision

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

of an historical social science that merges elements of the participating

disciplines been realized when it comes to history and sociology.7
There are exceptions to the trends discussed. There are new interdisci-
plinary alliances that have replaced old ones, for instance between social
and cultural history on the one hand, and cultural anthropology and eth-
nology on the other. There is a great deal of interdisciplinary cooperation
within specific problem-oriented fields such as research on violence, on
ageing, or on migration. But as far as the relations between history and
economics, political science, and sociology as disciplines are concerned,
the boundaries have not become more permeable over the past three dec-
ades. On the contrary. They have remained much more structured than
the proponents of Historische Sozialwissenschaft had envisaged in the
1970s.

Economic history and economics

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

7 Cf. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Soziologie und Geschichte als Nachbarwissenschaften,

in: Christiane Funken (ed.), Soziolo
gischer Eigensinn. Zur Disziplinierung der Sozialwis-
senschaften, Opladen 2000, 113-122; Lutz Ellrich, Unterlaufen, berbieten, Kooperieren.
Zum Verhltnis von Soziologie und Geschichtswissenschaften, ibid., 123-144; Thomas
Welskopp, Alien Allies: The Relations between History, Sociology, and Economics in
Germany, 19th20th Centuries, in: Ignacio Olbarri/Francisco J. Caspistegui (eds.), The
Strength of History at the Doors of the New Millennium: History and the Other Social and
Human Sciences along XXth Century, Barain (Navarra) 2005, 103-128; Mahoney, James/
Dietrich Rueschemeyer (eds.), Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences, Cam-
bridge 2003; Adams, Julie et al. (eds.), Remaking Modernity: Politics, History and Sociology,
Durham 2005; Wolfgang Streeck, Re-Forming Capitalism: Institutional Change in the Ger-
man Political Economy, Oxford 2009.
8
As reported in Hansjrg Siegenthaler, Geschichte und konomie nach der kultu-
ralistischen Wende, in: Geschichte und Gesellschaft 25 (1999), 276-301; Jakob Tanner, Die
konomische Handlungstheorie vor der kulturalistischen Wende? Perspektiven und Pro-
bleme einer interdisziplinren Diskussion, in: Hartmut Berghoff/Jakob Vogel (eds.), Wirt-
schaftsgeschichte als Kulturgeschichte. Dimensionen eines Perspektivenwechsels, Frankfurt/
New York 2004, 69-98. See also Gerd Gigerenzer/Reinhard Selten (eds.), Bounded Rationa-
lity: The Adaptive Toolbox, Cambridge, Mass. 2001; Hansjrg Siegenthaler (ed.), Rationalitt
im Prozess kultureller Evolution. Rationalittsunterstellungen als eine Bedingung der Mglich-
keit substantieller Rationalitt des Handelns, Tbingen 2005.
 history and the social sciences today 59

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

with transaction costs or entrepreneurial networks, for example, also ad-

dresses issues of institutional economics.9
Thirdly, economic sociology broadens and extends the issues treated by
institutional economics beyond the institutional. Jens Beckert and Rich-
ard Swedberg, two major authors in this field, point out that the role of
social, cultural, and political conditions for the operation of economic ex-
change systems is a classical sociological issue, long relegated to the back-
ground after 1945, before reviving since the 1980s. They speculate about
the reasons for the renewed interest in economic sociology:
The changes from Fordist regulation to more flexible types of organization-
al structures, the transformation of Eastern European economies, and the
process of globalization make the economy appear to be in a state of dramat-
ic change with the final outcome, the implications and sometimes even the
directions as yet unclear. These economic changes will have profound effects
on society at large.

They will change the role of the state, will make non-eco-
nomic variables like social capital into important economic resources, and
they will affect the family through radical changes in types of employment.
But on the basis of which theory can these changes be understood?10

9 Cf. Knut Borchardt, Der Property Rights-Ansatz in der Wirtschaftsgeschichte

Zeichen fr eine systematische Neuorientierung des Faches?, in: Jrgen Kocka (ed.), Theo-
rien in der Praxis des Historikers (Geschichte und Gesellschaft. Sonderheft 3), Gttingen
1977, 140-160; Douglas C. North, Institutionen, institutioneller Wandel und Wirtschafts-
leistung, Tbingen 1992; Rudolf Richter/Eirik Furubotn, Neue Institutionenkonomie. Eine
Einfhrung und kritische Wrdigung, Tbingen 1996; Peter A. Hall/David Soskice (eds.),
Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage, Oxford
2001; Kathleen Thelen, How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany,
Britain, the United States and Japan, Cambridge, Mass. 2004; Wolfgang Streeck/Kathleen
Thelen (eds.), Beyond Continuity: Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies,
Oxford 2005; Werner Abelshauser, The Dynamics of German Industry: Germanys Path To-
ward the New Economy and the American Challenge, New York/Oxford 2005; idem (ed.),
Politische konomie (Geschichte und Gesellschaft, Sonderheft 15), Gttingen 1999; Volker
R. Berghahn/Sigurt Vitols (eds.), Gibt es einen deutschen Kapitalismus? Tradition und globa-
le Perspektiven der sozialen Marktwirtschaft, Frankfurt/New York 2006; Hartmut Berghoff/
Jrg Sydow (eds.), Unternehmerische Netzwerke. Eine historische Organisationsform mit Zu-
kunft? Stuttgart 2007; Berghoff/Vogel, Wirtschaftsgeschichte als Kulturgeschichte. Anstze
zur Bergung transdisziplinrer Synergiepotenziale, in: idem (ed.), Wirtschaftsgeschichte als
Kulturgeschichte, 9-41, 19.
10 Jens Beckert/Richard Swedberg, The Return of Economic Sociology in Europe,
Introduction, in: European Journal of Social Theory 4 (2001), 379-386, here 381f.; Jens
Beckert, Beyond the Market: The Social Foundations of Economic Efficiency, Princeton, N.J.
2002; idem et al. (eds.), Mrkte als soziale Strukturen, Frankfurt/New York 2007; idem, Die
Abenteuer der Kalkulation. Zur sozialen Einbettung konomischer Rationalitt, in: Levia-
than 35 (2007), 295-309. Karl Polanyis classical study on the embeddedness of capitalist
economies receives new attention. See his The Great Transformation: The Political and Eco-
nomic Origins of Our Time, originally published in 1944; also: idem, The Economy as In-
stituted Process, in: Mark Granovetter/Richard Swedberg (eds.), The Sociology of Economic
Life, Boulder, CO 1957, 29-51.
 history and the social sciences today 61

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

Cf. Hartmut Berghoff/Jakob Vogel (eds.), Wirtschaftsgeschichte als Kulturgeschichte.

11
Dimensionen eines Perspektivenwechsels, Frankfurt/New York 2004.
12
Cf. J. Adam Tooze, Die Vermessung der Welt. Anstze zu einer Kulturgeschichte
der Wirtschaftsstatistik, in: ibid., 325-352; Tooze, Statistics and the German State 1900
1945, Cambridge 2001; Robert Salais et al., Linvention du chmage, Paris 1986. Cf. also
the articles on Arbeiter and Angestellte in O. Brunner/W. Conze/R. Koselleck (eds.),
Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutsch-
land, vol. 1, Stuttgart 1972, 110-128, 216-242.
13 Cf. Peter Wagner (ed.), The Language of Civil Society, New York/Oxford 2006, here
the contribution by Peter Hallberg and Bjrn Wittrock (28-51).
14 Cf. Richard Biernacki, The Fabrication of Labor. Germany and Britain, 16401914,
Berkeley 1995; Bndicte Zimmermann, La constitution du chomage en Allemagne. Entre
professions et territoires, Paris 2001.
62 jrgen kocka

There is the booming history of consumption, concerned, among other

things, with the interplay between cultural orientation, gender, and mar-
ket behaviour, extending into the history of commercial and service com-
panies, which, at least in Germany, is traditionally less well researched
than the history of manufacturing enterprises.15
There is the micro-historical study of a North Italian village in the late
17th century by Giovanni Levi. Using sophisticated methods, he shows
how very much transactions in this village, decisions on buying and sell-
ing, were embedded in a supra-individual network of relationships in
which honour, reciprocity, and self-interest were linked over the long
term, and were thus part of a culture. According to Christoph Conrad,
the crux of Levis reconstruction is that he exposes the atomisation of indi-
vidual transactions and actors as an illusion. Even so banal an act as buying
an animal or a small garden plot can be explained only in the network of
social, familial, and symbolic determinants. The micro-analysis thus recon-
structs a covert collective reality concealed by the atomisation of civil law
categories and thus of sources. Levi impressively shows how dependent the
individual economic actor was on social practice before he became the focus
of liberal economic theory.16

Finally, I mention the research done by a group under Pierre Bourdieu on

home ownership among skilled-worker and white-collar-worker families
in the Paris banlieue. The study investigates the social structures of the
economy. In particular, it looks at
how preferences arise and are disseminated in a society that render such no-
tions as sense of property, leafy suburb, being my own boss, understandable
Government capital formation programmes are examined, as are advertis-
ing images and leitmotifs, individual sales talks and loan negotiations.

Christoph Conrad concludes:

In this context of a cultural history of the economy, the point is not to trace
societal conditioning in preference formation every economist would ad-
mit that but to understand the economic actor model itself as the outcome
of societal and cultural preparation.17

Cf. Heinz Gerhard Haupt/Claudius Torp (eds.), Die Konsumgesellschaft in Deutsch-

15
land 18901990. Ein Handbuch, Frankfurt am Main 2009; Heinrich Hartmann, Organisa-
tion und Geschft. Unternehmensorganisation in Frankreich und Deutschland 18901914,
Gttingen 2010.
Christoph Conrad, How much, schatzi?, in: Berghoff/Vogel (eds.), Wirtschaftsge-
16
schichte als Kulturgeschichte, 43-67, 55; Giovanni Levi, Le pouvoir au village. Histoire dun
exorciste dans le Pimont du XVIIe sicle, Paris 1989 (Italian original 1985).
17
Conrad, How much, schatzi?, 59; Pierre Bourdieu, Les structures sociales de

lconomie, Paris 2000. Cf. also Paul Nolte, Der Markt und seine Kultur ein neues Paradig-
 history and the social sciences today 63

These examples should suffice to demonstrate that the culturalist turns in

history over the past two decades entail not only risks but also opportu-
nities for renewing economic history, if two conditions are met: (a) Dis-
course and conceptual history must be linked to the history of praxis,
which does not always succeed. (b) Economic history benefits only if it
adopts a broad understanding of its tasks and does not restrict itself to
economic matters in a narrow sense. Then it can produce results that
should also be interesting for economists and social scientists if, for ex-
ample, they are interested in the preconditions and consequences of mar-
kets. It seems that the recent financial and economic crisis has led some
economists to deal with the historical dimensions of market behaviour
and market failures more than before.18

Learning from one another

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

cations. The relation between comparative history and entangled history

is intensively debated. Eurocentrism and Western biases are to be over-
come in a productive way. All this is also leading to a renewal of theoreti-
cal considerations within the practice of history. It may lead historians to
a new openness vis--vis social-science approaches.20
This holds particularly true with respect to economic and social histor-
ical studies within the expanding field of global history. The debate on the
Great Divergence between economic developments in (parts of) China
and (parts of) Western Europe in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries is a
good case in point. New studies on global labour history profit from so-
cial science concepts and models (capitalism, class formation) if only with
the goal of modifying them with respect to the Non-Western world. Any-
way, historians interest in the world historical phenomenon of capitalism
seems to be growing again, including an interest in classical theorists from
Adam Smith and Karl Marx to Joseph Schumpeter and Karl Polanyi.21
On the other hand, social scientists with historical sensitivity have pro-
duced path-breaking work on large-scale global historical change. Bjrn
Wittrock is playing a leading role in this field.22
No doubt, there are many historians who do their work without draw-
ing from the resources of the social sciences. On the other hand, most
economists as well as many sociologists and political scientists define
their topics and investigate them without any historical orientation. But
there is an area of cooperation and overlap in which historians and social
scientists meet in ways useful for both sides. This area is growing again.
Historians can use pertinent concepts, models, and theories from the
social sciences in order to specify their questions and define their objects
of study, develop explanatory hypotheses, and structure their narratives

20 Cf. Heinz-Gerhard Haupt/Jrgen Kocka (eds.), Comparative and Transnational

History: Central European Approaches and New Perspectives, Oxford/New York 2010 (esp.
Kocka/Haupt, Comparison and Beyond: Traditions, Scope, and Perspectives of Compara-
tive History, 1-30); Jrgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt. Eine Geschichte des
19. Jahrhunderts, Munich 2009; Sebastian Conrad et al. (eds.), Globalgeschichte. Dimensio-
nen eines Perspektivenwechsels, Frankfurt/New York 2007.
21 Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the
Modern World Economy, Princeton 2000; Peer Vries, Via Peking back to Manchester: Britain,
the Industrial Revolution, and China, Leiden 2003; Patrick K. OBrien, Historiographical
Traditions and Modern Imperatives for the Restoration of Global History, in: Journal of
Global History 1, 2006, 3-39; Marcel van der Linden, Workers of the World. Essays toward a
Global Labor History, Leiden 2008; Jrgen Kocka, Die Historische Sozialwissenschaft und
der Kapitalismus, in: Merkur 64 (2010), 146-151.
22 Cf. J.P. Arnason/S.N. Eisenstadt/B. Wittrock, Axial Civilizations and World History,
Leiden/Boston 2005; P. Wagner/C.H. Weiss/B. Wittrock/H. Wollmann, Social Sciences and
Modern States: National Experiences and Theoretical Crossroads, Cambridge 2008.
 history and the social sciences today 65

(or better: argumentations). Sometimes they find methods useful which

have been developed in the social sciences, e.g. when handling mass data.
Dialogues with social scientists may help historians to reflect upon the
conditions, particularities, and consequences of their procedures. Usually
historians make use of the reservoir of social science ideas, concepts, and
methods very selectively, and they incorporate them into argumentations
of their own. The more historians are ready again to deal with the condi-
tions and consequences of events, experiences, discourses, and actions, i.e.
with structures and processes in history, the more urgent it becomes for
them to utilize social-science resources for historical investigations.23 His-
torians profit from collaboration with social scientists.
On the other hand, in this article several examples were given to show
how social scientists may profit from historical approaches and insights.
On a more general level, I want to underline two contributions which his-
tory can make to social science research and its presentation.24
First, historians take contexts seriously. They insist on the reconstruc-
tion of contexts and are sceptical vis--vis the rapid isolation and selec-
tive correlation of variables. Historians can offer help as to contextualiza-
tion. They can demonstrate how economic, social, political, and cultural
dimensions play out together. They are specialists on embeddedness. This
is where the economist Robert Solow saw the most important service eco-
nomic historians can offer to economic theorists:
Few things should be more interesting to a civilized economic theorist than
the opportunity to observe the interplay between social institutions and
economic behaviour over time and place Therefore an economic histo-
rian should be an observer and re-creator of the codes, loyalties and or-
ganizations which men create and which are just as real to them as physical
conditions. Add to that a command of two-stage least squares and you have
the kind of economic historian from whom theorists have the most to learn,
if only they are willing to try.25

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

26 With a similar thrust: Streeck, Re-Forming Capitalism. The underlying perception

of history as a discipline is sketched more thoroughly in: Jrgen Kocka, Geschichte als
Wissenschaft, in: Gunilla Budde et al. (eds.), Geschichte. Studium Wissenschaft Beruf,
Berlin 2008, 12-30.
 history and the social sciences today 67

carries no conviction when it is done with more ample twentieth-century

data?27

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.

27 Solow, Economic History and Economics, 243.

 THE PRESENT POSITION AND PROSPECTS OF
SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THEORY

Dietrich Rueschemeyer

Quite a few years ago, I got interested in collecting theoretical routines,

more or less well known analytic tools that would be useful for students to
know. I sought to make room for them in my teaching, even in seminars
that conventionally focused on grand theoretical conceptions of the clas-
sics or of contemporary authors.
What I had in mind would range from useful concepts (for instance
roles and role sequences) to productive middle range ideas (for instance
W. I. Thomass insistence that what counts is the actors, not the observers
definition of the situation, a claim that reappeared and was elaborated in
the ideas about reference groups) and it included also established theo-
rems, such as propositions about the interrelations of interaction, norms,
social control, and ranking in small groups. In my recent book Usable
Theory: Analytic Tools for Social and Political Research (Rueschemeyer
2009) I aimed for a systematic collection of such ideas. In this essay I want
to offer some broader reflections that suggested themselves as I was work-
ing on that project.1

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

known), Talcott Parsons and Robert Merton engaged in a consequential

debate on the best strategy for theoretical advance in the social sciences.2
Parsons argued for a comprehensive theoretical framework because an
adequate theory must reflect all of the complex interdependencies char-
acteristic of social life without omissions. He claimed that a structural
functionalism could approximate such a theory, treating relatively stable
patterns as (reasonably unproblematic) structures and focusing on proc-
esses within a social system the functions of structural functionalism
that contribute to or detract from the systems maintenance and devel-
opment.
Merton held that such an all-inclusive approach was premature. He ar-
gued instead for theories of the middle range. These deal with limited
and inevitably partial explanations of such pervasive phenomena as norm
compliance and deviance or the conditions of efficient administrative
organization. Such less comprehensive sets of theoretical propositions,
he argued, have a better chance to create testable and tested theoretical
knowledge and could bridge the gap between all-embracing theories and
empirical description.
Merton clearly defined the nature of comprehensive theory frames.
He called them general sociological orientations, and they later came to
be known as meta-theories. They represent, he said, broad postulates
which indicate types of variables which are somehow to be taken into ac-
count rather than specifying determinate relationships between particular
variables. Indispensable though these orientations are, they provide only
the broadest framework for empirical inquiry. (Merton 1968b, 142)
Though sharply set off from each other, both approaches represented
the ambition and the hope that the social sciences would be able to pro-
duce empirically testable and tested theories, a conception one might see
roughly in line with neo-positivist prescriptions about theory develop-
ment and testing.3 Both advanced reasonable arguments. And both had a
profound impact for decades.

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

Empirically grounded work following functionalist ideas became influ-

ential and even dominant in macro-comparative sociology and in com-
parative politics. Yet Parsons role declined as his own interests focused
more and more on recondite aspects of his comprehensive conceptual
framework, problems that were increasingly removed from empirical
analysis.
Merton won the respect of most theoretically interested empirical re-
searchers in both social and political analysis. And his influence lasts until
today. For instance, it is clearly visible in current moves to focus on causal
mechanism hypotheses.4
However, if we try to take stock of the results of twentieth century am-
bitions to generate theory ambitions that were central to both sociology
and political science we can point only to meager results. There are pre-
cious few genuine theories that consist of interrelated general proposi-
tions, empirically tested under the conditions specified. We have too few
theories in the full sense of the word that can be taken off the shelf and
used in efforts to explain and predict.5 Harry Eckstein spoke in 1975 of
an embarras de pauvret; and the situation has not much improved since
then.
But didnt Merton initiate real progress with his conception of mid-
dle range theory? If we examine what is probably the best-known mid-
dle range theory, reference group theory, we make an interesting discov-
ery. Reference group theory held that peoples judgments about reality,
both their assessments of what is the case and judgments about right and
wrong, are shaped by what they see as the experiences and the views of
others that is, by referring to one or another group that seems relevant
to them.

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

Using reference groups as a guide to comparative assessments of so-

cial reality, it was for instance made plausible why during the Second
World War military police, who had fewer promotion chances, were less
dissatisfied than fighter pilots who had more. An example of absorbing
norms from other groups was the role of anticipatory socialization in
the course of social advancement. The theory, then, could instill a good
sense of explanation; but it is not able to predict. The reason is clear on
reflection.
Reference group theory does some useful things. It prevents the nave
substitution of the observers estimate of the objective situation for the
understandings of the people observed and argues plausibly that expecta-
tions and views derived from the experiences of relevant others can mat-
ter decisively. This, together with some judicious ex-post selections of re-
ferred to groups, explains our sense of explanation. However, that reveals
itself as a spurious sense. Reference group theory does not tell us under
which conditions who looks to whom with an impact on which standards of
judgment. This is the reason why its hard to use it in predictions. And that
is also the reason why it is not really an explanatory theory either.
Ironically, then, the most prominent of the theories of the middle range
on which Merton placed his bets for the future of social analysis seems to
share the defining characteristics of general sociological orientations. It,
too, indicate[s] types of variables which are somehow to be taken into ac-
count rather than specifying determinate relationships between particu-
lar variables. That means the strategy of limited ambition did not lead to
full-fledged theories, though some of those do exist. I will return to one
below.
However, it would be a mistake to see reference group theory as just
another version of meta-theory and set it and other theories of the middle
range aside as similarly far removed from empirical analysis. It provides
much more than only the broadest framework for empirical inquiry.
Reference group theory must be understood as a highly focused theory
frame. Focused theory frames deserve our close attention. I will try to
show why.

Focused Theory Frames

Theory frames can guide hypothesis formation, but a few incidental

propositions aside they do not consist of or entail a body of testable hy-
potheses. Confronted with empirical evidence, theory frames are there-
fore not so much to be judged as true or false but primarily as fruitful or
 social and political theory 73

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

source mobilization, organizational capacity, and cognitive framing, new

insights were won that proved useful in empirical research.
Theda Skocpols study of major social revolutions (1979) opened with
a critical assessment of earlier work, which yielded a powerful frame. In
Capitalist Development and Democracy, Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Hu-
ber (1992) began their comparative historical investigation of democra-
tization with an explicit theory frame that focused on three balances of
power within society, between state and society, and the impact of inter-
national power relations.
Finally, in an important analysis of the scientific status of rational ac-
tion models, Terry Moe (1979) has shown that they fail to meet positivist,
covering law criteria of theory. The Prisoners Dilemma does not explain
or predict. However, it and other rational models, as Moe puts it, oper-
ate as intermediate heuristic mechanisms they cannot explain empiri-
cal phenomena, but may point to theories that do. They are, then, theory
frames of a special kind.
Focused theory frames have a number of remarkable characteristics
that situate them between meta-theories or comprehensive sociological
orientations and full-fledged theories that consist of interrelated proposi-
tions with testable implications. I want to emphasize six:
First, theory frames contain suggestions for hypothesis formation.
They are openings for do-it-yourself theorizing in the context of local
research.
Second, theory frames by seeking to identify all factors that seem
causally or structurally relevant for a given problem ensure that im-
portant context is taken into account in the formulation of specific hy-
potheses.
Third, theory frames often build on past research. As a result, theory
frames have a sharper focus than comprehensive metatheories on so-
cial reality as it presents itself in research.6
Fourth, theory frames often build on related frames, sometimes follow-
ing a common overarching frame (for instance, diverse focused frames
have been said to represent varieties of a new institutionalism). While
this may convey a false sense of security, supplied by fashion and safety
in numbers, it also establishes theoretical interconnections among dif-
ferent research areas, say among studies of revolution, of democratiza-
tion, and public social provisions.

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.

Joining Two Theories of Action

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

divergent philosophical and ideological links that are often associated

with them. Tentative, because I am willing to entertain the implications
of other premises of social and political analysis when this makes sense;
for instance, I am interested in causal influences of networks and institu-
tions on individual action, even though I do not subscribe to philosophic
claims that networks or social structures have ontological priority over in-
dividual action.
Building on the conceptions of Weber and Mead I argue that the most
elementary and strongest versions of rational action theory need to be
complemented by four belts of theoretical inquiry. These must include:
first, inquiries about the knowledge available to actors; second, inquiries
about the things that actors are after; third, inquiries about the norms by
which they feel bound or that they are willing to break; and fourth, in-
quiries about the emotions underlying and entering their actions.
Only if this subjective or internal dimension of action is taken into ac-
count (the label is that of Talcott Parsons) can these long-time rivals be
reconciled. But the time is ripe for this rapprochement. Douglass North
not the least influential among rational action theorists put it this way:
There is nothing the matter with the rational actor paradigm that could not
be cured by a healthy awareness of the complexity of human motivation and
the problems that arise from information processing. Social scientists would
then understand not only why institutions exist, but also how they influence
outcomes. (North 1990, as cited by Terry Moe in 2005)

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

dimension of action are constitutive elements of individual action and in-

teraction as well as of more complex social phenomena. For instance, our
perceptions and interpretations, whether they are by and large realistic or
incomplete, stereotypical, and even illusionary, are together with norma-
tive orientations, preferences, and emotions constitutive of roles, but
also of neighborhoods, of families, of political parties, as well as of nations
and their interests. In this first sense, the causal relevance of the internal
dimension of action is indirect. It helps constitute the groups and organi-
zations (as well as their interests) for which we may claim causal powers.
Second, knowledge and ignorance, norms and clusters of norms, changes
in preferences, and passionate as well as calm emotions can exert causal
effects directly, be it by themselves ignorance suggests many examples
or in conjunction with other elements think of eyes and ideas sharpened
or dulled by emotionally infused preferences.
Complex social formations are of special interest to us. Fortunately, we
have a full-fledged theory that deals with action, interaction, sentiments,
knowledge, as well as needs and wants and that can explain the emergence
of norms, patterns of conformity and deviance from them, leadership,
subgroups, morale, and effectiveness in problem solving in small groups.
I am thinking of Homanss theory of groups (Homans 1950, and Riecken
and Homans 1954) and later refinements.
Homanss is not a comprehensive theory. Obviously, it is confined to
face-to-face groups; but it also treats the surrounding world and its im-
pact on group life as a given; and it leaves many aspects of group life out
of consideration for instance the substance of emerging norms or the
violent or peaceful character of group action. That is, it leaves out quite
a few things many care a lot about. Thus Homans did predict in the late
1940s after he contrasted family roles in Tikopia and in a Boston suburb
that the family roles of the American middle class would change; but he
failed to anticipate the revival of the womens movement.
Importantly, however, small group theory shows how action and in-
teraction, shaped by the internal dimension of action, congeal into an
emergent social phenomenon. Equally important, it also demonstrates
that emergent social formations, here small groups, exert tremendous
influence on individual social functioning. This was, after all, why for a
couple of decades social psychology generated excellent research on small
groups. Their influence was taken as a convenient stand-in for the impact
of society at large. That, of course, would not do; but small groups of dif-
ferent kinds do offer examples of complexly composed causal agents shap-
78 dietrich rueschemeyer

ing individual action as well as the components of the subjective dimen-

sion of action.
This suggests a third critical insight about social causation: Causal re-
lations often run in important ways from complex social formations to
individual action and its constituent elements. In the quartet of chapters
that deal with knowledge, norms, preferences, and emotions, it was clear
from the beginning that these components of the internal dimension of
action are partly shaped by wider social structures. A good deal of our
knowledge does not come from our own perceptions and ideas. Norms
are taught, even imposed, and then often internalized. Many tastes and
preferences are acquired, learned in social contexts. And even emotions
are subject to social instigation and control.
This means that the ideal of reconstructing all phenomena in the so-
cial world from individual action and its component properties eludes
us even for elementary action itself. Reconstructing meso- and macro-
structures and -processes based on understanding individual action was a
major ambition of many theorists. That ideal may well not be attainable in
principle, perhaps for strong ontological reasons. Or it may elude us until
we have much better hunches and insights about how individual and col-
lective action relates to structural and cultural conditions.
Here it is instructive to look at the permutations of the thought experi-
ment called The Prisoners Dilemma. In its first incarnation it showed
how easily the rational pursuit of self-interest could yield negative results
for the actors involved as an ensemble. Many variations later, we often
see it and related models used for rational reconstructions of the emer-
gence of norms that are very similar to nave functionalist explanations
of social norms. As even two rational action theorists observe critically,
The individualist literature on the emergence of norms typically paints a
rosy portrait. Time and again, it tells how previously unrelated individu-
als facing common problems or opportunities (or both) converge under
specific conditions, to be sure to create norms that facilitate cooperative
behavior. (Hechter and Borland 2001, 204) The move from one dominant
interpretation of the Prisoners Dilemma and related models to another
very different one illustrates the problems of deriving meso-outcomes
from micro-analysis.
Inquiring into the internal or subjective dimension of action, then,
yields significant results for the strongest versions of rational action the-
ory. It also has strong implications for the most radical expressions of the
cultural turn. The difficulties that gave force to the linguistic, construc-
tivist, and interpretivist movements are real indeed. They are rooted pre-
 social and political theory 79

cisely in the complexities of the subjective dimension of action that I have

indicated, and I have no intention of denying or diminishing them. It is
the commitment to the goal of causal explanation that separates the po-
sition I advocate here from interpretivist resignation and certain radical
postmodernist programs. To be sure, cultural studies focusing on inter-
pretation can make very valuable contributions to nuanced understand-
ings of the meaning situations and actions have for the participants. What
is rejected is not such hermeneutic work that points to irony, hyperbole,
or to the focusing and truncating effects of dialog and debate. This is most
welcome. What is rejected is a retreat from causal argument.8
In spite of the complexities of the subjective dimension of action, we
have seen that causal arguments remain possible, even at the level of el-
ementary action and interaction, but also beyond it. True, they remain
partial and often require the notorious other things being equal clause
even though we cannot say which all of these other things are. Still, par-
tial causation can often be made plausible in a rough and ready way, and
it can be further pinned down with well-executed local research. Theory
frames that are repeatedly used and refined may offer good guesses about
the factors causally relevant for different problems and alternative out-
comes.

Peculiar features of meso- and macro-phenomena

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

of developing theory frames, explanatory propositions, and full-fledged

theories. I begin with two Durkheimian themes that concern the meso-
and macro-levels of social reality. Here is the first: The variability of in-
dividual action, which is grounded in the subjective dimension of action
and its multifarious ways of shaping motivations, attitudes, and behavior,
is not fully replicated at the meso- and the macro-level. Macro-patterns
are often more stable and predictable than micro-events. The contrast be-
tween suicide rates as properties of collectivities and the complex moti-
vation of individual suicides was famously exploited by Emile Durkheim
(1897/1951). He viewed going into the psychology of individual motiva-
tion as similar to wading into a swamp from which one is unlikely to re-
turn in good shape.
The second Durkheimian theme I have in mind takes off from the
first and offers a general explanation for the reduction of variability as
we move from the micro- to the meso- and macro-levels of analysis. We
encountered it already when considering the impact of groups on indi-
vidual action and its components. To repeat: Causal relations often run in
important ways from complex social formations to individual action and
its constituent elements. This can be extended with a significant addition:
Meso- and macro-contexts are in many ways causally relevant for the lives
of individuals and small groups, while they themselves are largely beyond
the reach of smaller units. An illustration from macro-analysis is found in
the impact that large and largely accepted institutions have on their corre-
sponding social fields. This explains the contrasts of how self-interested
behavior is treated in market behavior, political work, or family life.
In fact, it seems we can quite often as a reasonable rough rule expect
a double causal asymmetry in the relations among micro-, meso- and
macro-phenomena. While micro-elements are constitutive of meso- and
macro-phenomena and while meso-elements have a similar relation
to macro-formations, we often find that causal shaping and causal con-
straints seem to run predominantly in the opposite direction. That means
that micro-variability is often contained by meso- and macro-patterns.9
These ideas based as they are on hunches as well as shrewd insights
seem to enhance the prospects of theory-oriented research and successful
theory construction at the meso- and macro-levels of analysis in compari-

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

son to elementary action and interaction. It seems possible to construct

explanatory propositions at the more comprehensive levels without re-
course to well-established micro-theories, while the reverse the under-
standing of the subjective dimension of action without recourse to as-
sumptions about comprehensive social and cultural contexts appears
more problematic.
The implications of these ideas led many to invest great hopes in con-
ceptions of meso- and macro-structures as systems with stable equilibria,
possibly responding predictably to environmental conditions of subsist-
ence. It is indeed apparent that comprehensive social patterns are char-
acterized by powerful interdependencies of elements.10 An example are
the ramifications of a long-term rise in material welfare in poor coun-
ties. These affect marriage and divorce, socialization of children, kinship
networks, the lives of older people, and much, much more, while related
changes in family structure, education, consumption patterns, and savings
seem supportive of social and technical innovation as well as of economic
productivity. Such interdependencies seem indeed to suggest use of a sys-
tem model for macro-analysis.
However, there are good reasons to consider systemic conceptions of
the structural and cultural macro-contexts of social life as deeply flawed.
A model of society as a largely self-contained system characterized by
equilibria with strong maintenance mechanisms and perhaps underwrit-
ten by a consensual culture may have had some plausibility for recon-
structing the simplest forms of human social life. Yet it is at odds with per-
vasive outside influences we find in all known macro-contexts of social
life, be they due to conquest, one-sided political and economic power re-
lations, migration, diffusion, etc. It is at odds with persistent cultural and
structural inconsistencies and contradictions, which we find in centuries-
old empires as well as in modern industrial and knowledge-based rich
countries. It is at odds with the facts that the interdependencies, which do
exist, are often rather loose and hard to anticipate and that they allow for
multiple equilibria of quite varying degrees of stability and fluidity.11

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

Systemic conceptions also held the promise that macro-contexts of so-

cial life would yield to a-historic analyses that interrelate external condi-
tions, technology, and fundamental systemic requisites and pre-requisites.
Similarly situated societies would then exhibit similar features. Yet the
idea of a convergence of the structure and functioning of rich countries
has been challenged and virtually dismissed. And the idea of multiple
modernities (Eisenstadt 2000, Wittrock 2000) has gained ground. His-
tory abounds in dramatic differences among macro-social and macro-
cultural patterns. These differences point to long-lasting differences in
historical paths, obviating hopes for explanation that disregards historical
antecedents.12
If we look into the possible sources of such long-persistent differences,
some critical themes for macro-causal analysis emerge. Prominent among
them are strong contrasts in systems of inequality and their lasting rami-
fications, the organization of power and state formation, religious differ-
ences, and the establishment of ethno-racial boundaries; the latter is often
associated with the institutionalization of economic and political inequal-
ity as well as of religious orientations and practices.13
Virtually all of these contrasts in macro-social formations involve so-
cial institutions, which have found in recent decades increasing analytic
attention across the social sciences. Understood as complexes of norms
and practices that have very strong, often overwhelming backing, institu-
tions are a major part of all macro-social formations. They share three fea-
tures of interest in this discussion: First, they are one of the major mecha-
nisms shaping and constraining individual action and interaction as well
as the functioning of such meso-level social formations as voluntary as-
sociations, families, and business firms. Second, they often last long and
thus reflect contrasting past causal conditions, giving prominence to his-
torical causes in macro-social analysis and rendering differences among
societies and civilizations intelligible. Third, even though they have strong

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

management depending on degrees of job security, worker-management

relations, and so on.
Finally, and most obviously, experimentation is virtually never avail-
able; and using instead correlations of variables or multiple and varied
historical sequences raises the problems of black boxes and the more fa-
miliar doubts about post hoc, propter hoc where skeptics see only strings of
unrelated events instead of causal sequences.
Does that mean that ambitions for theoretical advance have only scant
foundation? I do not quite think so. The most likely prospect is indeed
that even in the long-run future we will have to content ourselves with fo-
cused theory frames, which remain limited in scope and cannot easily be
linked to one another, rather than proceed quickly to more and more full-
fledged theories, which we can also better connect and integrate with each
other than was possible until now. The difficulties sketched are the ma-
jor factors why in the past our advances took the form of focused theory
frames rather than the form of full-fledged theories, capable of explana-
tion and contingent prediction. And this is not likely to change radically.
However, while focused theory frames may be considered a poor ana-
logue to full-fledged theories, we do have the chance to improve theory
frames. How does this come about? By inspiring hypotheses in local re-
search that may be confirmed or at least made plausible by the empiri-
cal evidence, by searching to identify the boundaries of their applicability,
and by incorporating these results in revised theory frames. That theory
frames provide in addition an opening for tentative analytic induction
leaves some hope for ever greater approximations to full-fledged empiri-
cal theories.
Yet even a successful set of interrelated hypotheses with clear empirical
implications gives us only incomplete, partial explanations and predictions,
as we have seen in the case of group theory. This requires that such theo-
ries of limited scope be put into broader contexts, which in turn calls for
analyses capable of explanation and prediction or at least rough estimates
of the relevant factors. The discussion of particular features of macro-
contexts suggests a further limitation; and one of a different kind. Our
best hunches about macro-social formations suggest that if larger systems
inescapably diverge from each other, reinforced by path dependencies, it
will be difficult to come at the macro-level to systematic rather than histo-
rically delimited understandings. If macro-contexts are critical for an ad-
equate theoretical comprehension of less inclusive units and processes,
their historical character may well leave all or much of our analytic work
historically contingent for a long time and possibly in principle and forever.
 social and political theory 85

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 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-

3 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-

sity Press 2007, p. 371.
4 Peter Berger (ed.), The Desecularization of the World. Resurgent Religion and World
Politics. Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans 1999; Jrgen Habermas, Glauben und Wissen. Frank-
furt/Main: Suhrkamp 2001. See my critiques in: Hans Joas, Do We Need Religion? On the
Experience of Self-Transcendence. Boulder CO/London: Paradigm 2008, p. 21 ff. and 105 ff.
 the contingency of secularization 89

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.

5 Hermann Lbbe, Skularisierung. Geschichte eines ideenpolitischen Begriffs. Freiburg:

Alber 1975; Werner Conze/Hermann Zabel, Skularisation, Skularisierung, in: Otto
Brunner/Werner Conze/Reinhart Koselleck (eds.), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Vol. V.
Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta 1984, p. 789-829; Giacomo Marramao, Skularisierung, in: Joachim
Ritter/Karlfried Grnder (eds.), Historisches Wrterbuch der Philosophie. Vol. VIII. Basel:
Schwabe 1992, col. 1133-1161; Giacomo Marramao, Die Skularisierung der westlichen
Welt. Frankfurt/Main: Insel 1996.
6 See Hartmut Lehmann, Die Entscheidung des Jahres 1803 und das Verhltnis von
Skularisation, Skularisierung und Skularismus, in: Lehmann, Skularisierung. Der eu-
ropische Sonderweg in Sachen Religion. Gttingen: Wallstein 2005, p. 70-85; Ulrich Ruh,
Skularisierung als Interpretationskategorie. Freiburg: Herder 1980.
7
Reinhart Koselleck, Zeitverkrzung und Beschleunigung. Eine Studie zur Skula-
risierung, in: Koselleck, Zeitschichten. Studien zur Historik. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp
2000, p. 177-202.
90 hans joas

Kosellecks point of departure in this study is the observation that there

are disturbing similarities between early Christian ideas about a speeding
up of time in the face of an imminent Apocalypse and notions of tech-
nological progress in the sense of an increasing acceleration of social life.
This observation tallies with motifs that crop up frequently in Kosellecks
writings. First, though, we must attempt to clarify the observation itself.
This is not difficult in the case of the statement regarding technology. It
has become a commonplace to trace the acceleration of our lives back to
modern means of communication and transport, and the experience of
this acceleration is a common one. The idea of a pre-apocalyptic accelera-
tion of time, meanwhile, is rather hard to relate to for many people today.
Koselleck found evidence of this idea not only in early Christianity, but
extending into the era of the Reformation and in Luthers own interpre-
tation of the dramatic chains of events which he himself had set in mo-
tion, as a sign of the imminent end of days. Today, it seems to me, the
easiest way to begin to get across this idea is to imagine the psychological
consequences of an increased awareness of our own finiteness, as in old
age or when we are confronted with a medical diagnosis that drastically
limits our life expectancy: time seems to pass ever more quickly; con-
stantly accelerating, it races towards the end. There remains an unmistak-
able difference between these two experiences of acceleration. In the case
of apocalyptic anticipation, the idea is that time itself is shortening; God
Himself is compressing time. In the experience of modern technology,
an unchanging physical time is assumed. Here, the feeling of acceleration
consists solely in the fact that human actions use up less time.
What Koselleck was primarily interested in was whether, despite this
unmistakable difference, we may state that the modern perspective repre-
sents a secularization of Christian apocalyptic thought. There is no need
to recapitulate his expositions in detail here. His key conclusion in this
regard is that the modern idea is not simply a secularization of the old
Christian idea. For Koselleck, the modern perspective rests on the ex-
perience of modern technology itself. This result of his reflections is in
accordance with his general and in my view justified methodological
approach of not regarding traditions as something that, as it were, per-
petuate themselves, but as something that must be actively continued
and appropriated afresh under ever new conditions. While this prevents
a merely intellectual history perspective, for Koselleck a connection does
emerge, in mediated form, between Christian conceptual presuppositions
and the history of their secularization. The modern experience of accel-
eration, after all, plays a role in the development of a historical-optimistic
 the contingency of secularization 91

worldview, according to which technology brings a progress that fulfils

hopes of redemption. For Koselleck, secular hopes of redemption could
crystallize around the fact of technological progress.8 But in this sense, a
technology-centred understanding of progress could in fact be described
as the secularization of Christian hope. He adds that this very fact reduces
Christian ideas of redemption to a mere secondary phenomenon.
Now this is a highly stimulating line of thought. But it seems to me to
suffer from a tendency towards overgeneralization. If the key dimension is
the modern experience of technology itself, then all interpretations of this
experience are important. But these interpretations were and are by no
means always optimistic in nature. Furthermore, time and again even the
optimistic interpretations have to process disappointed hopes of redemp-
tion, hopes geared towards technological progress. While this processing
may transfer these hopes to future progress, it may also lead to a rupture
with historical optimism. In light of this, we would have to study in depth
the interplay between the experience of technology and religious experi-
ence and investigate the related systems of interpretation before making
generalizations.
Another problematic overgeneralization of his findings, so it seems to
me, creeps into Kosellecks work when he identifies, as a historical tenden-
cy, the subordination of Christian hopes of redemption to the optimistic
ideology of technological progress. This subordination can surely have oc-
curred only in those places which have seen a general process of seculari-
zation in the sense of a weakening of religious attitudes. But this process
is by no means universal. In the USA to take only the best-known ex-
ample of a religiously vital modern society we can certainly not refer to
a unilinear transformation from religious to secular worldviews. So what
we require is investigation of the embedding of interpretations of modern
technology in contemporary religious worldviews. Overhasty claims of
secularization merely distract from this. Koselleck, who sees acceleration
as the key characteristic of modernity, goes so far as to describe it as a
post-Christian category while making no attempt to justify the claim
of a historical rupture with Christianity that this entails.
So interpretation of the only text in which Koselleck explicitly develops
a theory on secularization leads us to an ambivalent result. He is careful to
avoid presenting his arguments on secularization solely in terms of intel-
lectual history, but seems inclined to false generalizations, positing a com-
prehensive process of secularization on the basis of meagre evidence.

8 Ibid., p. 194.
92 hans joas

Before we examine the implicit assumptions about secularization in

other writings by Koselleck, it is probably a good idea to briefly consider
his way of thinking in light of two of his academic teachers or mentors,
who are among the key figures in the 20th-century debates on seculari-
zation: Carl Schmitt and Karl Lwith. Beginning with his doctoral the-
sis, Koselleck always gratefully acknowledged Schmitts influence on his
work. There is also no doubt that Schmitts views on the development of a
sphere of political action in the absolutist state, a sphere that was neutral-
ized with respect to the bloody religious conflicts of the post-Reformation
era, was of constitutive importance to Kosellecks doctoral thesis Kritik
und Krise (Critique and Crisis). Carl Schmitts thesis that all modern polit-
ical concepts are secularized theological concepts was described by Hans
Blumenberg9 as the strongest version of the secularization theorem. Ko-
selleck referred repeatedly to this notion.10 Yet both of Schmitts ideas are
highly problematic. The modern state was by no means neutral towards
the confessions,11 and, against Schmitts assertions, the origins of theologi-
cal concepts themselves such as divine sovereignty often lay in the po-
litical language of the Roman Empire.12 This is not the place to go into
these questions, as we are concerned with Koselleck rather than Schmitt.

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

Koselleck ascribes tremendous significance to Butterfields theological

reflections here when applied to politics. Since war cannot be perma-
nently overcome even through a great punitive war, the crucial issue is
its containment. Koselleck does not share Butterfields view of the stra-
tegic significance of the Christian message of love in the politics of the
time. Nonetheless, I see clear evidence here of Kosellecks motives, deeply
rooted in his biography, motives that also drew him towards similar ar-
guments by Carl Schmitt. Schmitts intentions were no doubt originally
quite different.16 But as recounted persuasively by Reinhart Mehring, bi-
ographer of Carl Schmitt,17 Koselleck received Schmitts existentialism
and decisionism against the background of his experience as a soldier
in World War II as a moral questioning of the possibility of justifying
violence as such. So the de-normativizing notion of violence as the basis
of law generates the moral idea that violence cannot be justified even as
the basis of law. What Mehring sees at work here is the war generations
scepticism towards every justifying interpretation of violence and towards
all great constructions in the politics of history.

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

Karl Lwith, Meaning in History. The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of

18
History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1949.
19
Manfred Hettling/Bernd Ulr
ich, Formen der Brgerlichkeit. Ein Gesprch mit
Reinhart Koselleck, in: Hettling/Ulrich (eds.), Brgertum nach 1945. Hamburg: Hambur-
ger Edition 2005, p. 40-60, esp. p. 56.
20
As Reinhard Mehring argues (ibid.); see also Mehring, Heidegger und Karl L-
with, in Dieter Thom (ed.), Heidegger-Handbuch. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler 2003, p. 373-
375.
Karl Lwith, Mein Leben in Deutschland vor und nach 1933. Ein Bericht. Frankfurt/
21
Main: Insel 1989. Foreword by Reinhart Koselleck. (English translation London: Athlone
1994).
22 Reinhart Koselleck, Historia Magistra Vitae, in: Koselleck, Futures Past. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2004, p. 26-42.
23
Reinhart Koselleck, Zeitverkrzung und Beschleunigung, loc. cit., p. 193, fn. 28.
24 Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, loc. cit., p. 31 f.
 the contingency of secularization 95

moral superiority and their de facto political powerlessness in the absolut-

ist state was bridged by the construction of a philosophy of history that
made the desired power seem the inevitable result of future history.
The moral citizen, whether expressly stated or not, was always safe in a philo-
sophy of history which by name alone was an eighteenth-century product. It
was largely the successor to theology. Christian eschatology in its modified
form of secular progress, Gnostic-Manichaean elements submerged in the
dualism of morality and politics, ancient theories of circularity, and finally
the application of the new laws of natural history to history itself all con-
tributed to the development of the eighteenth-century historico-philosophi-
cal consciousness.25

The freemasons, to whose attitude towards religion Koselleck devoted

much attention, made particular efforts to replace religion [with] moral-
ity and theology [with] the philosophy of history.26
It is only by grasping this idea of the development of a secular philoso-
phy of history that trumped theology as the crucial hinge between the
situation of the bourgeoisie in the absolutist state and the development of
a political utopia that we can understand the deeper meaning of another
of Kosellecks particularly influential ideas. I am referring to his assertion
that during the same period and shaped by the same conditions, the col-
lective singular of history now arose out of the earlier idea of a multiplic-
ity of histories, all of them overarched by the one Heilsgeschichte (history
of salvation). There is a real need for this idea of the one history beyond
the many individual histories if this one history itself is to be ascribed
something like its own logic, indeed a kind of inherent subjectivity. Rath-
er than merely the product of countless human actions and experiences,
history can then be conceived as a subject which itself acts, has a will, pro-
vides certain actors with a mission, and so on. The intention of Lwiths
book had been to invalidate this idea. Jrgen Habermas interpreted this
as a stoic retreat from historical consciousness,27 which would have been
paradoxical if this retreat could be performed only through a comprehen-
sive study in intellectual history. In this respect we must agree with Her-
mann Lbbe. Far from seeing a liberation from history at work in Lwiths
oeuvre, he sees a resistance to the unreasonable ideological demand that

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

we ought to recognize history as argument in a way that merely assumes

meaning.28
This seems to me to apply to Reinhart Koselleck as well. In an appre-
ciation of the post-war thought of Karl Jaspers, he brings out how much
Jaspers remained a Kantian in the republican principles of his political
thought but without sharing his or any other version of liberal philos-
ophy of history. For Koselleck, Jaspers no longer saw the prospect of a
linear forward projection of increasing freedom. He strictly rejects all the
forms of reinsurance once capable of finding hope in history itself .29 So
it is a misunderstanding to conceive of the fight against the philosophy of
history as a rupture with historical thought. On the contrary, its aim is to
achieve a view of history anchored in a radical awareness of contingency,
one that has erased all traces of teleological or evolutionist faith in history.
It is precisely this that makes Kosellecks work so incredibly current.
But do these points also apply to Kosellecks understanding of secu-
larization? There is good reason for doubt on this front. Experts have
expressed major doubts about Kosellecks account of the development of
early modern historiography and the supposed transition from the theol-
ogy of history to the philosophy of history. Stefanie Stockhorst points out
that for the period of interest to Koselleck, we must at least work on the
assumption of the coexistence of traditional and innovative concepts.30
Basing himself on research by Adalbert Klempt, Matthias Pohlig and
Arno Seifert, Stephan Schleissing states that if we fail to factor in the
Protestant self-secularization of history since Melanchthon, we end up
with a false picture of the Enlightenment-inspired rupture with Christian
notions of history.31 Jan Marco Sawilla observes incisively that Koselleck
underestimates the longevity of Biblical chronology, which persisted well
into the 19th century. Sawilla also shows the implausibility of interpreting
universal historian August Ludwig Schlzer as confirming the assumption

Hermann Lbbe, Geschichtsbegriff und Geschichtsinteresse. Analytik und Pragmatik

28
der Historie. Basel/Stuttgart: Schwabe 1977, p. 82.
29
Reinhart Koselleck, Jaspers, die Geschichte und das berpolitische, in Jeanne
Hersch et al. (eds.), Karl Jaspers. Philosoph, Arzt, politischer Denker. Symposium zum 100.
Geburtstag. Munich/Zurich: Piper 1986, p. 291-302, esp. p. 298.
30
Stefanie Stockhorst, Novus ordo temporum. Reinhart Kosellecks These von der
Verzeitlichung des Geschichtsbewutseins durch die Aufklrungshistoriographie in me-
thodenkritischer Perspektive, in: Joas/Vogt (eds.), Begriffene Geschichte, forthcoming.
Stephan Schleissing, Das Ma des Fortschritts. Zum Verhltnis von Ethik und Ge-
31
schichtsphilosophie in theologischer Perspektive. Gttingen: Ruprecht 2008, see for example
p. 41.
 the contingency of secularization 97

that in the late Enlightenment as transcendence was dispensed with, for

the first time mankind was addressed as the prospective subject of its own
history in this world.32 On the contrary, for Schlzer, the primary use of
universal history, as the servant of religion, [was rooted] in a concept of
history and God anchored in a rational theology.33 Sawilla even establish-
es a link with the influence of Lwith when he writes that the search for
secular derivatives of the old Heilsgeschichte (history of salvation) begun
by Lwith, [led] to the paradoxical result that the existence of explicitly
religious interpretations was long overlooked.34
This finding does not apply only to Kosellecks own studies, but is char-
acteristic of the project of conceptual history as a whole. The Geschicht-
liche Grundbegriffe (Basic Historical Concepts), as Olaf Blaschke has
already pointed out,35 were conceived with an awareness of an inexora-
bly advancing process of secularization. While the series does include one
important article on the term Christianity (by Trutz Rendtorff) and of
course the entry on Skularisation/Skularisierung (by Hermann Za-
bel), there is no entry on religion! The simplistic assumption of an ad-
vancing process of secularization runs through all of Kosellecks writings.
We shall have to make do with a few examples. In his theory of temporali-
zation, Koselleck clearly wants to describe how the quasi-spatial distinc-
tion between a transcendent and mundane sphere, in other words tran-
scendence in contrast to all that is worldly a distinction that arose in the
Axial Age was converted into a temporal distinction between past and
future. So Verzeitlichung or temporalization even seems to him a better
term than Verweltlichung an equivalent of the term secularization found
in 19th-century Germany, in the work of Marx for example. But what of
all the thinkers who wrote on temporalization but were not supporters of
secularization? It is not just among non-Christian thinkers that we find a
tendency to espouse radical temporalization in the 18th and 19th centu-
ries. Was Hegel not a significant exponent of temporalizing thought and
would we not then have to determine the complex relationship between
his ideas on religion and the temporalization in his philosophy of history,
rather than simplistically declaring that the latter superseded the former?

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

Here Koselleck rejects any self-satisfied view of the Enlightenment, as if it

had invented tolerance a view that has left a deep impression in modern
Protestantism. Building on the work of another of his academic teachers,
Johannes Khn,40 he points out that Christian thinkers had fostered the
shift to the primacy of autonomy of conscience, so central to the postu-
late of tolerance, at a far earlier point in time. In terms of the history of
influences, many Christian minorities of a mystical, spiritualist or rational
persuasion, from Luther onwards, have fostered a freedom of conscience
of this kind. He is well aware of the great gulf that opens up when the
nexus between autonomy of conscience and faith in revelation dissolves.
Then, of course, there is a need for a new counterweight to the individuals
reference to his conscience, which otherwise seems mere arbitrary subjec-
tivism.
Natural law, natural feelings and the natural heart, rational insight, common
sense and generally reasonable theories of morality are apparently [!] at our
disposal as we seek to find a religiously neutral, confessionally indifferent
platform, on the basis of which the sum of all individual conscience might
find a new commonality.41

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

Seen against the background of this sensitive analysis of the aporias of

secular conceptions of tolerance, it seems absurd to impute antireligious
intentions to the secularist implications of Kosellecks thought that I aim
to demonstrate here. Yet these assumptions are present they are the tacit
premises of his thought. They take palpable form in terms such as post-
Christian and post-theological age.45 Taking Koselleck as our guide, this
inherent presumption of inevitability cannot be read as the mere value-
free reporting of an empirical tendency. After all, since Critique and Cri-
sis, Kosellecks analysis of Enlightenment thought had clearly taught us
that historical assertions of inevitability must themselves be understood
as weapons in the battle of opinion. According to Koselleck, in the En-
lightenment the political battle against the absolutist state was superseded
by a historico-philosophical interpretation of its outmoded status. Dem-
onstrating the inevitability of its disappearance thus becomes a weapon,
whose character as such is not acknowledged. But precisely the same ap-
plies to the Enlightenment prognoses of the disappearance of Christianity
or of religion as a whole, and this continues to apply into the present. Re-
pudiation of faith is replaced by the thesis that it is outmoded, backward,
behind the times. It is peculiar that Koselleck himself seems never to have
drawn this conclusion from his analysis of the Enlightenment with re-
spect to religion. But this fact does not show that he himself was trying
to deploy the thesis of secularization as a weapon. It merely shows that in
this field an assumption of historical inevitability, not constructed by him,
seemed to him self-evident. As a result, the great champion of historical
contingency failed to see the contingency of religious history and the con-
tingency of secularization.
Now that we have examined the religion-related premises of Kosellecks
conceptual history, let us return to our point of departure, namely the re-
lationship between secularization and modernization. There are three
obvious conclusions of relevance to the social scientific study of these
questions:
1. Kosellecks deconstruction of the idea of one history is an im-
portant step in deconstructing falsely homogenizing concepts of mo-
dernity and modernization, and therefore an antidote to the fetishism
of modernities. This is the term deployed by Canadian political scientist
Bernard Yack building on Herbert Schndelbachs critical interpretation

45 The expression our post-theological age appears in Kosellecks foreword to Cri-

tique and Crisis, p. 3; on the term post-Christian, see Koselleck, Zeitverkrzung und Be-
schleunigung, loc. cit., p. 195.
 the contingency of secularization 101

of the Dialectic of Enlightenment by Horkheimer and Adorno to describe

totalizing concepts of the modern age and modernity as social myths
that turn a multiplicity of different social processes and phenomena into a
single object. Without the concept of one history, there can be no myth of
a singular process of modernization. But the entire thesis that moderniza-
tion inevitably leads to secularization presupposes this singular process of
modernization. I suggest that we take one step back from this conceptual
simplification.46 If there is no single process of modernization, then nei-
ther the history of secularization as it has come to pass in large parts of
Europe nor the American experience of enduring religious vitality reveals
the secret of the one modernity.47 This would leave us merely with specific
sets of circumstances, with national (or regional) processes of religious
change.
In this case, we cannot even be sure that secularization in different eras
should really be regarded as one and the same process: in the France of
the late 18th century or in Germany during the industrialization of the
late 19th century or among the educated middle classes of Western Eu-
rope after 1968.
But of course the deconstruction of a falsely unifying concept is not the
last word in the empirically-oriented social sciences. The reconstruction
of the diverse paths of secularization and their explanation on the basis of
institutional realities and historical experiences certainly leads to identi-
fication of certain patterns that apply in many cases. David Martin made
an early attempt to distinguish between an Anglo-Saxon and a Latin-Eu-
ropean pattern, for example, meeting the demand for a general theory of
secularization48 with far greater success than modernization theory. If we
also acknowledge that there may be interactions between these patterns,
that Latin America for example has now come under the influence of the
US-American pattern of religious pluralism or that in the age of globaliza-
tion immigrants have a religious influence on their country of origin, it is
evident that the deconstruction of false uniformity gives rise to a need for
a new totalization. To date, I believe this case has been made most con-

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

vincingly by Paul Ricoeur in Time and Narrative.49 He draws on the work

of Koselleck in order to escape the Hegelian temptation of total media-
tion. But unlike Koselleck, rather than an anthropological theory of tem-
poral structures, he outlines on this basis a post-Hegelian, non-Hegelian
programme of empirically-backed partial mediation of a singular history,
a history that nonetheless includes difference. This mediation, of course,
always occurs in specific situations and is undertaken by specific subjects.
2. The deconstruction of falsely homogenizing concepts of history,
modernization and secularization points beyond precise historical analy-
sis of specific processes and sets of circumstances to the foundations of
historical action and historical experience. As already mentioned, Kosel-
leck has an action-oriented understanding of tradition. Traditions must
be actively perpetuated; the repetition of an action is always a new ac-
tion. In this sense as Swedish historian Bo Strth writes in a review of
Kosellecks book Zeitschichten (Temporal Strata) even enduring repeti-
tive structures are unique in every situation. The long-term structures,
which make change possible, change themselves with the changes they
have initiated.50 So Kosellecks conceptual proposals go beyond a simple
contrast between social structures and human action. The impression that
Kosellecks conceptual history had less affinity with the social sciences
than the writing of social history (which he also practised of course),51
could only arise if the writing of social history saw itself as structuralist
rather than anchored in action theory or if it reduced its understanding of
action to rational action and the pursuit of self-interest.
3. If we try to overcome the unthinking perpetuation of certain as-
sumptions about secularization in Kosellecks work, this also opens up
new ways of understanding the history of salvation, which only ever ap-
pears in the work of Lwith and Koselleck as a thing of the past that can
have no serious legacy in the present. As in Enlightenment polemics, their
work too conceives of the idea of a history of salvation solely in the sense
of a non-empirical pseudo-knowledge that is maintained by authoritarian

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

institutions against all rational evidence. Salvation and redemption are

contrasted with worldly happiness. Yet there have long been theological at-
tempts to overcome the notion, which is in fact obsolete, that the history
of salvation is a special history within the general history of humanity, in
line with the notion of salvation as a special religious topic and as some-
thing that stands in contrast to worldly life.52 Wolfhart Pannenberg and
Trutz Rendtorff are the key Protestant thinkers here and Karl Rahner the
leading Catholic one.53 The theological questions themselves cannot, of
course, be discussed here. But the reference to salvation and redemp-
tion opens up the prospect of thinking history not in terms of rationali-
zation, however understood, but in the light of those earthly experiences
viewed as a foreshadowing or sign of redemption. If such experiences as
in the so-called redemption religions are also interpreted as the gift of
a transcendent deity, then the focus of attention shifts to their genesis as
in the work of Max Weber and research on the Axial Age and their fate
since then, in the present and in the future. The special status of Israel
and of Christianity does not somehow appear vertically from above, but
as the historical particularization of religious life, a process of particulari-
zation whose peculiarity lies in the fact that it enabled the historicity of
the topic of salvation itself to become explicit for the first time.54 Then,
though, the question of the connection between Heilsgeschehen (salvation
events) and world history also appears in a different light than in the
work of Lwith and Koselleck not, that is, simply in the sense of the sup-
planting of one by the other, but as a new integration of the two. In non-
theological terms, this means that studies of processes of religious history
or secularization must reflect upon their specific religious or secularist
premises; such studies must also identify those experiences from which
people gain the ideas of what is good that come to guide their action
but also those experiences that lead to the insight that human action
is not enough, in and of itself, to realize the Good. Kosellecks reflections

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.

Translated by Alex Skinner

 THE MISSING SENTENCE: THE VISUAL ARTS AND THE
SOCIAL SCIENCES IN MID-NINETEENTH-CENTURY PARIS

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

in Paris in a period of unprecedented political and urban change played

a crucial role not only for authors like Baudelaire and artists like Meryon,
but also in the emergence of the positivist movement. In the history of
sociology textbooks, the first sentence is missing. This sentence will be the
last sentence of this essay.

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

Baudelaire was full of admiration for Meryon. He enjoyed the acerbity,

finesse, and sureness of a master of his style and subject, whose work re-
called the classic tradition of engraving: Seldom, in my eyes, writes
Baudelaire has the natural majesty of a giant city been reproduced with
more poetry. The majesty of the towering stone, the bell towers pointing
with a finger to the heavens, the obelisks of industry vomiting their col-
lections of smoke toward the firmament the raging skies, laden with
wrath and rancor, the depth of perspectives, intensified by thoughts of
all the dramas playing out in them none of the complex elements from
which the woeful and glorious dcor of civilization is composed is forgot-
ten here.5

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.

6 Translation by William Aspenwall Bradley. Richard S. Schneiderman, The Catalogue

Raisonn of the Prints of Charles Meryon, London (Garton & Co in association with Scolar
Press) 1990, p. 57.
 the missing sentence 109

Baudelaire was speaking of Meryons suite of etchings called Eaux-fortes

sur Paris:

Ill. 3. Meryon, Title Print from 1852.

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.

While Baudelaire was looking at the print, Meryon asked whether he

knew of a certain Edgar Allan Poe. Baudelaire replied that he had even
translated him.8 Yes but did he really believe in the existence of this

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.

Ill. 6. Meryon, Le Pont au Change. Tenth state.

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

Ill. 7. Meryon, Le Petit Pont.

Baudelaire underestimated Meryons sense of reality. For that reason,

his planned collaboration with the artist failed. It had been suggested to
Baudelaire that he write accompanying texts to the original twelve prints
of the Eaux-fortes sur Paris etchings whose mood we associate today
with Les Fleurs du Mal. Baudelaire was enthusiastic. This is a most wel-
come occasion, he replied, to write something dreamlike of ten, twenty,
or thirty lines on those beautiful engravings, the philosophical dreams of
a Parisian flaneur. Meryon flatly rejected this idea: What I want from
you, he strongly admonished Baudelaire, is that you say: on the right,
one sees this; on the left, that. Look for records in old books. Write: here
there were once twelve windows, but the artist reduced them to ten, and
then you must go to the Htel de Ville to get information on the exact
plan of the demolitions. Baudelaire was nonplussed: Monsieur Meryon
speaks, his eyes are turned to the ceiling, and he does not respond to any
remonstration.11

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

Characteristic of Meryons etchings is the mixture of exaggerated pre-

cision and imagination running wild. Full of suspense is the confronta-
tion between truth to topographical detail, on the one hand, and obvious
distortions of an entire subject, on the other often within a single print
and almost always within the cycles formed by the various stages of the
engravings. Meryon strove for mathematical precision. At the same time,
however, he could depict the Tour Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie more im-
pressively than all his predecessors and contemporaries, because he saw a
villain hidden behind every corner and the possibility of boiling oil and
molten lead raining down from the towers at any time.
Thomas Mann once wrote that a singular juxtaposition to the Ger-
man ear Baudelaire worshipped two gods, Richard Wagner and Edgar
Allan Poe: The joy that Wagners music gave him, the joy of finding one-
self anew in the artistic conceptions of another, he had discovered in but
one other case, his literary acquaintance with Edgar Allan Poe.12 In the
visual arts, Baudelaires god would have been, had he looked for yet an-
other one, Delacroix. The artist, however, in whose etchings the author
of the Fleurs du Mal was also finding himself anew, was Charles Meryon.
To mix exaggerated precision with imagination running wild is an ability
that Meryon and Baudelaire shared with Auguste Comte. They all were
mad to a certain degree, yet there was method in their madness.

II.

From his exile in Paris, Walter Benjamin wrote to Theodor W. Adorno

on February 23, 1939: It would be quite tempting to pursue a relation-
ship between Poe and Comte. As far as I know, there is none between
Baudelaire and the latter
For an astrologer, the relationship between Poe and Comte was obvi-
ous: they were both born on a 19th of January. There is also a relationship,
if only an indirect one, between Comte and Charles Baudelaire. In No-
vember 1847, Baudelaires hated stepfather, the general Aupick, was made
commander of the Ecole Polytechnique, which traditionally stood under
military command. In April of the following year, Auguste Comte asked
the commander to be hired as an examiner a request that failed like many
before and that forced Comte to renounce a career in the French system

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

of higher education. One reason why he was denied solid employment at

the Ecole Polytechnique was his inaptitude graphique, his inability to
draw, which had considerably lowered the score of his diploma. A better
grade in drawing would have opened for Comte the career of a civil serv-
ant. Positivism would probably never have been born.
Benjamins detective-like intuition did not fail him when he sensed a
possible connection between Edgar Allan Poe and Comte. There is a con-
nection indeed that ties the artistic milieu of Charles Meryon, in which
Poe played such an eminent role, to the intellectual circles of early positiv-
ism.
On the 9th of Moses 63 according to the positivist calendar, we would
speak of the 9th of January 1851 Auguste Comte informed the new, 44th
member of the Positivist Society that his application for membership had
been accepted. The new member was Edouard Foley. When Comte con-
sidered his own succession as leader of the positivist movement two years
later, he included Foley among the four candidates who seemed to him
worthy of receiving the title of a priest of humanity. Eventually, Comte
named Foley one of the thirteen executors of his will. That made him a
member of the innermost positivist circle.
Edouard Foley, however, was a close, perhaps the closest friend of
Charles Meryon.

Ill. 8. Antoine-Edouard Foley.13

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

Antoine-Edouard Foley, born in Paris in 1820, studied at the Ecole Poly-

technique before becoming a naval officer and, in 1842, a midshipman
on the corvette already familiar to us, Le Rhin. Here he got to know
Charles Meryon. The survival of the greater part of Meryons uvre is
owed to his friendship with Foley, which lasted for many years after they
both had left the navy. Foley, who later became a medical doctor, and
Meryon lived together in a small apartment on the rue Neuve Saint-
Etienne du Mont for almost two years. Even after they no longer shared
this apartment, they continued to see each other almost daily until 1855.
In the time of his mnage deux with Meryon, Foley regularly attended
Auguste Comtes private lectures and gradually became his confidant. We
need not speculate whether Meryon knew this, because in the Cabinet des
Estampes in Paris there is a letter from Meryon to Foley, dated Novem-
ber 3, 1857: It is with great sorrow that I have heard the news of your
master, Mr. Comte, passing away did he really die a natural death?
Meryons suspicion that the founder of positivism might have been mur-
dered should not be taken too quickly for yet another sign of his madness.
The suspicion was widespread: when Foley received the news of Comtes
death, he couldnt help remembering the persecutions and threats his
master had been exposed to while he was still alive.
Beginning with Foley, we can reconstruct a network of relations in
which Comte and Meryon may not have encountered each other as far
as we know but in which they did have to do with each other indirectly.

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. 9. Gallery in Comtes Apartment.

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. 11. Flix Bracquemond, Auguste Comte. Bracquemonds portrait of

Auguste Comte dates from 1851.

Do you know a print by Bracquemond, the portrait of Comte? Its a mas-

terpiece, Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo on the 4th of June,
1890. This judgment was widely shared throughout the 19th century.
Bracquemond had also made a portrait of Charles Meryon:

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:

In his meticulous study on Flix Bracquemond [Les Annes dapprentissage (1849

15
1859). La Gense dun ralisme positiviste, 1979], the art historian Jean-Paul Bouillon has
told how, in good part through Bracquemonds mediation, positivism and the visual arts
influenced each other. But the celestial length of this manuscript of more than 2,000 pages
printed but not published as it is so often the case with a French thse has limited its influ-
ence perhaps not on art history but certainly on the historiography of sociology.
120 wolf lepenies

Antoine Etex.16 Etex became a member of the Positivist Society immedi-

ately after Foley; Comte was full of hope that his influential textbook, the
Cours de Dessin, would prevent students from falling prey to anarchy in
art and politics. It was no small irony that Auguste Comte, who as a young
man had failed to make a career because he could not draw, eventually
used a drawing book as an instrument of positivist propaganda. Comte
also posed for a portrait by Etex.

Ill. 13. Antoine Etex, Auguste Comte.

Its completion, however, took too much time, as Comte complained. He

was in terrible need of this portrait because, unfortunately, there existed
already another portrait of him, whose distribution among his followers
he wanted to prevent at all costs. It was discrediting positivist ideals: I
would prefer to remain in posteritys memory without any graphic repre-
sentation at all, Comte wrote, than to see myself disfigured in a manner
that not even the worst photographs can do!17
The matter was extremely important to Comte. He asked Etex to per-
suade the creator of the bad portrait to either correct or to destroy his
work at once. It was the portrait that Vincent van Gogh would later call

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

a masterpiece, it was the work of Flix Bracquemond. Comte complained

that on this portrait he appeared too sad, not positive enough, where-
upon Bracquemond the realist replied that he could only paint what he
saw. And so yet another joint venture failed. Baudelaire had once been re-
jected by Meryon for his lack of realism. But Bracquemond was rejected
twice and for opposite reasons: by the poet Baudelaire for his overdose of
imagination, by the sociologist Comte for his lack of fantasy.
With the founding of the Positivist Society in 1848, Comte tried to cre-
ate a movement that would first change French and then European so-
ciety. Positivism was no longer a system of arguments that had to com-
pete with other theories for a claim to truth: it now displayed a set of
beliefs and rituals that competed with established religions for the status
of one and only true faith. A doctrine for the masses did not only need
holy books, it also needed a graphic representation. The new secular reli-
gion had to provide symbols that would help to develop an esprit de corps
among its followers. Works of art, prints and paintings, busts, sculptures
and monuments had to be created as expressive components of a move-
ment whose spread took on a missionary character.
Immediately after the founding of the Positivist Society, the first thing
Comte did was to look for an engraver who was to design a bronze med-
al the size of a five-franc coin. On the medals front side, the foundation
date, March 1848, was to be framed by the inscription Socit Positiv-
iste; on the reverse side, the positivist slogan Ordre et Progrs you
can still find it on the Brazilian flag would frame the name of the respec-
tive member of the society. At a time when many positivists did not dare
to profess their faith, the medals were to serve them like an amulet. They
were also designed as a token of mutual recognition and comfort. Comte
who wanted to turn the whole earth into a positivist planet said, with an
unusual touch of modesty: Perhaps at the moment we can order one
hundred such medals, if this is not too expensive. The medal, however,
was never engraved, probably for lack of money. The Maison dAuguste
Comte has preserved a medal with Comtes portrait but it is not the
medal as described by the founder of the positivist movement.

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

rgime parisien, could later become a proponent of a policy of decentrali-

zation aimed at dividing France into sixteen independent republics, with
Lyon, Marseille, and Bordeaux as the outstanding political centers. At the
end of the 19th century, authors like Charles Maurras and Maurice Bar-
rs invoked Comtes ideas when they fought against the centralism of the
Third, the socialist Republic.
Haussmanns work did not leave Comtes own circles untouched. Some-
times one has the impression that all of his wanderings in Paris were also
flights from the barons ubiquitously threatening dmolitions. It seems like
a premonition of the failure of the large-scale positivist attempts to win
converts that the lecture hall where Comte offered astronomy courses for
the workers of Paris, fell victim to clearing work for a new boulevard.
Changing the appearance of Paris was also one of Auguste Comtes
own utopian goals. Victorious positivism would transform the citys ico-
nography. The Vendme column would be torn down, replaced by a mon-
ument to Charlemagne. The corpse of Napoleon, fatal cadavre, would be
thrown out of the Invalid Cathedral. Eventually, all the positivist temples
in the French provinces had to orient their lengthwise axes toward Paris.
I shall preach positivism in Notre Dame before 1860. This is the zenith
of Comtes utopia, which was shaped by the experience of living in the city
of Paris as much as aesthetic modernism was. Auguste Comtes positivist
utopia was an urban utopia. His intellectual agenda consisted, to a consid-
erable degree, of town topics.

In this essay I have described a constellation of scholars and artists in the

mid-19th-century who are normally not seen as mingling with each oth-
er. It is a group that could tempt someone to try to refute Henry Jamess
claim that a community of eccentrics is not possible. Two things are fas-
cinating to me in this constellation: First, the great importance the visual
arts played for early sociology and social movements like positivism. Sec-
ond: by putting sociology in a context together with the visual arts it be-
comes obvious what an important role the city of Paris and the experience
of urban change played in the origin of sociology.
There is one sentence lacking at the beginning of all previous histories
of the discipline: Paris is the city in which, with the help of the visual arts,
sociology was born.
 POLITICAL ECONOMY IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT:
THE CASE OF MALTHUS AND SWEDEN

Lars Magnusson

Britain was the first country to experience an industrial revolution. Hence,

there seemed to be a strong case for regarding the development of Brit-
ish political economy as the blueprint for a general history of economic
doctrine, at least from the days of Adam Smith and onwards.1 This meant
that deviations from the norm tended to be looked upon as anomalies,
sometimes even as manifestations of intellectual shortcomings or a lack
of analytical rigour among non-British economists.2 However, as a con-
sequence of the swing-over during the last few decades from writing the
history of doctrine to writing intellectual history or in this context from
economic doctrine to economic intellectual history or discourse blue-
prints have fallen out of fashion. Instead of an older narrative which pre-
scribed the development of unit ideas (Arthur Lovejoy) and their spread
from a common centre, now the context of (economic) texts is at the
forefront, regardless of whether or not this context is to be understood
as a discursive phenomenon or seen against the backdrop of a particu-
lar socio-economic and historical path of development. Moreover, espe-
cially the Cambridge variant of intellectual history emphasises the influ-
ence and role of practice and the necessity to understand texts primarily as
speech acts. Accordingly, concepts, words and texts are used in particular
situations to argue for or against something and the choice of concepts
can sometimes seem arbitrary. In contemporary historiography it is more
important to understand what concepts mean in particular situations than
to trace their origins. This implies that applying ideas born in one par-
ticular (national and historical) framework in another always constitutes

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

a process of translation. Concepts and theories are not passively received

but must be interpreted in relation to a specific historical context.3
There is also a second reason why the use of Britain as a blue-print for
economic thinking and writing has gone out of fashion. No longer re-
garded as the standard example of a general economic and social devel-
opment, the peculiarities of Britains industrial breakthrough as well as its
causes and consequences from the eighteenth century and onwards are
often highlighted in contemporary historiography. The British path can-
not be used as a model for socio-developments elsewhere. Rather than
the rule, it constitutes a highly exceptional case.4 Consequently, we can-
not expect that its intellectual development can serve as a road-map for
the history of economic thinking and discourse elsewhere. The problem
with the old Whiggish interpretation using Britain as the standard is not
only that it is too Anglo-centric or that it neglects alternative viewpoints
and downplays important analytical achievements made elsewhere. Even
more pivotal is the problem that such an interpretation makes it difficult
to understand why and how economic thinking evolved in the way it did.
In order to grasp this, we must improve our knowledge concerning the
meaning of economic concepts, theories, and arguments in different his-
torical contexts. It was interpretations of meaning which carried weight
not only in the political and economic discussions but also in the scientif-
ic ones which ultimately determined the development of intellectual and
doctrinal ideas in a historical perspective.
As an illustration of this theme I will use the case of the Ricardo-
Malthus theory, one of the most original and powerful intellectual inno-
vations in economics sprung out of what Donald Winch has described
as Britains peculiarities.5 Sometimes scholars writing the history of
economic doctrine have wondered why this theory was neglected or un-
derstood so poorly among contemporaries outside Britain. Or even more
importantly, writers have asked why it was marginalised and replaced by
variants of neo-classical theory after the middle of the nineteenth century.
No doubt, the British context of the Ricardo-Malthus theory provides an
important answer to the question why it was not accepted and appreci-

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

ated everywhere. As an example of conceptual and theoretical translation

into a different national and historical context I will now use Sweden, a
country which followed its own peculiar path to become a modern and
industrial society.6

The Ricardo-Malthus theory

In the historiography of economics, David Ricardo and Thomas Robert

Malthus are usually regarded as the front figures of British classical politi-
cal economy and as the main initiators of what has been called the dis-
mal science. Depicted in such a manner already by contemporary Britons
such as William Cobbet, they were said to represent a school of econo-
mists sharing a gloomy view of the prospects for economic growth and
social improvement. Instead of steady growth and increased real income,
they predicted the establishment of a stationary state as a consequence
of the economic law of declining marginal returns on land. Undoubtedly,
the corner-stone of this pessimistic outlook was the theory of decreas-
ing returns on investments in land, a theory that today is often connected
with Ricardo, but for which Sir Edward West and Malthus were equally
responsible. In fact, the general idea was well known even earlier and it
appears as early as James Andersons Observations on the Means of Excit-
ing a Spirit of National Industry (1777).7 But almost as important for the
pessimistic outlook was Ricardos theory of profit as a residual, first pre-
sented in the form of a simple corn model in his Essay on Profit (1815).
According to Ricardo income distribution became a zero-sum game in
which profits decreased as land rent rose when more land was put under
the plough. This idea was presented at the same time as Malthus proposed
his principle that a population keeps wages at a constant (subsistence)
rate.
After 1815, Malthus model maintained a firm grip on theoretical polit-
ical economy in England and, to a great degree, also defined how the pub-
lic interpreted this subject up until the middle of the nineteenth century.8

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

According to Anthony Wrigley, the logic behind the Ricardo-Malthus the-

ory a logic which perhaps also provides us with a main explanation for
its great impact in Britain was that [t]heir writing remains authoritative
for the analysis of growth within the confines of a traditional economy,
an economy bounded by the productivity of the land.9 It escaped their
view that something else at the same time was transforming the econo-
my of the British Isles: the industrial revolution and the replacement of
an organic economy (in Wrigleys vocabulary) with a machine economy
based on new sources of energy (coal). Hence the Ricardo-Malthus view
slowly gave way to a certain optimism. According to the English histo-
rian Boyd Hilton, we can chart a dramatic change in the popular outlook
around 1850, when the gloom of the previous decades was replaced by a
much more positive attitude and a belief in progress and improvement.10
Especially the Great Exhibition of 1851 symbolised by the Crystal Pal-
ace in Hyde Park with its immense display of the grand achievement of
British industry making the country the workshop of the world marks
a definite end to pessimism.11 Also within political economy the firm grip
of Malthus and Ricardo gave way to a new kind of theorising emphasis-
ing progress and growth. Slowly the Ricardian theories of distribution and
value were replaced by another point of departure for economic analysis
which emphasised subjective utility as the main building block. The new
formula also included the notion that profit no longer was a residual or, as
was the case with the Ricardian socialists, a kind of exploitative surplus.
Rather, it was a rightful payment for a productive service. However, we
can still note John Stuart Mills attempts during the 1860s to straddle the
basic Ricardian model with new ideas emerging during this period.12
It is important to take note of the peculiar economic and social con-
text in which the Ricardo-Malthus theory emerges and becomes influen-
tial and also to pay attention to its close connection to the British expe-
rience. According to many historians, from Anthony Wrigley to Jan De
Vries, Great Britain experienced an industrious revolution that began in
the middle of the eighteenth century. The windfall profits from increasing
foreign trade and greater incomes due to the agricultural revolution and

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

transformation led to a rapid growth of traditional industry in the form

of domestic and putting-out industry, especially in textiles but also in
many other branches of industry. In turn, this led to a great upwards leap
in population. By the end of the eighteenth century, this rapid increase
put pressure not only on traditional land resources in order to feed and
house an enlarged population but also on the supply of raw material and
on the energy resources for domestic production and for the export sec-
tor. During the beginning of the nineteenth century, starvation (especially
in Ireland) as well as other miseries among the working classes seem to
have demonstrated the limits of the traditional organic economy. The
only solution seemed to lie in the establishment of machinery and factory
production.
Without doubt, an emphasis on the specificities of the British context
for the emergence and establishment of classical political economy, espe-
cially in its Ricardian and Malthusian form, has significant consequences.
Most importantly, it makes it possible to understand why the Ricardo-
Malthus theory made little headway outside Britain. In this regard, Swe-
den the case we will refer to shortly was by no means isolated. In the
United States, for example, there were few Ricardians and even fewer who
were ready to accept the Malthusian population theory especially not
its (dire) implications.13 Moreover, it is clear that even to the extent that
theoreticians such as Malthus and Ricardo were known or referred to out-
side Britain, they seem different from the ways in which they are usually
portrayed in general textbooks. As already noted, the main reason for this
is a translation process in which foreign authors are cited and made use of
in such a way that they fit different (national) contexts.14

The Swedish context

Together with colleagues and friends, Malthus travelled to Scandinavia

in 1799 in order to gather material for the second edition of his Essay on
Population. In the new edition, published in 1803, he depicted Sweden as
an illustration of his theory:
Its population has a strong tendency to increase; and that it is not always
ready to follow with the greatest alertness any average increase in the means

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-

15 Lars Magnusson, Malthus in Scandinavia 1799. In Michael Turner (ed), Malthus

and his Time. Houndsmills: MacMillan 1986, p. 62.
16 Torsten Grdlund, Knut Wicksell. A Life. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar 1996.
17 Carl G. Uhr, Economic Doctrines of David Davidson. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis
Upsaliensis, Studia oeconomica, 3, 1975.
 political economy in a historical context 131

ance between population and land. However, things were beginning to

change. Thus, the last Malthusian type of crisis to hit Sweden occurred
in the 1770s and was characterised by a steep rise of mortality, bad har-
vests, and epidemic hunger.18 By contrast, after 1820 in particular, Sweden
experienced unusually strong agricultural growth especially in corn and
livestock. Moreover, this period of growth was not as had been the case
in the late eighteenth century followed by an agrarian crisis, despite the
fact that population increase was quite rapid due to higher birth rates and
falling mortality. According to the Swedish bishop, poet, and author, Esaias
Tegnr, the explanation for the noticeable improvements after 1820 was
the peace, the vaccine, and the potato. Clearly, the loss of empire and
the long period of peace after 1809 (when Sweden lost Finland to Russia)
played an important role for sustained agricultural growth. However, what
broke the spell of agrarian crisis cycles was rising productivity by means
of agricultural revolution. From 1815 to 1860, agrarian production in-
creased by perhaps 75 to 100 per cent. This was considerably higher than
the simultaneous growth of population, which implies that the period was
characterised by rising per capita incomes in general.19 At the same time,
available evidence suggests that income became more unevenly distrib-
uted. Hence, the share of the population living in the countryside with
no land, or only a little land, increased considerably over time. Thus, the
number of peasant households was kept constant between the middle of
the eighteenth century and 1860, while the army of crofters and landless
more than quadrupled.20
It was especially increased land clearance which triggered this process
of growth after 1820. However, piecemeal technological innovations which
increased total factor productivity (in labour and land) also played an im-
portant role (better ploughs, increased use of horses, etc), along with in-
stitutional factors, such as agricultural reforms (enclosures), and more se-
cure property rights which elevated security for peasant investment. It has
been estimated that agricultural productivity per capita rose at a rate of at
least 0.5 per cent per year during the period 17501850. Without doubt,
this rising productivity led to positive income effects which enlarged de-

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

21 Lars Magnusson and Maths Isacson, Proto-industrialization in Scandinavia. Leam-

ington Spa: Bergs Publishers 1987, p. 18f.
22 For this see Lars Magnusson, The Industrial Revolution and the State. London:
Routledge 2009.
 political economy in a historical context 133

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

Swedish political economy around 1800

In order to fit into the general (Anglo-centric) version of the history of

economic doctrines, early twentieth century interpreters such as Karl
Petander and Eli F. Heckscher put a great deal of effort into determining
to what extent Swedish economic thinking and writing during the eight-
eenth century was of a typical mercantilist stance or not.24 They con-
cluded that up until the 1760s, the scene was dominated by dirigiste and
mercantilist viewpoints. Heckscher pointed out that the favourable bal-
ance theory is briefly mentioned by Anders Berch (who in 1741 became
the first professor in the economic sciences in Uppsala) in his Inledning till
Almna Hushldningen (1747). In addition, Heckscher emphasised that
Berch and other writers argued for more state support for manufactures,
import duties, etc. However, according to Heckscher and Petander, as of
the 1760s, the version of conservative mercantilism among these writers
is replaced by reform mercantilism. While by no means fully-fledged free
traders, Lars Salvius, Carl Leuhusen, and Anders Nordencrantz attacked

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

25 Carl G. Uhr, Anders Chydenius 17291803. A Finnish Predecessor to Adam Smith.

Turku: Meddelanden frn Nationalekonomiska institutionen vid Handelshgskolan vid
bo Akademi, 6 (1963).
26 E.F. Heckscher, op. cit., p. 871f. See also Lars Magnusson, Physiocracy in Sweden
17601780. Economies et Societetes , no. 1-2, 1995.
 political economy in a historical context 135

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

Lars Herlitz, Fysiokratismen i svensk tappning, 1767-1770. Gothenburg: Meddelanden

27
frn Ekonoisk-historiska institutionen vid Gteborgs universitet, 35 (1974).
28 Torbjrn Vallinder, University Professors and Amateur Writers: The Wealth of Na-
tions in Sweden up to 1990. In Ceng-chung Lai (ed), Adam Smith Across Nations. Oxford:
Oxford University Press 2000, p. 380.
136 lars magnusson

held the chair in jurisprudence, economy, and commerce at Uppsala Uni-

versity during 18071837. In his textbook for students, Lrobok i National-
ekonomien, from 1829, he presents three different systems of political
economy: the mercantile, the agricultural, and the industrial. He rejects
the first two because they provide only a partial understanding of the
economy, but accepts the third, the industrial system, on the grounds that
it gives a fuller understanding of such issues as value and price, distribu-
tion and economic growth. Although, by and large, Rabenius industrial
system is based on the thinking of Adam Smith, he seems to stand even
more firmly on the shoulders of Jean Baptiste Say.29 However, Rabenius
interpretation of Smith (and of Say) is extremely biased. Like Smith, he de-
fines his subject, national economy, as a science that deals with the wealth
of the nation. However, he also emphasises that the national economic in-
terest may well be in opposition to the interest of the individual: [but]
it would be totally wrong to believe that the public and the individual in-
terests everywhere and always are in harmony with each other.30 It is the
salus publica which is the aim of economic policy, and in order to achieve
this, the state must regulate the economy so that it does not degenerate
and become pernicious.31
As fathers of the industrial system, Rabenius points to Smith but also
to Say and to classical economists, such as Ricardo and Malthus. He men-
tions Malthus Principles in brief. But he does not distinguish between
Malthus and Ricardo and, in general, he treats the classical political econ-
omists as Smithians. As the corner stone of their teachings he identifies
the principle of the division of labour and the role they give to industry
in order to achieve growth and economic prosperity. Moreover, he disa-
grees with their general emphasis on freedom of trade and reduced state
intervention. In this respect he regards the mercantile system as a more
useful device, since an unlimited freedom without any doubt will lead to
self-destruction.32 For England, which already possesses a well-developed
industry and can sell its factory production to foreigners everywhere, it is
perhaps easy to talk about free trade, he says. In a manner similar to that
of Friedrich List (who in 1827 had published his small pamphlet, Out-
lines of a new system of Political economy, which anticipated his com-
prehensive book on the National System of Political Economy, published in

Lars Georg Rabenius, Lrobok I National-ekonomien. Uppsala: Palmblad & Co

29
1829, p. 25.
30
Rabenius, op. cit., p. iv.
31
Rabenius, op. cit., p. v.
32 Rabenius, op. cit., p. 26.
 political economy in a historical context 137

1841),33 he criticises Great Britain as a country of hypocrites. It would not

have been able to build its strong competitive position without making
use of protectionism and the mercantile system, he says. It is illogical that
they now complain that others use the same measures: Only by strictly
following the principles of the mercantile system, has England been able
to establish an industrial order high above anybody else. And he draws
the following conclusion:
Only when also other nations with the help of agriculture, manufactories
and trade have been able to reach the same level of improvement as Eng-
land, can it be appropriate also for them to admit to liberal principles, at the
same time as they continue to acknowledge the most basic principle of all
foreign trade; to be able to provide national producers with a steady and safe
demand, throughout the world, for their goods.34

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

Increasing versus decreasing pools of resources

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

declining marginal returns on land along with the dire consequences of

population increase which made their ideas particularly difficult to rec-
oncile with the Swedish situation. These are probably the reasons why it is
impossible to find explicit references to their theories in the Swedish eco-
nomic literature during the first half of the nineteenth century. Moreover,
while the discussion concerning such issues as the possibilities and means
for economic growth, the causes of poverty, the plights of the poor, and
pauperism, were commonplace from 1830 and onwards, they were not
carried out within the auspices of the Ricardo-Malthus theory.
One of the most influential thinkers and writers on social issues in
Sweden during the 1820s and later was Eric Gustaf Geijer, professor of
history at Uppsala University, poet, and polyglot. From the late 1830s and
for many years to come, he was a central figure in the contemporary dis-
cussion on poverty and poor-law reform.39 In his book, Fattigvrdsfrgan
(1839), he makes a number of observations which are typical of the gen-
eral tone of the Swedish discussion at the time. Also, he is the only writer
at this time who explicitly refers to Malthus theory of population. Ac-
cording to Geijer, Malthus theory might be sound as a general princi-
ple. But he also states that its dismal predictions can be avoided and that
they should not be regarded as deterministically necessary.40 In passing,
he mentions the change in the public discussion on the desirability of
population increase which has occurred since the beginning of the cen-
tury. Unlike the eighteenth century when population increase was looked
upon as a most beneficial factor for economic growth and prosperity, the
present age takes a much more pessimistic view, he pointed out. Like oth-
ers, Geijer had changed his views on this issue. In 1829 he had argued,
together with several others, that population increase was a most precious
thing. The only problem he recognised was the threat which an increase
of population and a further division of land could pose to political stabil-
ity, when the independence and power position of the backbone of the old
Swedish society, the odal peasant, were endangered.41 Without doubt, this
had been the orthodox view for ages. As late as 1801, the leading econo-
mist at the time, P.O. von Asp, referred to the Dutch case to prove the
advantages of a large population, arguing that in Sweden the small popu-

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

lation was perhaps the most important obstacle to the improvement of

agriculture.42
By 1839, Geijer is less serene about the consequences of population
increase especially for the working classes. However, he insists that in-
creased poverty and crises of Malthusian proportions can be avoided with
industrial expansion that can provide employment for the poor. If our na-
tion continues to rely entirely on agriculture, he argues, the consequences
will undoubtedly be poverty and social unrest. On this point Geijer refers
to the examples of Ireland, China, and Bengalia:
A population which completely places its reliance upon agriculture and con-
tinues to split up land to ever more hands will eventually turn into an over-
population which can easily transform itself into a rabble, clearly as bad and
dangerous as the mob in manufacturing towns.43

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.

Looking forward to the Swedish social model

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

Thus investment in human capital together with social policies aimed at

the less privileged members of society would increase the number of peo-
ple employed and raise their productivity. Almost one hundred years be-
fore its announcement, we seem to be witnessing the embryo of the Swed-
ish welfare model rather than dwelling in a world of diminishing returns.
As we have seen, the latter model never took root in Sweden. In any case,
by 1846 such a political economy seemed to belong to the past.

46 Jacob Lundell, Om Handtverksskrn. Nringsfrihet och Arbetets Organisation. Lund:

C.W.K. Gleerup 1846, p. 269 (my translation).
 PROFESSIONALISM AS IDEOLOGY

Rolf Torstendahl

Introduction

The term professionalism (which is related to the term professionali-

sation and has its origin in the everyday word profession) has become
overly popular in many occupations. White-collar workers, for instance,
use it to promote the high quality of their services. The term, however,
is not used in the same way in all professions, and what is more, it has
become loaded with new meanings during the last two hundred years. If
one tries to analyse the use of a term like this over a longer period of time,
conceptual history is unavoidable. As Bjrn Wittrock has emphasised,
this kind of historical work is of profound importance also to the social
sciences.1
The basic question of this essay is how different professions have
looked upon their professionalism. This in turn leads into both value-
related problems and questions of how different professions relate to one
another. The cultural frame of reference, and the empirical data used in
this study, stem from Western Europe and in some cases from the United
States. The object of the study is collective professionalism and the focus
will be on the different ways in which organisations, spokespersons, and
researchers have looked upon professionalism.2

1 Koselleck 1979; Wittrock 2005.

2
In the Scandinavian languages and in Finnish: investigations on teachers of differ-
ent categories, nurses, midwives, etc.; in German: investigations of doctors, teachers, aca-
demics, etc.; in Italian: investigations of doctors, engineers, teachers. Undoubtedly there
are many other special investigations in other languages that are unknown to the present
author.
144 rolf torstendahl

Collectives and Characteristics

The aim of the present investigation is not to include all occupational

groups that define themselves as professions, or aim for professional sta-
tus or have been regarded in one context or another as professions. In-
stead, the main focus will be on a limited number of groups which seem
to correspond to a number of relevant differences.
The following collectives will be discussed: barristers (Advokate or
corresponding groups in Continental Europe); academics (professors and
researchers of university disciplines); physicians (licensed medical doc-
tors); engineers (including both high level and medium level education);
teachers (including both primary and secondary school teachers); and
nurses (including all sorts of fully licensed nurses).
It is obvious that the groups selected are not all alike. All of them aspire
to be professions, but with different characteristics. Especially important
to the present investigation are the following aspects: the existence of a
community of members; the different types of membership; the strategic
aims of the group; the internal penalties for norm-violating conduct; the
acceptance of formalised punishment through trial by law; the develop-
ment of expertise as a main objective; and the degree of autonomy within
the profession.

Barristers

In spite of different court procedures and different national code-books,

barristers are when looked at from an organisational point of view
rather similar in many European countries. One difference in terminology
must nevertheless be pointed out. In countries other than the United
Kingdom, barristers are equipped not only with the right to defend clients
in court (i.e. go to the bar). They are usually referred to as Advokate or
something similar in other national languages. These Advokate are often
allowed to perform functions that in the British system are performed by
solicitors. In spite of this, we will refer to them here as barristers.
Being a barrister is an old profession. Barristers have long been brought
together in guild-like organisations, often with a semi-public standing in
Central Europe. Such organisations became regular in the 18th and 19th
centuries and gradually came to cooperate and merge at the national level
(Siegrist 1996; Burrage 2006).
 professionalism as ideology 145

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.

The penalties of the disciplinary committee are also regulated:

If the disciplinary committee finds that an advokat has offended against
good advokat conduct, the committee can decide to administer a discipli-
nary penalty to the advokat. Penalties are admonition, warning (which may
be combined with a penalty fee of a maximum of SEK 50,000) and, in the
most serious cases, exclusion. The disciplinary committee also has the pos-
sibility of merely issuing a statement.

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

All decisions on disciplinary matters are published by the Society on its

website and made public, which in turn makes it possible for the media to
report on these matters. Hence, the Society can be seen as an interesting
mixture of private organisation and public body with the State acting as
the ultimate guarantor of the rightfulness of the procedures.
While the organisations of barristers differ somewhat from country to
country, they also have many traits in common. The American Bar Asso-
ciation presents itself as a voluntary professional association with 400,000
members. Among its many standing committees, three deal with aspects
of professionalism.4 In addition, it should be noted that most of the states
in the U.S. have mandatory bar associations with their own rules. In the
United Kingdom, the old Inns of Court still function as the organisational
base for the countrys barristers. The Bar Council is the coordinator of the
Inns of Court but has, since 2006, relinquished its supervisory task to the
Bar Standard Board. The latter says of itself on its website:
The BSBs complaints and disciplinary system exist to establish systems to
identify risk areas to consumers; to take action to remedy poor performance
by barristers (or members of the profession); and, where things go wrong, to
provide an efficient and fair complaints and disciplinary system.5

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

Even so, a fundamental point in the self-image of the above-mentioned

associations is that barristers have the right to enforce their own penalties,
including exclusion, in cases of non-professional performance and con-
duct.

Academics

The authors who have written on academics as professionals are by no

means external observers but participants in academic life. In the litera-
ture on academics, dominated by American authors, it is taken for grant-
ed that a member of the academic profession is a faculty member with
different obligations in teaching, research, and service (Altbach & Fin-
kelstein 1997, 189). These spheres of activity are understood in terms of
different roles played by the same actors (Blackburn & Lawrence 1997,
passim and esp. 275).
The university tradition from 13th century Bologna and onwards seems
to have determined strongly what is and has been expected of university
professors. Different national environments with different organisational
models are not seen as fundamentally important for the development of
the profession. As is stressed by Wolfgang Mommsen, Helmut Schelsky, in
his famous work on the Humboldt tradition, Einsamkeit und Freiheit (first
edition 1963), tried to differentiate the functions of university scholars
but finally accepted the unity of teaching and research (Schelsky 1971;
Mommsen 1987).
The modern discussion of the academic profession was in fact start-
ed by Burton Clark, who was the editor of a volume with this exact title,
in which Mommsens article and several others are found (Clark 1987).
Rather than diversifying the professionalism of academics, this discussion
elaborates on the notion that a combination of tasks is what character-
ises the professionalism of academics (Boyer & Altbach & Whitelaw 1994;
Rothblatt & Wittrock 1993). However, two authors contend that the idea
of an academic profession is found only in Great Britain and the United
States and that professors in Western Europe do not form a liberal profes-
sion in the way that doctors or barristers do (Neaves & Rhoades 1987).
The latter is factually disputable given the fact that profession was not
an internal term in France or Germany or any other of the non-English-
speaking countries of Western Europe until it was introduced as a socio-
logical concept. In the idea of a Bildungsbrgertum, as used in the Ger-
man language, professors have certainly had a place at the side of other
academically educated occupations since the eighteenth century (Conze
148 rolf torstendahl

& 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

6 See http://erc.europa.eu/pdf/ERC_Advanced_A2_081021.pdf and http://erc.europa.

eu/pdf/PanelMembers_AdG_A.pdf (24 Sept. 2009).
 professionalism as ideology 149

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

No other profession is as well organised nationally and internationally as

that of physicians. The associations of the profession are relatively young.
In mid-nineteenth-century Britain, an old division into physicians, sur-
geons, apothecaries, and midwives answering to different specialities was
gradually changed. The British Medical Act of 1858 did not outlaw quacks
in a way that satisfied professional physicians. Physicians sought clear def-
initions of medical qualification, a register of qualified doctors, and other
state protections for their profession (Loudon 1986). In other countries,
Sweden for example, laws against quacks had been passed much earlier,
despite the great difficulties in making such laws effective in view of the
failures of educated physicians and the belief held by many patients that
traditional medicine was equally effective (Ling 2004).
Two investigations of German physicians in the nineteenth century
show that physicians benefited in prestige from the scientification of
their occupation. They also developed associations, not least to make their
standpoint effective against the health insurance funds (Huerkamp 1985;
Drees 1988). The actual knowledge and responsibility of physicians and
the internal control functions of their associations are taken as evidence
for the professionalism of doctors. They managed to get state support
in spite of their insistence on autonomy (Drees 1988, 178-208) and they
acquired a special recognition by the state through the elected represen-
tation to the Chambers of Physicians in several of the German states,
among them Prussia (Huerkamp 1985, 254-272).
In the year 1900 a new organisation was created, the Union of Ger-
man Physicians for the Safeguarding of Their Economic Interests, with its
base in Leipzig. Its explicit aim was to create strike funds in order to chal-
lenge the health insurance funds that exerted such influence in Germany
(Huerkamp 1985, 279-302).
150 rolf torstendahl

It is not only in Germany that associations of physicians have a long

history though for a long time these associations managed to rally only
a small portion of the total number of doctors. The British Medical As-
sociation (BMA) traces its ancestry to the Provincial Medical and Surgical
Association of 1832. Its membership included doctors in the colonies and
dominions (Little 1932, 51-60). In 1980 there were still almost 9,000 over-
seas members out of a total of 66,000, and the membership in the UK rep-
resented about two-thirds of the profession (Grey-Turner & Sutherland
1982, 309).7 In France, the AGMF, a society of physicians for mutual aid,
was founded in 1858. Although its position was weak, physicians were
well represented in parliament and could thus influence legislation (El-
lis 1990). The Swedish Society of Physicians (SLS) was founded in 1808,
and still exists as a professional organisation.8 In 1903 a rival association,
the Union of Doctors in Sweden (Sveriges lkarfrbund, SLF) was founded
and gradually developed into a combined interest organisation, i.e. trade
union, and professional association. At present the organisations coexist,
but the SLF is clearly the larger of the two (representing around 90 per
cent of the doctors).
The reader should not be deceived by the different patterns in organi-
sational development among physicians. The associations had the same
aims. They stressed the need for professional expertise in health care and,
at the same time, safeguarded the interests of their members. The BMA
states on its website: The British Medical Association is the independ-
ent trade union and professional association for doctors and medical stu-
dents, with over 140,000 members in the United Kingdom and overseas
(www.bma.org.uk [23 Feb. 2009]). This combination of trade union and
professional organisation is not unique to the BMA. Its Swedish counter-
part, SLF, says on its website that the association is both the trade union
of doctors and the organisation of the profession (www.slf.se [16 Feb.
2009]). The combination of objectives is put forward as self-evident in the
texts on the websites. According to article 3:1 of the Memorandum of the
BMA, the main objectives are to promote the medical and allied sciences
and to maintain the honour and interests of the medical profession and to
promote the achievement of high quality health care.9 The SLF in its by-
laws states four objectives: maintain a good and dignified spirit in the pro-

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

vidual patient, as opposed to what Kari Martinsen refers to as medical-

technical rationality. Nursing has, at least in theory, liberated itself from
the profession of physicians. Caring rationality has been contrasted to
medical-technical rationality (Martinsen 1989, 94-97; cf. Rehn 2008).
There is a close affinity between the arguments of all these new theo-
rists of nursing professionalism. Since the late 1970s, understanding and
empathy have been key elements in the professionalism that analysts
have encountered among nurses. Some analysts add to this a gender per-
spective. Nursing has qualities that are derived from womens understand-
ing (Davies 1995).
An international organisation of nurses was established in 1899 and
held its first regular congress in 1904, and in several European coun-
tries and the United States, nationally based organisations were estab-
lished around the turn of the century. Their main issue was registration
or licensing (Seymer 1957; Bridges 1967; Abel-Smith 1960; Rafferty 1996;
Knibiehler et al. 1984; Melby 1960; Martinsen 1989; Bohm 1972). Formal
membership was thus an early objective, but the organisations also con-
sistently asked the state for help with setting the standards for registration
and/or licensing in Britain in 1919, in France in 1922, in Sweden in two
steps in 1919 (state-accepted schooling) and 1958 (state licensing), and in
Norway also in two steps in 1924 (regulated schooling) and 1948 (state li-
censing). Internal penalties have never played an important role and have
become obsolete or been abolished, and in many countries the only pos-
sible penalties are those imposed by state inspections or courts of law for
damages caused by inappropriate or wrongful conduct.

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

15 http://www.kgd-geschichtsdidaktik.rub.de/ (5 Mar. 2009),

16 http://gfd.physik.rub.de/ (5 Mar. 2009).
156 rolf torstendahl

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

Among engineers, there is no general pattern for the creation of organisa-

tions. In fact, the differences are so great that the unity of the profession
may be questioned. What is common for most engineers is that they have
gone through a specialised education, most often apart from the general
school and university system (Torstendahl 1993). They also take for grant-
ed that they should have an elevated position in society.

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

While the notion of professionalism is almost totally absent from the

arguments of European engineers and their collectives, their American
counterpart, the AEA, stresses the profession and the community of
engineers.20 Such words are very hard to find in the texts produced by
British, French, German, and Swedish associations of engineers and pub-
lished on their websites. Historically, they have established their identity
on the basis of a specific competence unique to their profession, and more
than anything else, it is this identity that forms the backbone of the ideol-
ogy of European engineers.21
Community formation was important for early British engineers, but
its significance has waned, and locally it has only ever been at hand in Ger-
many. Communities have been very important in France, but they are related
only to specific schools and directly to classmates. The communities and
organisations have been self-conscious and proud, but they have not, in
any of the three organisational models, stressed professionalism, and with
the exception of a few researchers who have acted independently of these
organisations, nor have their historians and spokespersons.
It would seem that engineer has functioned as a social characteristic
with enough weight to make any further emphasis on professionalism su-
perfluous. Consequently, one can detect few traces of professionalism as
an ideology in the material focusing on European engineers. In the United
States, some researchers have applied the notion of an ideology of profes-
sionalism to engineers, and certainly the most comprehensive organisa-
tion at the moment affirms that this ideology corresponds to its ambitions
to foster professionalism among engineers.
European engineers, even more so than European teachers, show indif-
ference to the idea of professionalism.

Results

That there is a lack of agreement in society in general about what profes-

sionalism is and what it is not can hardly be considered a new insight.
What we have shown here, however, goes one step further. While profes-
sional groups have quite different ways of understanding professionalism,

20 http://www.aea.org/aboutAEA.htm (24 Sept. 2009). Further explication of the values

of the profession is found in different documents on the website, e.g. an article In Honor of
the American Engineer (/HonorEngineers.pdf).
21
The section on engineers relies on a comprehensive manuscript by the present au-
thor on European engineers from 1800 to the present.
158 rolf torstendahl

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

although they do take this professionalism (which is attached partly to the

university as such and partly to the various disciplines) for granted. Engi-
neers (in Europe) have shown little interest in professionalism, focusing
instead on their standing as engineers.
As we can see, the ideology of professionalism has developed in a
number of different ways. Professionalism has turned out to be a value of
varying importance to different groups and the meaning of the concept
differs depending on what occupational activities are being performed.
In sum, one could say that the ideology of professionalism has been very
strong in some professional groups, while others have made little use of it.
 professionalism as ideology 161

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U.P.), 2000.
 PART THREE

Civilizational Studies
and the Comparison of Civilizations
 INTERPRETING HISTORY AND
UNDERSTANDING CIVILIZATIONS

Johann P. Arnason

A common objection to the idea of civilizational analysis casts doubt on

the validity of its most basic premise: the supposedly bounded and dis-
tinctive units called civilizations are rejected as reified constructs, and
therefore incompatible with historical approaches to social and cultural
phenomena. Megaliths and monoliths are terms that have been used
at least in oral discussions to express this disapproval of civilizations
as descriptive categories and objects of theorizing. Those who take such
views are usually unfamiliar with recent efforts to refine the conceptual
framework of civilizational studies, not least in order to avoid the reify-
ing trends and connotations evident in some earlier work. The following
discussion will take off from one particularly interesting proposal of this
kind. S.N. Eisenstadts reflections on the civilizational dimension of hu-
man societies1 (and, as we might add, of human history) start with a re-
lational and historical perspective that allows for a variety of formations
and does not impose a model of bounded entities belonging to the same
invariant type. The civilizational approach is, in other words, not reduc-
ible to the assumption that civilizations defined in a strong and uniform
sense are the key units of the socio-cultural world. It should be formu-
lated in terms attuned to a broader range of civilizational patterns and
constellations; the distinctive profile, the self-contained dynamics, and
the mutual demarcation of civilizations become matters of degree rather
than principle, and their level of development is a subject for comparative
historical analysis. Similarly, the relative weight of civilizational aspects,
understood in this flexible way and conceptualized as one set of socio-
cultural factors among others, should be seen as a question to be settled
by historical study of changing configurations.

1 S.N. Eisenstadt, The civilizational dimension in sociological analysis, in id., Com-

parative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities (Leiden/Boston, Brill, 2003), pp. 33-56.
168 johann p. arnason

The ontology of the social-historical

As I will try to show, this understanding of the civilizational dimension

can be linked to a more radical strategy for rethinking basic concepts.
Castoriadiss ontology of the social-historical, although developed without
any reference to the question of civilizations, suggests new ways of con-
ceptualizing that problematic; but to explain the connection, a closer look
at Castoriadiss argument is needed.2 For present purposes, his attempt to
elucidate rather than to theorize the social-historical may be summed
up in three points. The first signals a radical critique of traditional para-
digms: they appear as unjustified attempts to project models derived from
elsewhere into the social-historical dimension. The two main examples
of this paradigm transfer are based on analogies with living beings and
with logical structures. Organismic notions of society are most frequently
linked to the functionalist mode of thought, and Castoriadiss critique of
that tradition, in Marxist and non-Marxist versions, is crucial to his whole
project. If we shift the focus to civilizational studies, the influence of func-
tionalist models seems much more limited than in sociological theory and
analysis (Marcel Mausss reference to civilizations as hyper-social systems
of social systems did not translate into the functionalist line of inquiry
that might now be suggested by such terms), but the organismic analogy
affected this field in another way. Patterns of growth and decay, funda-
mentally similar to those observable in the biosphere, have been ascribed
to civilizations (or high cultures, where that terminology is preferred).
The cyclical scheme thus construed was most forcefully applied by Os-
wald Spengler; although the specific claims of his cultural morphology
are no longer a matter of serious debate among comparative historians,
the underlying image of rise and decline has had a wide if not always ac-
knowledged influence. The emerging but still underdeveloped discussion
on crises and collapses of complex societies, especially on a civilizational
scale, shows how important and at the same time difficult it is to move
beyond organismic analogies in this area. More nuanced models, empha-
sizing complex and varying mixtures of disintegration and regeneration,
are gaining ground among historians, but there is disagreement on basic
conceptual issues.3

2 Cornelius Castoriadis, Linstitution imaginaire de la socit (Paris, Seuil, 1975). All

quotations from this book are translated by the author of the present paper.
3 See especially Glenn M. Schwartz and John J. Nichols (eds.), After Collapse The Re-
generation of Complex Societies (Tucson, The University of Arizona Press, 2006), and Patricia
McAnany and Norman Yoffee (eds.), Questioning Collapse (Cambridge, Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2010 critical reactions to Jared Diamonds work on collapse).
 interpreting history and understanding civilizations 169

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

amenable to that kind of criticism. More indirect approaches are needed,

and two alternatives suggest themselves. The path through classical phi-
losophies of history leads to conclusions already developed through the
critique of Hegelian and Marxist perspectives on society. More distinc-
tive results emerge when the argument links up with later work focusing
on the logic of historical inquiry. Although Castoriadis does not identify
this post-classical philosophy of history as clearly as its Hegelian-Marxist
predecessor, the connection is visible enough for the main points to be set
in their proper context. The question raised is about ways of understand-
ing history as succession (in other words: a sequence of events), and the
two main models on offer are causal explanation and interpretive under-
standing. Castoriadis mentions three schemes of succession: the causal
link, the means-ends framework, and the logical implication; but the two
latter ones have, in the most important cases, been merged, as in G.H.
von Wrights model of the practical syllogism. The most basic objection is
that they block the understanding of history as a permanent emergence
of radical otherness, immanent creation, non-trivial novelty.5 A certain
minimal recognition of history as creative becoming seems inherent in
the self-understanding and the practice of histoire vnementielle (the
event is unthinkable without the connotations of openness, novelty, and
contingency), but it tends to get obscured or devalued by more elaborate
conceptions of history as a structured process or as a mode of inquiry.
As long as efforts to theorize history lean on the externally grounded
guidelines discussed above, they will fail to link up with the experiences
and pre-comprehensions that suggest a more direct access to distinctive
aspects. Castoriadis wants to reverse this trend by elucidating (not, in
his view, the same thing as theorizing) the occluded but never completely
lost meaning of temporal succession. As he argues, this approach will con-
verge with the lessons of preceding critical reflection on theories of soci-
ety. The most pronounced case of historical creation is the appearance of
new societies (new types of society) and the incessant self-transformation
of every society,6 and this was precisely the blind spot of broadly defined
functionalist and/or structuralist paradigms. At the same time, the con-
nection with history underlines the temporality of human societies.
Before moving on to consider the final turn to an ontology of the social-
historical, let us as an aside note that Castoriadiss metahistorical re-
flections leave out some interesting themes of twentieth-century historical

5 Castoriadis, Linstitution imaginaire, p. 256.

6 Ibid.
172 johann p. arnason

thought. In particular, the search for intelligible units of historical study

has raised questions and touched upon topics relevant to the problems to
be discussed here (the term just quoted is Arnold Toynbees, but it is ap-
plicable to the work of many other scholars). This line of thought has pri-
marily taken issue with a perceived over-emphasis on the nation-state as a
framework of social life and historical change; in some cases the critique
led to projects of global or universal history, but more limited horizons
have also been explored, and the most important formations brought up
for debate in that context are regions and civilizations (empires might be
mentioned as a third example, but here the conceptual implications seem
even less clear). In both cases, debates on specific structures have given rise
to more general ideas about configurations of the social-historical world.
The regions discussed by historians in search of relevant and distinc-
tive units be it Norden, Central Europe, or Inner Asia can never be
defined in strictly geographical terms. Rather, the concrete meaning given
to geographical horizons is a result of ongoing historical experiences, and
regional identities are, in that sense, always in the making. This intertwin-
ing of preconditions and innovations is even more pronounced when it
comes to civilizations as perceived by historians whose angle of vision
overlaps but does not coincide with the sociological one. Fernand Brau-
dels work, which is also of exceptional significance for regional studies,
is perhaps the most representative example of this approach to the civi-
lizational field. For Braudel, civilizations are continuities, interminable
historical continuities, persisting across series of economies, series of
societies,7 but they also have a history that has to be written with due
regard to events, conjunctures, turning-points and heroes.8 Civilizations
can, in other words, only exist as permanently changing combinations of
continuities and innovations. And for all the emphasis on the longue du-
re in Braudels historical analyses, this brings his metahistorical train of
thought into contact with Castoriadiss ideas.
The final move, the ontological interpretation of the social-historical,
spells out the implications of the two steps summarized above. It draws
more directly on the regained understanding of history, but links this
insight to a comprehensively revised image of society. History is, as the
critique of reductionistic paradigms showed, inseparable from temporal-
ity, and temporality implies creation, at least in the basic sense of ongo-

7 Fernand Braudel, Grammaire des civilisations (Paris, Arthaud-Flammarion, 1987), p.

66, 67.
8 Ibid., p. 58.
 interpreting history and understanding civilizations 173

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

Institutions are, in other words, frameworks for interconnecting past,

present, and future. Finally, the complex of institutions and time-space
configurations depends on patterns of meaning whose internal coherence
is inseparable from a constitutive opening to the creation of new mean-
ings.
This roadmap for an ontology of the social-historical opens up a whole
field of further questions, but it is in my opinion the most insightful ap-
proach of its kind, and will prove particularly useful when it comes to
closer analysis of the civilizational dimension. The focus on creativity re-
vives a theme that has occasionally been acknowledged but never devel-
oped in the sociological tradition (the locus classicus is Durkheims work
on the elementary forms of religious life). Castoriadiss treatment of it
places a strong emphasis on the multiple contexts of creativity: spatial and
temporal settings, institutional frameworks, and horizons of meaning. At
the same time, the critique of causalist and functionalist models, as well as
(more implicitly) models of rational action, underlines the limits of social

9 Castoriadis, Linsitution imaginaire, p. 296.

10
Ibid.
11
Ibid., p. 301.
12
Ibid.
174 johann p. arnason

and historical explanation. The contextualizing line of argument may be

read as an interpretative turn, and thus although Castoriadis never makes
his points in these terms a new round in the unfolding debate on expla-
nation and understanding.
Before moving on to substantive civilizational issues, a general and
provisional connection should be outlined. Eisenstadt has repeatedly
without ever arguing the case at length stressed the link between his
civilizational turn and the question of creativity in society and history.
A quick reflection suggests four basic points of contact between the two
problematics. First, the emergence of civilizations, defined as large-scale
and long-term configurations of world-shaping ideas and interconnected
institutions, is an exemplary case of creativity. Second, however, the self-
perpetuating civilizational frameworks channel creativity in specific direc-
tions and block or marginalize others. Third, distinctive features of (and
contrasts between) civilizations are, among other things but not least, re-
lated to degrees and domains of creative innovation. Finally, civilizations
undergo changes that can culminate in mutations involving the formation
of new civilizational patterns, sometimes in such a way that a plurality of
civilizations replaces a single existing one; such transformations must also
be counted among the major manifestations of social-historical creativity.
All these analytical perspectives will reappear in more specific guises as
the discussion progresses.

Exploring the civilizational dimension

It seems appropriate to begin with Eisenstadts definition of the civiliza-

tional dimension:
The central analytical core of the concept of civilization in contrast to
such social formations as political regimes, different forms of political econ-
omy or collectivities like tribes, ethnic groups or nations, and from religion
and cultural traditions is the combination of ontological or cosmological
visions, of visions of trans-mundane and mundane reality, with the defini-
tion, construction and regulation of the major arenas of social life and in-
teraction Such definitions and regulations construct the broad contours,
boundaries, and meanings of the major institutional formations and their
legitimation and greatly influence their organization and dynamics.13

13
S.N. Eisenstadt, The civilizational dimension, p. 34.
 interpreting history and understanding civilizations 175

Our present aim is twofold: to understand this dimension as a distinctive

aspect of the social-historical domain, open to varying lines of develop-
ment in different settings, and to show that at the same time, the civiliza-
tional perspective expands the horizons of the social-historical by thema-
tizing factors and features otherwise neglected (and not given their due in
Castoriadiss ontological frame of reference).14
As I will argue, Eisenstadts short account of the civilizational dimen-
sion calls for additions as well as revisions; but to put the critical remarks
in perspective, its strengths should first be underlined. Eisenstadts em-
phasis on connections between cultural interpretation and social regula-
tion might, at a quick glance, seem reminiscent of the Parsonian tradition
to which he was once much closer. A more attentive reading will, how-
ever, reveal several crucial differences. The interconnections between the
two fields in question articulations of being-in-the-world and of social
life are too flexibly defined to conform to the model that assumes struc-
tural or functional determination of one side by the other (as in Parsons
theory of social evolution, where the long-term shaping of institutional
patterns by cultural programmes is the surface of a deep structure that
confines culture to a functional role in the social system). Rather, the the-
sis put forward by Eisenstadt indicates an enduring but malleable bond
whose varying forms are a matter for historical inquiry. Neither typical
trends nor ultimate limits to variation can be identified without compara-
tive empirical studies.
Further contrasts with the Parsonian paradigm emerge on both the
cultural and the social side. In the former case, the main emphasis is no
longer on values as sets of orientations for social action. Nor can the shift
be understood as an upgrading of cognitive aspects, included but not
properly foregrounded in Parsons version of the cultural programme. The
key point is the interpretive turn inherent in the reference to ontological
or cosmological visions, and since the latter notions imply a relationship
to the world, they constitute an opening to philosophical reflection. Al-
though Eisenstadt never engages with phenomenological work on themes
relating to the experience and understanding of the world, the elective af-
finity between his civilizational approach and that style of philosophical
thought seems obvious. On the other side, it is noteworthy that the insti-
tutional impact of world-making visions is described in terms of defini-

See Suzi Adams, Castoriadiss Ontology: Being and Creation (New York, Fordham
14
University Press, forthcoming in 2011).
176 johann p. arnason

tion, construction and regulation. To put it another way, the domains of

social life are not regarded as given functional units or subsystems. Their
boundaries as well as their internal rules depend on cultural contexts. A
further significant point is the absence of an explicit reference to legitima-
tion. This may translate into a more positive indication: the relevance of
legitimation as a separate aspect of defining and regulating frameworks
varies from one historical constellation to another, and civilizational dif-
ferences in this regard should be a subject for comparative inquiry.
Finally, the division of the social world into arenas has an obvious and
far-reaching implication. The subdivisions of the social world are fields of
conflicting forces, and this is to be acknowledged as a defining feature,
rather than a mere disruption of systemic or functional patterns. But the
recognition of social conflict also links it to cultural presuppositions. Inter-
pretive visions are always accompanied by interpretive conflicts, not least
at the level of world-views open to divergent articulations. The interplay of
orthodoxies and heterodoxies is a recurrent example, unequally developed
in different civilizational contexts. In more general terms, the entangle-
ments of cultural, social, and political conflicts mutually irreducible but
always interrelated appear as a key theme for civilizational analysis.
A brief comparison with Castoriadiss ideas will help to clarify the
emerging line of argument, and to identify a missing aspect of the civiliza-
tional dimension. To begin with, a basic affinity between the ontology of
the social-historical and the attempt to demarcate a civilizational dimen-
sion should be noted. A theoretical perspective that stresses the centrality
and plurality of world visions (by implication both coexisting and succes-
sive) is clearly akin to the approach that strives to grasp the role of im-
aginary significations in the self-constitution and structuration of human
societies. On the other hand, the civilizational frame of reference as for-
mulated by Eisenstadt goes beyond the ontology of the social-historical
in focusing attention on changing ways of intertwining cultural perspec-
tives on the world and institutional forms of social life. Not that Casto-
riadis is unaware of the world-making or world-articulating side to the
social imaginary. As he notes, the image of the world and the self-image of
society are always interconnected, and their unity is in turn
based on each societys definition of its needs, as it is inscribed in its ac-
tivity, effective social doing. The self-image that society constructs for itself
includes as an essential dimension the choice of objects, action etc., embod-
ying that which has meaning and value for the society in question.15

Castoriadis, Linstitution imaginaire, p. 209.

15
 interpreting history and understanding civilizations 177

It would be hard to deny that these formulations reflect a certain reduc-

tionistic thrust: the world perspective tends to merge with a selective fo-
cus on phenomena in the world, whose significance is in turn identified
with the meaning and value which they acquire through the constitution
and reproduction of society. The whole argument is uncomfortably close
to the functionalist view that Castoriadis subjected to telling criticism;
there is no adequate account of the self-distancing effect which articula-
tions of the world can some of them much more markedly than others
have on social actors and institutions. In this regard, Eisenstadts bipolar
model of the civilizational dimension seems more promising. It posits
articulations of the world as autonomous and distinctive expressions of
creativity, alongside the institutional ones, and allows for varying degrees
of distance between the two sides. At the same time, the emphasis on cul-
tural ontologies to quote a term used elsewhere in Eisenstadts work as
important and effective in their own right enables us to distinguish be-
tween three levels of their formative logic. The interpretation of world ho-
rizons inherent in the human condition, and therefore shared by different
civilizations, is analytically separate from the specific and superimposed
constellations of meaning that define the cultural profile of a particular
civilization; both enter into but remain distinct from ideological elabora-
tions in response to social problems and demands. These considerations
support the claim that a civilizational perspective can expand our grasp of
the social-historical.
As the above reading of Castoriadiss arguments suggested, neither the
ongoing reshaping of nor the more abrupt radical changes to significa-
tions and institutions can be understood in isolation from their contexts.
They unfold within configurations of space and time, and imprint their
specific patterns on both time and space. This aspect is not included in
Eisenstadts definition of the civilizational dimension. But a brief return
to classical sociology will indicate a way of dealing with the problem. The
classics can be credited with two mutually independent discoveries of the
civilizational domain, from strikingly different angles but along implicitly
complementary lines. The Weberian approach prefigures Eisenstadts con-
ception: as recent scholarship on this subject has shown, the well-known
Weberian statement about ideas shaping the course of action presuppos-
es the intermediary role of institutions, and Webers most path-breaking
analyses of the connections in question are developed in comparative civi-
lizational terms. The other approach was adumbrated by Durkheim and
Mauss. It starts with external and historically salient features of civiliza-
tional formations, rather than with their internal structures: civilizations
178 johann p. arnason

are, in Mausss words, families of societies, groupings that in each case

encompass a plurality of social formations integrated on a smaller scale.
In the most obvious cases, a shared civilizational framework unites mul-
tiple political centres (this pattern recurs in otherwise very different his-
torical and civilizational settings, from ancient Mesopotamia to modern
Europe), but when imperial conquests impose political unity with some
cultural connotations on a vast spectrum of societies with different tradi-
tions (Rome and China are key examples), it becomes a matter for histori-
cal and comparative inquiry whether the empire functions as a civiliza-
tional matrix. The metaphorical reference to a family is meant to cover
both coexisting and successive social formations; spatial and temporal
contours are therefore integral parts of civilizations as seen by Durkheim
and Mauss. By the same token, the comparative analysis of civilizations
must be closely linked to the study of historical regions. It is not being
suggested that Weber was wholly unaware of these implications. The cul-
tural worlds to which he refers also appear as cultural areas, and their
geographical locations are taken into account. But there is no sustained
discussion of the regional dimension of civilizations. To mention only two
conspicuous examples, Webers analysis of Chinese civilization does not
deal with the East Asian region that was shaped more by the diffusion of
Chinese cultural and institutional patterns than by Chinese imperial ex-
pansion, and his interpretation of the Occidental trajectory never engages
with questions concerning the regional differentiation of the West. Con-
versely, Durkheim and Mauss do not ignore the interpretive and institu-
tional core structures of civilizations. The reference to civilizations pos-
sessing their specific sets of basic concepts (in the concluding chapter of
Durkheims Elementary Forms of Religious Life) may be read as a reminder
of this problematic. But although there are some other hints in the same
vein, they do not add up to a clear picture, and the main emphasis is on
the diffusion of cultural traits techniques in the broadest sense as well
as organizational models and modes of thought within the civilizational
family of societies.
There is, to sum up, no classical model for a synthesis of the two ap-
proaches. If we propose to combine them, and thus to develop a more
complex and balanced definition of the civilizational dimension (under-
stood as an aspect of the social-historical), closer examination of explicit
and implicit relationships between them is needed. The most plausible
starting-point, directly linked to the line taken by Durkheim and Mauss,
is the scale of integration represented by families of societies. By making
formative influence on this level a defining feature of the civilizational
 interpreting history and understanding civilizations 179

dimension, we can distinguish it more clearly from an omnipresent as-

pect of human societies. Some kind of interconnection between articula-
tions of the world and frameworks of social life is always envisaged and
achieved, irrespective of the size and complexity of the social formation in
question. The conceptual focus on large-scale and long-term formations
reflects and reinforces strong trends in civilizational studies; it must, as
will be shown below, be modified in certain regards, but first we should
take measure of its contribution to civilizational analysis. The configura-
tions that encompass multiple societies, coexisting and successive, are not
only spatial and temporal frames for the kind of integration that estab-
lishes civilizational unity; they also open up possibilities of intra-civiliza-
tional differentiation and hence perspectives of comparison between var-
ying patterns of such processes. Mausss later comments on civilizational
themes show that he saw the European processes of nation formation as
an exemplary case of differentiation within an overarching civilizational
framework, and therefore a basis for comparison with the record of other
civilizations. But this is still one of the less developed themes of civiliza-
tional analysis.
The two sides to the civilizational dimension may be briefly described
as the interpretive-institutional and the spatio-temporal one (the latter
can also be seen as the geocultural and geopolitical aspect of a civiliza-
tional formation). It seems useful to refer to interpretive-institutional
factors as civilizational patterns, and to such patterns embodied in spa-
tial and temporal formations as civilizational complexes. The notion of
civilizations in the plural is most frequently applied to the latter. We can
speak of civilizational constellations when two or more civilizational com-
plexes are particularly closely interconnected through shared sources and/
or intensive exchanges (the archetypal case is the group of civilizations
that succeeded the Roman Empire and entered in asymmetric and dif-
ferent ways into the making of Europe). Comparative views on this set
of themes will have to go far beyond the horizons of classical sociology.
A preliminary survey can begin with the relationship between civiliza-
tional patterns and civilizational complexes, and the variations to which
it is subject in diverse contexts. Two prominent but very different cases
can serve to illustrate a more general problematic. The Chinese and Jew-
ish civilizations are in many respects poles apart, but debates on the Axial
Age and its long-term legacies have brought them into a common frame
of reference; a more direct comparison may be of some use.
China appears to be a well-established example of comprehensive cul-
tural transformations during the Axial Age (with the proviso that this was
180 johann p. arnason

a particularly long-drawn-out process; Christoph Harbsmeier refers to

an axial millennium). The scene of the transformation was a large area
with an eventful history and considerable differences between the politi-
cal units into which it was divided. Three phases of political change can
be distinguished within the chronological limits of the Axial Age. A pe-
riod of political fragmentation and devolution was followed by very in-
tensive interstate competition leading to the emergence of a few superior
power centres, and then by imperial unification. Selective references to
the cultural and ideological models developed during the Axial Age be-
came core components of the imperial tradition. It seems justified to de-
scribe the whole process as the formation of Chinese civilization (how to
label the preceding Shang and Zhou dynasties is a question that will not
be discussed here). As such, it can be compared to a later formative pe-
riod. From the third to the late sixth century, the erstwhile imperial do-
main underwent another phase of prolonged fragmentation, and at the
same time, new components of internal as well as external origin changed
the overall profile of Chinese cultural traditions (the emergence of Dao-
ism as a revealed religion sui generis coincided with the arrival of Bud-
dhism from India through Central Asia). Developments during the same
centuries gave rise to an East Asian region characterized by adaptive bor-
rowings of Chinese cultural models. Both the pluralistic turn of religious
culture and the simultaneous regionalizing process are good reasons to
distinguish an emerging Sinic civilization from an earlier Chinese one
(the term Sinic has been used by various authors, but not always in the
same sense). In both regards, the transformation was sealed by the reuni-
fication of the empire and the following consolidation of strong states in
Japan and Korea. A decisive restoration of the Chinese imperial centre (in
a shape based on the Han legacy but enriched by the new cultural frame-
work) was accompanied by the demarcation of a region where civiliza-
tional authority was exercised without imperial control.
For our present purposes, the significance of this historical record is
that it exemplifies at two successive junctures the simultaneous crystal-
lization of civilizational patterns and civilizational complexes. Moreover,
the relatively clear-cut distinction between an empire conducive to civi-
lizational unity and a civilizational sphere transcending imperial rule
invites comparison with other cases. The most obvious example is the
Roman Empire, whose rise to unchallenged power coincided with the
heyday of the Han Dynasty in China. Roman rule around the Mediterra-
nean was also a civilizational factor of the first order, but the presence and
the established primacy of Greek civilization as well as some other less
 interpreting history and understanding civilizations 181

prominent historical forces made the result different. Recent critiques of

the notion of Hellenization, as well as new insights into the complex inter-
action between Greek and Roman cultural patterns, support the view that
civilizational dualism was an enduring feature of the pre-Christian empire
(the transformation signaled by the Constantinian turn is another story).
To use the terminology suggested above, this was a civilizational constel-
lation rather than a civilizational complex.
A closer look at the Jewish case leads to very different conclusions.
The religious reorientation that took place in Ancient Israel is commonly
ranked among the most seminal axial transformations, but its direct his-
torical impact was more severely limited than in the other outstanding
cases. It responded to problems and reacted against traditions character-
istic of a larger and more heterogeneous cultural area (the Ancient Near
East); more specifically, a break with established models of sacred king-
ship, including the imperial forms it had more recently taken, gave rise to
new visions of sovereignty, legislation, and community. But these innova-
tive moves occurred in a small and divided country, particularly exposed
to the ambitions and rivalries of stronger powers. Moreover, historical re-
search on the formation of Judaism has increasingly tended to stress the
trends at work during the Exile and the Second Temple, i.e. under direct
or indirect imperial control and with correspondingly minimal effects on
the broader environment. The civilizational potential of Jewish religiosity
was realized on a larger scale through later developments in very differ-
ent socio-political settings and on the basis of combinations with socio-
cultural patterns rooted in other axial transformations. Monotheism is
the accepted label for the religious orientation that played a key role in
the crystallization of new large-scale and long-term formations. The term
is, as has often been argued, an oversimplification, but it has proven hard
to replace, and it is undeniably justified to the extent that a more gen-
eral trend towards monotheism was radicalized and fused with a set of
more specific changes to the religious imaginary. The idea of a supreme
and exclusive legislator, the corresponding redefinition (or, following Jan
Assmann, relocation) of sovereignty and the notion of the chosen peo-
ple were radically innovative but at the same time inherently controversial
cultural themes that lent themselves to multiple variations over a long pe-
riod of time.
This civilizational trajectory is, in short, marked by a distance between
civilizational patterns and civilizational complexes, much greater than in
the Chinese/Sinic case. It would, however, be very misguided to conclude
that preexisting patterns were embodied in new civilizational complexes
182 johann p. arnason

after a multisecular phase of latency. It is true that both Christianity and

Islam, which became the constitutive visions of new civilizations, took
shape through the re-elaboration of the Jewish legacy; but in both cases,
their new civilizational role called for major readjustments, accompanied
and contested by religious currents that were not fully absorbed into the
new formations. The adaptation of Christianity to imperial power was
a circuitous and long-drawn-out process, whereas the Islamic message
seems to have taken an imperial turn at a very early stage; the civiliza-
tion-building dynamics of the two religions were thus codetermined by
political factors. In the Christian case, religious schisms of several inter-
connected kinds were involved in the transformation of the Roman world.
The cluster of alternative religious orientation now subsumed under the
label of Gnosticism was, as recent scholarship has shown, closely linked
to the gradual disentanglement of Judaism and Christianity.16 Heterodox-
ies more internal to the Christian mainstream troubled the very regions
where the imperial centre had remained intact (the eastern Mediterrane-
an) and undermined its capacity for re-conquest as well as defence. Last
but not least, a more gradually developing religious divergence between
East and West was of decisive importance for the civilizational map of
the post-Roman world. As for the Islamic road beyond Rome, revelation
and expansion were linked through a reactivated model of prophecy; the
early Islamic vision of politics seems to have centred on a model of sacred
kingship that would preserve as much prophetic authority as possible, but
the disintegration of this project led to a polarization of alternative ways
to harmonize politics and religion (the Sunnite and the Shiite branch), as
well as to the formation of a broader schismogenetic culture.
All these historical factors affected the transition from late antiquity to
a multi-civilizational Mediterranean world. But there is yet another side
to the story. Following Eisenstadt, it seems appropriate to classify Juda-
ism (after the destruction of the Second Temple) as a diasporic civiliza-
tion whose interaction with the dominant civilizational complexes was
often of major importance for the course of cultural history. A diasporic
civilization is, by definition, subject to strict limits on the development of
institutions and power structures; on the other hand, its distinctive and
demarcating patterns are backed up by more or less elaborate mechanisms
of defence. Such formations can survive major setbacks and changes to
their environment. In the Jewish case, a diasporic civilization was clearly

See especially Guy G. Stroumsa, Savoir et salut (Paris, Le Cerf, 1992).

16
 interpreting history and understanding civilizations 183

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

importantly) Zhou dynasties; there are, as noted above, good reasons to

doubt this and to assume a civilizational divide during the last millenni-
um bce, but the discussion has certainly not been closed. European self-
interpretations, up to and including contemporary ones, have found the
idea of civilizational continuity with the classical world very attractive, but
those who contest this and see the end of classical antiquity as the birth
of three new civilizations seem to have a stronger case, even if new argu-
ments continue to be developed on both sides. On the other hand, cul-
tural self-interpretation can emphasize discontinuities in ways that seem
excessive when subjected to closer historical scrutiny. A strong current
in the Japanese tradition stressed contrasts between China and Japan to
such a degree that the latter appeared as a separate and distinctive cultural
world. This is the view theorized, in very different language and on the
conceptual level of contemporary civilizational analysis, in Eisenstadts
work on Japan; but the view that Japan represents a particularly original
variant of Sinic civilization still seems more plausible.
Debates about the chronological and geographical boundaries of civili-
zational formations will raise the question of their defining core patterns.
To conclude with a final glance beyond the limits of this paper, the an-
swers are bound to emphasize the nexus between religious and political
components, but less as a particular and privileged aspect than as a meta-
institution that impacts on all domains of social life and defines a frame-
work for social change.
 COMPARISON WITHOUT HEGEMONY

Sheldon Pollock

That a Sanskritist should have the honor of being asked to contribute to

the Festschrift of a distinguished sociologist has nothing to do with the
Sanskritist in question and everything to do with the sociologist. In a way
that is now virtually unthinkable in the American academy, where sociol-
ogy has been both temporally and spatially flattened into the contempo-
rary moment of the Westthanks to what Norbert Elias once called (with-
out however explaining) social sciences retreat into the presentBjrn
Wittrock commands an astonishing knowledge about the world at large
and an endless fascination with its historical development. This can be
seen as an inheritance of the great European tradition of historical com-
parative sociology to which he belongs and that has, if not its origins, then
at least its most enduring achievement in the work of Max Weber.
One aspect of Webers comparative project that I have found puzzling,
however, is the absence of any theorization on his part of the comparative
method itself, its historical ontology, its logic, even its purposes. At one
point I was convinced that the problem was mine, not Webers, that I had
simply failed to locate the grand methodological statement on compara-
tivism only to be expected from the mind that had written so profoundly
on the theory of the cultural and social sciences. But I found nothing in
Gesammelte Aufstze zur Wissenschaftslehre, or in the various accounts of
Webers method, which scarcely mentioned comparativism let alone re-
vealed an explicit statement of his on the topic.1
It turns out that, even though Webers later scholarly practice was not
only fundamentally comparative but, in being so, a clear departure from

1 See Kalberg 1993, Ringer 1997.

186 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

2 W. Schluchter (personal communication); see n. 41 below.

3 Ringer 2002: 175.
4 See for example Stepan 2001; for intersections among the social sciences, Bowen
1999; for a recent general synthesis, Mahoney and Rueschemeyer 2003. Theoretical reflec-
tion is however prevalent in the American variety of comparative historical sociology, as in
the much-cited essay of Skocpol and Somers 1980.
 comparison without hegemony 187

in the areas of interest to me: comparative intellectual history and com-

parative literature. The reasons for these differences seem not too hard
to find. Take the case of comparative politics in the past several decades.
Tainted by its connection with area studies and belittled by the formal
modeling that invaded the field, it has needed to argue out its scientificity
with as much vigor as it can muster. Comparative literature, by contrast,
has a methodological commitment built right into its identity as a disci-
plinary form, given that making literature and making meaning are both
inherently comparative activities. But perhaps for this very reasonin ad-
dition to the fact that comparison would appear to be the last thing people
in comparative literature do these daysnobody bothers to think about it
much, except to bemoan its supposed impossibility.5 As for comparative
intellectual history, there are so few people who practice it that the ab-
sence of theoretical self-reflection is entirely unsurprising.
What is surprising, however, given the ubiquity of comparative think-
ing whether overt or latent in the human sciences, that there is not a sin-
gle work we can turn to today for understanding the logic of systematic
comparison (the practices and purposes), especially treated in a compara-
tive way (across disciplines), or its historical ontology (the coming into
being of the very possibility of some objects).6 I am certainly not going
to attempt to provide any such account here; I have not the intelligence
for such a task even if I had the space. Instead I offer some informal re-
flections, first on comparison as a scholarly method in intellectual history
and literary studies, asking in particular what kind of knowledge compar-
ison is meant to produce; and second, on the methods pitfalls that have
brought it increasingly into disrepute, where they come from, whether
and if so how they may be avoided. I only wish the quality of these hur-
riedly assembled and somewhat desultory observations were more com-
mensurate with the level of esteem in which I hold the scholar to whom
they are offered as a token: dsis dolg te phl te.

II

What does it mean to do comparative history today, especially compara-

tive history of the non-West, and especially the history of the early mod-

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

ern period?7 What distinguishes comparative-intellectual from global,

connected, and other historiographies with multiple Ns? What relates the
Ns in such historical studies, that is, what is the intended outcome of the
multiplication of cases?
Asian historiography of the early modern period has sought, increas-
ingly in the past decade or so, to move beyond the straightjackets of na-
tion or culture area toward some larger frameworks for explaining hu-
man activity. One of those frameworks, world or global history, has been
resurrected from its near death at the hands of microhistory a generation
ago by the samjvan elixir of globalization itself. An uncommonly intel-
ligent recent example of cross-regional history in Asian studies is Victor
Liebermans project on the Eurasian Context of the Early Modern His-
tory of Mainland Southeast Asia. This sought to identify political, cul-
tural, and economic transformations across Eurasia for the period 1400
1800 and where possible to identify linkages among them. The enterprise
sometimes presents itself as an exercise in comparison, but it is actually
a quest for global commonalities and patternswhat Lieberman calls
sustained trends toward political, cultural, and economic integra-
tionaimed toward establishing a reliable global periodization.8 (Similar-
ly, in a recent and more overtly comparative history project examining the
Roman and Chinese empires, comparison seeks robust processes [for
determining which] factors were crucial rather than incidental and how
different contexts could produce similar outcomes, or vice versa.)9
In a second type of historiography with multiple Ns, connected (or
tangled) history, and crossed (and its subspecies, transfer) history
the two are actually different if closely related, and both are usually dif-
ferentiated from plain vanilla comparative historythe cases are not in
fact thought of as analytically separate but rather as mutually constituted.
And to a large degree the object of historical analysis is precisely this mu-
tual constitution and web of connections; there is no comparison because
there are not in fact two objects to compare but only a single process.10
In South Asian studies, connected history is directed toward recalibrat-

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

ing the received cartographies deemed meaningful for capturing histori-

cal reality. Events occurring in disparate parts of the world are shown to
have connections with each other from goods or persons moving through
those regions.11 But connected history is a method strictly limited by its
objects and their interconnections.
Histoire croise, which associates social, cultural, and political forma-
tions, generally at the national level, that are assumed to bear relation-
ships to one another, and where entities and objects of research are not
merely considered in relation to one another but also through one anoth-
er, in terms of relationships, interactions, and circulation (like transfer
studies with which it is closely associated), is far more process-oriented
than connected history.12 Self-proclaimed crossed history would appear to
be largely restricted to Western European studies, but I have found myself
inadvertently doing something like it for premodern Eurasia, in a study of
ancient empires, where making an empire meant learning to imitate (in
Gabriel Tardes sense) other imperial powers.13 Thus, there are sometimes
ironic confusions about the boundaries between comparative history and
connected and crossed history: sometimes what we thought was a com-
parison turns out to be a connection. And yet things that are connected
can still, of course, be compared. Being imperial may be imitative action,
but the models do not predetermine the applications in every detail, and
what is not reproduced from the dominant model can be as consequential
as what is.
Intellectual history proper is only fitfully recovering its confidence after
decades of self-doubt in the face of defections to social and other forms of
history. This is certainly true with respect to the theoretical challenges in-
tellectual history presents when extended beyond the modern West, its al-
most exclusive field of operation to date, though non-Western intellectual
history and its potential disruption of the emerging disciplinary paradigm
remain almost invisible to contemporary Western reflection.14 Compara-
tive intellectual history needs even more grounded justification for relat-
ing its objects than either connected or crossed history, for the latter strive
only to account for the linkages that did exist among the cases, whereas
the former is not predicated upon any necessary connections, crossings,

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

or conjunctures between or among the objects under comparison.15 Of

course, the comparative intellectual historian is in principle not averse
to finding such conjunctures. That Jesuit astronomers in Lisbon and
Calcutta in the 1720s made planetary calculations that threw into doubt
the traditional cosmology of the Hindu astronomer-king Sawai Jaisimh
of Jaipur is worth knowing in a comparative historical account of early
modern astronomy. But this kind of exogenous transformation of Indian
ways of knowing, accelerating with the victory of colonialism and after,
is not what comparative intellectual history is concerned to comprehend.
Still less is it concerned with what is actually only a higher-order instance
of what I have just described: understanding how differently intellectuals
responded to shared stimulias might be done in a comparative study of
the spread of nineteenth-century nationalismsince in India no shared
conceptual stimuli took root prior to sustained European contact in the
nineteenth century.
The Ns that constitute the objects of comparative intellectual history
to speak programmatically noware forms of systematic thought that are
found everywhere literate culture itself is found. It provisionally posits the
importance of synchronicity among these Ns but should make no a pri-
ori claims that temporary synchronicity entails conceptual symmetry, that
(to take the most difficult example) the modernity of the early modern
world should everywhere look the same; in fact, asymmetriesdiffer-
ent forms of modernity that are, in principle, possibleare as important
and revealing as anything. How comparable forms of thought change in
time, change differently, or do not change at all, and why they do or do
not change, is precisely what this kind of historical inquiry seeks to un-
derstand. Clearly this approach has nothing to do with the sort of com-
parative history that employs universal models, usually derived from
European experience, as a grid on which to plot societies, and as such, can
operate independently of chronology.16 Not only should chronology be
central to comparative intellectual-historical practicewhich is not the
same thing as comparative philosophybut no given model of intellection
can be held to be universal. Observing this limit, I argue below, is critical
if comparativism is to be saved from itself.
It is vitally important, thus, that the synchronicity grounding compara-
tive intellectual history contain no necessary content of this or any other

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

Bharatas Ntyastra; Wordsworths Preface and Chinese literary

theory);
2. Comparison of theory and practice in a given tradition (e.g., Walter
Benjamins translation theory and his translation of Baudelaires Fleurs
du Mal);
3. Comparison of comparison itself as an mode of discourse: Kants em-
bedded and Hegels disembedded comparativism, and the identifica-
tion of comparative norms (see below); the comparison of comparativ-
ism (e.g., Herodotus and Hegel).
Each kind of comparison is entirely legitimate in the world of literary
studies, and each produces a very different kind of knowledge. Some co-
incide with those mentioned for comparative history (producing new
questions in N1; validating a hypothesis over N cases; developing causal
accounts of big structures and processes). Others supplement them with
complex types of historical linkagesbetween Homer and Hgen, say, or
Homer and James Joycethat point toward capacities unique to litera-
ture, now to identify the relationship of social form and expressive genre,
now to generate a long tradition of reference. Still others serve to enrich
the individual cases, by producing ever finer, more granular appreciations
of their distinctiveness.

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

Ginzburg ms., a discussion of La Crquinires Conformit des coutumes des Indiens

24
Orientaux, avec celles des Juifs et des autres Peuples de lAntiquit. Herodotus compared
Greeks and Persians, Aristotle the constitutions of Greek cities, Plutarch the lives of great
men, but none thematized comparison as a form of knowledge.
 comparison without hegemony 195

The second component is colonialism, which has a relationship with

comparativism that may signal causality no less than concomitance. If
systematic comparative philology is a well-known and exquisite example,
finding its origins at the very time and place of colonial contact, in late
eighteenth-century Calcutta, we sometimes forget that nineteenth-centu-
ry Europe is the high-water mark of historical-comparative studies across
virtually all disciplinesethnology, history, law, literature, mythology, re-
ligion. It is not news, but it also not inconsequential, that such projects
were linked to the age of discovery and colonialism, and comparativism
itself to the self-understanding of European supremacy.25
In precolonial India, by contrast, comparativism seems to be virtually
unknown. Eloquent negative evidence comes from the study of philolo-
gy. Although vastly different Indian languages (and eventually European,
such as Father Schwartzs German) jostled each other in places like Tan-
jore in the years 16001800, and the era was marked by the work of bril-
liant grammarians of individual languages and other philologists, no one
ever sought to compare these languages in any way. This was not because
comparing as such was unknown: comparison/analogy (upamna) was
an acknowledged (and increasingly important) form of valid cognition,
and weighing things against each other (tulan) and their relative dif-
ference (tratamya) were widely used conceptual categories.26 Indeed, the
Indian thought world, with its infinite categorizations and distinctions of
all reality, cared more about classifying than any culture in history. But if
classification comprises comparison it is comparison of a particular sort,
unconcerned with finding historical laws or positing ontological deficits.27
A full-dress historical ontology would also show how and why there
has recently arisen a widespread if vague sense that historical compari-
son is fundamentally problematic, both epistemologically and (in the

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

cal actus of the understanding, through which concepts are generated as

to their form, are: 1. comparison of representations among one another
in relation to the unity of consciousness; 2. reflection as to how various
representations can be conceived in one consciousness; and finally 3. ab-
straction of everything else in which the given representations differ. As
the author summarizes, The most basic act of the understanding that is
necessary for the generation of concepts is the act of comparison.32
Hegel analyzed the tacit comparison inherent in the construction of
identity of any thing in the section on Something and an Other in the
larger Logic. In Hegels own idiom: Otherness thus appears as a determi-
nation alien to the determinate being thus characterised, or as the other
outside the one determinate being; partly because a determinate being is
determined as other only through being compared by a Third, and partly
because it is only determined as other on account of the other which is
outside it, but is not an other on its own account; or in McTaggarts pel-
lucid rephrasing: Each Something is dependent for its own nature on an
Other the relation to an Other is what makes it what it is.33 And, at
a rather different elevation of philosophical analysis, one might even say
that Marxs theory of the genesis of the commodity form presupposes a
kind of comparativism: the difference between the two commodities is the
prerequisite for an exchangethat is, comparisonbetween them to take
place.34
From these epistemological reflections on the fundamental character
of comparison we turn to the phenomenological. The sociologist Rog-
ers Brubaker has argued that comparison is intrinsic not only to social
research and sociological analysis, in all phases and at all levels, but to
much of lived social experience as well. Inequality, for example, is a so-
cial category that rests entirely on comparative grounds, and we can speak
of a vernacular or folk comparative sociology that inhabits such every-
day analyses (and that might usefully supplement or replace our own in
given contexts). The reason to move beyond comparativism (the title of
the paper) but not comparison is that, according to Brubaker, methods of
comparison are simply heuristics, not warrants of the truth. They offer no
epistemological guarantees in themselves; they are strategies rather than
methods.

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

From a more expansive point of view, howeverlike that of Jerry Fo-

dor, for whom the scientific method is basically Try not to say anything
falsewe can see that, if there is no particular method of comparativism
we should follow to gain scientific truth, there are some we should shun
to avoid scientific falsehood. One of these is allowing the comparisons in-
evitable in our thinking to remain occulted in our arguments, rather than
explaining their relationship to our primary object of study and what role
they are playing in its interpretation. Another defective method is related
to the naturalization or reification of the unit of analysis or methodologi-
cal nationalism (an imperfect, a priori, understanding of the case itself
that is under analysis) but is even more criticaland can be fatalto
comparativism as such.35
Comparison often comprises an unreflective moment of generalization
based on the primary case. You cannot select out what is to serve as the
second item in a comparison without having first identified family resem-
blances between the two instances. In order to compare empire A with
empire B, say, you must first select out and generalize features of A before
you are even able to identify B as a legitimate comparative partner (i.e.,
that both are empires in the relevant sense). That is, you must already and
a priori have decided what constitutes an empire, though this decision is
based on case A alone. In the very act of generalizing that case as the unit
of analysis you are already suppressing, or potentially suppressing, ele-
ments of differenceelements that it is the whole purpose of comparison
to captureor interpreting them falsely as deviations from what is illegiti-
mately posited as norm. Under ideal circumstances of self-awareness the
process here can be treated simply as a variant of the hermeneutic circle:
B takes on its particular meaning only in the context of ABCD, but that
context itself only becomes meaningful if we already know what A, B, C,
D individually and somehow independently mean. Like the hermeneutic
circle, the comparative circle can be a virtuous one, as I will suggest. Hav-
ing identified B as an empire (or empire) through generalization from A,
we may then correct our generalization by probing differences between B
and A.
More often than not, however, the ideal circumstances are not met and
the virtuous circle becomes a vicious one when a particular is elevated
into a standard (as the literary comparatists have noted). This flaw, along

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

with occulted comparison, is ubiquitous in eighteenth- and nineteenth-

century European texts, when comparative thinking first becomes routi-
nized. Consider again both Kant and Hegel. In Kants Idea for a Universal
History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose (1784) we are told:
If we start out from Greek history as that in which all other earlier or con-
temporary histories are preserved or at least authenticated, if we next trace
the influence of the Greeks upon the shaping and mis-shaping of the body
politic of Rome and follow down to our own times the influence of Rome
upon the Barbarians who in turn destroyed it we shall discover a regu-
lar process of improvement in the political constitutions of our continent
(which will probably legislate eventually for all other continents).36

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

And so on with respect to painting, printing, institutions of higher learn-

ing, officialdom, parliaments of elected representatives, the State itself
with a rational written constitution.40 All this is meant to illuminate the
foundational question: how is it that only Western cultural phenome-
naas we like to thinkhave achieved universal significance and val-
ue? And this is of course a fundamentally comparative question, and it
prompts a vast chain of comparisons based on the assumption that one of
the partners must be developmentally or inherently dominant. There can
be only one valid science, one real rationality, one true historical meth-
od (which are quite different phenomena from the capitalism that is the
subject of the book itself and that Weber theorized as essentially different
from all other forms of greed for gain). The European varieties are not
just a different species of a wider phenomenon butcomparatively speak-
inga superior species, whose superiority is vindicated by their histori-
cal victory (Weber is uninterested in the possibility that colonialism may
have produced this victory, to the degree it can be said to exist). What We-
ber sought from comparison was not deeper understanding of differences
but identification of deficiencies.41
It is not a far step from this way of thinking to a very concrete and
serious kind of domination that has been and still is underwritten by
this form of comparison, namely modernization theory. In its core this
is clearly a form of comparativism, mixed with a stadial or evolutionary
vision of history. And in this conceptual world, all other societies are de-
fined and grasped only in terms of its relationship to the West, and only
in terms of its place in a narrative defined in terms of the global history
of the West against which all other histories will be measured.42 Thus,
you compare the societies of Africa or India or the Middle East to that of
the U.S., find them deficient, and, not infrequently, attempt to transform
them into the latter. Modernization hereby recapitulates nineteenth cen-

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

tury comparativism and colonialism, with American foreign policy en-

forcing the dominant comparative partneritselfon the rest of the world,
in the certainty that its model for national success: freedom, democracy,
and free enterprise is the one sustainable model.43

***

The historical ontology and logic of comparativism are surprisingly un-

derstudied questions in the human sciences. Intellectual history and lit-
erary studies reveal a range of rich and complex varieties of comparative
practices and forms of knowledge, often unfamiliar to other forms of
comparison, that need to be carefully thought through. While failure to
do that thinkingand to achieve a clearer sense of how precisely com-
parison has underwritten forms of historical domination from the earli-
est systematic comparative studies in the eighteenth century up to mod-
ernization theory in the late twentiethhas brought comparativism into
disrepute in recent years, comparison as such seems unavoidable; it may
even be something of a cognitive necessity.
But if comparison is necessary, the will to domination that sometimes
seems built into the comparative method is certainly not. It is possible to
produce comparison without hegemony across the human sciences. We
begin to do this by making our inevitable but implicit comparisons explic-
it, explain what role they are playing in the interpretation of our primary
object, and exercise sufficient reflexivity to avoid demanding symmetry
when there is only synchronicity, turning difference into deficiency, or ex-
panding particularity into paradigm.

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.

Islam as a World Religion and the Evolution of

Islamicate Civilization

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

ber, but the problem of historicizing the relationship remains unsolved

that is, historicizing the development of a distinctive civilization around
the basic premises of the world religions. Historicization is indispensable
for understanding the distinctive directionality of social change in each
civilization, and for identifying distinctive civilizational processes and ra-
tionalities. To begin with, we have not really historicized the concept of
the world religion itself. By this I mean, excepting Webers incomplete
book on Ancient Judaism, we dont have a systematic sociological account
of the formative period of the world religions. Assuming that no world
religion is born fully formed into world history, we cannot at present tell
at what point a religion becomes a world-religion.
Islam is the youngest of the world religions, where we have much better
historical evidence than on any other world religion, and therefore our
historicizing can be done on more secure grounds. Eisenstadts view of
civilizations as comprising centers and peripheries, orthodoxies and het-
erodoxies is valuable, as is his insight into the transformative impact of
heterodoxies within the world religions. (Eisenstadt 2003, 1: 17-19) This
insight, too, needs to be historicized. If we take it, together with Webers
and Troeltschs Church/Sect/Mysticism trichotomy of forms of religious
organization (Troeltsch 1931), we find that in Islam, sectarian formation
is the earliest development, beginning with the first civil war just a quarter
of a century after the death of the Prophet, long before the development
of law and theology, and it works itself out into an orthodoxy/heterodox-
ies pattern a century later after the Abbasid revolution in the mid-eighth
century. That pattern was almost overthrown by the Fatimid (i.e., Ismaili
Shiite) revolution in North Africa and Egypt in the tenth century, but it
survived and remained relatively stable until the Safavid revolution and
the rise of a Shiite empire in Iran in the sixteenth century.
In sharp contrast to the Christianity-derived concept of the sect, we
find the sects in Islam to be intensely politicalto be, religio-political
factions as Webers older contemporary, Julius Wellhausen (1975), called
them. The reason is that at the beginning of the first civil war, the only dif-
ferentiated embodiment of religion was the Qurn whose canonical text
had just been established by Uthman, the third Caliph (whose murder
set the civil war off).
As the Qurn was the only religious institution dur-
ing the first civil war, we hear of the Qurn-readers as a social group but
not of jurists or judges. Legal or proto-legal issues indeed instigated and
dominated strife throughout the first civil warissues such as the Caliphs
right to pardon lawbreakers, and rebellion against the unjust ruler and the
kins right of revenge against the wrongly killed [Caliph]. But there was no
 islamicate civilization 207

consensus on what the law was and no judicial authority or framework

for deciding conflicts peacefully. (Veccia-Vaglieri 1952) Every side did ap-
peal to the Book of God but the differences in its interpretation could only
be settled violently. Their settlement by the winners of the civil war was
merely political and did not prevent future development of heterodox in-
terpretation by those who lost but organized themselves into sects. The
Abbasid revolution was itself the work of a clandestine religio-political
faction or sect, the Hashemite Shia, as was the Mahdist Fatimid revolu-
tion of the Ismaili Shia in North Africa a century and a half later. (Halm
1996)
In short, there is a striking misfit between Webers conception of sect,
derived from Christianity, and the intensely political character of religious
schism in medieval Islam. (Cook 1999: 276) The sociological explanation
of the difference between Christianity and Islam is the following: With
religion being so little institutionally differentiated under the first four
rightly-guided Caliphs, you could not possibly have had the kind of for-
mation Weber and Troeltsch called sect. Islamic law began to develop
only after the Abbasid revolution, and with it the second major differen-
tiation of religion and politics took shape.1
All along this formative period of many centuries, a civilization was
growing around Islam. This civilization differentiated different spheres of
life in a relation of meaningful consistency to Islam as an evolving world
religion. Following Marshall Hodgson, I will call it the Islamicate civili-
zation. I share Arnasons (2006) positive evaluation of Hodgsons civili-
zational analysis of Islam, but have to say that Hodgson, as good as he
was with the later developments, failed to historicize the rise of Islam. In
fact, his discussion is largely reductionist and he talks about the rise of
the caravan trade, military use of the camel and so forth, and in doing so
he somewhat underplays the distinctive contribution of Islam to the Near
Eastern civilization of the citied agrarian societies from Nile to Oxus.

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

This underestimation of the distinctiveness of the Islamicate civilization

is even greater in the late antiquity approach to Islam by Fowden (1993;
2001), Al-Azmeh (1997; 2007: esp. 267-89) and others.
A striking proof of Hodgsons insight that the Islamicate civilization
belonged to and synthesized the agrarian civilizations of antiquity from
the Nile to the Oxus within its framework as a world religion concerns
the Shiite heterodox branch of Islam, which failed to replace Sunni Islam
in the medieval period but did become the official religion of the Safavid
empire at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Unlike Troeltsch who
saw the church as one of the three social forms of Christianity, Weber
(1978, 1: 54-55) formally defined it as a general form of hierocratic organ-
ization and in analogy to the state as the general form of political organ-
ization. Whereas the Islamicate orthodoxy (Sunni Islam) remained Cae-
saropapist in Webers typological terminology, an independent Shiite
hierocracy gradually emerged in Iran in the course of the transformation
of Shiism from sectarian heterodoxy to the national religion of Islam.
(Arjomand 2003) Two instances of the long-term institutionalization of
autonomous religious hierarchies in its history make Iran the most hospi-
table land for the growth of hierocracies outside of medieval Western Eu-
rope. In each instance, a dual structure of religious and political authority
emerged very gradually after an abrupt religious change resulting from a
political revolution. The first instance was the emergence and consolida-
tion of a Zoroastrian hierocracy in late antiquity, which can be considered
the long-term consequence of the Sasanian revolution in the third century
ce; the second, the establishment and growth of a Shiite hierocracy after
the Safavid revolution at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Each in-
stance can be considered a process of value-rationalizationa process of
harmonization of the Iranian idea of political order as universal monar-
chy with the Zoroastrian religion and with Shiite Islam respectively. (Ar-
jomand 1984; 2004a: Excursus)
The developmental pattern of post-revolutionary differentiation of a
hierocracy from the state in Sasanian and Safavid Iran does not address
the prior issue of bridging the aforementioned gap between the formation
of Islam as a world religion and the development of the Islamicate civiliza-
tion in the intervening centuries. The issue can now be addressed by his-
toricizing the process that shaped a distinctive pattern of legitimation of
power and structure of authority by bringing the tenets of Islam and the
values of pre-Islamic Near Eastern empires into meaningful consistency.
This developmental pattern traces the process that Wittrock (2001) calls
crystallization and I characterize as a developmental pattern of value-
 islamicate civilization 209

rationalization. I have argued that the most important type of rational-

ization analyzed by Weber as a developmental pattern is in fact value-
rationalization. I characterized this process as a mode of harmonization
of heterogeneous principles of order by bringing heterogeneous cognitive
and normative orders pertaining to different spheres of life into a meas-
ure of meaningful consistency (Sinnzusammenhang). This meaningful or
symbolic consistency evolves gradually and often imperceptibly among
cultural clusters and is produced by elective affinities. This consistency
accounts for the civilizational rationalities that we recognize as civiliza-
tional style. (Arjomand 2004a)
My contention is that the pattern of differentiation between the reli-
gious and political sphere as established by the center/orthodoxy in the
Islamicate civilization (and incidentally taken over by the Shiites when-
ever they succeeded in establishing their own state) can be understood as
a distinctive developmental pattern which I characterize as a process of
value-rationalization. This project requires that the religious and the civi-
lizational perspectives be made analytically distinct but linked historically,
and it gives rise to two interrelated issues for which we cannot get any
help from Weber: (1) what Benjamin Nelson (1980) called civilizational
encounters, and (2) the crucial link between empire and civilizations. The
two are obviously interconnected because empires are a kind of melting
pot of civilizations.2
The rise of Islam in Arabia is obviously its first formative period, which
I will call the Medina stage. I shall argue that imperial formation consti-
tutes the next formative period of Islamic history. This second stage is in
some respects more relevant than the first or the Medina stage for un-
derstanding the relation between religion and civilization in general, and
Islam and power in particular. It is the formative period regarding both
developmental patterns that result in differentiation of different spheres
or domains of life, and intercivilizational processes. Indeed, the two are
intimately connected. By historicizing the link between Islam as a religion
and the Islamicate civilization in this period, I want to analyze a key de-
velopmental pattern that institutionalized the differentiation of religion
and the state into a durable structure that survived to modern times. This
pattern is easily missed in the tradition of comparative religion which ig-
nores the imperial connection and focuses entirely on the influence of or

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

survivals from Judaism and Christianity. Max Webers erroneous charac-

terization of Islam as a warrior religiona contrasting ideal type to Bud-
dhism, Judaism and Christianitylikewise presumes the Medina para-
digm.
The imperial formative stage is also easy to miss by those who take the
paradigm of Medina in the Arab Peninsula to be the only formative stage
of Islam. This latter group includes many Muslims whose understanding
of their own civilization amounts to something like sacred history. I say
something like sacred history because there is an interesting difference
between the religious and the civilizational perspectives in this regard. In
the religious perspective, the Medina paradigm and Muhammad are fun-
damental; but no so in the civilizational perspective. From that perspec-
tive, the closest term to sacred history used by the Muslims themselves is
history of prophets and kings. Those who consider Medina the only for-
mative stage include scholars like Patricia Crone. In Gods Rule: Govern-
ment and Islam (2004)
, she construes medieval Islamic thought implic-
itly in terms of the Arabian paradigm. She highlights as Islamic tribal
features, whose transplantation beyond Arabia was at best secondary, and
sectarian theories that never shaped the structure of domination in the
Muslim empires. The dominant medieval pattern, the actual structure of
domination that lasted for over a thousand years, consequently appears to
her as un-Islamic. (Crone 2004: 146)
The remarkable extant document known as the Constitution of Medi-
na says nothing about government and was more accurately described by
Wellhausen as Muhammads commune charter (Gemeindeordnung). The
authority of Muhammad the Prophet (nabi) it instituted was never
de-
veloped by him or in the Qurn to provide constitutional foundations for
the state. (Arjomand 2009b) His successors improvised the title of Gods
Deputy/Caliph and used the refractory tribes he had managed to unify
under the banner of Islam in the last two years of his life to create a vast
empire of conquest with the defeat of the Byzantine and Persian armies.
As a consequence, by the end of the first civil war in 661, the Muslim state
looks like a huge army of Arab tribal contingents, mostly settled in a few
garrison cities, with only the most rudimentary civil bureaucracy.
Then began the imperial era. The Umayyads made Damascus their cap-
ital and Byzantine Syria the heartland of their vast empire, used Byzantine
and Sasanian coins and kept their tax accounts in Greek and Persian till
the last decade of the century. The Abbasids built the City of Peace, Bagh-
dad, near the ruins of the ancient Persian/Sasanian empire in the 750s.
 islamicate civilization 211

The Abbasid revolution is now generally seen as the social revolution of

Islam, and I have characterized it as an integrative revolution with far-
reaching consequences in social integration and creation of a more inclu-
sive political community based on Islam rather than Arab ethnicity. (Ar-
jomand 1994) As an integrative revolution, it also widely opened the Arab
empire to intercivilizational encounters with the newly integrated (and
often newly converted) subject populations of the imperial polities.
Adopting Hodgsons (1974) conception of the Islamicate civilization,
we can easily historicize this intercivilizational encounter through which
the ancient Middle Eastern political tradition was absorbed by it and en-
dorsed without the slightest reservation. The ancient tradition conceived
the political community and its ruler as the flock of subjects and their
shepherd (raiyya, plural ray and ri). This basic idea was amplified
by the Indo-Persian sources on statecraft and political ethic, and by the
Persian theory of kingship centered on the (imperial) idea of the king of
kings (shhanshh).
The synthesis produced the fundamental Islamicate conception of
the divinely ordained normative order consisting of the two powers
prophethood and monarchy, as realized in history by the prophets and the
kings (al-rusul wal-muluk). It was thus fully formed before the develop-
ment and institutionalization of the Islamic ethico-legal system called the
Sharia (divine path). According to this conception, monarchy was neces-
sary for the maintenance of order and justice so that the subjects could
follow the path (sharia) of those Messengers who had brought down one
of the Books of divine guidance. Monarchy and the Law of God were thus
the two mutually irreducible components of the Islamicate normative or-
der of the Abbasid empire (7501258). Within this dual order, the Islamic
ethico-legal system, including an elaborate commercial law and economic
ethic, developed in the cities (and never among the nomadic tribes). The
jurists who elaborated the Islamic law also covered the legal regulations of
other secular domains such as agriculturethe ownership of irrigated
land and water.
Meanwhile, we have the much better known intercivilizational encoun-
ter, namely the reception of the Greek political science, with the notable
exception of Aristotles Politics, beginning with Abu Nasr al-Farabi in the
tenth century and culminating in Nasir al-Din Tusis Nserian Ethics in
the thirteenth century. The theory of the two powers was recast into the
tripartite Aristotelian division into politics or management of the state,
economics or household management, and ethics or management of the
self. The mutual accommodation of this synthesis of Persian and Greek
212 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

twelfth centuries. The Ghaznavid patrimonial state was transplanted to

India by the Ghurid military slave generals who founded the Delhi Sul-
tanate in the early thirteenth century. Meanwhile, another type of patri-
monial regime developed with the formation of nomadic Turkic states in
the eleventh century, namely the Qarakhnid kingdom in Central Asia
and the Seljuq Empire in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Anatolia. According to this
conception, the kingdom was the patrimonial property of the whole fam-
ily of the Khan and was divided into appanages upon his death. The prob-
lem of succession, however, resulted in the disintegration of the Seljuk no-
madic empire, as it did with the Timurid Empire in the fifteenth century.
Hodgson rejected Webers ideal types of patrimonialism and sultanism
for these nomadic empires, and offered his own model of the military
patronage state for the post-Mongol era. On closer inspection, however,
Hodgsons ideal type was closely derived from the contemporary Mamluk
Sultanate in Egypt and Syria. The Mamluk amirs elected the Sultan among
themselves. As a consequence, the Mamluk kingdom was taken over as a
whole by an elected Sultan and never divided among the princes of the
royal house as appanages. The Mamluk regime was strikingly similar to
the Delhi Sultanate as an Islamicate politythe imported Persianate pol-
ity transformed into a complex system of collective rule by military slave-
Sultans.
Given their relatively small number among the population, the Mam-
luk Sultans of Egypt and Syria and their families developed an extensive
network of patronage over civic and educational institutions through the
civilian elite. By contrast, the nomadic tribal confederations which estab-
lished the Turko-Mongolian empires transformed themselves into perma-
nent ruling castes after conquest, and remained rigidly separate from the
civilian population to which they cultivated the ties of patronage by hold-
ing courts and founding endowments. Holding enormous undifferenti-
ated land grants (soyurghl) which did not distinguish between fiscal and
prebendal elements, they became the landlords of the peasant masses. The
pattern of social stratification under the Turko-Mongolian nomadic em-
pires thus differed significantly from that of the Persianate polity and from
the Mamluk state in Egypt and Syria. The bureaucratic class, secretaries of
the chanceries, who were the bearers of the culture of ethics and statecraft,
dealt with the civic society and institutions of the kingdoms and provided
us with a picture of the social hierarchy and stratification in terms of sta-
tus by arranging different modes of address appropriate for different ranks
within the civilian population. A rigid dichotomy of the military elite
(askari) and the subjects (rey) that divided society into a dominant Turko-
214 said a. arjomand

Mongolian estate and the non-military Persian or Tajik estate, comprising

both the urban strata and the peasantry, was superimposed on it. (Arjo-
mand 1999) I therefore suggest that the Turko-Mongolian nomadic state
should be considered as a separate subtype of Islamicate patrimonial state
and distinct from Hodgsons military-patronage state.
Needless to say, the division of the domains of life between the two or-
ders, the religious and the political, in all these types of Islamicate regimes
differs significantly from Western configurations, not to mention those of
other civilizations. Arguably the greatest difference was due to a startling
Muslim omission in the Arabic Aristotelian corpus. Unlike Aquinas, who
commissioned the translation of Aristotles Politics, his contemporary,
Nasir al-Din Tusi3 and the Muslim philosophers were unfortunate in that
Politics was the only major work of Aristotle not translated into Arabic.
The unavailability of Politics in the Muslim world meant continued una-
wareness of many key Aristotelian political concepts that became avail-
able to Aquinas and others in the thirteenth century and shaped Western
political thought, such as the commonwealth (res publica) and the rule of
law (government by laws and not men), with the citizen being the rul-
er and the ruled at the same time. Partly for this reason Persian norms
constituted much of the real substance of the new political theory, Greek
practical philosophy only its form. (Arjomand 2005a)
The cornerstone of the monarchy as one of the two powers of the Is-
lamicate legitimate order was the ancient Mesopotamian idea of the cir-
cle of justice, to use its final designation anachronistically. The idea of the
circle of justice has been aptly characterized as the basic social contract
of the agrarian Near Eastern empires. (Darling 2007) It was transmitted
into the Arabic literature in the ninth century as a pithy maxim with a
Persianate inflection: There is no government except be men and no men
except by wealth and no wealth except by prosperity and no prosperity
except by justice and good policy. (Ibn Qutayba, 1: 63) In the medieval
period, it was variously modified to comprise the second power of the Is-
lamicate legitimate order, the Sharia, as subordinate to monarchy. It was
occasionally given the pictorial form of a circle with eight segments, and
as such, transmitted to the early modern empires that grew out of the
Turko-Mongolian nomadic patrimonial states of the fifteenth century:
the Ottoman, the Safavid and the Mughal. In a book on political ethics
which closely follows Tusis, Akhlq-e Ali, the Ottoman kadi, Knalzade
(3: 49), presents the circle of justice as the basic normative principle of

3 They both died in 1274.

 islamicate civilization 215

the early Muslim empires as heirs to Hodgsons agrarian civilization of the

Near East:
The world is a garden; its wall is the state (devlet)
The order of the state derives from the Sharia
The Shari`a has no guardian except the king
The king cannot govern except by the army
[He] cannot gather the army except by wealth
Wealth is gathered by the subjects
The subjects are bonded to the banner of the emperor (pdishh) by justice
Justice is the cause of the well-being of the world.4

A last important remaining issue to discuss in this section is the effect of

civilizational diversity on divergent developmental patterns within each
civilization. I wish to touch upon it with two examples of the mutual in-
teraction between orthodoxy and heterodoxySunnism and Shiism.
The first example is the development of a juristic theory of the Caliphate,
which was superimposed on the Islamicate, normatively dual legitimate
order of monarchy and the Sharia during the latter half of Abbasid era
from the eleventh to the thirteenth century. The development of the Sunni
theory of the Caliphate, also termed Imamate, began in the eleventh cen-
tury when the Abbasid caliph and the Buyid sultan ruled jointly. It was
formulated in contradistinction to the Imami or Twelver Shiite theory on
almost all its major points. It censored the term Gods caliph and sub-
stituted for it the deputy of the messenger of God (khalifa rasul allh),
which highlighted the late Abbasid religious character of the caliphs dif-
ferentiated authority. The Sunni jurists adopted the Mutazilite position
that the Imam-Caliph should be elected, as against the Shiite argument
for appointment by designation. The idea of election was sustained by the
legal fiction of the baya (oath of allegiance) as an act of investiture consti-
tutive of a binding contract, ideally concluded by the people of loosening
and binding on behalf of the community, but for most jurists it was also
valid even when concluded by a single potentate.
By this time the appropriation of Islamic law by the traditionalists and
their professionalization into the estate of ulam (the learned) was far ad-
vanced. With this momentous differentiation of religious authority and
its extension over the ethico-legal order now identified as the Sharia, the
jurists of the two schools of law favored by the Caliph became the carri-
ers of a new political theory. This meant ulam identifying the Caliphate
increasingly with the differentiated religious authority of the as officially
representative of Islam. The result was the publication of two works with
4 Each line is inserted into a segment of the circle.
216 said a. arjomand

the identical title of Ahkm al-sultniyya (Governmental ordinances) and

with very similar content that claimed political ethics and public law as a
branch of Islamic jurisprudence from the statecraft literature of the secre-
taries and from the more recent political science of the philosophers.5
What is most interesting from the viewpoint of civilizational analysis is
the fundamental similarity between the attitudes of medieval Sunni and
Twelver Shiite jurists towards political order in relation to the Sharia. The
bifurcation of political authority into caliphate and sultanate in this period
resulted in a distinct mode of justification of political authority in terms
of the necessity of maintenance of public order through the enforcement
of the Sharia. This mode of derivation of the necessity of the Imamate
is common to orthodox and heterodox jurists of the period alike; and, in
both cases, it results in the severing of the link between the necessity of
upholding the Islamic norms and the legitimacy or qualification of the
ruler. Both groups derived the necessity of Imamate from the necessity of
the upholding of the Sharia and observing the Islamic norms, irrespective
of the qualification of the actual ruler. (Arjomand 2010a: 240-41)
My second example is the developmental path of judiciary organiza-
tion in the Ottoman empire. I have presented the growth of an independ-
ent Shiite hierocracy in Iran as a long-term consequence of the Safa-
vid revolution at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Now I want to
present the great strides in the rationalization of Islamic judiciary organi-
zation made in the Ottoman empire (and there only) as a divergent de-
velopmental pattern. Ottoman judiciary reorganization under Suleyman
the Lawgiver (Magnificent) (15201566) is too well-known to require de-
scription. What I rather want to do is to argue that it was stimulated by
the highly heterodox, ultra-Shiite, Mahdist revolution of the Safavid Shah
Ismil (15011524) in Iran and Anatolia, in response to which the Otto-
man Sultans posed as champions of Sunni orthodoxy.
Shah Ismils Mahdist revolution succeeded in Iran but was suppressed
in Anatolia by Selim I (15121520) at the beginning of his reign. Like all
revolutions, it produced a large body of exiles, consisting of Iranian Sunni
notables who fled east and west, and set in motion an interaction between
Shiite and Sunni Islam whose consequences for the development of pub-
lic law were as momentous as those in the medieval development of the

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

theory of Caliphate/Imamate surveyed above. Notable among the learned

jurists who participated in Selim Is campaign against the Qizilbsh (the
Redheads, as Shah Ismils fanatical followers were called) were Kemal
Pashazade, who served as Selins Saykh, and his student, Abul-Suud Ef-
fendi, who was from the Kurdish region under Safavid domination, and
enumerated the deviations of the Qizilbsh from orthodoxy. Abul-Suud
later rose to great prominence, holding the office of Shaykh al-Islm
(15451574), and was a chief architect of the Ottoman judicial organiza-
tion, which included appointment of muftis (jurisconsults) in addition to
judges, who applied the state law (knun) as well as the Sharia and were
all ranked hierarchically under the Shaykh al-Islm of Istanbul as the
Chief Mufti of the empire. The construction of the imposing Ottoman ju-
dicial system by these two Chief Muftis was in part a reaction to the Safa-
vid heterodox revolution. (Arjomand 2005b; 2010a: 260-63)

Islamicate Civilizational Processes and Modernization

Redfields paradigm for the intracivilizational process can be profitably

reconsidered in relation to Eisenstadts other seminal idea of multiple
modernities. I take the object of the concept of multiple modernities to
be the search for different directions of the process modernization and its
culturally-specific outcomes. Modernity is not unidirectional and generic
but can move in different culturally determined directions. Here, too, the
concept of developmental patterns can be used to capture the sense of di-
rectionality of multiple modernities. Furthermore, multiple modernities
means not just intercivilizational multiplicity but also the multiple quality of
what Eisenstadt calls the civilization of modernity and illustrates by the in-
clusion of the Jacobin variant of modernism. I suggest that we are again
dealing with a process of value-rationalization and a civilizational process.
Compelling analyses of the modernization of an axial civilization on
the basis of Redfields paradigm have been offered by Milton Singer (1955;
1972) and Lloyd and Suzanne Rudolph (1967). Singer and the Rudolphs
have presented the developmental pattern of the great transformation in
modern India as modernization of a great tradition and simultaneously
traditionalization of modernity. The tranditionalizing element in the In-
dian modernization process has been identified by the famous Indian
sociologist, M.N. Srinivas, who had briefly collaborated with Redfield, as
Sanskritization: adoption of the higher caste, Sanskritic ritual by the lower
castes. As Srinivas (1966) pointed out, Sanskritization and modernization
go hand in hand. This development of multiple Indian modernities can
218 said a. arjomand

also be thought of as an architectonic process of value-rationalization in

which traditional and modern values are used as building blocks in a rea-
sonably consistent construction of the meaning of life in contemporary
India. (Arjomand 2010b)
To see how Islamicizationthe analogue of Srinivass Sanskritization
and modernization go hand in hand, I identified two entwined develop-
mental patterns in the growth of Islam as a world religion, one of geo-
graphical expansion along its frontiers in Eurasia and Africa, the second
of intensive penetration of Muslim societies. Neither of these is exhausted,
and together they underlie the expansion of Islam as the fastest growing
contemporary religion and what is called its resurgence. The reformist,
fundamentalist and Islamist movements that make up this resurgence are
seeking to make their respective societies more Islamic, and are doing so
in competition with other religions and secular ideologies. The Islamic
intracivilizational process of value-rationalization has been accelerated
by many key processes of modernization such as urbanization, spread of
literacy, expansion of higher education, national political integration and
mobilization, growth of the media of mass and electronic communication
and, last but not least, globalization.
Intracivilizational processes such as Sanskritization and Islamicization
are not necessarily civilized in the old, normative sense. I think the main
reason is that they self-consciously reify civilization, as do Huntington
and his Muslim admirers. The reified, holistic conception of civilization
entails what Edward Tiryakian calls its de-differentiation. It highlights
its perceived fundamentals as the focal point of transformative or opposi-
tional social action, and tends to ignore its complexity and possibilities for
selective adaptation. The improbably phenomenon of Hindu fundamen-
talism can best be understood as a prime example of such civilizational
contraction, as can Islamism and Islamic fundamentalism. (Arjomand &
Tiryakian 2004) This return to fundamentals is not necessarily faithful to
tradition but can involve its invention. Some element of the hegemonic
values can be added to the fundamentals by way of unacknowledged ap-
propriation, or conversely, some element of the folk tradition or custom can
be elevated into core values of the great or central tradition in opposition
to hegemonic values.6 Furthermore, de-differentiation is not everlasting

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

generic category of Jacobin modernism. I studied a different and older

developmental patternnamely the growth of the Muslim institutions of
learning, madrasas as a part of the philanthropic complexes based on the
Islamic law of waqf (endowments)in the context of the relative strength
or weakness of the Turko-Mongolian nomadic empires and military-pa-
tronage states mentioned earlier. (Arjomand 1999) I uncovered a cyclical
development of a sphere of legally protected autonomy that Hegel took as
the defining feature of civil society. It is precisely this sphere of civic and
religious autonomy in pre-modern Muslim societies that is severely erod-
ed by the state-centered pattern of modernization. It is one of the great-
est paradoxes of contemporary history that this sphere of autonomy is
slowly reviving in secularist Turkey with the waning of the Kemalist ideol-
ogyand it forms a social base of the current AK (Justice and Develop-
ment) government, while it is being irreparably stifled by the state in the
Islamic Republics of Iran and Pakistan. The state-control of the previously
autonomous religious sphere in Iran and Pakistan has prompted some
observers (Ghamari-Tabrizi 2008, and Malik 1996: 74, respectively) to
characterize the Islamicization programs in these countries ironically as
secularization. I would instead identify it as ideological modernism, call
it Jacobin or anything else, as the factor responsible for this striking para-
dox. Nowhere is this dimension of Islamic modernities better brought out
than in the unfolding pattern of Islamicization in Pakistan.
Pakistanthe first Islamic Republic in historywas set up for the
Muslims of the Indian subcontinent, including a huge number of refugees,
in 1947. The Islamist ideology, as developed by Mawdudi (d. 1979) in In-
dia and later radicalized by Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966) in Egypt, has received a
great deal of attention, and we are familiar with it as the conscious cloning
of the economic, political and educational systems of the modern fas-
cist, communist and socialist ideologies. The fascinating fact that is dem-
onstrated in meticulous detail by Jamal Malik (1996) is that the pattern of
Islamicizing institutional development in Pakistan corresponds remark-
ably well to Mawdudis intellectual translation of Islam from a religion to
an ideology. Malik shows that the process that culminated in the Islami-
cization ordinances of President Zia ul Haq had been in the making for
a long time and was the consequence of the Islamic modernist impulse
behind the creation of Pakistan.
Thus, Zias fiscalization and state control of Zakat, the previously vol-
untary charitable Islamic levy to create an Islamic welfare state, had its
roots in the Zakat Committee set up by Prime Minister Liaqat Ali Khan
in 1950, while the Council for Islamic Ideology he used as the advisory
222 said a. arjomand

organ in the Islamicization Program was set up by Ayoub Khan in 1962.

(Malik 1996: 35, 86) The most telling impact of ideologyalbeit the Cali-
fornia rather than the Moscow variant of the socialist ideology of the
1960scame under the Berkeley-educated Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Bhuttos
Constitution of 1972 gave the Council for Islamic Ideology the new func-
tion of preparing programs for total Islamicization of Pakistan. In 1975
76, the Council prepared a comprehensive report on creating an Islamic
system of education. (Malik 1996: 37, 129) The Islamicization of the edu-
cational system was carried out under Zia ul Haq, integrating the madra-
sas whose number grew phenomenally and a few of which produced the
Taliban.
Islamism or political Islam was born within Islamic fundamentalism in
the era of the nation-state, and in response to the growth of secular states.
The Egyptian Sayyid Qutb considered the secular state a modern idol and
produced his influential justification of revolutionary violence against
the rulers of the monolithic, modernized states in Nassers prison shortly
before his execution in 1966. The intracivilizational pattern was revived
in the 1970s by the so-called Takfir wal-hijra (excommunication and
withdrawal/emigration) groups who purported to replicate the Prophets
struggle against the pagan oligarchy of Mecca. Nowhere is the mark of the
era of the nation-state on political Islam more visible than in the internal-
ist orientation of the movement for Islamic revolution, and in the Islamic
radicals definition of the object of Jihad as revolutionary struggle. As de-
fined by President Sadats assassin and the Qutbist revolutionaries of the
1970s, the individually incumbent neglected duty was Jihad against the
near enemynamely, the modern idol of the secular state and its head.
Global concerns, foremost among them the liberation of Jerusalem, were
secondary to the overthrow of that monolithic idol (tqut) within each
Muslim nation-state. It was with this internalist orientation that Aymn
al-Zawhiri, still in his teens, was personally inspired by Sayyid Qutb to
form a Jihad cell in 1967 for his high-school friends. The organization he
thus set up for the new Islamic vanguard grew to become Egypts most
deadly, the Tanzim al-Jihd (organizing the holy war). Throughout this
period, Zawhiri affirmed that the road to Jerusalem goes first through
Cairo. (Gerges 2005)
The impact of globalization introduced a strong element of intercivili-
zational clash that overcame the introversion of political Islam and gave it
an externalist orientation that rapidly gained momentum. However, with
the declaration of Jihad against the Soviet Union and the Soviet-backed
regime in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and with the recruitment of Muslims
 islamicate civilization 223

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

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 TOWARDS A WORLD SOCIOLOGY OF MODERNITY

Peter Wagner

In the early 1980s, the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB), a publicly

funded centre for problem-oriented social research, embarked on a com-
prehensive assessment of the experience with applied research on policy
issues and its impact on the social sciences. Such research had been flour-
ishing all over the Western world during the preceding decades, then re-
ferred to as the age of the great programmes (Wittrock 1984), and the
moment for some stock-taking seemed to have arrived, not least for an
institution that was the leader in the field in its country. The initial agenda
of this stock-taking exercise was rather limited, and the hiring of a young
graduate in political science, the author of these lines, was deemed suf-
ficient to implement it. As the object of the undertaking was only vaguely
defined and appeared to vary highly between countries, however, a wider
exploration was required at the start. Searching through Policy Sciences, a
relevant US-based journal for this matter, I came across the article Gov-
ernance in crisis and the withering of the welfare state by Bjrn Wittrock
(1983), which immediately intrigued me because of its wider perspective.
Resources were rather abundantly available at WZB, and its then presi-
dent, Meinolf Dierkes, had an open mind and was always willing to cre-
ate space for innovation. My suggestion to invite Bjrn Wittrock to Berlin
was welcomed, and shortly afterwards, our long discussions in the corri-
dors of a converted Grunewald villa started.
When we began our discussions, we were not fully aware of the fact
that the societies we studied were going through the early phase of a ma-
jor social transformation that affected our research and could partly be
addressed through it. The high hopes for scientifically guided policy-mak-
ing had not been fulfilled, and the moment for evaluation and broader
reflection about modes of interaction between the worlds of knowledge
and of policy had arrived that much was clear (Wittrock 1985). The
originally envisaged analysis of changes in institutional landscapes, fund-
ing patterns, and thematic orientations of policy-oriented social research
228 peter wagner

would, however, not have allowed us to uncover the larger dimensions of

the ongoing social transformation. Bjrn Wittrock, though, had always
been interested in the long course of history and the wide extensions of
social, political, and cultural relations. Time and again, he widened our
corridor discussions with remarks that not only transcended my knowl-
edge but whose significance for our research I was sometimes at a loss to
perceive. We agreed, though, and I remember our shared satisfaction, that
the social sciences needed to return to more comprehensive concerns.
Bjrn Wittrock was adamant about renewing the links between political
and intellectual history, between historical scholarship and the increas-
ingly ahistorical character of the social sciences, and between political
philosophy and social theory. But what for him was an intellectual exer-
cise was still very much a programme for me. He did not shy away from
addressing questions that other scholars would not dare to pose, not to
mention proposing answers for them. Our discussions have encouraged
me to do the same, and the remainder of this article will aim to proceed
in this spirit always bearing in mind the question about the still ongoing
major social transformation that has been occupying us ever since Bjrn
and I first met.
Sociologically, modernity and more recently globalization has often
been described in terms of time-space compression (most explicitly Har-
vey 1990). Without giving particular theoretical or definitional signifi-
cance to this term, it is undoubtedly fruitful to connect the experience of
modernity to human ways of situating their own lives in time in its most
basic sense, to be modern means to be in ones own time and extending
their relations to others in space. Reinhart Kosellecks (1979) felicitous
characterization of the change in European political languages between
1770 and 1830 as distancing the horizon of expectations from the space of
experience expresses a temporal statement in a spatial metaphor. Despite
recent sensitivity to the spatio-temporality of human social life, however,
the analysis of modernity remained marked by strong boundaries in space
and time: between antiquity and modernity; between the European ori-
gins of modernity and its later global diffusion; between a history of mo-
dernity as contained in national societies and current global modernity,
to name only a few. If there is some validity to the latter claim about a
global modern condition, in particular, then these themes should be re-
addressed from the view-point of a world sociology of modernity that is
in urgent need of elaboration.
 towards a world sociology of modernity 229

Space (1): Multiple Modernities and Our Relation to the Axial Age

It is understandable but rather unfortunate that the theorem of multiple

modernities addresses the current plurality of modern forms of socio-
political organization by resorting to the claim of a long-lasting parallel
unfolding of different cultural programmes (Eisenstadt 2002, 2003). The
objective of arguing for persistent plurality is thus achieved, but the his-
torical origins of the claim tend to fall into oblivion. After all, Shmuel
Eisenstadts analysis is grounded on a reconsideration of the so-called
Axial Age, the period between roughly 700 and 400 bce, around which,
according to the original philosophical version, world history turns, sepa-
rating pre-history from history. However one judges the current state of
the Axial Age debate (see Arnason, Eisenstadt and Wittrock 2005 for a
comprehensive re-assessment), the hypothesis not only claims that paral-
lel and somewhat similar major socio-cultural transformations occurred
in several regions of Eurasia during that period; it also needs to affirm
some, albeit thin, interconnectedness between those regions, as otherwise
the parallelism would be a highly unlikely coincidence. Thus, a more ade-
quate version of the multiple modernity theorem would place less empha-
sis on the separate and different origins of various cultural programmes
and consequently on some fundamental diversity between contemporary
modernities and would focus instead on the long-term interconnections
in world history that not only permit historico-sociological comparison
but also suggest that there may be some proximity, or family resemblance,
between the basic problmatiques that human beings tried to address col-
lectively at various places and points in time.1

Time (1): From the Ancients to the Moderns

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

formations as modern, with the partial exception of Athenian democracy,

but it is worthwhile to reflect more on their modernity, with all its limits,
and in particular on the modernity of the transformations themselves.
The idea of any strong and direct connection between the axial-age
social configurations and those of our present era is untenable. No one
posits any such a connection or relation between Greek democracy or the
Roman Republic and present Europe, and thus Western thinkers should
be cautious in suggesting any such long-term continuity for other civiliza-
tions, such as the Chinese one, which may emerge only due to ignorance
about the finer details of Chinese history (Wagner 2010a). On the other
hand, the alternative assumption of radical discontinuity, as promoted for
instance by Aldo Schiavone (1996), only begs further questions. Even if
we allow for radical re-interpretations, we need to account for the fact that
our sociopolitical language derives many of its key concepts from ancient
Greek and that Continental European juridical institutions operate on the
basis of canonized rules that are known as Roman Law.3 In other words,
a long historical perspective on the history of modernity should centrally
focus on the question of the relation between the ancients and the mod-
erns as neither one of straight continuity nor of radical discontinuity.
Those authors, such as Benjamin Constant, who contributed to formulat-
ing that distinction were after all not drawing a sharp line of separation
but were investigating degrees of difference and similarity (see Karagian-
nis and Wagner forthcoming).

Space (2): 1800 European Modernity or Modern World-Making?

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

First, the diffusion of modernity has been explained by theorists of

modernization and development as triggered by the performative superi-
ority of a functionally differentiated society. In Talcott Parsons own writ-
ings (see, e.g., Parsons 1964), however, the argument is presented in a less
forceful way than his followers often assumed. Drawing on the analogy
with natural selection, Parsons leaves considerable space for the survival
of a variety of species due to insulation or identification of niches. Intro-
ducing more recent ecological concerns, one can go further and suggest
that diversity is an asset in its own right given the greater probability of
adaptation in changed circumstances. But we should not carry the anal-
ogy too far, as social change in human societies is reasonably seen as quite
distinct from natural selection. Staying closer to historical evidence, we
can recognize that elites in some societies perceived European develop-
ments across the nineteenth century as a challenge to which they needed
to respond (see Kaya 2004). This is the case for the Russian and the Otto-
man empires, in both of which a debate about the need for, and the degree
of, Westernization emerged. Towards the end of the nineteenth century,
related debates emerged in China and Japan, though the degree of confi-
dence in ones own institutions and culture was higher than in the afore-
mentioned cases. The outcome of these encounters (to use Talal Asads
term, 1995) arguably altered the trajectory of the non-European societies,
but it is not fruitfully to be seen as either Westernization or the assertion
of a long-standing cultural programme but rather as a selective percep-
tion, active interpretation, and modified introduction of certain features
of European modernity in the given context.
Second, the need for adaptation because of European military superi-
ority might be seen as a special case of the perceived higher performance
of the West. It is a very special case, however, because here the encounter
is determined by the risk of military defeat and possibly extinction, not by
any feature of the West that is regarded as worthy of emulation in its own
right. The European colonizers had without doubt the higher firing pow-
er and many colonial encounters were determined by this difference. The
history of South Africa provides a good illustration as neither the Dutch
nor the British settlers were initially aiming for colonization in the more
narrow sense of the term, that is, occupation of the territory and domi-
nation over the local population. The Dutch settlers invaded the territory
further only when exposed to stronger British settlement and domination
in the coastal trading-posts, and even then their encounters with the na-
tive African population were limited to those parts of the territory occu-
pied for agricultural purposes. The African societies resisted successfully
232 peter wagner

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.

Time (2): 1880s1960s a Global Organized Modernity

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

distinction between economic and political liberties. Since oppression

on grounds of religion was a major reason for the early North American
settlers to leave Britain, the commitment to religious freedom became a
corner-stone of the self-understanding of the United States as a society
committed to the freedom of individual expression, as lastingly confirmed
in the Bill of Rights added to the U.S. Constitution. Elsewhere, in Europe
and in many new societies, the liberal modern imaginary informed po-
litical debates in a pivotal manner but hardly ever reigned supreme for
extended periods before the 1970s.
In Europe, as described in more detail elsewhere (Wagner 1994), the
liberal imaginary was first restricted by means of exclusion of large strata
of the population, in a formal way by means of limits to civic rights and
political participation, in more informal ways through limited access to
modern economic and cultural practices. As the imaginary provided the
resources for the transcendence of those original limitations, a major line
of internal critique of modernity demanded full inclusion. Such inclusion
was by and large accomplished by the first inter-war period by means of
organizing modernity around collective concepts such as, most important-
ly, nation and class, though at the expense of channelling the expressions
of individual liberty into the containers of large-scale organizations, as
secondary means of containing the reach of the modern imaginary.
Looking beyond Europe, we can recognize how colonial domination
became the global concomitant to the original restrictions of domes-
tic liberal modernity. In analogy to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
views of women and workers, European property-owning male think-
ers clearly recognized that special justifications were required to exclude
groups of human beings from modernity once the latters imaginary was
accepted, and a variable mix of biological, socio-structural, and histori-
cal reasons were invoked to explain why Africans, in particular, were not
able to shoulder the responsibility that goes along with the recognition of
their full autonomy. An educational view of the relation between the Eu-
ropeans and the colonized was created employing parental, domestic con-
cepts of responsibility for beings who, though human, were still in a state
of minority. In parallel, European action towards the colonized was seen
in terms of efficient intervention towards development following an in-
dustrial model of mastery and control. Such discourse prevailed until the
1970s in European development-policy documents, that is, far into the era
of decolonisation in the name of collective self-determination (Karagian-
nis 2004).
234 peter wagner

The South African situation showed a partial exception that overall

confirms the domestic-industrial approach towards non-European oth-
ers.4 The apartheid conception of separation and domination, later re-
ferred to as separate development, was gradually elaborated during the
first half of the twentieth century to find full institutional expression in
the regime that came to power in 1948. Thus, the era of apartheid coin-
cides with the period of organized modernity, including a contestation-
ridden build-up up to the Second World War and the full elaboration in
the second post-war era. In place of a detailed analysis, an example may
here suffice: The District Six Museum in Cape Town documents the social
destruction of an inner-city neighbourhood when apartheid rules were
used to impose the relocation of the population of highly mixed ethnic
origins and religious beliefs in favour of the building of a whites only
quarter. One display in the exhibition, at first sight surprisingly, shows
urban planning policies in the Swedish city of Malm during the 1960s,
without further comment and without need for any since the thought-
provoking power of this display in its context works on its own.

Time (3): 1970s2010 Globalization as the Destructuring of

Organized Modernity

Contemporary South African society struggles to overcome the apartheid

heritage. Social inequality and residential segregation are not easily re-
moved even by a majority party that is firmly in power and has an efficient
state apparatus at its disposal for policies of transformation. Furthermore,
apartheid is part of the lived experience of the coloured and black popu-
lation of South Africa that cannot be negated or denied without the risk
of depriving experiences and the memory of them of any reasonable sig-
nificance. Jacob Dlaminis Native nostalgia (2009) analyses life in a town-
ship under apartheid by recalling it to memory, including his own. Such
memories are not without fondness, and the liberal-democratic present
clearly does not always compare favourably with a past marked by oppres-
sion and exclusion. In this respect, it resonates with European or North
American nostalgic longings for the orderly world of the 1950s and 1960s
that withered away in the face of individualization and globalization, as
current sociological and journalistic jargon has it.5

4 The terminology draws on Boltanski and Thvenot 1991.

5 In some respects, the book may be compared with Edgar Reitz monumental film
Heimat, evoking German everyday life under Nazism and during the restorative second
 towards a world sociology of modernity 235

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.

Space (3): the Global Present Rethinking Freedom,

Equality, and Solidarity

The preceding observations should have suggested that, globalization be-

ing far from an entirely novel phenomenon, we have lived in a common
world for two and a half centuries, if not millennia, even though we have
interpreted it in a rather large variety of ways at different times and in dif-
ferent places. Sociologically, the transformations of this world should be
analysed in terms of changing structures and extensions of social rela-
tions authoritative, allocative, and ideational ones (Wagner 2010a), and
the preceding analysis should have given some ideas and concepts as to
how this enormously difficult task can be addressed and possibly accom-
plished. Such an analysis, even if pursued in a flawless way, will gain its
full significance only if it is placed in the context of the modes of norma-
tive philosophy that have accompanied modernity with great explicitness
over the past two and a half centuries and in a more implicit or indirect
way over much longer periods. Here three brief remarks in terms of a re-
appraisal of the normative commitments of the French Revolution have to
suffice.
It may be true, first, that individual liberty has never had such a promi-
nent place in world history as it has now. Major theoretical efforts have
been made to separate liberate, some may want to say the idea of indi-
vidual freedom from conceptual contexts that were seen as endangering
its full meaning. Time and again, however, it has also been observed that
such attempts have had the opposite effect: by abstracting freedom, to
paraphrase Hegels terminology, from the practical contexts in which free
action can only be meaningful, some conceptual purification can possibly

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

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 PART FOUR

Cultural and Social Dynamics

 THE FIRST DRAFT OF HISTORY:
NOTES ON EVENTS AND CULTURAL TURBULENCE

Ulf Hannerz

Some time ago I studied the work of newsmedia foreign correspondents

(Hannerz 2004). A point my journalist informants recurrently made was
that a characteristic of their work was that they were there, in the right
place at the right moment, to do the first draft of history. They would be
there as witnesses of events, but also to report, formulate, interpret. Prob-
ably the correspondents used the phrase mostly to convey a sense of won-
der and excitement, and might not think more about it. Yet I find the first
draft of history an intriguing notion, depicting a quick move between
past and future. It is prospectively retrospective: looking forward to look-
ing backward.
The journalists celebration of the event is surely in part the natural bias
of someone who was, in fact, there. Stories of this kind also fit well into
the rhythm of newswork, and the production of news as a commodity.
Thus it can become a useful skill of journalistic narration to make events
out of what is not really so eventful. My informants could also tell me how
they would do news stories about more drawn-out, abstract processes by
hanging them on some more momentary concrete peg.
Yet probably we will admit that there is something to this parachutist
view of history a parachutist being the kind of journalist who arrives
quickly at the scene of a major news story, assembles that story and re-
ports it, then leaves again. Some events make more of a difference than
others, and enter into the record of human life. Historians, who mostly
have not been there (at least not then), have also made it a part of their
business to portray the concrete drama of the event, with an emphasis on
its uniqueness. But how do we, as social scientists attempting to under-
stand change, deal with the events which sometimes appear central to it?
Something like a half-century ago, Fernand Braudel (1980: 25ff.) conclud-
ed that in contrast with historians, many of whom he found preoccupied
with histoire vnementielle, social science has almost what amounts to a
244 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

The death of Martin Luther King, and the threat

against Salman Rushdie

Events, as dealt with by journalists, are an extremely diverse category:

revolutions, earthquakes, industrial disasters, riots, world cups, elections,
summit meetings, coups, beauty contests, assassinations It is difficult to
imagine a one size fits all theory of events. What follows here is rather
some notes on more or less recent scholarly commentary which seems to
converge on one kind of view toward the place of events in change. I will
begin, however, by revisiting a couple of personal experiences with some
bearing on the topic.3
The first comes out of my field research in the late 1960s in an African-
American neighborhood in Washington, D.C. Much of the study was not
so eventful an ethnography of the everyday routines of a way of life. Yet
this was a period when, in a low-income black urban area in the United
States, one was to an extent ready for the not-so-routine to happen. The
relevant vocabulary was contested: some would speak of riots, others of
insurrections. These labels have different political connotations, but I
will disregard those here and use the former term simply because it was in
more common use.
When I began my study, there had already been a number of these oc-
currences: in Harlem, New York, in 1964; in Watts, Los Angeles, in 1965;
quite recently in Chicago and Cleveland 1966. Then during the long,
hot summer of 1967, major riots occurred in Newark and Detroit. It
was widely accepted that sooner or later, Washingtons turn would come.
Minor disturbances came and went in various parts of the city, without
any serious escalation. Sometimes there were specific forecasts of a riot to
break out, say, the upcoming weekend; and then afterwards attempts to
explain why it had not occurred.
In the end, it did happen, set off not by any local circumstance but by
the assassination of Martin Luther King in Memphis in early April, 1968.
There were major riots in Washington and a number of other U.S. cities
over the next few days. Largely it was a matter of looting, but houses were
also burned down, and lives were lost. I was not a direct observer, and
even less a participant observer in the strict sense of the term, while the

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.

Storming the Bastille: a prototypical historical event

Both these experiences were more than personal experiences of mine

they were indeed happenings that journalists came to witness and that
were covered in the media, the first one obviously extensively, the second
less conspicuously. (One radio reporter on Broadway tried to interview
me as a voice out of the sidewalk crowd, but gave up after hearing my aca-
demic on the one hand, on the other hand ) Do they fit in anywhere in
an understanding of the part of events in change?
One attempt to theorize events in history is that of William Sewell
(1996a; see also 1996b), sociologist/historian/political scientist. Sewells
background view is not so different from that of Braudel several decades
earlier: historical sociologists have disdained the study of mere events
and sought instead to discover general causal patterns, whereas narrative
historians, revelling in the contingency and particularity of events, have
refused on principle to engage in explicit theorizing. Thus the event has
rarely been scrutinized as a theoretical category. Yet he senses a certain
rapprochement between the two tendencies, and evidently wants to con-
tribute to it by way of such a scrutiny.
Events play a crucial role in historical change, Sewell suggests, but an
understanding of that role must be founded on a concept of structure.
Structures composed of cultural schemas, distributions of resources, and
modes of power shape practices, and practices at the same time constitute
248 ulf hannerz

and reproduce structures. Most practices tend to be consistently repro-

duced over extended periods, but small changes in practices may accu-
mulate over time, eventually to result in significant structural transfor-
mations. Yet when changes take place, they are rarely smooth and linear
but tend to be clustered into relatively intense bursts. The characteristic
texture of historical temporality is lumpiness rather than smoothness, and
while events may occur as a culmination of processes long underway, they
frequently entail transformations which could not have been fully predict-
ed from the preceding gradual, incremental changes. This, Sewell argues,
is why a theory of social change requires special attention to those lumps,
a theoretically robust conception of events.
The case he draws on to work out his understanding of events is that
involving twelve days in Paris in July, 1789, a sequence of occurrences
centering on the storming of the Bastille, and the invention of a concept
of revolution. Sewell goes over the materials in some detail, to which I
cannot do justice here. I will point summarily, instead, to the particular
attention he devotes to emotion and signification as intrinsic situational
aspects of the event. Most social scientists avoid emotion like the plague,
he says irrationality, volatility, subjectivity and ineffability do not go well
with their own intended lucidity and objectivity, and may somehow seem
to taint their claims to proper scholarship. Yet they cannot afford to disre-
gard the part of heightened emotions in the transformative power of the
event. The historical event typically has a certain duration, and during this
period actors tend to be beset by insecurity, producing a variety of results:
anxiety, fear, exhilaration, hyperactivity, paralysis, extreme caution, reck-
less abandon. Individuals may respond in different ways, but the same in-
dividual may also show a series of these reactions in succession. Moreover,
they interact over them; what Durkheim called collective effervescence
lifts people out of their individual inhibitions. This emotional charging is
an important component in the relative openness of outcomes of change
through events.
Historical events are also cultural transformations, involving major acts
of signification. New symbols may be brought into existence, old symbols
can change meaning and value. In Paris in 1789, the emergent meaningful
linkage between the crowd and the notion of popular sovereignty brought
the new idea of revolution into being. The taking of the Bastille, suggests
Sewell, brought about a comprehensive reconstruction of the categories of
French political culture. Existing ritual forms could be appropriated and
modified, for purposes opposite to the old ones, yet like rituals elsewhere
generating the betwixt and between sense of liminality, of structureless-
 the first draft of history 249

ness (here Sewell draws on classical formulations of the anthropologist

Victor Turner [e.g. 1969]) where hierarchies and social constraints evapo-
rate. Participants enter into a profound sense of communitas. Such inno-
vations in meaning and its management are not separate from changes in
power and the distribution of resources, but they redefine the nature of
things coming out of the historical event.
Sewells definition of the historical event is (1) a ramified sequence
of occurrences that (2) is recognized as notable by contemporaries, and
that (3) results in a durable transformation of structures. Certainly the
occurrences in Paris during that July were understood to be extraordi-
nary. If parachutist foreign correspondents had existed at the time, they
would surely have hurried there.4 As for durability, Sewell concludes that
this event changed forever the horizons of world politics. The histori-
cal event brings about a cascade of consequences. Typically, it produces
more events.

Collective violence in South Asia

Reading Sewell on the character of historical events, I discern certain par-

allels with another study, the anthropologist Stanley Tambiahs Leveling
Crowds (1996), an analysis of instances of collective violence in India, Pa-
kistan, and Sri Lanka. The study is not explicitly concerned with events
as an analytical category. Nevertheless, it seems entirely possible to con-
sider these instances of collective violence (we may call them riots)
in such terms. The characteristic ingredients are similar to those which
Sewell points out, and in fact the classic work on crowd behavior which
Tambiah takes as his theoretical point of departure, Gustave Le Bons La
psychologie des foules from 1895, was in fact inspired or, noting Le Bons
conservatism, should one say provoked? by the French revolution. One
could have expected Sewell and Tambiah to refer to each other, but since
the publications I draw on here are from the same year, they may have
been unaware of each others similar ongoing pursuits.
Tambiah regards his study as somewhat experimental. Dealing vari-
ously extensively with riots from the late nineteenth century onwards, he

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

draws on a wider range of sources than an anthropologist may be accus-

tomed to doing, but he also finds the topic of collective behavior one out-
side the conventional limits of his competence.
The riots he scrutinizes are those which, in the heterogeneous socie-
ties of South Asia, involve conflicts between ethnic, national, and religious
groups what in this region often goes under the rubric of communalism.
Tambiah makes the point that the crowds engaging in these outbreaks of
violent conflict are not necessarily made up of the poorest, most disorgan-
ized people from the lowest strata of society, but often include individuals
of varying social backgrounds. They tend not to be entirely spontaneous
and unstructured, but often have leaders and activists.
In his analysis of the riot as an intense, largely localized collective ac-
tivity, Tambiah indeed points to some of the same features as Sewell does
(and he draws on other writers on collective and mass phenomena as well;
apart from Le Bon also for example on Durkheim, Freud, and Canetti).
He notes how individual participants merging into crowd formations
experience and manifest certain heightened psychic states and convulsive
behavioral impulsions. Physical density seems to produce psychic den-
sity another example is from the intimacy of a British football crowd. In
the confrontative riot, one feels free, or even compelled, not only to hurt
or destroy the enemy physically, but also to make his property ones own.
New and terrifying experience can be interpreted in terms of old cultural
structures, but these are also affected by the instant mythologizing. As the
adversarys sacred pantheons of gods, saints, and heroes are desecrated,
the riot mob crosses symbolic boundaries, dissolves categories and clas-
sifications, creates a liminal time. Then again, the state of uncertainty is
basic. In one moment the crowd is aggressive and self-aggrandizing. In
the next the mood may be one of panic. Tambiah gives special attention to
the importance of rumor: often with anonymous origins, perhaps short-
lived but sometimes devastatingly effective while it lasts.
Apart from dealing with the riot as a phenomenon of collective be-
havior more or less circumscribed in time and place, however, Tambiah
also discusses its extensions. Here his formulations move beyond Sewells
about events begetting more events. Introducing additional analytical
concepts, he bridges a micromacro gap. On the one hand, there is a focal-
ization which progressively denudes local incidents and disputes of their
contextual particulars, and a transvaluation which distorts, abstracts, and
aggregates the minor materials of conflict into larger collective issues.
Thus microevents at the local level, through chainlike linkages, acceler-
ate and cumulatively build up into an avalanche, whose episodes progres-
 the first draft of history 251

sively lose their local contextual, circumstantial, and substantive associa-

tions, while the violence, lasting a few days, is retrospectively generalized
and made into a macroevent or master narrative. On the other hand, in
a process of parochialization, there is a reproduction of a national issue
in diverse local places, where it explodes like a cluster bomb in multiple
context-bound ways (1996: 257). In part, these processes involve the
work of propagandists and rumormongers, but in the South Asian setting,
Tambiah can also point to symbolic activities of specific kinds which are
involved in the construction of wider linkages the distribution of earth
from a major shrine, or of sacred water from the Ganges, can help fasten
the attention of people in the localities of the periphery on the affairs and
controversies of the center, and engage their sentiments.

Metaphors of speed and suddenness

When Tambiah turns from the particularities of crowd behavior to the

wider linkages of these occurrences, he seems to shift in his vocabulary
toward a more general conception of events. I also find it interesting to
note the kinds of metaphors that both he and Sewell use to capture the
qualities of wider event-driven change. To convey the sense of force,
speed and suddenness of the changes they are dealing with, the authors
of these texts seem to find it necessary to go beyond the terms ordinarily
used to describe social phenomena. Again, Sewell refers to a cascade of
consequences. Tambiah sees microevents building up into an avalanche,
and compares the dispersed localization of a national issue to a cluster
bomb. And then he suggests that we may seek inspiration in physics, and
in formulations concerning turbulence. A social flow crosses the bound-
ary from smoothness to the high instability and disorder of turbulence
when small-scale tensions and conflicts, usually managed through es-
tablished norms of restraint and mechanisms of social control, get out of
hand and pile up and turn into new waves and motions, creating rhythms
with overlapping speeds and sizes.
This imagery may not become central to Tambiahs analysis, but here I
am prompted to make the further association to another writer who has
made turbulence a key concept in a theoretical edifice: the political scien-
tist James Rosenau (1990). Not so concerned with the minutiae of events,
and thus mostly working at another level than Sewell and Tambiah (who
do not refer to him), Rosenau attempts to work out a new overall view of
international relations in the late twentieth century, an understanding of
a postinternational politics insofar as one key feature is an intensified
252 ulf hannerz

involvement of other actors than states. As he takes the notion beyond

its use as an appealing metaphor, he seeks out sources in physics as well
as organizational theory for a conception of turbulence as a combination
of complexity and dynamism. In a turbulent environment, the number,
differentiation, and interdependencies of actors, issues, and situations are
inordinately high, and the rapidity of variations in these actors, issues, and
situations is also especially great. Organizations (or other actors) involved
in such an environment find themselves again and again in situations
marked by ambiguity and uncertainty; circumstances over which they
cannot readily exercise control, and which are not conducive to rational
action (1990: 62). There is, notes Rosenau, a danger of mistaking mere
commotion for turbulence and thus exaggerating the depth and breadth
of change (1990: 69). Swift-moving flows of activity gathering strength
and surging irregularly in varied directions convey the impression of con-
stant change. Yet as in the case of whirlpools and hurricanes, the activities
of the turbulent social systems do not necessarily result in lasting change.
One characteristic form of change under conditions of turbulence,
however, Rosenau (1990: 298 ff.) identifies as cascades. And the meta-
phorical inspiration is not far away. These sequences are analogous to a
flow of white water down a rocky river bed the flow churns and shifts,
sometimes moving sideways, sometimes diagonally, and sometimes even
careening in the reverse direction, and leaving sprays, eddies, and whirl-
pools in its wake.5
In the same way, action sequences gather momentum, stall, reverse
course, and resume anew, as their repercussions spread through soci-
ety. These cascades are more than events, go beyond events, in directions
which are not coordinated and mostly cannot be fully anticipated. As they
gather momentum and drag in wider circles of actors, each new shift adds
further complexity and dynamism within the interdependent structures
linking the actors.

Moments of flux, cascading responses

In what directions do these writers point, with their metaphorics and

analytical formulations? At this point, we may return to those two ex-

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

periences of mine, in Washington, D.C., and New York. It should be clear

that there are two main foci in those comments by Sewell, Tambiah, and
Rosenau to which I have referred. On the one hand, the former two pay
special attention to the more internal characteristics of events as more
or less momentary and localized clusters of human activity lumps or
bursts as Sewell puts it. On the other hand, all three concern themselves
to one extent or other with the continued and more dispersed effects of
these events, as responses occur, and then perhaps responses to these re-
sponses, in the webs of relationships surrounding them.
What I first want to emphasize, then, is that I do not see the two events
I have briefly described as the first, triggering, in that sense central, events
of wider processes. Before the riot in Washington in early April, 1968, was
on the one hand the murder of Martin Luther King in Memphis, Ten-
nessee, immediately before, and on the other hand the series of similar
conflagrations in other major American cities in the preceding years. The
Washington riot, its occurrence and its form, would be difficult to under-
stand separately from either. The symbolic confrontation over the Rushdie
affair on Lower Broadway, New York, followed on the publication of the
novel Satanic Verses, and Ayatollah Khomeinis fatwa.
It seems to me that the King assassination well exemplifies Tambiahs
point about how a microevent the shooting of one man by another man
(we still do not really know whether a conspiracy was involved) through
focalization and transvaluation builds up and accumulates effects into
a macroevent, consisting of simultaneous riots spread out over urban
America. The Rushdie affair, on the other hand, could seem to be an il-
lustrative instance of Tambiahs concept of parochialization, where the
original event explodes like a cluster bomb, inserting itself differentially
in varied contexts cascading, to draw more on Rosenau. Satanic Verses
was published in England, banned in India, and provoked early riots in
Pakistan; the fatwa was issued in Iran, there was a death threat in Ni-
geria against the locally controversial Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka
who had expressed his solidarity with Rushdie, and in Italy guards were
reputedly placed at the grave of Dante who in his time had made adverse
comments on Islam. In Sweden a conflict arose among members of the
Academy over how to deal with the Rushdie issue, and in the United
States there was a debate over the responsibility of major bookstore chains
for the freedom of expression fearful of bombings, these establishments
had temporarily stopped selling the notorious book. Moreover, according
to the New York papers, literary celebrities were concerned with their in-
ternal pecking order, as manifested in actions of solidarity, and in selec-
254 ulf hannerz

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

evolve rapidly but perhaps imperfectly, where uncertain immediate per-

ceptions blend with stored assumptions and imageries, and where at any
one point in time it may not be entirely clear what will happen next.
I would suspect that it is often an event rather like this that my for-
eign correspondent interlocutors would have had in mind when they see
themselves as eyewitnesses to history. Something is conspicuously there
in front of them, or surrounding them, to be registered with their senses;
full of movement and drama, most likely using a range of modalities of
expression, and not least bodily activity; not just talking heads or words
in a document. And again, when there is not obviously any such event
available, they may do what they can to approximate it, finding something
tangible that allows a focus to their reporting.
But can we say that these events made a difference? Did they result in
any enduring change, or was what I saw in Washington and New York
in Rosenaus terms mere commotion, among the end points of chains
of rather superficial ongoings, not actually to be included even as minor
ingredients in a later draft of history?
These questions seem difficult to answer conclusively. In certain ways,
however, I believe we can see the cascades continuing beyond these oc-
currences. As far as the riots of the late 1960s in Washington, D.C., and
other American cities are concerned, it has often been argued that viewed
as any kind of rational political action, they were self-defeating, a move
into a cul de sac. The neighborhoods most directly involved came out of
this period in an even worse condition. But this is looking at things only
locally. A wider view would also place these events into that wider na-
tional context of turbulence involving the war on poverty, continuously
debated policies of affirmative action, and so forth. Moreover, it seems to
me likely that they came to define a moment in world history. They oc-
curred at the end of the civil rights era, in a phase where issues of race
and ethnicity became more starkly defined, in terms of political and eco-
nomic conflict rather than legal rights, and involving more reciprocal vio-
lence. In addition, the scene was in world cities, rather than in a suppos-
edly backward region of the nation. It can be argued that in the aggregate,
the King assassination and the riots which followed affected the endur-
ing view of the United States in the world. Perhaps equally importantly,
in the United States and globally, these events dramatized racial, ethnic,
and cultural group differences as an enduring and possibly inevitable di-
mension of social life. Loosely associated with phrasings of black power,
impressions of these upheavals cascaded through what Rosenau refers to
as the post-international world as materials for ethnic self-assertion, or
256 ulf hannerz

for claims about the desirability or necessity of multiculturalism, in a way

that few other local, ethnicity-involving events anywhere in the world
have done. This is obviously not to propose that they could have such ef-
fects all alone again, the point is that these effects occurred in processes
of parochialization, in those multiple context-bound ways. The events
could have a part in these processes, however, in large part because they
were reported, even powerfully visualized, in media in many parts of the
world. If the Vietnam War which went on at the same time has been de-
scribed as the first television war, perhaps these were the first television
riots.
The Rushdie affair came to a sort of happy end: the author emerged
from hiding, and continued writing. Again, however, looking backward
from a point some twenty years later, the momentary cascading at the
time may now seem like only one phase of intensification in a longer pe-
riod of turbulence involving what shall we call it? Islam and the West.
Obviously there are again many ingredients, some more important, some
less: armed conflicts in the Middle East, other literary events such as Betty
Mahmoodys Not without My Daughter and Samuel Huntingtons clash
of civilizations; then, dominating the early years of the new millennium,
the date of September 11, and a little later, the controversy over the Dan-
ish Muhammad caricatures with its global reverberations. To gain any
real understanding of the complexity and dynamism making up this tur-
bulence, we need to try and specify the parts of European and American
capitalism, liberalism, and secularism; of Middle Eastern politics, econo-
my, and demography; of Islamism; of the end of the cold war; and per-
haps some number of other factors. Nonetheless, in the minds of more or
less informed citizens, when it comes to summarizing the turbulence, the
Rushdie affair, because of its particular ways of cascading through media
and dispersed contexts, may have had some special force.

Conclusion: analyzing cultural turbulence

Scrutinizing what goes into the kinds of occurrences discussed here,

drawing on commentators such as Sewell and Tambiah as well as my own
experiences, it seems again and again that phenomena of handling mean-
ing and communication play a crucial role in the making of historical
events. This is true both of the local phase of fluid, intense interactions
and of the phase where understandings, of one kind or other, of these
bursts spread through wider networks. In the early phase, in moods that
can shift quickly between anger, exhilaration, fear, or other points on the
 the first draft of history 257

map of human emotions, participants (and spectators turning into par-

ticipants) draw on their repertoires of memories and meanings to grasp
what is happening and to direct their own actions. For middle aged col-
lege alumni, recollections of past demonstrations, hey hey, ho ho ; for
ghetto street brothers, a recent soul hit, we all get together As Tambi-
ah points out, there is an innovative handling of available cultural forms.
They are disordered and reordered, and in the volatile condition, catego-
rizations are dissolved and boundaries crossed. There are new symbols,
and new connections between old ideas. The symbolic authority that was
important social capital only yesterday may be without much value today,
at least at this moment. Ambiguity and uncertainty are prevalent. Even if
participants may attend closely to one another, and react to one another,
their actions and the situation as a whole may be far from transparent to
them. Things may happen fast. Rumors can pass quickly. Nobody seems
to know where they came from, but they may redefine circumstances in
an instant.
And then in the next phase, those processes occur which take the event
out of the local context, onto a larger arena and into other more circum-
scribed settings, through what Tambiah refers to as focalization, transval-
uation, and parochialization. Again these seem to be in large part a matter
of managing meaning. Rumormongers, propagandists, and symbol hand-
lers are at work.
In conclusion, I suggest that in some major dimensions, an under-
standing of historical events of the kind identified here requires a kind of
cultural analysis but a cultural analysis which at the same time merges
with a kind of insights and preoccupations which in the social sciences
have been identified with another research field, that of collective behav-
ior. We may need to break down a conceptual wall, and a wall between
disciplines, here. Perhaps there was a time when phenomena like crowds
and riots were somehow taken to be cases of humankind in the raw, in
some precultural (or deculturated) mode of excited sociality. What goes
on, however, is rather a collective process of rapid reworking of meanings
and meaningful forms, under interactive conditions which may be condu-
cive to misunderstandings and the reconfiguration of differences as well
as to innovation a kind of high-speed cultural process.
Tambiah rather cautiously experiments with such a merger as he re-
turns to the classics (primarily Le Bon). One might proceed from there to
more recent research and conceptualization. I would have in mind, for ex-
ample, the study of moral panics, beginning in the work of the sociologist
Stanley Cohen (1972) on confrontative British youth cultures and their
258 ulf hannerz

public reception. It is interesting that Cohen, while primarily locating his

own work in the genre of deviance research, also tests its routine concep-
tual boundaries as he calls attention to affinities with the field of disaster
research, focusing mostly on human conduct in the wake of natural disas-
ters. Not least, however, does Cohen emphasize the contemporary role of
media, in that second phase in the study of events. This is where witness-
ing is followed by reporting and interpreting to the world outside, largely
away from the scene. In the vocabulary of cultural analysis, it is here, not
least, that cultural brokerage may have a niche, where the events of some-
where may be formulated as significant and memorable for others more
or less distant in time and place. Here, in other words, is where that first
draft of history is written, where people like parachute journalists become
not just witnesses to events, but actors in defining them.
I would like to draw attention to one conceptual implication. Linger-
ing in anthropology as well, but certainly present in disciplines where the
concept is less central, is a bias toward assuming that culture is long-term,
enduring, stabilizing; primarily a matter of the longue dure. There is no
need, however, for any fixed cutting point in the temporal dimension of
cultural analysis. In the kind of events of which we have had a glimpse
here, characterized by something we may term cultural turbulence, we
need to make the culture concept more time-neutral, open to the differ-
ent velocities of human history. Human beings are forever cultural, infor-
mation-handling animals, dealing with their surroundings by way of in-
terpreting and making signs. Equipped with memory, they approach new
situations with the repertoires of meanings and meaningful forms which
they have already built up, and that may to an extent be a time-binding
capacity. But they can also reformulate, reinterpret, and recombine; invent
and learn anew; discard and forget. As we attempt to place cultural turbu-
lence under scrutiny, that is an important part of what we must deal with.
It may be, too, that cultural turbulence in the world is something that,
now and in the future, we can less than ever disregard. Probably there
will always be realms of life characterized by stable habits and seemingly
overwhelming, enduring sameness. Yet stuff will happen. And more inter-
dependencies, and not least technologies of culture that allow dispersed
publics to get those first drafts of history more rapidly, in more diverse
forms, and from more places and events than ever before, may shape oth-
er imagined communities, and imagined worlds. Perhaps that means that
doing the later scholarly versions with greater precision, attending to the
recurrent as well as the contingent, becomes a yet greater intellectual chal-
lenge.
 the first draft of history 259

References

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Braudel, Fernand. 1980. On History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Cohen, Stanley. 1972. Folk Devils and Moral Panics. London: MacGibbon and Kee.
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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-
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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-
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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?

Ideas, pre-conditions, practices

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, ideologue

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

it possible to understand how she could have been as influential as she

was.3 Although she elaborated upon her arguments throughout her career,
her basic ideas remained the same. Over and over, but perhaps most suc-
cinctly in her contribution to the report which the Homecraft Committee
(hemsljdskommittn) presented to His Majesty the King in 1917, she em-
phasized the e-words that were essential to understanding homecraft: eco-
nomics, ethics, esthetics, education, and emigration (Zickerman 1918).
Needless to say, these are all entangled with one another.
In different ways, economic issues have been incitements to the form-
ing of crafts movements in many parts of the world. In Sweden poverty
had worsened during the latter half of the nineteenth century, in part due
to population increases. Many people left the countryside and joined a
swelling urban proletariat. Those who were able to, emigrated, primarily
to the United States, and emigration was a great concern among intellec-
tuals and politicians who worried that the best of the Swedish stock was
disappearing. Like other reformers before her, Zickerman thought that
Swedes were poor because they were lazy and had too little to do during
the long, dark winters. And, she emphasized, industrialization had made
matters worse: now that people could buy necessities, they were even less
willing than before to fill idle hours with wood-working or weaving.
What Zickerman proposed was a grand economic program to relieve
idleness and poverty. In her view, it was a matter of national concern and
a moral duty that she and her associates in the homecraft movement help
poor people help themselves to find work and thereby to enhance the
moral and aesthetic quality of their lives. This meant that people had to be
taught to reject cheap, mass-produced goods (gottkpskram) and learn to
appreciate the quality and beauty of home-made wares. They had to learn
to make traditional crafts from those few who still mastered them. But
they were not merely to copy peasant furniture and textiles, they were to
improve them. Not all traditional artifacts were first-rate and stern control
was needed to maintain high quality and proper styling. Ultimately, Zick-
erman hoped that her program would have even greater effects: she ex-
pected that peoples love of their homes and their nation would be awak-
ened and strengthened. Such love would prevent both emigration and the
growth of a rootless, un-Swedish proletariat.

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

Lilli Zickerman and her associates worked with formidable energy to

solve a host of practical problems. How would producers and buyers find
one another? How were crafts products to be transported from different
parts of Sweden to the capital, where the first outlet store had opened
in 1899? One way to solve this was to establish outlet shops all over the
country, for example in budding tourist centers such as those around Lake
Siljan in Dalarna. These stores were to be permanent and would thereby
differ from the seasonal markets in which rural people usually sold their
wares. Zickerman argued that goods could be sold more efficiently if the
stores were open all year and located near both manufacturers and buyers.

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

into which no concentration and no bodily or spiritual power has been

invested, that kind of work is reprehensible and has to be abolished (Zick-
erman in Stavenow-Hidemark 1999: 84).
Zickerman directed her outrage also at other targets. In 1904, she gave
a speech at the combined opening of the homecraft store and youth meet-
ing in Leksand that she had arranged together with the architect and artist
Gustaf Ankarcrona. She begins by turning to the young people in the au-
dience. She flatters their mothers and grandmothers saying that it was in
their work that the original taste of Dalarna came forward most clearly
with its fresh sense of color, its practical understanding of quality in weav-
ing, its admirable sense of form. Then she continues:
I know and you know it yourselves that you have been about to fol-
low that current of superficiality that characterizes our era. Yes, you have
allowed yourselves to be tempted by the cheap finery with which the fac-
tories try to mislead you, to such an extent that you threw away, sold, nay
even made rag rugs out of these sterling little pieces of art that you inherited.
(Zickerman in Stavenow-Hidemark 1999: 118-119, my emphasis)

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).

Ottilia Adelborg, artist

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

born in 1853, became an important figure in the Swedish womens move-

ment. All her life she fought, as a conservative, for womens right to vote
and for womens right to higher education; she was particularly concerned
with the education of rural women. From 1886 to 1907, she served as
managing director of the offices of the Fredrika-Bremer-Association.6 In
one of her speeches she admonished her audience to stand united in or-
der to accomplish a calm, collected, and propaganda free emancipation
of women (cited after Bokholm 2002: 292). She received several honors.
Ottilia, on her part, showed artistic talent at an early age. I sketched
my way through childhood, she writes in her diary (Oct. 25, 1919). How-
ever, her mother was not keen about art school, and it was not until her
aunt, Johanna Hammarskjld, intervened that Ottilia Adelborg could at-
tend the Royal Academy of Art (18781882). The entire family moved
to Stockholm in connection with Ottilias studies and then stayed on in
the capital. Among the other students at the academy were Karin Berg,
who was to marry Carl Larsson, and Anders Zorn. Soon after leaving the
academy, Ottilia Adelborg began making a name for herself as illustrator
of childrens books and calendars. Eventually, she also published books of
her own. In 1892, she brought out Prinsarnes blomsteralfabet (The Princ-
es Flower Alphabet), a beautiful book with exquisite drawings influ-
enced by Walter Crane, a central artist within the English Arts and Crafts
Movement. The title alludes to the three young princes in the Swedish
royal household at the time. This book was followed by other childrens
books, notably the playful and original Pelle Snygg och barnen i Snaskeby,
published in 1896. This book was reissued many times and was translated
into several languages; in English it was published as Clean Peter and the
Children of Grubbylea. In this book and also in later books for children
she had found a Swedish style of her own (von Zweigbergk 1965). Pelle
Snygg is one of the reasons why Ottilia Adelborg has been called the crea-
tor of the Swedish picture book for children.
While important to her, the childrens books were not Ottilia Adel-
borgs only pre-occupation. For several years she traveled extensively
abroad. Although money was scarce, her diary reveals that sums of money
kept dropping in: often in the form of an inheritance from a wealthy rela-
tive. She made several trips through central Europe, she visited France

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).

Fig. 3. Old women in Mockfjrd, Dalarna, engaged in bobbin lace making.

From a film Lilli Zickerman commissioned to the Path Frres film company
in 1917. The film documents different handicraft techniques in rural Sweden.
Svensk hemsljds arkiv, Riksarkivet, Stockholm.

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

ideas of the homecraft movement were both incomprehensible and use-

less. Although she keeps her distance and practically never mentions close
friendships with the people of Gagnef, she nevertheless depicts respectful
meetings between human beings, not relationships between aristocrat and
folk or between educator and pupils. She wants to understand the people
among whom she lives. But as an artist, she also wishes to preserve their
nave, fairy-tale style qualities. She does not wish to depict them as or-
dinary contemporaries.

Fig. 5. One of the drawings Ottilia Adelborg published in

her book Frn Gagn-mns ns (1909).
Photo, Riksarkivet, Stockholm.

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

It is instructive to place side by side the life histories of two contempo-

raries who, despite striking individual differences, shared many ways to
meet the demands and opportunities of the cultural and historical mo-
ment in which they lived. What then was important to these two women
in their involvement with the homecraft movement? What impression do
they give us of their relationship to the people whose crafts they worked
to resuscitate?
Lilli Zickerman and Ottilia Adelborg were certainly both pre-occupied
with a sense of imminent cultural loss and a sense that industrialization
was about to destroy the most beautiful manifestations of Swedens tradi-
tional rural culture. Even though Zickerman was far more concerned than
Adelborg with practical economic matters and, in fact, with helping people
financially, it is clear that they were both convinced of the need to energize
common people and help them to rescue the very best of their inherited
arts and craft skills. The revitalization and preservation of bobbin lace and
other arts were not trivial aspects of this rescue effort but central to it.
Moreover, they were both convinced that they possessed the ability to in-
spire others. Despite Adelborgs frequent self-deprecation, there can be no
doubt that, just as much as Zickerman, she thought of her work as a gift
to common people. Both saw it as their role to teach people to discover
the waning artistic and cultural skills they did not realize they still pos-
sessed. Both were as certain of the need for cultural preservation as Artur
 cultural loss and cultural rescue 277

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

Adelborg, Ottilia. 1892. Prinsarnes blomsteralfabet. Stockholm: Albert Bonnier.

. 1896. Pelle Snygg och barnen i Snaskeby. Stockholm: Albert Bonnier. (Translated
into English as Clean Peter and the Children of Grubbylea. New York: Longman).
. 1909. Frn Gagn-mns ns. Skifverier och ritningar. Stockholm: Albert Bonnier.
. 1918. Grns en by som varit. Stockholm: Albert Bonnier.
. 1920. Dalritningar. Stockholm: Albert Bonnier.
. 18991936. Unpublished diary, 7 volumes. The Nordiska Museet, Archives,
Stockholm.
Bauman, Richard, and Charles L. Briggs. 2003. Voices of Modernity: Language Ideolo-
gies and the Politics of Inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bokholm, Sif. 2002. I vimlet. Mtesplatser fr kvinnosak och kultur kring sekelskiftet
1900. In Eva sterberg and Christina Carlsson Wetterberg (eds.), Rummet vidgas.
Kvinnor p vg ut i offentligheten ca 18801940. Pp. 252-309. Stockholm: Atlantis.
Danielson, Sofia. 1991. Den goda smaken och samhllsnyttan. Om handarbetets vnner
och den svenska hemsljdsrrelsen. Stockholm: Nordiska museets handlingar 111.
Glambek, Ingeborg. 1988. Kunsten, nytten og moralen. Kunstindustri og husflid i Norge
18001900. Oslo: Solum forlag.
Glassie, Henry. 1972. Folk Art. In Richard M. Dorson (ed.), Folklore and Folklife. Pp.
253-281. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hyltn-Cavallius, Charlotte. 2007. Traditionens estetik spelet mellan inhemsk och inter-
nationell hemsljd. Stockholm: Carlssons.
Key, Ellen. 1909. Kvinnorrelsen. Stockholm: Albert Bonnier. (Translated into English,
with an Introduction by Havelock Ellis, as The Woman Movement. New York: G.P.
Putnams Sons, 1912).
. 1916. Folkbildningsarbetet. Srskilt med hnsyn till sknhetssinnets odling. Two
volumes. Stockholm: Tidens frlag.
Klein, Barbro. 2000. The Moral Content of Tradition: Homecraft, Ethnology, and
Swedish Life in the Twentieth Century. Western Folklore 59: 171-195.
Lundahl, Gunilla. 2001. Karaktr och knsla. Ett sekel med svensk hemsljd. Em-
maljunga: Raster frlag.
Nordesj, Lena (ed). 2009. De lskade Gagnef. Gagnefs Minnesstugas 100-rsjubileum.
Gagnef: Stiftelsen Gagnefs Minnesstuga.
Nyln, Anna-Maja. 1976 (1969). Swedish Handcraft. Translated by Anne-Charlotte
Hanes Harvey. Lund: Hkan Ohlssons.
sterberg, Eva, and Christina Carlsson Wetterberg (eds). 2002. Rummet vidgas. Kvin-
nor p vg ut i offentligheten ca 18801940. Stockholm: Atlantis.
Rdstrm, Anne Marie. 1980. Frken Ottil. En bok om Ottilia Adelborg barnens konst-
nr och en pionjr fr folklig kultur. Borlnge: Dalarnas museum.
Sundstrm, Satu. 2009. Bleknad bonad. Om Jerusalemvvnaden och ett mte mel-
lan tre kvinnor. In Lena Nordesj (ed.), De lskade Gagnef. Gagnef Minnesstugas
100-rsjubileum. Pp. 36-44. Gagnef: Stiftelsen Gagnefs Minnesstuga.
Svensson, Birgitta, and Louise Waldn (eds). 2005. Den feminina textilen. Makt och
mnster. Stockholm: Nordiska museets frlag.
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Zickerman, Lilli. 1918. Den svenska hemsljdens ortskaraktrer. In Hemsljdskommit-

tns betnkande angivet den 10 december 1917. Part I, pp. 103-300. Stockholm: P.A.
Norstedt & Sner.
. 1937. Sveriges folkliga textilkonst. Part. I, Rlakan. Stockholm: Freningen fr
svensk hemsljd.
. 1999. Lilli Zickermans bsta. Hemsljdstankar frn kllan, edited by Elisabet
Stavenow-Hidemark. Ume: Tidskriften Hemsljden.
Zweigbergk, Eva von. 1965. Barnboken i Sverige 17501950. Stockholm: Rabn & Sj-
gren.
 THE BUDDHIST CONNECTION BETWEEN
CHINA AND ANCIENT CAMBODIA:
RAMAN A MANDRAS VISIT TO JIANKANG1

Wang Bangwei

Historians of Chinese Buddhism all know the importance of three bio-

graphical books of prominent monks, Gaoseng Zhuan (The Biographies
of Prominent Monks), Xu Gaoseng Zhuan (The Continued Biographies
of Prominent Monks) and Song Gaoseng Zhuan (The Song Biographies of
Prominent Monks). The second one, Xu Gaoseng Zhuan, being called Tang
Gaoseng Zhuan (The Tang Biographies of Prominent Monks) as well, cov-
ers the period from the beginning of the sixth century to the middle of
the seventh century. It was written by Daoxuan, a well-known Buddhist
monk-scholar, early in the Tang Dynasty. Though most of the figures in
the book are Chinese Buddhist monks, in some chapters, particularly in
the Chapter on Text Translators, a number of Buddhist monks from other
countries are included. The experiences of these monks, either in their
home places or in China, provide materials illustrating the connections
between these countries and China. One example of these countries is an-
cient Cambodia.
In Daoxuans book, the first biography is of Sam ghapla, a Buddhist
Master from the country of Funan, that is, ancient Cambodia. Attached
to the biography of Sam ghapla are three short biographies of which the
first one is of Mandra, or Mantuoluo in Chinese transliteration. It says as
follows:
Early in the time of Liang, there was another ramana called Mantuoluo
(Mandra) from Funan. In the language of Liang (i.e. in Chinese) his name
means sounding lightly. He brought a lot of Indian texts and presented
them to the Emperor. The Emperor ordered him to join with Sam ghapla

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

in translating the texts of The Ratnamegha, The Dharmadhatu and The

Majurprajpramit. The texts they produced are altogether in eleven
scrolls. Although he was involved in the translation work, he did not know
the language of Liang very well, so the meaning of the translations produced
by him is not easily understood.2

And in the Biography of Sam

ghapla it says as follows:
In the language of Liang the name of Sam ghapla means keeper of sam gha
or armour of sam ghavarman?). He is a native of Funan. He was
gha (Sam
very clever at an early age and inclined to Buddhism. At school age he
joined the sam gha. He was especially skilled in studying the essays of Ab-
hidharma. His great reputation was known in all of the South Sea area. Af-
ter being fully ordained, he extensively studied the Buddhist Vinaya. He was
so brave that he wanted to travel abroad and propagate Buddhism. Hearing
that in the country of Qi (China) Buddhism was advocated, he got on a boat
and arrived at the capital of China. He lived in the Monastery of Zhengguan
and became a disciple of Gunabhadra.3 Under the guidance of Gunabhadra
he studied the Mahyna texts intelligently. Within a short time, he learned
a lot and became competent in the scripts and languages of several coun-
tries. Just at this time the Dynasty of Qi fell and Buddhism was declining,
but Sam ghapla only cleaned his body, let his heart be quiet, and stopped
connection with the outside. He stayed in his room and cultivated his own
personality. While the Dynasty of the Great Liang was established, the gov-
ernment searched for talents. Thus in the fifth year of Tianjian (506 C.E.),
Sam ghapla was invited to translate texts in the Hall of Shouguang, the Gar-
den of Hualin, the Monastery of Zhengguan, the House of Zhanyun and
House of Funan, all five places being located in Yangdu (Jiankang, the capi-
tal of the Liang, todays Nanjing). Until the seventeenth year of Tianjian (518
C.E.), he had translated eleven texts consisting of forty-eight scrolls. The ti-
tles include The Stra of King Aoka, The Vimuttimagga and others. 4

2 Taisho Tripitaka, No. 2060, p. 426b.

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.

 ramana mandras visit to jiankang 283

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.

5 Taisho Tripitaka, No. 2149, p. 265c.

6 Taisho Tripitaka, No. 2151, p. 364b.

7 Taisho Tripitaka, No. 2034, p. 98c.

284 wang bangwei

Fei Changfang also mentions two other catalogues of Buddhist texts a

little earlier than his, the Li Kuo Lu (The Catalogue by Li Kuo) and the
Baochang Lu (The Catalogue by Baochang), from which his information
was obtained, though both have been lost later. The accounts in the Bud-
dhist catalogues after Fei Changfang and Daoxuan, for example Kaiyuan
Shijiao Lu (The Buddhist Text Catalogue during the Reign of Kaiyuan) by
Zhisheng, are all based on the above narratives.8
Funan, or ancient Cambodia, was the largest country in Indo-China
from the first to the seventh century.9 The territory of Funan was larger
than todays Cambodia. The Chinese name Funan, according to some
scholars, is from an ancient Mon-Khmer word, bnam, meaning moun-
tains. The connection between Funan and China had commenced quite
early, in the time of the Three Kingdoms, that is, around the middle of
the third century C.E. During the Northern and Southern Dynasties a
number of Buddhist monks arrived in China from Funan. Mandra and
Sam ghapla were two of them.
Though we have the above-mentioned accounts, there is still very little
we know about the life of Mandra in China. However, in a book written
by Annen, a Japanese Buddhist monk-scholar of the time of Heian, the
name Mandra is mentioned. Annen edited a book called Xitan Zang (The
Siddham -Pitaka) in 880 C.E. In this book he discussed the so-called four-
teen svaras or Sanskrit vowels and cited seven different explanations by
various scholars. The sixth is related to Emperor Wudi of the Liang and
Mandra. His text is as follows:
The sixth explanation is that by Emperor Wudi of the Liang. The Emperor
Wudi disputed with the above-mentioned masters. He says that two graphs
have been lost because it has been too long since the time of the great Saints.
Now that the great Saints have appeared again, how can it be said that the
graphs are lost (Master Huiguan cites the points of Master Guan to dispute
saying that) it is also a mistake if one takes the graphs of siddham to fill
the gaps. The siddham is just an auspicious symbol and has nothing to do
with the fourteen svaras. (Next he cites the points of Master Guan again to
dispute) the explanation of Duke Xie who added the last four graphs to fill
the gaps, but this is just what arvavarman, a trthaka (heretical) teacher,
taught the King of tavhana. arvavarman added the last four graphs then
it can become fourteen svaras. But in fact these four are not the sounds.

8 Taisho Tripitaka, No. 2154, p. 537b.

9 For a general ancient history of the area of Southeast Asia, including Funan or Cam-
bodia, see, for example, G. Coeds, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia, Canberra: Aus-
tralian National University Press, 1975.
 ramana mandras visit to jiankang 285

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

Guanding was a well-known Buddhist monk-scholar in Sui Dynasty

times. Master Guan very likely refers to Huiguan in the time of Liu Song
(420479 C.E.). Master Zong was Sengzong of the same time. Duke Xie
refers to Xie Lingyun, the most well known writer and scholar of the time.
Xie lived from 385 to 433 C.E.11
Through this account we know that Mandra was a Chan Master and
a Mahynist as well. The story of arvavarman who taught the King of
tavhana can be found in two well-known Indian story collections,
Kathsaritsgara and Br hatkathmajari. In the story it is said that
arvavarman was a minister under the King of tavhana. He hoped to
train the pronunciation of the King who had a stiff tongue.12

10 Taisho Tripitaka, No. 2702, p. 377c.

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

As Mandra arrived at Jiankang in the second year of Tianjian, it is very

probable that he came together with the royal delegation of Funan. Ac-
cording to Liangshu, in the tenth, thirteenth, sixteenth years of Tianjian
(511, 514, 517 C.E.), the first year of Putong (520 C.E.), the second year of
Zhongdatong (530 C.E.), the first and the fifth years of Datong (535, 539
C.E.), each year there arrived one delegation from Funan. It shows how
frequent the communication was between Funan and China. And this is
why Emperor Wudi of the Liang decided to build a house called House
of Funan in the capital particularly for the various people arriving from
Funan. Meanwhile many books were brought by these people from Funan
to China. In the Bibliography Section of Suishu, The History of Sui Dynasty,
under the title of Book of Brahmana Scripts we find a record saying there
was a Hu Script Book from Funan kept in the Liang.15 The Hu Script Book
of Funan was obviously different from the Book of Brhman a Script, which
was generally thought to be from India, though both unfortunately were
lost quite early. To judge from the title Hu Script Book of Funan, it is very
possible that it is a book written in the scripts of ancient Mon-Khmer lan-
guage.
During the Liang Dynasty not only did Buddhist monks original-
ly from Funan arrive in China and translated Buddhist texts there, just
as Mandra did, but there were also some Indian Buddhist monks who
traveled to China through Funan. One example is the well-known Indian
Buddhist monk-scholar Paramrtha. We find his biography also in Daox-
uans book Xu Gaoseng Zhuan. Paramrtha is also called Kulantha in the
biography. The text reads as follows:

14 Zhonghua edition, Fasc. 3, pp. 789-710.

15 Zhonghua edition, Fasc. 4, p. 945.

Cf. Jao Tsung-I, Shuo Funan Hushu (On the Hu
Scripts of Funan), in his Fanxue Ji (Papers on Sino-Indian Studies), Shanghai Classics Press,
1993, pp. 175-177.
288 wang bangwei

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

According to his biography Paramrtha was from Ujjayan, a country

in West India. He first arrived in Funan and was then invited to China.
In China he translated a number of Buddhist texts and so became one
of most prominent translators in Chinese Buddhist translation history.
Though we do not know how long Paramrtha stayed in Funan before
he came to China, his visit to that country, and the cases of Mandra and
Sam ghapla as well, all show that Funan was under very strong influence
of Buddhism, particularly Mahyna Buddhism, at that time. We know
of similar examples from other places like Kucha and Khotan on the so-
called Silk Road in Central Asia.
In Chinese literature Funan is also called Banan. In the book Naihai
Jigui Neifa Zhuan by the well-known Tang Buddhist pilgrim-monk Yijing,
we find a great deal of information about the geographic and religious sit-
uation in the South Sea area.
Starting from Nlanda (in India), after one has traveled five hundred yo-
janas17 east, the whole area is called Eastern Frontier. At the farthest place,
there is a mountain called Great Black Mountain, which is estimated to be
on the southern boundary of Tibet. It is said if one travels from the south-
west of Sichuan, after about one month, one can arrive at this mountain.
Further to the south, near the seacoast there is a country called rksetra. To

16 Taisho Tripitaka, No. 2060, p. 429c.

17 Literally yojana means a distance traversed in one harnessing or without unyoking,

thus it was used as a measure of distance in ancient India which is said to equal about 18 or
13 or 7 kilometers according to various explanations.
 ramana mandras visit to jiankang 289

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

And on the geographic situation, Yijing says:

Counting from the west there are the Island of Polusi and the Island of
Maluoyu, which are now the country of Srvijaya, then the Island of Mohex-
in, the Island of Heling, the Island of Dada, the Island of Penpen, the Island
of Poli, the Island of Juelun, the Island of Foshibuluo, the Island of Ashan and
the Island of Mojiaman. There are more small islands which cannot all be
mentioned here.19

And more on Buddhism:

In all these countries Buddhism is followed by the people and most of the
Buddhists belong to Hnayna, except in Maluoyou where there are a few
belonging to Mahyna. Among these countries some are of about a hun-
dred Chinese li in circumference, some are several hundred in circumfer-
ence, and some measure about a hundred yojanas. Though it is difficult to
calculate distances on the great ocean, those who travel in merchant ships
know the approximate distance of these countries. Because the people of
Juelun first visited Jiaozhou and Guangzhou, they were generally called by
the name of Country of Kunlun. Only these people of Kunlun have curly
hair and black skin, the other countries are not different from China. It is
their habit to have their legs bare and to wear ganman (a cloth). These things
have been fully described in the Nanhai Lu (The Accounts of the Southern
Sea). Setting out from Huanzhou, right to the south, one will reach Bijing af-
ter a journey of rather more than half a month on foot; if one travels by ship
it takes five or six days. If one arrives at Champa in the south, that means he
has arrived in the country of Linyi. In this country most Buddhists belong
to the Sam mityanikya, and a few belong to the Sarvstivdanikya. Setting
out southwestwards, one will in a month reach Banan, which formerly was
called Funan. At first the people of the country lived naked and worshiped
the devas (gods). Later on, Buddhism started to flourish there. However,

18 Taisho Tripitaka, No. 2125, p. 205b.

For more discussion on this account,

see Wang Bangwei, Nanhai Jigui Neifa Zhuan Jiaozhu (Accounts of the Inner Law Sent Home
from the South Sea), by Yijing, with a newly collated and annotated text, Beijing: Zhonghua
Book Company, 1995, pp. 13-17.
19 Ibid.

290 wang bangwei

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.

 ramana mandras visit to jiankang 291

References

Annen, Xitan Zang (The Siddham

-Pitaka), Taisho Tripitaka, No. 2702,

Coeds, G., The Indianized States of Southeast Asia, Canberra: Australian National
University Press, 1975
Daoxuan, Xu Gaoseng Zhuan (The Continued Biographies of Prominent Monks), Taisho
Tripitaka, No. 2060,
Daoxuan, Datang Neidian Lu (The Buddhist Text Catalogue of the Great Tang), Taisho
Tripitaka, No. 2149,
Fei Changfang, Lidai Sanbao Ji (The Three Jewels in History), Taisho Tripitaka, No.
2154,
Huijiao, Gaoseng Zhuan (The Biographies of Prominent Monks), Taisho Tripitaka, No.
2059,
Jingmai, Gujin Yijing Tuji (The Pictures and Records of Texts Translation in Ancient and
Today), Taisho Tripitaka, No. 2151,
Kathsaritsgara, Sanskrit version in Devanagari scripts, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass,
1977
Liebich, B., Zur Einfhrung in die indische einheimische Sprachwissenschaft, I. Das
Ktantra, Heidelberg, 1919
Liu Xu, Jiu Tangshu (The Old History of Tang Dynasty), Zhonghua edition,

Yao Silian, Lianshu (The History of Liang Dynasty), Zhonghua edition,

Jao Tsung-I, Shuo Funan Hushu (On the Hu scripts of Funan), in his Fanxue Ji
(Papers on Sino-Indian Studies), Shanghai Classics Press, 1993, pp. 175-177,

Scharfe, H., Grammatical Literature: A History of Indian Literature, ed. by J. Gonda,
Vol. V, Fasc. 2, Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1977
Trantha, rGya gar chos byung, History of Indian Buddhism, English translation by
Lama Chimpa and Alaka Chattopadhyaya, Calcutta: K.P. Bagchi & Company, 1980
Wang Bangwei, Datang Xiyu Qiufa Gaoseng Zhuan Jiaozhu (Biographies of 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, .
Wang Bangwei, Nanhai Jigui Neifa Zhuan Jiaozhu (Accounts of the Inner Law Sent
Home from the South Sea), by Yijing, with a newly collated and annotated text, Bei-
jing: Zhonghua Book Company, 1995,
Wang Bangwei, Xie Linyun Shisi Yin Jikao (Xie Linyun and his Sishi Yin Xunxu:
The earliest approach to Indian Phonology in Mediaeval China), in Guoxue Yan-
jiu (Chinese Classic Studies), Vol. III, Beijing: Peking University Press, 1995; revised
version in Ershi Shiji Wenshi Kaoju Wenlu (The Collection of Papers of Historical
and Literary Evidential Studies in Twentieth Century China), Vol. II, Kunming: Yu-
nan Peoples Publisher, 2001,
Wei Zheng et al., Suishu (The History of Sui Dynasty), Zhonghua edition,

 AUTOCHTHONOUS CHINESE CONCEPTUAL HISTORY
IN A JOCULAR NARRATIVE KEY:
THE EMOTIONAL ENGAGEMENT QNG

Christoph Harbsmeier

Understandably, conceptual history in Germany and indeed in Europe at

large as well as in the USA has predominantly been a matter of words: the
use of words, the definition of words and the function of words as factors
creating spaces for action in history. Everyone knew, of course, that ter-
minological history is not the same as conceptual history, but in practice
it has been most convenient to identify the terminological repertory con-
nected with a concept and then go on to study the uses and functions of
that terminology in discourse.
Chn Chn (11591223) Biq z yBiqs Mean-
ings of Characters shows that conceptual history of such a traditional
kind has its deep roots in China. For Chn Chn does discuss the key-
words of what in the West has come to be called school of Neo-Confu-
cianism for a sufficiently long time for this misleading term to have be-
come endemic and acceptable. The Chinese did not really have a standard
term for this complex movement, though l xu Study of Principles
and do xu Study of Principles were used for whatever the essence
of the movement was. Not school in any case, but study.
Chn Chns perspective on conceptual history is pervasively serious,
albeit defiantly colloquial in style. Also, his discourse is definitorily con-
ceptual. It concentrates on the analysis of key concepts in key philosophi-
cal texts. Chn Chn distills from this the essence of the semantic force
of these buzzwords and their characteristic role in Chinese intellectual
history.
Such concentration on high-flown discourse at the pinnacles of the py-
ramidal hierarchy of philosophical analysis and spirituality seemed natu-
ral enough at Chn Chns time. But it provoked in China a reaction by
Chinas greatest folklorist of folk narrative, Chinas first great joculogra-
294 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

and those who are laughed at by others

will in turn laugh at others.
That people laugh at each other
when will that ever end?
The Store-house of Laughter collects jokes
that make one laugh.
Thirteen chapters of this must still count as a
slim volume.
Some will read this and feel pleased with
themselves,
but I must warn them not to be so pleased.
Others will read this and get angry,
but I must advise them not to get so angry.
This world, past and present, is one big store-
house of laughter.
And I as well as you, my gentle readers, are all
inside:
providing for mankind a laughing stock for
empty tales.
Without empty tales one is no man,
without laughter, there are no empty tales.
Without laughter and empty tales, there is no
world!!
Monk Budai (died A.D. 916)! My master! My
master!

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

the less pretentious the attitude of the sing-

ers.
And those songs that are en vogue at
present
are all just scores for illicit love.
This may be so,
but the (risqu) Sng jin on the River P
is being taken up in the Gu fng section of
the Songs,
our father-figure Confucius has made the
record about them
and on the basis of this emotions count as
genuine and must not be dismissed.
The Mountain Songs may be very vulgar
but are they not the relics of the states of
Zhng and Wy (famous for their lewd love
songs)?
But if in this degenerate age
there are only fake sh-lyrics (notorious for
their conventionalism)
and never any fake Mountain Songs
this is because the Mountain Songs do not
compete for fame with the texts of lyrics,
therefore one is unwilling to fake these.
If they really have not been prepared to fake
these
then for me to avail myself of these and to
preserve the genuine articles
is that not appropriate?
Now the present generation imagine that
antiquity as presented by the historian Sma
Qin is as presented in the songs from the
states of Zhng and Wy,
and that what remains of it among the peo-
ple is like the Mountain Songs,
then presumably the Mountain Songs must
be judged to belong to the Parnassus of our
age.
If I can borrow the true feelings between
men and women
to deploy this as an antidote against the
false pretences of conventionalism,
their merit will be as great as that of the gu
zh r erotic songs.
Therefore I record these gu zh r erotic
songs
298 christoph harbsmeier

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

there will be no bad thoughts at all of any resent-

ment or envy.
Again, my wish was to choose the most beautiful
accounts of qng, old and new,
and to make a brief account of each of them
so as to let others understand how qng can be
made to last,
and how at that point absence of qng turns into
its presence,
selfish qng turns into public-spirited qng,
how all regions, states, and the whole world
can interact kindly in accordance with qng
and how one can hope to introduce change to
shallow conventions.
However, lately my fallen spirits have been on the
run
my Inkstone Field studios all overgrown with
weeds,
So then, having been preempted by Mr Zhnzhn
wish
is surely an occasion for joy.
This compilation is divided into categories and
thus cut up,
and it is long-winded in the extreme.
Even if the subject matter is especially about men
and women,
and it is not everywhere dignified and proper,
but at the final phase
it will all revert to correct propriety.
Those who have eyes to read can broaden their
qng
and those who have no eyes to read properly will
not get to guide their desires.
Thus, on this basis, I have made this preface,
and I have made a qng Buddhist gth to go with
it.
The gth goes like this:
If Heaven and Earth had no qng
they would not have created all creatures.
If all creatures had no qng
they would not be able in turn to generate each
other.
They go on producing, and they are not ruined,
and all this is because their qng is not ruined.
The Four Elements have all been set up inanely,
but xngqng are neither empty nor fake.
 the emotional engagement qng 301

If there is qng then even those who are far away

from each other are close,
and if there is no qng then even those who are
close to each other are distant.
Those lacking qng and those having qng
are immesurably distant from each other.
I wish to establish an education in qng
and to teach qng to the living creatures.
Children have qng for their father,
subordinates have qng for their ruler,
and generalising from features like these
they all present this aspect.
All things are like coins strewn about
one feeling is the string that ties them together.
When the strewn-about coins are strung together
with string
then all the world become relatives.
If there is poetry on harmful things,
then one will harm ones own qng.
If one observes the spring flowers blossom
then together with them there arise joyful
thoughts.
Then thieves will not arise
and wickedness will not occur.
What is there then for the Buddha to show com-
passion for,
what is there for the sage to show off his morality
to?
When the seeds of qng are spread out
Heaven and Earth are all in confusion.
One can do nothing about it: my own qng is
abundant.
One can do nothing about it: other peoples qng
is less.
My hope is to find a person who has qng
and together with him to develop the dharma-
Truth.

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

The first small volume is devoted to impeccable behaviour motivated

by qng . It declares itself to be concerned with the li category
of such behaviour as such, as well as its subcategories. Every category is
commented upon at the end of its small volume in a mini-postface which
provides general comments on the whole little volume. In the opening of
the present postface Fng Mnglng remarks:

The host of qng comments: From time immemorial

the matter of devoted effort, filial piety, moderation and distinction will
always be performed in a forced way as long as they are practised (delib-
erately) according to their principles, but when they come from the ulti-
mate qng then they will always be authentic. Husband and wife are the
closest there are in the world. But a husband who is without qng is not
a proper husband; a wife without qng is not a decent wife.
VOL. 1: The category of emotional virtuousness
Virtuous couples
Virtuous wives
Virtuous concubines
Virtuous courtesans

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

VOL. 2: The category of emotional fated affinities

Unexpected marriage
Men who marry in their old age
Women who choose their own husbands
Re-union of husbands and wives

The third main category is that of s private emotional engagement,

which in the nature of things Chinese had to be conducted in secret, and
which while connoting the illicit, was currently condoned as long as it was
discreet in classical Chinese society. On this category Fng Mnglng has
prudential rather than moralistic advice:
Take care that you do not for a
moments pleasure make a life-times mistake for others.
VOL. 3: The category of emotional secrecy
Clandestine emotion leading to marriage
Clandestine emotion not leading to marriage
Clandestine rendezvous
Clandestine affairs with maidservants

The fourth main category is that of chivalry in emotional engagement,

and it clearly gives Fng Mnglng great pleasure to start out this cate-
gory with three subcategories of female chivalry. It is to be noted that the
incongruous idea of female chivalry was popular in traditional Chinese
popular literature. Fng Mnglng comments to show that chivalry is all a
matter of emotional empathy:
If
these (chivalrous people) had no qng how could they understand oth-
er peoples qng ? Since they do not disturb other peoples qng , this
shows that their human qng is extremely profound.
VOL. 4: The category of emotional chivalry
Chivalrous women who can choose their own husbands
Chivalrous women who can assist others
Courtesans who can defend the name and integrity of others
Chivalrous fellows who can understand the more subtle human emotions
Chivalrous fellows who accomplish tasks for others
The chivalrous who can kill those without emotion

The fifth category is that of effusive extrovert emotionality under which

Fng Mnglng very sensitively places bravery: one perceives the taxo-
nomic bent in his way of thinking. Fng Mnglng comments:
In any case, how could a person without
qng have courage? Without qng , courage is foolhardiness.
304 christoph harbsmeier

VOL. 5: The category of emotional effusiveness

Magnanimous extravagance
Magnanimous splendour
Magnanimous eccentricity
Magnanimous bravery

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:

qng engenders erotic passion, and

erotic passion engenders qng . When qng and erotic passion engen-
der each other endlessly, then there is bound to be destruction and break-
ups. When there are no such things, that is simply a stroke of good luck.
Still, this way of talking is probably excessive. Half the trouble is that one
is not good at handling erotic passion. Then things get strange indeed,
and it leads to people making excuses and putting the blame on qng .
But why should qng be to blame?
VOL. 6: The category of emotional erotic passion
Mens erotic passion for women
Womens erotic passion for men
Mens and womens erotic passion for each other

The seventh category of besotted infatuation suffers no subcategorisation,

according to Fng Mnglng. One senses the delight with which Fng
Mnglng places emotional attachments in the logical vicinity of besotted
doltishness. He comments:
When one looks at it from the
point of view of someone of successful cold intelligence, as a matter of
principle all qng is besotted, and the matters between men and women
are trifling.
VOL. 7: Emotional foolishness
No subcategories.

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

Blanc 1981) In the concept of Fng Mnglngs encyclopaedia the focus

is on such resonance as it relates to qng . The subclassification is again
quite nicely taxonomic. Fng Mnglng comments:
Ghosts have the qng of humans; spirits have
the qng of ghosts.
VOL. 8: The category of emotional resonance
Emotional resonance in humans
Emotional resonance of spirits and ghosts
Emotional resonance of inanimate things

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:

The historian of qng said: Man is

the sort of creature that is born and dies from qng ; qng , on the
other hand, is not born and does not die because of man. When a man
lives, qng can cause him to be dead; when a man is dead, qng can
cause him to become alive again.
VOL. 10: The category of emotional supernatural efficacy
Supernatural efficacy in curing illness
Supernatural efficacy in resurrection
Supernatural efficacy in dying together
Supernatural efficacy in desires fulfilled after death
Supernatural efficacy in promises carried out after death
306 christoph harbsmeier

Supernatural efficacy in pursuing the beloved after death

Supernatural efficacy in desires fulfilled in the next incarnation
Supernatural efficacy in sending a message after death about reincarnation
Supernatural efficacy in reappearing after death
Supernatural efficacy in love-making after death
Supernatural efficacy in supernaturally efficacious coffins

The eleventh category of eighteen stories in all is without subdivisions

because it is devoted to a phenomenon hard to handle intellectually but
prominent in certain narratives: the mysterious transferral of emotional
effects across widely different realms of reality, like the wind emotions are
said to blow across reality, taking shape even in plants and animals. Just
as plants, says Fng Mnglng in his introduction to this section, as bear-
ers of emotions obtain a certain significance, so men without emotions
should be taken to lose any significance they might otherwise have had.
Fng Mnglng comments:

The historian of qng says: The main thing in qng is move-

ment and the absence of fixed mundane form. Suddenly it moves people,
and they do not know what is happening to them. It is in the image of
the (medico-metaphysical category of) the wind, that is why it transforms
into the wind
VOL. 11: The category of emotional transformation
No subdivision into subcategories.

The category of matchmaking is an obvious one to predominate in the

narratives of qng , and it remains important to remember that amorous
association that is not s private/illicit must in general be mediated by
others than the participants in it. Thus qng is not construed as a per-
sonal matter between those who have qng . It inscribes itself into a pre-
scriptive matchmaking context that includes much more than matchmak-
ers proper, right down to the odd ant. Fng Mnglng comments much in
the manner of the traditional court historian:

The historian of qng says: Matchmaking refers to the ordinary mat-

ter of arranging marriages. Ordinary matters I do not record, only when
there is something extraordinary do I write it down.
VOL. 12: The category of emotional matchmakers
Immortals as matchmakers
Officials as matchmakers
Wives as matchmakers
 the emotional engagement qng 307

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 thirteenth category focusses on regretful concomitants of qng . The

central significance of this category is not evident until one recognises
that emotional engagement comports vulnerability. Fng Mnglng com-
ments:
The deeper the qng one is en-
dowed with becomes, the broader the realm of what is to be regretted:
that is as it should be.
VOL. 13: The category of emotional regrets
Regrets about non-fated ties
Regrets about unsuitable liaisons
Regrets about lamenting the dead
Unconsumed resurrections

The fourteenth category is that of what militates against emotional attach-

ment. Fng Mnglngs comments here take proverbial common life ex-
perience as a point of departure:

The historian of qng says: As the saying goes: enemy in

love. The enemy becomes an enemy out of love. As the saying goes: every-
thing has a beginning, but few things get to their proper end.
VOL. 14: The category of enemies of emotional attachment
Marriages opposed by parents
Separations imposed by parents
Infidelity
Jealousy
Slander
Deceit
Encountering villainy

The fifteenth category is concerned with what inspires emotional attach-

ment in traditional narratives. Fng Mnglng comments:

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 sixteenth category places emotional attachments in the context of

the traditional Chinese current notions of retribution. Particularly com-
mon, it turns out, is negative retribution suffered by the heartless. Fng
Mnglng begins his comment with the obvious relevant proverb:

The historian of qng says: As the prov-

erb says: When you sow melons you harvest melons; when you sow beans
you harvest beans. This says that retribution is not arbitrary. If there was
no retribution for qng , then who in this world would be urged on by
qng ?
VOL. 16: The category of emotional retribution
Retribution for the warm-hearted (2)
Retribution for the heartless (14)

The seventeenth popular category concerns debasement in a traditionalist

fashion, starting out defiantly with degeneration in the imperial house-
hold. Here Fng Mnglng turns moralist:

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

Extraordinary forms of debasement

Miscellaneous forms of debasement

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 nineteenth category is that of spurious emotional attachment in nar-

ratives, the implausibilies in the tall tales of qng . Fng Mnglng com-
ments:

Personally I am neither bard nor court historian. I have not a hun-

dred tongues. And so I dare not disregard these (doubtful) cases of qng
, but in the end I dare not fail to have my doubts about them.
VOL. 19: The category of suspicious emotional attach-
ments
In Buddhaland
Among celestial beings
Among various immortal ladies
Among terrestrial immortals
Among mountain spirits
Among water spirits
Among dragon spirits
Among temple image spirits
Among miscellaneous sprites

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

VOL. 20: The category of emotional ghosts

Famous ghosts of the inner quarters in the imperial palaces
Ghosts of talent
Ghosts living in tombs
Ghosts attending funerals
Ghosts hovering about coffins
Nubile ghosts
Unidentified ghosts

The twenty-first category is that of amorous monsters. Fng Mnglng

comments:

Extraordinary spirits of beasts, plants the five elements and

the various creatures of the world often avail themselves of women to be-
witch men. It is only once in ten times that they avail themselves of males.
VOL. 21: The category of emotional monsters
Human monsters
Monsters from strange lands
Yaksa (Buddhist) monsters
Bestial monsters
Feathered monsters
Scaly monsters
Shelled monsters
Insect monsters
Plant monsters
Monsters that are heartless things
Monsters from artefacts and the like
Unidentified monsters

The twenty-second category is the very important one of homophile qng

. Fng Mnglng comments:
In this world there are those who
are strongly addicted to this practice: how could emotional attachment
only be directed to the other sex?
VOL. 22: The category of emotional homophily
Homophile chastity
Homophile passion
Homophile infatuation
Homophile gan
Homophile transformation
Homophile remorse
Homophile infidelity
Homophile adversaries chu
 the emotional engagement qng 311

Sisters and brothers both loved by emperors, that love being unlasting
Homophile retribution
Homophile debasement
Homophile entanglement
Evil spirits
Supernatural efficacious ghosts

The twenty-third category of emotional communication across species.

Fng Mnglng explains:

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

VOL. 24: The category of emotional (literary) vestiges

Episodes in (regular) sh poetry
Episodes in (free) c lyrics
Miscellaneous episodes.

So then, by the lights of Fng Mnglng, it is by emotional attachment

and engagement that we are what we are. It is by virtue of such qng
that we will be remembered if at all.
In conclusion to this entirely unoriginal little essay, aiming only to
let Fng Mnglng speak for himself in our times, I want to add a lit-
tle personal point of my own. It is essentially through the you qng
of friendship that intellectually ambitious milieus have been created
throughout history. Moreover, it is through such continuing you qng
that these milieus are maintained. A happy few of us develop the talent
to facilitate that elusive intellectual you qng . A blessed very few of us
learn the talent to even create institutional surroundings for intellectual
you qng . We owe Bjrn Wittrock gan qng , which is more than
ordinary gratitude for what he has done and keeps doing for so many of
us, for so many years.
 the emotional engagement qng 313

Notes on further reading

A convenient printed edition of Qng sh li l will be found in: Qng sh

, Shnyng: Chnfng wny chbansh, 1989.
An invaluable continuation of the Qng sh li l, beautifully printed,
providing a vast amount of traditional Chinese narrative material on love
relations, and organised very much along the lines of the Qng sh li l is
this: Co Xijn , Gu jn qng hai , photographic reprint
edition Shanghai: Shnghai gu j chbansh, 1991 (first ed. 1915).
The decisive Western work on Qng sh li l remains the classical
book by Mowry, which was indeed the completely indispensable inspira-
tion for the present essay. I have often deviated from its interpretations,
but everywhere I have greatly profited from this pioneering work without
which I could never have dared to write about my subject: Mowry, Hua-
yuan Li, Chinese Love Stories from Ching-shih, Hamden: Archon Book, 1983.
On the emotions in Ming and Qing China in general, the patient read-
er will find Paolo Santangelos massive works over the past decade a mine
of inspiration as well as an orgy of comparative bibliographic information:
Paolo Santangelo, Sentimental Education in Chinese History: An Interdis-
ciplinary Textual Research on Ming and Qing Sources, Leiden: Brill, 2003;
Paolo Santangelo, Love, Hatred, and Other Passions: Questions and Themes
on Emotions in Chinese Civilization by Paolo Santangelo and Donatella
Guida, Leiden: Brill, 2006; Santangelo, Paolo, Two different treatises on
love and their different concepts of love, Qingshileile and De amore, in
Ming Qing Yanjiu 2007, Naples, pp. 117-; Santangelo, Paolo, Materials for
an Anatomy of Personality in Late Imperial China (Emotions and States of
Mind in East Asia), Leiden: Brill, 2010.
On Chn Chn and his dictionary of Neo-Confucian terms the
very pleasant and user-friendly classical work of reference remains: Wing-
tsit Chan, Neo-Confucian Terms Explained: The Pei-hsi tzu-i. Neo-Confucian
Studies, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.
On the concept of gan see: Charles LeBlanc, Huai-nan-tzu: Philo-
sophical Synthesis in Early Han Thought. The Idea of Resonance (Kan-
Ying). With a Translation and Analysis of Chapter Six. Hong Kong: Hong
Kong University Press, 1996.
For the Shn g see ki Yasushi , tr., F Hry sanga no
kenky , Tokyo: Keis shob, 2003, and the mas-
terful study and translation in Cornelia Tpelmann, Shan-ko von Feng
Meng-lung. Eine Volksliedersammlung aus der Ming-Zeit, Wiesbaden:
Franz Steiner Verlag, 1973.
 ON THE CONTAGIOUSNESS OF
NON-CONTAGIOUS BEHAVIOR: THE CASE OF
TAX AVOIDANCE AND TAX EVASION

Peter Hedstrm and Rebeca Ibarra

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

The chapter is organized as follows. We start with explicating in some

detail the logic of the PCB mechanism, and we discuss its relevance for
understanding the macro-level dynamics of various kinds of social behav-
ior. To make the theoretical discussion more concrete, we use tax avoid-
ance and tax evasion as illustrative cases. We focus on tax avoidance and
tax evasion because in addition to being socially and economically im-
portant issues, they illustrate particularly well the operation of the PCB
mechanism. Although illegal tax evasion is not directly contagious be-
cause of its private nature, legal tax avoidance is highly contagious and the
route into tax evasion is likely to go through tax avoidance. After discuss-
ing the role of the PCB mechanism in explaining tax evasion, we present
the results of an agent-based simulation analysis that examines in more
detail the macro-level dynamics that this mechanism is likely to give rise
to. We conclude the chapter with briefly addressing the main theme of
this book, the importance of broad horizons.

2. Parasitic contagious behavior

As will be discussed in more detail in the concluding section, we view this

chapter as a contribution to the rapidly expanding theoretical toolbox of
analytical sociology (see Hedstrm 2005; Hedstrm and Bearman 2009).
The analytical approach is founded on the premise that proper explana-
tions detail the social mechanisms which generate the social outcomes to
be explained (Elster 1989). The main reason for emphasizing so strongly
the importance of clearly specified micro-level mechanisms is that we ar-
rive at more intellectually satisfying answers to the question of why we ob-
serve the social phenomena we observe if we specify the individual-level
mechanisms likely to have brought them about. Furthermore, and as a
side effect, detailing the mechanisms at work is likely to lead to more use-
ful theories because detailed knowledge of how things are brought about
is useful if one wants to alter a process in a more desirable direction.

2.1. DBO theory1

To explicate the logic of the PCB mechanism, we take our point of depar-
ture in so-called DBO theory, i.e., in an action theory in which desires
(D), beliefs (B), and opportunities (O) are the primary theoretical terms
upon which the analysis of action and interaction is based (Hedstrm
2005). Figure 1 illustrates the basic idea.

1 This section draws on Hedstrm (2005).

 the case of tax avoidance and tax evasion 317

Figure 1. Core components of DBO theory.

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.

2.2. Social influence from a DBO perspective

Social interactions and social influence are at the core of most sociologi-
cal theories for the simple reason that an individuals actions often cannot
be explained unless they are related to the actions of others. When the
actions or behaviors of some actors influence the actions of others, DBO
theory suggests that this influence must be mediated via the mental states
(beliefs or desires) or the action-opportunities of the latter actors. That is
to say, from the perspective of DBO theory it is essential to distinguish
between three broad types of social influence: (1) desire-mediated, (2)
belief-mediated, and (3) opportunity-mediated interactions. In the dyadic
case we can describe the interaction between two individuals as in Figure 2.

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

desire-based: if many others prescribe it, it may be more acceptable or le-

gitimate to prescribe it; or it may be opportunity-based: if many others
prescribe it, the drug is more likely to be available in the local pharma-
cies and this increases the opportunities for prescribing the drug without
unnecessary delay. But irrespective of which mechanism or combination
of mechanisms is at work, if the focal physicians tendency to prescribe
the drug is positively influenced by the number of other physicians who
already have prescribed it, we have an example of classic social contagion.
The type of social mechanism focused upon here is more complex
than the one that generates this classic form of social contagion. The PCB
mechanism concerns two different types of actions, and the relationship
between the two can be described as follows:
1. The type of action that we seek to explain, let us refer to it as A1, is not
contagious in the sense of Figure 2. The reason for this either can be
that individuals lack information about the extent to which others have
performed A1 or because the actions of others, even when known,
have no influence on others desires, beliefs, or opportunities to do A1.
2. Action A2 is contagious in the sense of Figure 2.
3. An individuals tendency to do A1 increases if he/she has done A2 in
the past.
Given the perspective of DBO theory, if individual js tendency to do
A1 increases if he/she does A2, it follows that A2 or one of its proximate
causes must influence A1 or one of its proximate causes. With proximate
causes we refer to the desires, beliefs, and opportunities relevant for the
action in question, and we use the following notation to distinguish be-
tween them: B2j refer to the state of individual js beliefs relevant for ex-
plaining action A2; D1j refer to the state of individual js desires relevant
for explaining action A1; A2i refer to individual is action of type A2, and
so on. Figure 3 illustrates more clearly the possible relationships.
320 peter hedstrm & rebeca ibarra

Figure 3. DBO explication of the parasitic-contagious-behavior mechanism.

Figure 3 clearly brings out the distinctiveness of the PCB mechanism. As

can be seen, the PCB mechanism is a concatenation of an inter-actor and
an intra-actor component, and this is what gives it its distinctive feature.
The left hand sides of the graphs are identical to the inter-actor compo-
nent of Figure 2, but the right hand sides are intra-actor components with
leakage or influence from one action domain to another. The two graphs
differ from one another in that in the upper graph it is actions within one
domain that influence the proximate causes of action in the other domain,
while in the lower graph the leakage occurs at the level of the proximate
causes.
As the various arrows in Figure 3 show, there are numerous constella-
tions of DBO patterns that belong to the PCB family of mechanisms. To
make the discussion somewhat less abstract, let us discuss one of them in
some detail. Self-efficacy beliefs (e.g., Bandura 2001) are likely to play an
important role in producing leakage from one domain to another. Self-
efficacy refers to a belief in ones capabilities, i.e., to a belief in ones ability
to successfully carry out a particular task. Figure 4 explicates this in DBO
terms.

Figure 4. DBO explication of the role of self-efficacy beliefs in explaining action.

 the case of tax avoidance and tax evasion 321

Self-efficacy beliefs play an important role in explaining individuals ac-

tions because individuals are more inclined to perform actions they be-
lieve they can succeed in than actions they cannot. The role of self-efficacy
beliefs in linking actions in different domains can be described as follows
(see Figure 4). Individuals observe others performing an action (A2i) and
this will influence their self-efficacy beliefs (B2j) and subsequent actions
(A2j) because If they can do it, I can do it as well. Successfully perform-
ing action A2j in turn will influence the individuals self-efficacy beliefs
(B1j) regarding related actions (A1j) because If I can do A2, I can do A1 as
well.
For example, observing our friends running five miles may influence
our self-efficacy beliefs in such a way that we also start running because
if they can do it, we can do it. Since we cannot observe our friends mak-
ing love, lovemaking cannot be contagious in this sense, but if our ability
to run influences our love-related self-efficacy beliefs, lovemaking can be
parasitically contagious on running.

2.3. The case of tax avoidance and tax evasion

As mentioned in the introduction, one important social and economic
domain where the PCB mechanism is likely to operate is the tax domain.
Taking this mechanism into account seems particularly important if we
seek to explain the co-evolution of illegal tax evasion and legal tax avoid-
ance.2 In terms of the PCB mechanism, tax evasion is the equivalent of
A1 in the previous section and tax avoidance is the equivalent of A2. The
PCB mechanism is relevant for explaining the dynamics of tax evasion
when the following conditions hold true:
1. Tax evasion is not contagious (in the sense of Figure 2).
2. Tax avoidance is contagious in the sense that the extent to which an
individual avoids taxes is likely to be a positive function of the extent of
tax avoidance among others.
3. There is a causal leakage at the individual level such that if an individ-
ual engages in tax avoidance it is likely also to increase the chances of
him/her engaging in tax evasion.
To substantiate these claims we need to address the following questions:
Q1. Why is tax evasion not contagious in and of itself?
Q2. Why is tax avoidance contagious in and of itself?
Q3. Why is tax avoidance likely to also bring about tax evasion?

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

The answer to Q1 is information related. The existence of social norms

condemning illegal selfish behavior combined with the increased risk of
being legally punished if others find out about ones tax evasion, means
that most tax evaders keep their cards close to their chests. As a result,
information about tax evasion practices is not widely diffused. Evading
taxes is something done in private; not something that is broadcast pub-
licly. Hence, one of the essential preconditions for social contagion, the
between-actor transmission mechanism, is missing in the case of tax eva-
sion, and for this reason tax evasion is not likely to be directly contagious
in and of itself.
Tax evasion can be indirectly contagious, however, in that media re-
ports about evasion can influence individuals beliefs etc. in such a way
that their evasion behavior is altered. As far as this form of indirect influ-
ence is concerned, the actor labeled i in Figure 3 is some form of gener-
alized other who represents typical standpoints or actions of a group of
individuals. This type of indirect influence is not the focus of this paper.
The answer to Q2 is the opposite to the answer to Q1. Since the nor-
mative pressure against tax avoidance is not as strong as in the case of
tax evasion (but see Carroll 1987 for an alternative view), and since there
are no legal sanctions against such behavior, tax avoiders can freely talk
and publicize their behavior. Hence we should expect individuals to be
informed about the tax-avoidance practices of others, and this means that
the crucial between-actor transmission link is at hand in the case of tax
avoidance. But why should we expect an individuals tax avoidance to be
influenced by the availability of such information? From the perspective
of DBO theory, information about the tax avoidance of others will influ-
ence a focal actors tax avoidance if and only if it influences the individu-
als relevant desires, beliefs, or opportunities.
Space restrictions prohibit us from discussing in any detail the various
desire, belief, and opportunity-mediated influences linking one individ-
uals tax avoidance to that of another, so let us instead briefly discuss a
few relevant examples representing different paths in Figure 3. Let us start
with a desire-mediated influence (see Figure 5).

Figure 5. Desire-mediated influence linking tax avoidance of others (A2i )

to the tax avoidance of Ego (A2j ).
 the case of tax avoidance and tax evasion 323

One concrete example of a desire-mediated influence is the following. If

Ego is paying his taxes, perhaps because he thinks that it is a citizens duty
to contribute to the public good, but many others do not, this is likely to
decrease Egos tax morale and to increase the likelihood that he adopts a
similar behavioral pattern as the others at the next point in time (see Tor-
gler and Schaffner 2007 for some supporting empirical evidence on the
effects and consequences of tax morale). That is to say, tax avoidance of
others is likely to make tax avoidance into a more desirable alternative.
Tax avoidance of some can influence the tax avoidance of others not
only by influencing their desires but also by influencing their beliefs (see
Figure 6).

Figure 6. Belief-mediated influence linking tax avoidance of others (A2i )

to the tax avoidance of Ego (A2j ).

One specific type of belief-mediated influence is the one which is at the

heart of Fehr and Gintis (2007) work on social reciprocity. Summarizing
the results from a large number of experimental studies, they show that
beliefs about what others are doing are crucial for explaining why indi-
viduals do what they do. Their research suggests that most individuals are
neither egoists nor altruists, but conditional altruists who contribute to a
public good if they believe that others are doing the same. That is, some
people will always seek to minimize their taxes to the fullest extent possi-
ble, and some are happy to contribute to the public good, but most people
are conditionalists who are willing to pay their taxes as long as they be-
lieve that others are doing the same. In this kind of situation, beliefs about
the actions of others can have considerable impact, and these beliefs are
influenced by what others do. If our focal actor believes that others are
doing their fair share, he will contribute to the public good, but if his be-
liefs were to change, his tax behavior is likely to change as well.
The third and final type of inter-actor mechanism to be discussed here
is shown in Figure 7.
324 peter hedstrm & rebeca ibarra

Figure 7. Opportunity-mediated influence linking tax avoidance of others (A2i )

to the tax avoidance of Ego (A2j ).

One situation where this type of opportunity-mediated influence is likely

to operate is when individuals learn new tax avoidance strategies from
others. When this mechanism operates, the behavior of some creates new
opportunities for others to legally avoid their taxes. For example, legal tax
avoidance includes going before courts to challenge tax regulations. Of-
ten appeals brought before a high court challenge the constitutionality of
the tax law. If the courts resolution favors the taxpayer, then everyone can
benefit from it. Hence this action opens up opportunities at no cost for
other taxpayers claiming the same right.
Let us then turn from influences that operate between actors to those
that operate within one and the same actor. In doing so, we try to provide
an answer to the third question posed above (Q3): Why is tax avoidance
likely to also bring about tax evasion? Once again, from the perspective of
DBO theory, to the extent that an individuals tax avoidance influences the
likelihood of the individual in question also engaging in tax evasion, this
influence must be mediated via the individuals evasion-relevant desires,
beliefs, or opportunities. As illustrated in Figure 3, the act of tax avoid-
ance as such can influence the evasion-relevant desires, beliefs, or oppor-
tunities, but the influence also can come directly from the avoidance-rele-
vant desires, beliefs, or opportunities.
Because of space limitations, we will only be able to scratch the surface
of the complex set of interdependencies linking an individuals tax avoid-
ance to his/her tax evasion. The desire-mediated pattern shown in Figure
8 illustrates the case where an individuals tax avoidance influences his
evasion-relevant desires and thereby his evasion behavior.

Figure 8. Desire-mediated influence linking Egos tax avoidance (A2j )

to his/her tax evasion (A1j ).
 the case of tax avoidance and tax evasion 325

One example of a desire-mediated influence is a learning-by-doing proc-

ess. For example, by engaging in tax avoidance, the individual learns that
the probability of being audited by the authorities is minimal. This leads
to a revision in the individuals beliefs about the probability of getting
caught if he were to illegally evade his taxes. This revision in beliefs, in
turn, will give rise to a corresponding increase in the expected value of
evading, and an increase in the probability of evading.3
Tax avoidance also can influence tax evasion by influencing the eva-
sion-relevant opportunities (see Figure 9). For example, successful tax
avoidance is likely to generate additional resources for the individual in
question, and these resources can open up new opportunities for evasion,
e.g., the opportunity to hire an expensive tax lawyer.

Figure 9. Opportunity-mediated influence linking Egos tax avoidance (A2j )

to his/her tax evasion (A1j ).

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

Tax avoidance is a complex activity, which in most cases requires expen-

sive and well-trained accountants and/or lawyers. This means that the
real opportunities are mainly available to those with sufficient resources.
The unequally distributed opportunities for avoidance may reduce the le-
gitimacy of the tax system and encourage those who are unable to reduce
their tax liabilities with legal means, to instead engage in illegal tax eva-
sion. If individual j sees that individual i gets away with it by legal means
which are not open to him, he is likely to be tempted to try to achieve the
same result through illegal means (see Wheatcrof 1955). That is, an indi-
viduals (lack of) opportunities to engage in legal tax avoidance will make
illegal tax evasion into a more desirable alternative.
Let us conclude this section by also briefly discussing the belief-belief
leakage illustrated in Figure 11. At this point it may be proper to mention
a few words about what we mean by belief. We use the term in the same
sense as Hahn (1973), i.e., a belief is a proposition about the world held to
be true, and this broad definition means that what we normally refer to as
knowledge is a subset of beliefs.

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.

3. Linking micro and macro

As mentioned above, to explain a macro or social outcome, it is necessary

to provide clear micro foundations. Providing micro foundations is not
sufficient, however. In addition to specifying why individuals act and in-
teract as they do, we must explain why, acting as they do, they bring about
 the case of tax avoidance and tax evasion 327

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).

Figure 12. Core micro-macro links needed to explain tax behavior.

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

That is to say, an agents tendency to act is equal to the product of the

agents desires, beliefs, and opportunities. We then compare this ac-
tion tendency with a random number drawn from a uniform probabil-
ity distribution, and if the action tendency of agent i exceeds the random
number, the agent will act; otherwise the agent will not act. This means
that an agent with a zero-value in the desire, belief, or opportunity vec-
tor never will act, and that an agent with the value 1 in all three vectors
always will act. In between these two extremes, an agent is more likely to
act, the higher the agents action tendency is.
We assume that the agents are embedded in a social network, and that
they influence those they send links to and that they are influenced by
those that they receive links from. The type of network they are embedded
in is a so-called community network, i.e., a network consisting of different
groups or communities. In this case we assume that there are 200 agents
who belong to two groups of equal size. The probability of a link being
formed to another agent of the same group is assumed to be equal to 0.8,
while the probability of a link to an agent of the other group is assumed to
be equal to 0.01.
In addition to the ties linking the agents to one another, the two groups
differ in terms of their opportunities for tax avoidance. One group repre-
sents a high-income group with more opportunities for tax avoidance and
the other group represents a low-income group with less avoidance op-
portunities. In the initial simulation presented below, we assume that the
average opportunity of a low-income agent is 90 percent of the average
opportunity of a high-income agent.
As discussed in the previous section, we focus on two different types
of actions, legal tax avoidance and illegal tax evasion, and we assume that
the probability of an agent engaging in tax avoidance is influenced by the
proportion of tax avoiders among those who the agent in question re-
ceives links from. More specifically we assume that
DAit = DAit-1 (1 + pt-1)
BAit = BAit-1 (1 + pt-1)
OAit = OAit-1 (1 + pt-1)

where DAit is the avoidance-relevant desires, BAit is the avoidance-relevant

beliefs, OAit is the avoidance-relevant opportunities of agent i at time t,
 the case of tax avoidance and tax evasion 329

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.

.. High Income Avoiders __ . __ Low Income Avoiders

____ High Income Evaders __ __ Low Income Evaders

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

These analyses thus show that also a non-contagious type of behavior

like tax evasion can be contagious if it can piggyback on a contagious be-
havior, like tax avoidance. The analyses also show that the PCB mecha-
nism can contribute to a substantial increase in tax evasion when the in-
tra-individual mechanism is sufficiently powerful.

4. Conclusion: On analytical sociology and the importance of broad

horizons

This chapter makes a contribution to the theoretical toolbox of sociology.

The PCB mechanism focused upon here is likely to be of importance for
partially explaining a range of social phenomena, and the way in which
we approached the problem exemplifies an important tenet of analytical
sociology. Analytical sociology is a dynamically oriented macro sociology
with clearly explicated micro foundations. It is concerned with explain-
ing important macro-level facts such as the diffusion of various social
practices, patterns of segregation, network structures, typical beliefs, and
common ways of acting. It explains such facts not merely by relating them
to other macro-level facts, but by detailing in clear and precise ways the
mechanisms through which they were brought about. First, the analyst
needs to clearly specify the logic of action and interaction upon which
the analysis is founded, and then the analyst needs to derive the macro-
level outcomes that the mechanism or set of mechanisms is likely to bring
about.
A recurrent theme of this book concerns the importance of broad ho-
rizons. How does analytical sociology fit into this broader theme? At first
sight it may appear as if analytical sociology with its detailed focus on
micro-level mechanisms would be the antithesis of a broad-horizons ap-
proach, but such a view would be mistaken. As argued in Hedstrm and
Udhn (2009), analytical sociology is most properly viewed as a contem-
porary incarnation of Mertons notion of middle-range theory (e.g., Mer-
ton 1967). From the perspective of this theoretical tradition, it is essential
to distinguish between different aspects of the broadness of a theory
or an explanation. Any explanation can be said to consist of two types of
components: (1) an explanandum or that which is to be explained, and
(2) an explanans or that which is to explain the explanandum. Theories
differ from one another in terms of their broadness with respect to their
explanandum as well as their explanans.
332 peter hedstrm & rebeca ibarra

When discussing different types of explanans, Mki (1992) introduced

the notion of isolation. Isolation is a certain kind of abstraction which
consists in focusing attention on certain explanatory factors at the ex-
pense of others. For example, if the set of possible explanatory factors
consists of {a,b,c,d} and we focus exclusively on {a,b} we have performed
an isolation. Using Mkis terminology, the included set {a,b} is referred
to as the isolated field and the excluded set {c,d} as the excluded field. One
important dimension distinguishing different types of theories from one
another is the size of the isolated field in relation to the excluded field.
Some theories focus attention on a narrow set of explanatory factors while
others seek a broader and more comprehensive account.
A similar set-based distinction can be made with reference to the ex-
planandum. Some theories explain highly specific and particularistic
phenomena while others explain a wide range of phenomena (or types of
phenomena). The variation along this dimension is not a matter of isola-
tion in Mkis sense of the term, but concerns how general the theory is.
The larger the set of phenomena or type of phenomena a theory explains,
the more general it is. If Theory A explains the set {p,q,r,s} and Theory B
explains the set {r,s}, Theory A is more general than Theory B.
In order to bring to the fore the defining characteristics of middle-
range theory, it is necessary to take both of these dimensions into account
(see Figure 14). The horizontal dimension in the figure refers to the ex-
planans and the degree of isolation, and the vertical dimension refers to
the explanandum and the generality of the theory. The two dimensions
are orthogonal to one another in the sense that at each level of generality
theories can differ from one another in terms of their degree of isolation.
Middle-range theory is located in between the extremes represented
by the four corners of this figure.4 As far as the vertical, explanandum-
related dimension is concerned, middle-range theory is not preoccupied
with detailed descriptions of particular events, processes, or patterns of
association but theories sufficiently abstract to deal with differing spheres
of social behavior and social structure, so that they transcend sheer de-
scription and empirical generalization (Merton 1968c: 68).

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

Figure 14. Generality, isolation, and the defining characteristics

of middle-range theories.

As far as the horizontal, explanans-related dimension is concerned, the

concern is not with theories that seek to take into account all explana-
tory factors that possibly could have contributed to the outcome to be ex-
plained. Analytical sociologists are committed to the method of isolation
and believe that useful theories should focus on certain elements believed
to be important and to intentionally ignore others. The type of explana-
tions thereby arrived at provide partial explanations of delimited aspects
of social phenomena (Merton 1968c: 39-40). Mertons theories of self-
fulfilling prophecies (Merton 1968b) and Matthew effects (Merton 1968a)
are ideal examples of this theoretical strategy. They isolate a few explana-
tory factors that explain important but delimited aspects of the outcomes
to be explained. They do not seek to retell the causal story in minute de-
tail; instead they seek to highlight the heart of the story.
Analytical sociology thus aims for a clear, precise, and simple type of
theory which can be used for partially explaining a range of different phe-
nomena, but which makes no pretense of being able to explain all social
phenomena, and which is not founded upon any form of extreme reduc-
tionism in terms of its explanans. It is a vision of sociological theory as
a toolbox of semi-general mechanisms each of which is adequate for ex-
plaining a limited range or type of phenomena. The broadness of the ap-
proach should be judged at the level of the toolbox, not at the level of sin-
334 peter hedstrm & rebeca ibarra

gle mechanisms. Analytical sociology is a broad social-scientific approach

that incorporates insights from philosophy, social psychology, cognitive
science, behavioral economics, and network science into a novel ap-
proach to macro-sociological inquiry.
 the case of tax avoidance and tax evasion 335

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 PART FIVE

Universities and the Dilemmas

of Higher Education
 VIEWS FROM THE ACROPOLIS AND THE AGORA:
CLARK KERRS INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY

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

Industrial society, industrial civilization even, was the outcome of his-

tory for both Kerr and Marxists. However, Marxists expected that indus-
trial civilization would be brought about by class conflict, workers eventu-
ally triumphing over employers. Kerr expected no such direct outcome,
certainly not a class-based outcome. On the contrary, by nature industrial
society was a composite, a diverse collection of interests and status po-
sitions, finely graded. He noted the existence of many different kinds of
workers and specialists. And while some residue of class feeling remained,
by and large the issues of the day and of the future were rivalries for au-
thority because under plural conditions no one kind of authority existed.12
Whereas industrializing movements and transformations would in
time occur everywhere, the process would be difficult and unsettling, if
more difficult for some nations and for some groups than for others. Con-
flicts would occur, a struggle between uniformity and diversity, between
managers and managed, but the titanic battles which mark our period of
transition have already passed into the pages of history. And, in a para-
phrase of Marx from The Communist Manifesto, Kerr and his colleagues
wrote that the giant of industrialization is stalking the earth, transform-
ing almost all the features of older and traditional societies. Eventually
industrialization will have swept away most pre-industrial forms of soci-
ety, except possibly for a few odd backwaters.13
By eventually Kerr meant the middle of the twenty-first century. Just
as in the first industrial revolution, the pace of transformation varied from
region to region and nation to nation. In 1975, when he and his colleagues
published their reconsideration of the 1960 summary, they admitted that
the work of industrialization had not been as thorough as first they had
thought. Many countries were too poor and weak to progress beyond
agrarian conditions.14 Industrialism, meaning the total transformation of
society, had more or less arrived in the more developed nations. The rela-
tions of men and women were altered. More women had entered the labor

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.

15 Industrialism and Industrial Man: 295.

16Ibid.: 280.
17Ex Ante: 49.
 views from the acropolis and the agora 345

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

granting of doctoral degrees (with some minor accommodation to the

state colleges). A fourth segment was private, but allowed a major play-
ing role since independent colleges and universities were already an es-
tablished segment of the states provision for higher education. The pri-
vate institutions were concerned that unless consulted, planning decisions
would locate cheaper and competitive institutions within their catchment
areas.
One intention of the Plan, remarked upon repeatedly, was to provide
systematic access to higher education for those qualified for it and to al-
low for upward educational mobility through the mechanisms of student
transfer from segment to segment. The principle was especially important
for Kerr. It suited his view that an industrial society was a society that re-
spected merit and also promoted opportunity, which was also a general
American belief. John Rawls had confirmed the point. The democratic
provision was also a legitimizing principle for the University of California,
which was growing into a multi-campus federation (as were the other seg-
ments). Without a structural means for students to enter the University
who were unable to do so following high school, a more select admissions
policy was likely to rouse the states inherent populism that in any case
was the fear. Student transfer legitimized the tripartite segmental divi-
sions. Without that provision, Kerrs ambitions for the University of Cali-
fornia would have been severely jeopardized.
Another element of the Plan was to reduce legislative input and inter-
ference into higher education. In the decades leading up to the Plan, leg-
islators had been active in any number of ways, establishing colleges in
rural or low population areas, for example. Prestige was a factor. The Plan
largely removed or nobbled such personal intervention, which was gener-
ally unrelated to cost, and left the responsibility for planning to each of
the segments. More autonomy would have existed for the state colleges if
they had been given the constitutional protections that the University of
California had acquired in the nineteenth century after bruising battles
between rival economic interests. But the state colleges did not gain con-
stitutional standing, nor did the Plan itself, to the chagrin of Kerr.
The Plan restructured higher education in accordance with the multi-
ple needs of an industrial society. They were an expression of the third or
middle way that Kerr said was confirmed by the work of John Maynard
Keynes. The government of the state of California set out the structural
framework in which funding and mission were defined. Mission creep
was restrained, the student populations relevant to each segment were
specified, a weighted funding formula was adopted, but further planning
348 sheldon rothblatt

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.

24Uses of the University: 37.

Burton R. Clark, Creating Entrepreneurial Universities: Organizational Pathways of
25
Transformation (Kidlington, Oxford: Pergamon, 1998) and Sustaining Change in Univer-
sities: Continuities in Case Studies and Concepts (Maidenhead, Berkshire: Society for Re-
search into Higher Education and Open University Press, 2004).
 views from the acropolis and the agora 351

In explaining the multiversity, calling attention to its special character-

istics, Kerr had to dispose of one more inheritance in order to drive home
his point about the historical novelty of the multiversity. The multiversity
was a conglomerate, so interlocked with industrial society and so plural
in character that choosing between many alternatives was frequently dif-
ficult. The Master Plan with its allocation of institutions by mission was
intended to ease that burden, but in practice determining which external
pressures were legitimate and which inconsistent with a particular mis-
sion was problematical. Past generations of academics might appeal to
history, to tradition, to received values. Of course universities were not as
conservative as critics maintained. They had always changed. In private,
Kerr admitted that while intellectual changes were always occurring, most
major change was the consequence of outside stimulation or coercion. By
themselves, professors were institutionally conservative.
But whether progressive or conservative, from the nineteenth century
onwards academics became accustomed to expressing and defending the
nature of a university by appealing to its inherent idea, an intellectual
talisman to keep the utilitarians at bay and prevent other unwanted in-
truders and hawkers of unpalatable notions from entering the groves of
academe.
That idea was never perfectly clear. Depending upon whether the
source of it was derived from the history of the Anglo-Scottish-American
university or from the idealist philosophies held by members of German
universities, it might refer to original inquiry, to the teaching of under-
graduates, to Hellenic theories about the difference between liberal and
servile education, to the search for truth, to academic freedom, to the
Higher Learning, to any and all of these. It hardly mattered that in prac-
tice university academics had long been engaged in activities perfectly
in accord with the logic of industrial society. When it came to justifying
those activities, explaining and defending them, academics fell back on
the readily available tradition of speaking about universities as if they had
an essence, an innate quality, a master ideal. This was not disingenuous.
This was, as Kerr was implying in the Godkin Lectures, the common way
of discussing universities because no other had been clearly articulated.26

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

To be included among those who honor Bjrn Wittrock is itself an honor.

I have long been an admirer of his extraordinary scholarly sensibility, in-
sight, analytic ability, and virtuosity. He is also to be admired for his ca-
pacity to follow his interests wherever they may take him; this has yielded
a scholarly record that is not only excellent but also extensive and diverse;
and whatever he touches turns into something valuable. I have also had
the pleasure of being a fellow tribesman. We have both served in that un-
usual capacity of directing, simultaneously, institutes for advanced study
in the social sciences. That commonality has created a special bond, which
I treasure. This occasion gives me an opportunity to celebrate our collegi-
ality and friendship. I chose to write on the general topic of the history of
higher education, one of Bjrns interests and loves.

Some Simplified but Accurate Pre-History

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

as well as undergraduate education; state colleges (later state universities)

that were primarily four-year, bachelors-granting institutions; and junior
colleges (later community colleges), offering two-year terminal degrees
with some opportunities for transfer to four-year colleges. The publics
were called up to serve the educational needs of states and localities, and
their student populations emanated mainly from their home states. Pri-
vates were governed by boards of trustees composed mainly of influen-
tial businessmen and professionals. Publics were governed by a variety of
boardssome appointed, some elected, but all answerable ultimately to
the state and local governments that financed them. Most states at one
time or another established a flagship university, but the public sector was
weak in states (for example, Massachusetts, New York) that had strong
traditions of private higher education.
As I take up my theme of the blurring of these lines in the second half
of the twentieth century, I organize my remarks under three headings: fi-
nancial support, political constituencies, and governance.

The Evolution of Financial Support

The famous GI Bill, subsidizing the further education of veterans of

World War II military service, marked a great influx of federal funds into
higher education. It also entailed an early and significant crossing of lines
between publics and privates. The legislation did not distinguish between
them, and veterans with financial support flocked to both. The GI Bill was
a great stimulus to both publics and privates, and diversified the student
clienteles of both. In the same period the privates, including the pres-
tigious ones, began to diversify their student bodies. Harvards national
scholarship program was a notable example. It reached out nationally to
brilliant high school students and supplied numbers of them with full or
almost full scholarship support. This meant an extension of its reach geo-
graphically, socially, and into the ranks of students traditionally bound for
public institutions. By the 1950s Harvards undergraduate student body
was, by student background, half private and half public and half-Massa-
chusetts and half-other.
As the GI Bill was running its course, two additional sources of fund-
ing, mainly for universities, appeared on the scene. One was the entry of
private foundations into funding university research; the Ford Foundation
was a landmark institution in this regard. About the same time the fed-
eral government entered the research-funding picture. Some of this sup-
port arose from military and national defense motives, but soon it grew
 private and public in american higher education 357

into a wave of general support for scientific research. The post-Sputnik

priorities for science and education accelerated this movement, and over
time the federal government has assumed an enlarged role, and included
some scholarship and fellowship programs. Some institutions (for exam-
ple, Massachusetts Institute of Technology) became very dependent on
government grants and contracts. Foundation and federal support had
several further consequences: (a) it blurred public and private boundaries
by giving to both; it advantaged institutions with doctoral programs, both
public and private; (b) it disadvantaged four-year private and state. and
community collegesall primarily teaching institutions; (c) it stimulated
a massive growth in graduate programs in both public an private uni-
versities; (d) it diversified student clienteles, since admissions policies for
graduate programs were fully national and international; (e) impacted the
stratification of academic disciplines by disadvantaging the humanities
and to some degree the social sciences with respect to financial support,
faculty salaries, and perquisites.
Several other interrelated developments unfolded as the century pro-
gressed through its second half:
State support for public institutions has experienced an irregular but
significant long-term decline. This has been a general phenomenon. In
some places (for example, the University of Michigan) the trend has
pushed the percentage of state contributions below 15 percent of the
total. A paradoxical concomitant is that there has been little or no cor-
responding decline of states role in the governance of their universities
and collegescreating a discrepancy between financial support and
political control. This decline has evidently and inevitably favored the
privates; there is much current debate about the crisis of the publics.
Partly as a result of this decline, and partly as a result of increasing
costs, student fees have moved upward in both privates and publics.
This has sometimes been partially counterbalanced by increasing stu-
dent financial aid. Over time the steady and sometimes dramatic in-
creases in fees (e.g., the 2009 increases by more than one-third in Cali-
fornia public higher education) has generated protest in student and
other quarters. It has also raised fundamental questions about whether
higher education is being strangled as a social resource and whether
it is losing its traditionally valued equalizing and social-mobility roles
and moving toward rigidifying class privilege.
Also related to the decline in state support is an increase in seeking
private donations on the part of the publics; this increases competition
between privates and publics and further blurs the boundaries between
358 neil j. smelser

them. It has, however, left publics at a disadvantage because of inherit-

ed understandings that they are publicly funded. Increased reliance on
private sources has disadvantaged non-research public institutions in
relation to prestigious public ones, both because the latter have greater
drawing-power and because their alumni have deeper pockets.
Most recently, funding from collaborating with business and industry
(dramatic in technologies such as bio-engineering) has grown in sig-
nificance. This has also favored major research institutions, both public
and private, and further reduced the differences between them.
The combined effects of all these developments have been to meld the
missions and activities of privates and publics. Publics have moved more
toward private support (except for the mass of non-research institutions);
and privates have become more involved in the public sector with regard
to their financing. And in looking forward to some of the consequences
for governance, the diversification of funding sources and the resultant
competition has turned fund-seeking administrators into scramblers and
opportunists. This contrasts with a traditional reliance on student fees and
returns from endowment in the case of privates and a more-or-less steady
flow of state support for the publics.

Changing Political Constituencies

Internal. Any historical account of the evolution of institutions of high-

er education must begin with their increasing structural complexity. In
much of the nineteenth century, higher education was private and under-
graduate. It emphasized humanistic (including religious) studies, counted
the children of the affluent and influential their principal source of stu-
dents, and embraced a mission of preparing those students for elite roles
in society. This model has given way, selectively and irregularly, to a more
complex one, along the following lines:
The growth of publicly supported institutions, dramatized by the pas-
sage and implementation of the Morill Act of 1862.
The differentiation of types of institutionsresearch universities, state
colleges and universities, independent and parochial institutions, com-
munity colleges, and, most recently, virtual universities.
The massification of campuses, entailing more middle- and working-
class students, and, later, more students from traditionally unrepresent-
ed racial, ethnic, and cultural groups.
The establishment of natural and life sciences and, later, the behavioral
and social sciences as essential parts of the curriculum.
 private and public in american higher education 359

The addition of post-graduate study and advanced degrees to under-

graduate study.
The addition of professional education to collegiate and post-graduate
study.
The addition of education-abroad programs.
Particularly in large institutions, the addition of research centers and
institutes.
All these additions have manifested a kind of blistering principle of so-
cial change, whereby new programs and structures are added onto exist-
ing ones rather than displacing them. This additive formula of change lies
behind the increased complexity.
All these structural changes precipitated new classes of internal con-
stituencies, including new groupings of faculties into specialized academ-
ic departments and professional schools as well as broad areas of knowl-
edge (sciences, social sciences, humanities); more heterogeneous groups
of students (undergraduate, graduate, and professional, and subdivisions
among these); teaching assistants and research assistants; non-faculty re-
search personnel; ancillary staff taken on by expanded library facilities;
new student services (advising, financial aid, housing, psychotherapy);
and expansion of offices of admission, mailing divisions, and personnel.
Most of these groups remain latent politically, but do develop interests
and can be activated politically if they experience threats. All this makes
for a greater need to coordinate the affairs (including the budgets) of edu-
cational institutions, and adds contingency and complexity to the politics
of governing them.
External. Dramatic changes have also occurred with respect to insti-
tutions external constituencies. It is helpful to distinguish between long-
standing ones and those that have appeared in the more recently. Among
the former are:
The town side of the town-gown relationship, which has a long his-
tory of ambivalence toward colleges and universities, liking them for
the prestige and jobs they bring to the community, but not liking them
for their rowdy students, their acquisition of tax-free land, and their
snobbishness toward the locals.
Parents of students, a latent constituency but one that expects colleges
and universities to prepare their children for occupational success and
social status, anddespite the decline of in loco parentisexpects in-
stitutions to help keep their children out of mischief.
Alumni and other donorsa cultivated constituency, valued for their
moral support and financial donations, but also one that takes an in-
360 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

In the world of private philanthropy, there has been a long-term move-

ment away from the pattern of granting non-designated funds to uni-
versities and colleges and toward more applied or targeted research
that presumably produces more direct and useful outcomes. This intro-
duces a new level of accountabilityabove and beyond spending grant-
ed funds responsibly and honestlynamely to indicate what results
are expected from grants and to pay more attention to the effectiveness
and relevance of research accomplished. This is a significantly expanded
notion of accountability and makes the foundations more circumstan-
tial constituencies.
The same trend toward increased results and more accountability inform
the granting activities of the federal governmentactually more so, be-
cause public monies are involved. In addition, government agencies
have exerted an even more significant kind of political pressure on
institutions of higher education. Themselves responding to political
movements of affirmative action, feminism, and environmentalism,
federal granting agencies ask if receiving institutionsboth public and
privateare in conformity with federal laws and guidelines in their
admissions, affirmative action guidelines in hiring and contracting, in
their regard for environmental impacts, and in their concern for the
rights of humans and animals. These have magnified the significance
of the federal government as a political constituency, all the more so
because of the seldom-used but potentially disastrous threat of with-
holding research funds.
Second, these constituencies interests have spread. In particular, a general
accountability mania has affected state legislatures and state executive
offices. Despite the general decline in contributions of state governments
to the budgets of institutions of higher education, states have augment-
ed their interest in accountability, especially with respect to admissions,
teaching workloads of faculty, and institutional effectiveness. Colleges and
universities have to spend more of their time preparing data, defending,
and persuadingif not outright hoodwinkingstate agencies with respect
to their activities.
Third, the involvement of the business and corporate sectors in the lives of
universities and colleges has increased, partly as a result of initiatives taken
by those institutions to fill the gap of leveling or declining federal support
after the Cold War years, partly as the result of the opportunism of indus-
try, and partly as a result of federal legislation permissive of academic-
business liaisons. The magnitude of this increase is not known, and the
principles governing the new symbiosisincluding principles of hand-
362 neil j. smelser

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

The general implication of these observations is that, historically, uni-

versities and colleges as types of organization are especially prone to sur-
prises (in large part because they would like to believe that they are not
part of academic life), are ill-equipped to react to them when they arise
(in large part for the same reason), and are prone to forget about them
in their desire to return to normality once they have happened. These
are scarcely valuable assets these days, and a great deal of organizational
learning and adaptation appears to be in order.

Consequences for Organizational Structure,

Leadership, and Governance

Because of the alteration of the constellation of internal and external con-

stituencies, college and university campuses have moved far from the his-
torical assumptions of simplicity, communality, and serenity based both
on historical reality and invocations of a mythical past.
The exercise of internal authority and organizational coordination in
institutions of higher education have by now evolved to a complex mix
of principles: (a) historical residues of a religious calling, which combines
self-imposed discipline and personal freedom; (b) elements of collegiality,
a company of equals whose political cement is civility and mutual influ-
ence (within this kind of polity, above all, resides the myth of the universi-
ty as a unified community); (c) elements of formal bureaucracy, superim-
posed over time by the exigencies of growing size and multifunctionality;
and (d) a system of dual governance that is simultaneously hierarchical
(with administrators retaining final authority) and democratic (with ad-
ministrators delegating widely to academic senates and consulting with
faculty, and to a certain extent with staff, students, and alumni). Needless
to say, these different principles of authority and coordination often stand
in tension with one another.
The growth and complexity of internal and external constituencies
have superimposed several new elements on this already patchwork sys-
tem of governance:
Governing the institution has become a much more complex operation
because of the numbers and diversity of constituencies involved, as
well as the corresponding growth in number and kind of contradictory
pressures and demands on campus administrations. The observable di-
rections taken by campus leadership are an increase in the public rela-
tions aspects of colleges and universities; a dictate to speak to different
groups with different voices; certain defensiveness; and a decline of the
 private and public in american higher education 367

wise statesman role of college and university presidents (personal-

ized in figures like Robert Maynard Hutchins, James Bryant Conant,
and Kingman Brewster). As the potential for offending some interest-
ed group by uttering any general statement has increased, so have the
temptation to say nothing publicly and many different things privately.
The potential for political surprises, mainly in the form of political
criticism and attacks from different groups and constituencies, as well
as fighting among these constituencies, has also magnified, because
the number of lurking interested parties has increased. The Chancel-
lors Office of my own campus at Berkeley actually formed a Commit-
tee on Surprises in 2003, in an effort to bring intelligence to bear on
what makes for political surprises for the campus, as well as an effort
to foresee looming surprises in order that they could be treated less
as surprises and more as problems. The implication of the greater
potential of surprises for college and university leaders is that they
are called upon to spend more of their time in diplomatic and crisis-
management activities than ever before. The paradox is that while ef-
fective institutional leadership now calls for boldness and initiative in
cultivating the institutional, financial, political, and moral support of as
many constituencies as possible, leaders are also under great pressure
to be timid because these constituencies develop their own stakeholder
claims, and as a result there are always many toes waiting to be stepped
on.
Last but not least is a certain kind of bureaucratic paradox. One of the
consequences of growth and specialization in institutions of higher
education has been, as noted above, an increase in their organization-
al complexity. This is what lies behind the increasingly bureaucratic
character of life in these institutions. It is also one of the factors that
have been responsible for the increased number of internal and exter-
nal constituencies and demands emanating from them. But what is the
typical organizational response to actual or anticipated pressure and
conflict? The simple answer is more bureaucracy. Confronted with
demands from racial, ethnic, cultural, and gender groups, campuses
establish offices, officers, and faculty committees on affirmative action.
Confronted with demands for conformity with environmental regula-
tions, campuses establish environmental offices and officers. Confront-
ed with the threat of lawsuits, they beef up their legal staffs. Expanding
public relations offices and officers and employing lobbyists also add
to the administrative staffs. The developmental pattern has been the
superimposition of bureaucracy bred by actual and potential conflict
368 neil j. smelser

on top of bureaucracy bred by growth and complexity. Both tendencies

push in the same organizational directionincreased staff, increased
costs, and increased organizational cumbersomeness.

Possible Implications for the Future

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

will no doubt increase as universities and colleges continue to compete

with one another for recognition, status and stature, with the main cur-
rency for those being productivity in the worlds of research and pub-
lication. Pressures to teach enough, well, and imaginatively will also
continue to be felt from administrators, chairs, conscientious educa-
tors, external constituencies such as legislators and parents. Given all
the changes analyzed in this essay, it appears that the future is not a
simple matter that one type of commitment or activity will displace
others. There will continue to be pressure to do everything well or more
or better, so that overloading rather than change of mission will be the
keynote for academics and academic institutions.
Despite all this, we may expect a further general evolution away from
the traditional liberal arts emphasis in colleges and universities. We
have already seen the increased skewing toward science and related
subjects (computer-science, environmental studies) at the expense of
social sciences, humanities and arts; in the increasing vocationalization
of student choices; and in the demands for relevant training on the part
of those who are to hire students after they graduate. Moreover, as one
who has been a persistent advocate of the revitalization of general edu-
cation, I do not see that the flurries of enthusiasm and reform efforts
along these lines can hold a serious candle to the stronger trends men-
tioned.
I have attempted to avoid global value judgments about all the trends
and forecasts in developing the diagnoses and projections in this essay,
but rather to present a sober, objective account of things. No doubt my
traditionalist sentiments have shone through from time to time, but my
general sense is that it is fruitless to attempt to undo or roll back those
changes that history has created and continues to create. The challenge is
certainly to continue the struggle to preserve and augment the commit-
ments to that which is traditionally valuable in the noble history of higher
education, but to pursue that commitment in the context of an irrevers-
ible series of historical changes that have compromised them.
 THE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES OF QUANTITATIVE
MEASURES IN THE MANAGEMENT OF SCIENCE

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

By concentrating on the paradoxically irrational consequences of the in-

tentionally abusive or just opportunistic and mindless implementation of
bibliometric measures, I believe, one can best undermine the widespread
trust in numbers (Porter) that supports them.
Two unrelated remarks of caution: First, an attack on the use of quan-
titative measures in the evaluation and management of science does not
mean that such measures are flawed in principle. Most important is that
no matter which measures, their adequacy depends on the questions they
are supposed to answer, the phenomena they are supposed to indicate.
Not everything that can be measured is relevant, and some questions can-
not be answered with quantitative measures. That is a truism.
Second, although the bibliometric indicators have been subjected to
many methodological critiques, their unintended consequences have been
researched much less intensely. In fact, most of them are still anecdotal
and speculative. I will not repeat the methodological criticism except
where necessary to understand the consequences but concentrate on the
unintended effects only, reviewing the most important ones and indicat-
ing whether they are evidence-based or still speculation.

2. Regulatory weakness of science and higher education policy

The particular danger of applying quantitative measures in the manage-

ment and regulation of research and the high risk of generating unin-
tended consequences stems from the nature of the research process itself.
Science policymakers, and on a smaller scale, managers in universities,
research institutes, and funding councils are in a different situation than
policymakers and managers in other policy arenas. Their overarching ob-
jective is to achieve the production of new knowledge, but they can neither
know how to achieve this objective nor know which conditions they can
and should manipulate to make knowledge production more innovative
and efficient. Unless the new knowledge sought after is already known in
principle and analyses can be automated (as in the case of the human ge-
nome or in materials science) neither the product nor the way to obtain
it is known. This is very different from, say, the construction of a highway
system. One important difference is the relation and the distance between
regulators and regulated. Those who regulate and are legitimated to do so
are dependent on the regulated to advise them how to do it. While this
problem exists to a certain degree in most policy fields, in the case of sci-
ence this asymmetry between principal and agent is most pronounced.
374 peter weingart

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.

3. Publication and citation counts, impact factor and

communication behaviour

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

more citations. For each of these indicators a one-dimensional mode of

reaction or a so-called incentive compatibility is assumed. That assump-
tion is mistaken, however.
Several reactions that count among the unintended kind are well-
known by now. Researchers have increased their publication output by di-
viding their articles to least publishable units, which means that the same
amount of information is communicated in a larger number of articles.
Butler has shown in a study that upon the implementation of formula-
based funding, i.e. linking the number of publications in peer reviewed
journals to funding, the number of publications went up, but the qual-
ity of the papers had not increased as measured by citations (Butler 2003,
41). A study in Spain found that researchers have responded to the linking
of publication output to income by increasing their research output and
thereby have responded as intended (Jimnez-Contreras 2003, 133, 138).
Comparing the Australian with the Spanish experience, Butler states that
in the Spanish case CNEAI achieved its stated aims, namely to increase
productivity and internationality of Spanish research, while the Australian
funding formulas were intended to reward quality, but in fact rewarded
quantity (Butler 2003, 44). As a result Australia fell even behind nearly all
OECD countries in terms of quality.
Another consequence of the regime of evaluation-based funding is that
scientists publish more but less risky, mainstream rather than borderline
papers and try to place them in lower quality journals as long as they are
in the ISI journal index. Rather than being a means to communicate re-
search findings the main purpose of publishing is to obtain funds, a le-
gitimate but unintended reaction as, e.g. in the Australian case, price tags
can be attached to publications: A$ 3000 for an article in a peer-reviewed
journal, A$ 15000 for a book (Butler 2003, 40). A further consequence
appears to be a bias towards short-term performance rather than long-
term research capacity (Marginson, Considine 2000, 17, cited in Glser
et al. 2002, 12). The UWA introduced a quantity of research output based
funding formula and subsequently its status in terms of its relative citation
impact (RCI) declined (Glser et al. 2002, 14).
The implementation of output measures and their connection to fund-
ing has, in its crudest form, led to publication growth which has a number
of questionable repercussions itself. The pressure on journals for space
and on reviewers to review the articles has increased considerably, and
it will probably never be known how much of this increased pressure is
due to a real increase of productivity due to the new incentives and how
much of it is just hot air.
 quantitative measures in the management of science 377

Obviously, administrators and policymakers are aware of the fact that

productivity measures risk inducing spurious effects. For that reason,
from the very start attempts have been made to introduce quality indi-
cators. Citations to articles have been chosen as the primary indicator
of quality. In spite of long theoretical debates about the validity of the
link between acts of citing and quality and limited applicability due to
the nature of available data banks and differences in publication cultures
among disciplines, at least in most natural sciences citations are accepted
as such measures and are moderately good proxy for peer assessment in
some subjects but a weak proxy for a large number of disciplines, includ-
ing fields within Biomedical-related subjects and Engineering-related
subjects (Mahd and DEste 2008). In the social sciences and humanities
they are useless. Citation counts have subsequently been used to create a
derived indicator, the impact factor, which has widespread repercussions
both on individual behaviour and the behaviour of journals, i.e. editors
and editorial teams respectively, as well as on the communication system.
Citation counts and impact factors are regularly applied in individual and
institutional evaluations to complement and refine productivity indica-
tors. They are also used in recruiting processes, decisions about tenure
and salary increments. First, I focus on the unintended effects that cita-
tion counts and the impact factor have on the individual behaviour of sci-
entists.
Obviously it is in the interest of scientists to improve their citation
scores in whatever way they can. One way to boost the citation count is
to publish reviews. Reviews are known to be cited more frequently than
other kinds of articles. The unintended consequence is that more weight
is given to repetition rather than original research. The strategy to choose
trendy subjects and fashionable topics is obviously articulated differently
in different disciplines but, to cite one example, in biology the advice is to
link or pretend to link your work to medicine, as the huge medical litera-
ture can yield many citations for any paper published in a prominent jour-
nal or, choose the most popular species; it may be easier to publish un-
sound but trendy work on humans than an incisive study on a zebrafish
(Lawrence 2007, R584). Thomson Reuters has warned against the use of
the impact factor as the object under study is a journal. Its not an indi-
vidual or a department or a university or a country (cited in Rovner 2008,
41). This and the grave methodological flaws of the impact factor have
not prevented deans and department chairmen, peer-review commit-
tees, and researchers from looking at the impact factor when judging their
colleagues work and/or their own records (IMU 2008; Amin and Mabe
378 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).

4. The impact of the impact factor on scientific journals

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.

5. Rankings and university reactions

The introduction of rankings of universities in the early 1990s, first that

of THES, then the so-called Shanghai ranking, which for the first time
allowed universities to be compared to each other worldwide, has had
dramatic consequences for the self-perception and the management of
universities. I also count the various evaluations like the British RAE and
the German CHE ranking and the Excellence Initiative among these be-
cause they are all designed to create competition among the universities,
and they are all based on a combination of indicators and peer review.
Rankings were welcomed by policymakers and the media alike. University
presidents and administrators were more ambivalent. Their reactions de-
pend as could be expected on the relative positions of their universities
(cf. Maasen and Weingart 2007 for examples). Concerns about the meth-
 quantitative measures in the management of science 381

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

of their teaching loads leaving teaching to junior colleagues (Glser and

Weingart 2010).
Feller reports a particularly ironic structural effect of the implementa-
tion of
performance measurement systems based on external, discipline based
rankings categories: each organizational unit (college/department) was
credited with the performance (e.g. publications; research awards) of its fac-
ulty, with this performance in turn influencing funding for future period.
The arrangement provided strong at times compelling incentives for each
unit to capture all the benefits associated with their faculties activities
Concerned that their units would not be credited for the external research
performance of their faculty, college deans, and thus department heads, be-
gan to adopt fortress-like policies, informing and instructing their faculties
not to participate in projects with faculties in other reporting units. The re-
sult was to impair the ability of the faculty, and the university, to compete
for major Federal and foundation grants increasingly directed at collabora-
tive, interdisciplinary undertakings (Feller 2009, 339).

Similarly, Leydesdorff and Meyer (forthcoming) have observed a post-

2000 decline in university patenting, which they explain as an unintend-
ed structural consequence: As more universities are ranked in terms of
knowledge output, and patents or spin-offs are usually not part of this
ranking, the incentive to patent has been weakened. An effect on the level
of university administration is the shift of balance from departments to
central university managers as the financial rewards for achieving top
grades have grown (or, more accurately, as the penalties for failing to
obtain the top grades have escalated). Universities have seized upon
the RAE to justify both monitoring the research performance of depart-
ments more systematically and distributing resources across departments
in a more unequal manner than formerly. The RAE has often been used
by senior university managers to impose a more centralised, hierarchical
form of management (Martin and Whitley 2009, 27).
In the case of the RAE it is well known by now that the universities had
learned to play the game so well that the rise in grade 5 universities could
not be rewarded with the additional funds and new differentials had to
be introduced. Above all it could not be determined if the results meant
an actual improvement of quality or a learning effect to manipulate the
procedure.
 quantitative measures in the management of science 383

6. Summary of effects and conclusions for science policy

The unintended effects of quantitative performance measures and rank-

ings are now so numerous and systematic in nature that they can no long-
er be ignored nor belittled. Rather, they have to be assessed as a general
problem of the overall strategy to replace the mechanisms of professional
control and management in the realm of science. The fundamental flaw
of management by indicators is that they cannot represent the complexity
of the research enterprise, i.e. of its actors and its institutions decisions.
Instead, they reflect only one dimension of a multidimensional phenom-
enon, and they can be manipulated by those subjected to them and inter-
ested in influencing them to their own benefit.
It is neither probable that the status quo ante will be reconstructed, nor
is it managerially desirable or politically feasible. Universities have grown
in size and costs, scientists have spent a lot of money with no account-
ability, and the social, cultural, and political environment of science has
changed. Trust in institutions has been at least partially withdrawn. All
this means that the golden times, when science was an uncontrolled es-
tate bestowed with such trust, are definitely over. On the other hand, it is
an absurd situation that one or two large private companies which are in
control of the data banks containing the bulk of the communication in
science thereby also control the entire system of higher education and re-
search including the communication system, albeit indirectly and perhaps
without a sciencepolicy-oriented intent. If the scientific community has
had to respond to demands for political legitimacy, it is hard to explain
why these companies have so far not only been spared the same kind of
demands but have been actively supported by politicians and scientists
alike. The combination of their oligopolistic market position and the per-
ceived need on the part of policymakers and science managers to render
performance evaluations more efficient seems to leave only one option,
namely the improvement of existing indicators. Thus, the British RAE is
to be replaced by the Research Evaluation Framework in which perform-
ance metrics will play an even greater role and peer review a lesser one.
As Martin and Whitley comment: The switch to the metrics-based REF
may well reinforce pressures not to stray too far from mainstream disci-
plinary research. Indeed, one might venture to predict that it will not be
too long before UK academics will be bitterly criticising the adverse con-
sequences of the REF and its metrics, and reminiscing fondly about the
good old days of the RAE and peer review! (Martin and Whitley 2009,
30). Improvement cannot mean the fine-tuning of quantitative indicators.
384 peter weingart

It can only mean the design of intelligent combinations of qualitative as-

sessments and quantitative indicators which operate in a checks-and-bal-
ances mode. The belief that the assessment of the process of knowledge
production can be had at great speed is a pipe dream, and the longer it is
sustained the greater the ultimate damage will be.
 quantitative measures in the management of science 385

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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

1 Helga Nowotny (1987) Eigenzeit. Entstehung und Strukturierung eines Zeitgefhls.

Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; Engl. (1994) Time. The Modern and Postmodern Experi-
ence. Cambridge: Polity Press.
388 helga nowotny

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

the inside. Academics came to see and describe themselves as described

by the auditors. They started to think of themselves as the subjects of au-
dit, or as subjects of ethics review, or of particular policies with their aims
and means.
This is not the place for yet another review of how universities, their
internal management structures, and the relationship among colleagues
continue to change as a consequence of various evaluation, assessment,
and bench-marking exercises as well as international university rankings
and excellence initiatives. Especially for the future of the humanities as
so-called non-STEM disciplines, these developments give rise to numer-
ous and serious concerns.9 But favorable changes also took place whenev-
er the complacency and mediocrity in universities was shaken by expos-
ing them to the competitive winds of change.
There are even signs that at the turn of the millennium the predomi-
nantly economic paradigm of short-term benefits underwent a slight cor-
rection with the realization that Europe will need to invest in basic re-
search as the foundation of its future position in a globalizing world. In
2007, the European Research Council was established as a special part of
FP7 to fund frontier research in all fields of science and scholarship. It is
devoted to a truly bottom-up approach without any thematic priorities,
targeting individual researchers and scholars with scientific excellence as
its sole selection criterion.10
The focus of the analysis of these major transitions have largely been on
structural changes like the constitution of the European Research Area,
the much maligned, misunderstood, and mismanaged Bologna process,
and how to foster European competitiveness through innovation. Largely
unnoticed, another shift occurred: the time regimes for science and re-
search have changed, and perhaps irreversibly. Time for research has be-
come compressed on an unprecedented scale and rate, and since there are
limits to compression, the future is becoming increasingly temporalized.
It is charged with promises and filled with potential. Value creation is ex-
tended from the present to the future. It is as though an invisible credit
system had been set up, from which we borrow freely and incessantly
without much regard to the actual value created at present.
This is largely the function of two related developments. The first is the
sheer acceleration of the production of new knowledge. Given the expan-

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

Reliance on protocols and setting up standards are intended to ease in-

teraction. They either homogenize an intrinsically heterogeneous content
or abstract from it. More generally, the invention of procedures that guar-
antee verification, compliance, and efficiency are rapidly replacing old-
fashioned and localized, fragmented and obstinate ways of doing things
in society and in the academic world. These easing practices promise to
save time, even if it takes time to learn and get accustomed to them. But
they do much more.
They mark a shift from content to procedure, from informal arrange-
ments to formalized, and hence much stricter, compliance. While nobody
can object to accountability, ethics reviews, and a public policy agenda,
the compelling reliance on procedures, protocols, and standardization
also entails a loss: individual responsibility is delegated to an anonymous,
bureaucratic apparatus. And it is easy to see how the reward and promo-
tion structure based on such practices and their reporting and monitoring
system might prompt a cynical instrumentalism. The effort to be seen as
compliant, or even as engaging in a form of anticipated compliance, takes
precedence over dedication for its own sake.
These procedural, easing practices have also the (unanticipated?) con-
sequence of compressing research time, in the sense of reducing uninter-
rupted time for research. Such timeless time is relegated to the margins
of the use of time in order to reach specified objectives and deliverables
within pre-set deadlines punctuated by temporal milestones.14 Research
time becomes compressed, as it must be reflective in absorbing these and
other anticipated practices and their results, while internalizing them.
Seen from the point of view of managerial rationality, the time-saving as-
pect may well be in the foreground. Seen from the point of view of the
researcher, an extremely demanding scarcity is the result. Researchers are
asked to reflect, observe, comment on, and anticipate the conditions of
the production of new knowledge as well as the impact it is likely to
have, while being engaged in producing that new knowledge.
The feeling of temporal deprivation that intermittently or chronically
besets researchers and scholars corresponds to what happens on the mac-
ro level of the system. Yet, the science system cannot eliminate time depri-
vation. It has to cope with it. More than ever, research and innovation are
driven globally by the worldwide competition that has become the hall-

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

analysis of biographies and careers in the life sciences offers a fascinat-

ing and worrisome picture of the intricate intersection of individual
planning and decisions and the system logic of present and future sys-
temic developments.15 The system and its evaluators frown upon gaps in
ones career, and the tendency to projectification is pervasive.16 Life and
work are separated into clearly periodicized units, temporal junctures that
sharply delineate beginnings and endings. To be sure, this is not unique
to academics. Artists as workers have served as an involuntary model for
some time.17
Finally, I want to return to the occasion and the person whose accom-
plishments we are celebrating. The compression of research time and the
temporalization of the future may harbor risks for what is essential to sci-
ence as we know it. Science is an oral culture. Threatened are not the lec-
tures, seminars, conferences, and discussions in which this oral culture is
embedded, but the oral culture in the deep sense of the word: seemingly
aimless and undirected conversation, intellectual sparks and ideas that
form while speaking in informal exchanges. At an incipient, yet indispen-
sible level, this oral culture contains the nucleus for the desirability of col-
laboration. The fecundity of such exchanges has been institutionalized in
the privileged and intimate space of Institutes for Advanced Study. Privi-
leged, because the oral culture of science has been given a spatial and tem-
poral frame for the purpose of bringing together researchers and scholars
in a creative environment acknowledged as a breeding zone of ideas. An
Institute for Advanced Study like SCAS is such a fecund lieux dorality.18
Bjrn Wittrock has been a master in building it as a refuge especially for
the humanities.
In the whirlwind of moving forward with the temporalization of the
future, the precondition of every creative activity is easily forgotten: the
time it takes to mature, even if maturation may come in bursts that take
us by surprise in unexpected moments. With the dematerializion of the
book looming on the horizon, the time needed for ideas to mature will

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

be shortened even more. Electronic libraries, digitization, and the uni-

versal fantasies of Google Inc. will lead to an exponential increase in the
quantity of easily accessible information. Soon the present will become
overwhelmingly accessible.19 But what will such an electronic paradise of
texts and images mean for research and scholarship? I can only concur
with Anthony Grafton that scholars will need to travel down two very dif-
ferent roads simultaneously. The instant access on the laptop is one. But if
one wants to go deeper, the path becomes narrower. For some, it leads to
libraries and the haptic and other sensations they offer. For others, it leads
to local knowledge to be found in engaging company, in the free exchange
of ideas, and in places where the oral culture of science is preserved. In
such unique spaces, local knowledge is generated by tapping into the vast
reservoir of global knowledge.
Let it mature and give it time for maturation.

Ad moltos annos, dear Bjrn, and moltos annos for SCAS.

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?

Gustaf Arrhenius and Wlodek Rabinowicz

Not to be born at all is best, far best that can befall.

Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, line 1224.1
Gut ist der Schlaf, der Tod ist besser freilich das beste wre, nie geboren
sein.
Heinrich Heine, Morphine, 1848, lines 15-16.
Life is so terrible, it would have been better not to have been born. But who
is so lucky? Not one in a hundred thousand!
Old Jewish saying.

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

1 Translated by F. Storr (London, Heinemann; New York, Macmillan, 191213).

400 gustaf arrhenius & wlodek rabinowicz

nonsensical joke.2 Others, as illustrated by the quotes from Sophocles

and Heine above, seem to have a different view. Thus, for example, Melin-
da Roberts (2003) and Matthew Adler (2009) have defended an affirma-
tive answer to the existential question. Contrariwise, Derek Parfit (1984),
John Broome (1999), and others have worried that if we take a persons
life to be better for her than non-existence, then we would have to con-
clude that it would have been worse for her if she did not exist, which is
absurd: Nothing would have been worse or better for a person if she had
not existed.
We shall suggest an answer to the existential question to the effect that
one can claim that it is better or worse for a person to exist than not to
exist, without implying any absurdities. First, however, we shall explain in
more detail why this question has again moved to the forefront of moral
philosophy. We shall then discuss some of the proposed answers in the lit-
erature and our own suggestion. Lastly, we shall consider and rebut some
possible objections to our position.

II. The Person Affecting Restriction and the Existential Question

The Person Affecting Restriction, put as a slogan, states that an outcome

can only be better than another if it is better for someone. The restriction
has a strong intuitive appeal and it has been suggested that it is presup-
posed in many arguments in moral philosophy, political theory, and wel-
fare economics.3 Moreover, several theorists have argued that the coun-
terintuitive implications in population ethics of so-called impersonal
welfarist theories could be avoided by adopting the restriction. This ap-
plies in particular to the well-known Repugnant Conclusion, which as
has been pointed out by Parfit is entailed by classical utilitarianism.4

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

It is not easy to discern what exactly the distinction between imper-

sonal and person affecting theories amounts to in the literature, partly
because different authors have had a different take on the distinction and
partly because other ideas have been conflated or mixed with the Person
Affecting Restriction. As has been shown elsewhere, one can interpret the
restriction in a manner which makes it perfectly compatible with imper-
sonal welfarist theories such as classical utilitarianism.5 Thus, it could be
understood as an idea about what kind of facts moral goodness super-
venes on, for example, that goodness is essentially related to the interests
of human beings. We are, however, interested in a stronger reading of the
restriction which stresses the individualist aspect of value even more by
claiming that morality is essentially person comparative:
The Person Affecting Restriction: If an outcome A is better (worse) than B,
then A is better (worse) than B for at least one individual.6

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

In comparisons between outcomes involving different people, however,

and in particular in cases involving people whose existence is contingent
on our choices, the restriction becomes ambiguous. An outcome A is bet-
ter than B for Peter if Peter has a higher welfare in A as compared to B.
We can assume that much. But what if Peter exists in outcome A but not
in outcome B? Is A then better than B for Peter? More generally, can exist-
ence be better or worse for a person than non-existence? In other words,
what is the correct answer to the existential question? Hence, depending
on the answer to the existential question we get different versions of the
Person Affecting Restriction and very different implications regarding
how to morally evaluate different possible futures.

III. Neither Better nor Worse to Be than Not to Be

A popular answer to the existential question is to claim that existence

cannot be better or worse than non-existence for a person, nor equally as
good for that matter, since existence and non-existence are, in some sense,
incomparable in value for a person. David Heyd seems to endorse this po-
sition when he argues against the view that existence could be worse than
non-existence by claiming that such a view is inconsistent with a person-
affecting theory as it presupposes the comparability of non-existence with
life of a certain quality.8
In his early pioneering work in population ethics, Narveson seems to
share Heyds concern, although he formulates it in terms of comparing
levels of happiness:
If you ask, whose happiness has been increased as a result of his being
born?, the answer is that nobodys has Remember that the question we
must ask about him is not whether he is happy but whether he is happier as a
result of being born. And if put this way, we see that again we have a piece of
nonsense on our hands if we suppose the answer is either yes or no. For if
it is, then with whom, or with what, are we comparing his new state of bliss?

(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

Is the child, perhaps, happier than he used to be before he was born? Or

happier than his alter ego? Obviously, there can be no sensible answer here.9

Similarly, Alan Buchanan et al. claim that

when the alternative is nonex-
istence, there is no individual who is made worse off by being conceived
and born10 and John Broome states that it cannot ever be true that it is
better for a person that she lives than that she should never have lived at
all.11
The negative answer to the existential question in combination with the
Person Affecting Restriction has such counterintuitive conclusions that it
is hard to believe that anyone would seriously endorse the conjunction of
these two views. Consider the Future Bliss or Hell Case:

Diagram 1

The blocks in the above diagram represent populations. The width of

each block represents the number of people in the corresponding popu-
lation, whereas the height represents their welfare. Assume that we can
either see to it that all the people in the future have excellent lives (the
y-people in outcome A) or that they have hellish lives (the z-people in

9 Narveson (1967), p. 67 (emphasis in original). Cf. Dasgupta (1995), p. 383: Recall

our definition of the zero level of well-being. This isnt a standard arrived at through a com-
parison with non-existence. Such comparisons cant be made. The unborn arent a class of
people. It makes no sense to attribute a degree of wellbeing, low or high or nil, to the state
of not being born.
10 Buchanan et al. (2000), p. 234.
11 Broome (1999), ch. 10, p. 168 (emphasis in original). See also Parfit (1984), pp. 395,
489.
404 gustaf arrhenius & wlodek rabinowicz

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.

IV. The Argument from Absurdity

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

existential question, that is, if we take a persons life to be better or worse

for her than non-existence, then we would have to conclude that it would
have been worse or better for her if she did not exist, which is obviously ab-
surd: Nothing would have been worse or better for a person if she had not
existed.13 This argument is eloquently stated by Broome:
[I]t cannot ever be true that it is better for a person that she lives than that
she should never have lived at all. If it were better for a person that she lives
than that she should never have lived at all, then if she had never lived at
all, that would have been worse for her than if she had lived. But if she had
never lived at all, there would have been no her for it to be worse for, so it
could not have been worse for her.14

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

Krister Bykvist has suggested a similar principle, which he calls Accessibil-

ity: If A is better (worse) for S than B, then A would be better (worse) for
S than B even if A obtained.18 However, as we pointed out above, it doesnt
follow logically from it is better for p to exist than not to exist that it
would have been worse for p if she did not exist since in the latter case
one of the relata, p, would be absent. Moreover, it seems clear that SC1
is false, mutatis mutandis, for related concepts, such as considered better

16 Wlodek Rabinowicz suggested this argument already back in 2000 in personal

conversation with Arrhenius, Broome, Bykvist and Erik Carlson at a workshop in Leipzig;
he has briefly presented it in Rabinowicz (2003), fn. 29, and in more detail in Rabinowicz
(2009), fn. 2. For a similar argument, see Arrhenius (1999), p. 158, who suggests that an
affirmative answer to the existential question only involves a claim that if a person exists,
then she can compare the value of her life to her non-existence. A person that will never
exist cannot, of course, compare her non-existence with her existence. Consequently, one
can claim that it is better for a person to exist than not to exist without implying
any absurdities. In fact, even if he ultimately rejected our approach (and instead went for
the idea that it can be good but not better for a person to exist than not to exist), Parfit
(1984) came very close to making the same point when he observed that there is nothing
problematic in the claim that one can benefit a person by causing her to exist: In judging
that some persons life is worth living, or better than nothing, we need not be implying that
it would have been worse for this person if he had never existed [] Since this person does
exist, we can refer to this person when describing the alternative [i.e. a world in which she
wouldnt have existed]. We know who it is who, in this possible alternative, would never
have existed (pp. 487-8, emphasis in original; cf. fn. 13 above). See also Holtug (2001),
Bykvist (2006) and Johansson (forthcoming).
17 As we have seen, this principle is assumed by Parfit (1984), pp. 489, 395. Thus, on p.
395, when considering an outcome in which there is a person who has a life worth living,
Parfit writes: we need not claim that this outcome is better for this person than the alterna-
tive [in which this person would not have existed]. This would imply the implausible claim
that, if this person never had existed, this would have been worse for that person (empha-
sis in original).
18 Bykvist (2007), p. 348. Symbols have been changed in this quotation, for the sake of
consistency.
 better to be than not to be? 407

by / would be considered worse by and preferred by / would be pre-

ferred by.19 So it is not clear to us why one should go for SC1 rather than
for the following connection between better for and would be worse
for:
Subjunctive Connection 2 (SC2):
(i) If a person p exists in both outcomes A and B, then A is better (worse,
equally as good) for p than (as) B if and only if B would be worse (better,
equally as good) for p than (as) A, if B obtained.
(ii) If a person p exists in A but not in B, then A can be better (worse, equally
as good) for p than (as) B although B would not be worse (better, equally
as good) for p than (as) A, if B obtained.

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).

19 This is acknowledged by Bykvist (2007), p. 349.

20 Holtug (1998), p. 171.
408 gustaf arrhenius & wlodek rabinowicz

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

V. The Argument from Welfare Level Comparisons

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

worse for a person. The reason is that according to Roberts a non-existing

person has a certain welfare level, namely, zero welfare:23
Nora does not have any properties at all at any alternative at which she
does not exist and , where Nora has no properties at all, all the properties
that she does have that empty set add up to a zero level of wellbeing
It would have been better for Nora not to have any wellbeing at all to have
zero wellbeing than to have the negative level of wellbeing that she in fact
has. It would have been better for Nora never to have existed at all than it
is for Nora to exist.24

However, in our view it is quite nonsensical to ascribe any wellbeing level

at all to a person in a state in which she does not exist. Wellbeing presup-
poses being. Moreover, as we have shown above, one can endorse an af-
firmative answer to the existential question without being committed to
affirming that non-existence could have been better or worse for a person
and without assigning any welfare levels to persons who dont exist.
However, one might insist that the suggestion we make still doesnt
make sense: that we cannot make sense of one state, A, being better for
p than another state, B, if we cannot compare the wellbeing levels of p in
the two states in question. This might be what Heyd and Narveson have in
mind in the quotes above.25 Likewise, when Bykvist claims that SC1 (his
Accessibility principle) is true about any interpretation of better for that
is conceptually linked to well-being , it seems that his idea is that bet-
ter for-claims are analyzable in terms of comparisons between well-being
levels possessed by a given individual in different outcomes. This would
entail SC1 given that no individual has any level of wellbeing in an out-

23 Adler (2009), p. 1506, tentatively embraces a similar position: Existence can be

better or worse for an individual than nonexistence. Nonexistence can be better or worse
for an individual than existence. Where an outcome set contains potential nonexistents,
their interests should be taken into account by assigning them a utility level of zero in the
outcomes where they do not exists.
24 Roberts (2003), pp. 168-9. Moreover, Roberts (1998), p. 64, writes that I am thus
supposing that it is at least possible that s has more well-being in a world in which s does
not exist than s actually has. Suppose ss existence in X is unavoidably less than one worth
living and that s has, in any world in which s does not exist, a zero level of well-being.
Under these conditions, ss level of well-being at zero is actually greater than ss well-being
in X (emphasis in original). On the other hand, she also claims that [t]here is no need,
ever, on my account of either wrongful life or the non-identity problem to assign a value,
even a value of zero, to nonexistence for an individual who never exists in the world that is
subject to appraisal (Roberts 1998, p. 174-5, emphasis in original).
25 See also the quote from Dasgupta in fn. 9.
410 gustaf arrhenius & wlodek rabinowicz

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

In our tribute to Bjrn Wittrock, we have defended an affirmative answer

to the existential question to the effect that one can claim that it is bet-
ter or worse for a person to exist than not to exist, without implying any
absurdities. Hence, not only is Bjrns existence better for us than his non-
existence; it is also better for him.32

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

Said A. Arjomand (Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1980) is Distinguished

Service Professor of Sociology and Director of the Stony Brook Institute
for Global Studies. He is the founder and former President (19962002,
200508) of the Association for the Study of Persianate Societies and Edi-
tor of its organ, Journal of Persianate Studies. He was a Fellow at the In-
stitute for Advanced Study, Princeton 198485, and at the Swedish Col-
legium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences 1998. His books include
The Shadow of God and the Hidden Imam: Religion, Political Organization
and Societal Change in Shiite Iran from the Beginning to 1890 (1984), The
Turban for the Crown: The Islamic Revolution in Iran (1988), and After
Khomeini: Iran under his Successors (2009).
Johann P. Arnason is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at La Trobe
University, Melbourne, and Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Human
Studies, Charles University, Prague. His main research interests are in so-
cial theory and historical sociology, with particular emphasis on the com-
parative analysis of civilizations. Publications include Civilizations in Dis-
pute: Historical Questions and Theoretical Traditions, Leiden 2003; Axial
Civilizations and World History (co-edited with S.N. Eisenstadt and Bjrn
Wittrock), Leiden 2005; Domains and Divisions of European History (co-
edited with Natalie J. Doyle), Liverpool 2010.
Gustaf Arrhenius is Torgny Segerstedt Pro Futura Scientia Fellow
and, since 2006, Docent (Reader) in Practical Philosophy at Stockholm
University and SCAS. He is affiliated with CERSES, CNRS, Paris; Oxford
Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, University of Oxford; Oxford Centre
for Ethics and Legal Philosophy, and is also a member of the Tampere
Club. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of To-
ronto (2000) and his FD in practical philosophy from Uppsala University
(2000). He is especially interested in issues in the intersection between
moral and political philosophy and the medical and social sciences, and
he has written extensively on our moral obligations to future generations,
on applying the methods of social choice, and on game theory. Currently,
he is researching issues in population ethics, the structure of value, dem-
416 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

culture and globalization. He has conducted field studies in the United

States, West Africa and the Caribbean, and in various sites (including Je-
rusalem, Johannesburg and Tokyo) for a study of news media foreign cor-
respondents. His most recent books are Transnational Connections (1996);
Foreign News (2004); Anthropologys World (2010).
Christoph Harbsmeier is Professor of Chinese at the University of
Oslo. He is also Permanent Honorary Guest Professor at Peking Univer-
sity, Wuhan University, Zhejiang University (Hangzhou), Fudan Univer-
sity (Shanghai), East China Normal University (Shanghai), and Shanghai
Normal University. His main interest is in Chinese and comparative intel-
lectual history, Chinese linguistics, and the history of Chinese cartoons.
His publications include Language and Logic (=Science and Civilisation in
China vol. VII.1), Cambridge University Press, 1998; Aspects of Classical
Chinese Syntax, London: Curzon Press, 1981; Socialism with a Buddhist
Face: The Cartoonist Feng Zikai, Oslo: Universitetsforlaget 1984.
Peter Hedstrm is an Official Fellow of Nuffield College, a Profes-
sor of Sociology at the University of Oxford, and a well-known author-
ity in the field of analytical sociology. He is particularly interested in the
analysis of diffusion processes and complex social networks. He served as
President of the European Academy of Sociology from 20042008, and is
currently Secretary General of the International Institute of Sociology. His
recent books include Dissecting the Social: On the Principles of Analytical
Sociology (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and The Oxford Handbook
of Analytical Sociology (edited with Peter Bearman, Oxford University
Press, 2009).
Rebeca Ibarra is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology,
University of Oxford. Her research interests focus on economic and fis-
cal sociology with a particular interest in contagious social behavior and
methods for analyzing micromacro links. Currently she is working on
the role of social networks and contagious behavior for explaining the
evolution of tax avoidance and tax evasion in Sweden and Mexico.
Hans Joas is Director of the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural
and Social Studies in Erfurt and Professor of Sociology at the University of
Chicago, where he also belongs to the Committee on Social Thought. He
is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. His prin-
cipal areas of interest are social theory (with a special focus on Ameri-
can pragmatism and German historicism), sociology of religion, the study
of war and collective violence. His main publications in English include:
G.H. Mead. A Contemporary Re-examination of His Thought (1985, 1997);
The Creativity of Action (1996); The Genesis of Values (2000); War and Mo-
418 notes on contributors

dernity (2000); Do We Need Religion? On the Experience of Self-Transcen-

dence (2008); Social Theory (with Wolfgang Knbl, 2009). His most recent
book in German, Kriegsverdrngung (with Wolfgang Knbl, 2008), will be
published in English by Princeton University Press in 2012.
Barbro Klein is Permanent Fellow and a former Director of the Swed-
ish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala. She is Professor Emerita of
Ethnology at Stockholm University, Fellow of the American Folklore So-
ciety, and member of the Royal Gustavus Adolphus Academy. Her main
interests are the analysis of oral narration, rituals, museum displays, and
other forms of expressive culture in complex multi-ethnic settings. She
has also studied the entangled disciplinary histories pertaining to ethnol-
ogy, anthropology, and related fields. Her publications include Swedish
Folk Art All Tradition is Change (with Mats Widbom, 1994); From Ex-
perience to Text: On Reflexivity in the Cultural Sciences (in Swedish with
Billy Ehn, 1994); Narrating, Doing, Experiencing (edited with Annikki
Kaivola-Bregenhoj and Ulf Palmenfelt, 2006).
Jrgen Kocka is Professor Emeritus of History at the Free University of
Berlin, Research Professor Emeritus at the Social Science Research Cen-
ter Berlin, and Vice-President of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of
Sciences. His main research areas are: the history of work and capitalism,
German and European history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
comparative history, and history in relationship to the social sciences.
Kockas recent books in English include: Industrial Culture and Bourgeois
Society (1999); Civil Society and Dictatorship in Modern German History
(2010); Comparative and Transnational History. Central European Ap-
proaches and New Perspectives (edited 2010).
Wolf Lepenies was Rector of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin 1986
2001 and is currently Permanent Member Emeritus there. His principal
area of interest is the history of the human and social sciences. His books
include The Seduction of Culture (2006) and Auguste Comte. Die Macht
der Zeichen (2010).
Lars Magnusson is Professor of Economic History at Uppsala Uni-
versity. He is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and
chairs the Board of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala.
His main research interests are Swedish and European economic history
and the history of economic ideas. His publications include Mercantil-
ism: The Shaping of an Economic Language (1994); An Economic History
of Sweden (2000); The Tradition of Free Trade (2006); Nation, State and the
Industrial Revolution (2009).
 notes on contributors 419

Helga Nowotny is President of the Scientific Council of the Euro-

pean Research Council, Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Uni-
versity of Vienna, and Professor Emerita of Social Studies of Science at the
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zrich. Her main scientif-
ic interests concern the social studies of science, science and society, and
social time. Her publications include The New Production of Knowledge
(co-authored, 1994) and its sequel, Re-thinking Science. Knowledge and the
Public in an Age of Uncertainty (with P. Scott and M. Gibbons, 2001). In
2008, MIT Press published Insatiable Curiosity. Innovation in a Fragile Fu-
ture (translated from German) and, in 2010, Naked Genes. Reinventing the
Human in the Molecular Age (co-authored with Giuseppe Testa).
Sheldon Pollock is currently Ransford Professor of Sanskrit and In-
dian Studies at Columbia University. He is Editor of the Murty Classical
Library of India (Harvard University Press), and Co-editor of South Asia
across the Disciplines (University of California Press, University of Chicago
Press, Columbia University Press). His main research areas are Sanskrit
philology and Indian intellectual and literary history. Among his publica-
tions are The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture,
and Power in Premodern India (2006), and Literary Cultures in History:
Reconstructions from South Asia (edited, 2003). He is currently working
on Liberation Philology (Harvard University Press).
Wlodek Rabinowicz holds the Chair of Practical Philosophy at Lund
University and is a Non-resident Long-term Fellow of the Swedish Col-
legium for Advanced Study in Uppsala. He is Editor of Theoria and for-
mer Editor of Economics and Philosophy. He is President of the European
Society of Analytic Philosophy and Chairman of the Swedish Philosophi-
cal Society. He is a member of the Institut International de Philosophie,
the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Royal Swedish Academy of
Letters, and Academia Europaea. He has published extensively in leading
philosophical journals within such fields as moral philosophy, theory of
value, decision theory, and philosophical logic.
Sheldon Rothblatt is Professor Emeritus of History and former Di-
rector of the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of
California, Berkeley. He has held visiting teaching appointments in Swe-
den, Norway, Austria, and at various American universities. His principal
area of research is the comparative history of universities, especially since
the eighteenth century, and he has a particular interest in the history of
campus architecture, liberal education, student subcultures, and academic
values and structures. His principal books are The Revolution of the Dons:
Cambridge and Society in Victorian England (1968 and 1982); The Mod-
420 notes on contributors

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

cratisation in Northwestern Europe 18801985 (London, 1991); Zarozhde-

nie demokraticheskoi kultury (Moscow, 2005).
Peter Wagner is ICREA Research Professor at the University of Bar-
celona. His main interests are in social and political theory, comparative-
historical sociology, and the sociology of the social sciences. His work has
focused on comparative and historical analyses of varieties of modernity,
democracy and capitalism. His recent books include Plurality and Prog-
ress. Modernity in Political Philosophy and Historical Sociology (Nordic
Summer University series Summer talks, 2010); Modernity as Experience
and Interpretation. A New Sociology of Modernity (Polity Press, 2008); Va-
rieties of World-making. Beyond Globalization (edited with Nathalie Kara-
giannis, Liverpool University Press, 2007).
Wang Bangwei is Professor at the Oriental Institute at Peking Uni-
versity. He is also a Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, and
a Life Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge University. His interests are mainly
in Buddhist studies, in Sanskrit philology, and in the history of religions in
East Asia. His many publications include (Cri-
tical edition and commentary on the Da Tang Xuyu qiufa gaosengzhuan),
, , 1988; (Critical edition and com-
mentary on the Nanhai jigui neifa zhuan), , , 1995;
(Studies in the Life of the Tang distinguished
monk Yijing, his life and his works), , , 1996.
Peter Weingart is Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Science
Policy at the University of Bielefeld. He was Director of the Institute for
Science and Technology Studies (IWT) 19932009 and of the Center for
Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) 19891994. He has served as Visiting
Professor at the University of Stellenbosch since 1994 and is a Fellow of
the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS). He is a member
of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and of the Academy of
Engineering Sciences (acatech). His current research interests are science
advice to politics, interrelations between science and media, and science
communication. He assumed the editorship of MINERVA in 2007. Recent
publications include Wissen Beraten Entscheiden. Form und Funktion
wissenschaftlicher Politikberatung in Deutschland (with J. Lentsch, Weilers-
wist, Velbrck Wissenschaft, 2008); Die Stunde der Wahrheit (Weilerswist,
Velbrck Wissenschaft, 2005); Science Images and Popular Images of the
Sciences (edited with B. Hppauf, London, Routledge, 2007).
 TABULA GRATULATORIA

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Ada and Aleksander Kan, Stockholm, Sweden
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Erkki Kilpinen, Helsinki, Finland
Kim Hodong, Seoul, South Korea
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426 tabula gratulatoria

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Thomas Lindkvist, Gteborg, Sweden
Sten Lindstrm, Ume, Sweden
Mats Lundahl, Stockholm, Sweden
Mats Lundstrm, Uppsala, Sweden
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428 tabula gratulatoria

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Patrik Strm, Gteborg, Sweden
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Grel Husn Strmqvist, Stockholm, Sweden
Lennart Sthle, Uppsala, Sweden
Gran Sundholm, Leiden, The Netherlands
Richard Swedberg, Ithaca, NY, USA
Piotr Sztompka, Krakow, Poland
Roger Slj, Gteborg, Sweden
Sverker Srlin, Stockholm, Sweden
Daniel Tarschys, Stockholm, Sweden
Folke Tersman, Uppsala, Sweden
Carl Tham, Stockholm, Sweden
Gran Therborn, Cambridge, United Kingdom
Nigel Thrift, Warwick, United Kingdom
Larissa Titarenko, Minsk, Belarus
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Johan Tralau, Stockholm, Sweden
Peeter Tulviste, Tartu, Estonia
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Eva sterberg, Lund, Sweden
Uffe stergrd, Copenhagen, Denmark

Abduh, Muhammad, 219
Abelshauser, Werner, 59
Abel-Smith, Brian, 153
Abrams, Philip, 170
Abul-Suud Effendi, 217
Adelborg, Bror Jakob, 268
Adelborg, Gertrud, 268269, 271
Adelborg, Hedvig, 268, 270
Adelborg, Maria, 268, 271
Adelborg, Ottilia, 261263, 268278
Adler, Matthew, 400, 409410, 412
Adorno, Theodor W., 101, 114
Agardh, Carl Adolph, 135, 137138, 141
Agerstrm, Jens, xvi
Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud, 220
Al-Azmeh, Aziz, 208
Alexander, Jeffrey, 169
al-Farabi, Abu Nasr, 211
Alfvn, Hugo, 272
al-Ghazli, Abu Hamed, 216
Ali Khan Arzu, 195
Allison, Graham, 46
al-Mwardi, Abu l-Hasan, 216
al-Sadat, Anwar, 222
Al-Tusi, Nasir al-Din, 211, 214
al-Zawhiri, Aymn, 222223
Anderson, James, 127
Ankarcrona, Gustaf, 267, 272
Annen, 284
Appadurai, Arjun, 202
Appleby, Joyce, 63
Aristotle, 193194, 200, 211, 214
Arnason, Johann, 191, 205, 207, 209
Asad, Talal, 219, 231
Asp, Pehr Olof von, 139140
Assmann, Jan, 181
Bailyn, Bernhard, 63
Barrs, Maurice, 124
Baudelaire, Charles, 105107, 109114,
119, 121123, 194
Becher, Tony, 148
INDEX
Beckert, Jens, 60
Behn, Robert D., 42
Bell, Daniel, 105
Below, Georg von, 186, 201
Benda, Julien, 352
Benjamin, Walter, 114115, 194
Berch, Anders, 133135
Berger, Peter, 88
Berghahn, Volker, 59
Berg, Karin, 269. See also Larsson,
Karin
Berkes, Niyazi, 219
Berlin, Isaiah, 11, 82
Beyme, Klaus von, 56
Bharata, 194
Bhutto, Zulfikar Ali, 222
bin Ldin, Usma, 223
Birnbaum, Norman, 372
Bjrklf, Sune, 261
Blaschke, Olaf, 97
Blume, Martin, 378
Blumenberg, Hans, 92, 94
Bothius, Gerda, 272
Borchardt, Knut, 59
Bouillon, Jean-Paul, 119
Bourdieu, Pierre, 57, 62, 153
Bracquemond, Flix, 117119, 121
Braudel, Fernand, 170, 172, 243244, 247
Bremer, Fredrika, 269
Brewster, Kingman, 367
Brooke, John, 1618
Broome, John, 400, 403407, 410
Brown, James, 246
Brubaker, Rogers, 197
Brunner, Otto, 92
Bruny, Tad T., xv
Butler, Linda, 376
Butterfield, Herbert, 93
Bykvist, Krister, 406410, 412
Canetti, Elias, 250
Carlson, Erik, 406
430
Castoriadis, Cornelius, 168177
Charbon, Ella, 115
Charlemagne, 124
Chn Chn, 293
Chikamatsu Monzaemon, 192
Chydenius, Anders, 134
Clark, Burton R., 147148, 350
Cobbet, William, 127
Cobden, Richard, 141
Cohen, Michael D., 45
Cohen, Stanley, 257258
Coleman, James S., 318, 327
Comte, Auguste, 105, 114124
Conant, James Bryant, 367
Confucius, 297
Conrad, Christoph, 62
Constant, Benjamin, 230
Crane, Walter, 262, 269
Crone, Patricia, 210
Dahrendorf, Ralf, 57
Dante Alighieri, 253
Daoxuan, 281, 283284, 287
Darwall, Stephen L., 411
Davidson, David, 130
Davies, Celia, 153
Dawkins, Richard, xvii
Dayan, Daniel, 254
De Vries, Jan, 128
Degas, Edgar, 119
Delacroix, Eugne, 114, 119
Derrida, Jacques 55
Descartes, Ren, 117
Dharmaksema, 285
Dhrtavarman, 286
Dierkes, Meinolf, 227
Dietrichson, Lorentz, 262
Dlamini, Jacob, 234
du Pont de Nemours, Pierre Samuel, 135
Durkheim, Emile, 55, 73, 80, 173,
177178, 205, 248, 250
Eckstein, Harry, 71
Eduards, Maud, 48
Eisenstadt, Shmuel N., 57, 167, 174177,
182, 184, 205206, 217, 220, 229
Eley, Geoff, 56
Elias, Norbert, 185, 205
Elkan, Sophie, 272
Etex, Antoine, 120
Eugen Napoleon of Sweden, iv, 263
Euripides, 193
Evans, Linda, 156
index
Fehr, Ernst, 323
Fei Changfang, 283284
Feller, Irwin, 382
Fng Mnglng, 294296, 298299,
301312
Fitoussi, Jean-Paul, 46
Florin, Christina, 155
Fodor, Jerry, 198
Foley, Antoine-Edouard, 115116, 120
Foucault, Michel, 55
Fowden, Garth, 208
Frank, Martin, 378
Franklin, Benjamin, 339
Franzen, Martina, 380
Fraser, Nancy, 4
Frederick II of Prussia, 98
Freidson, Eliot, 152
Freud, Sigmund, 250, 399400
Fuchs, Martin, 5
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 94
Gahn, Mrta, 265
Galbraith, John Kenneth, 349
Garfield, Eugene, 378
Geertz, Clifford, 55, 79, 244
Geijer, Eric Gustaf, 139140
Gibbons, Michael, 148, 388389
Giddens, Anthony, 57
Gide, Andr, 193
Gintis, Herbert, 323
Giusti, Aurlia, 115
Gluckman, Max, 244
Gould, Rebecca, 197
Grimm, Jacob, 262
Grimm, Wilhelm, 262
Guichard, Joseph, 117, 119
Gunabhadra, 282
Gustafsson, Lars, 235
Gustav III of Sweden, 134135
Habermas, Jrgen, 4, 55, 88, 93, 95
Hall, Peter, 56
Hamilton, Alexander, 2123
Hammarskjld, Johanna, 269
Harbsmeier, Christoph, 180
Hardy, Thomas, 111
Hartz, Louis, 232
Haussmann, Georges-Eugne, 106,
123124
Hazelius, Artur, 263, 277
Heckscher, Eli F., 133135, 141
Hedstrm, Peter, 331

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 24, 97,
169, 194, 197, 199200, 221, 235
Heidegger, Martin, 94
Heine, Heinrich, 295, 399400
Herder, Johann Gottfried, 261
Herlitz, Lars, 135
Herodotus, 194
Heyd, David, 402, 408
Higuchi, Ichiy, 193
Hilton, Boyd, 128
Hobsbawm, Eric, 53
Hodgson, Marshall, 207208, 211215
Hlscher, Lucian, 87
Holtug, Nils, 407408, 412
Homans, Georg C., 77
Homer, 193194, 199
Hood, Christopher, 36, 40
Horkheimer, Max, 101
Huber Stephens, Evelyne, 74
Hugo, Victor, 109
Huiguan / Master Guan, 284285
Humboldt, Wilhelm von, xviii
Hume, David, 134
Huntington, Samuel, 218, 223, 256
Hutchins, Robert Maynard, 349, 367
Iggers, Georg G., 54
Ingres, Jean Auguste Dominique, 119
Ismil I, Shah of Iran, 216
Jackson, Andrew, 29
James, Henry, 111, 124
Jaspers, Karl, 96, 191, 205
Jefferson, Thomas, 17, 2122, 29, 339
Jingmai, 283
Joas, Hans, 57
Jobs-Bjrklf, Kersti, 261
Joyce, James, 193194
Kant, Immanuel, 116, 194, 196197, 199
Karlfelt, Erik Axel, 272
Katz, Elihu, 254, 318
Katznelson, Ira, 11
Kaundinya Jayavarman, 286
Kaviraj, Sudipta, 202
Kelly, Gene, 317
Kemal Pashazade, 217
Kerr, Clark, 339353
Key, Ellen, 262, 271272
Keynes, John Maynard, 339, 347
Khan, Ayoub, 222
Khan, Liaqat Ali, 221
Khatami, Sayyid Mohammad, 220
index 431
Khomeini, Ruhollah Moosavi, 220, 247,
253
King, Martin Luther, 245, 247, 253, 255
Kingdon, John W., 45
Kinnock, Nigel, 37
Klempt, Adalbert, 96
Koselleck, Reinhart, 87, 89100,
102103, 170, 228
Khn, Johannes, 99
Lagerlf, Selma, 272
Lamm, Carl Robert, 263
Laplace, Pierre-Simon, 44
Larsson, Carl, 266, 269, 272
Larsson, Karin, 272. See also Berg,
Karin
Le Bon, Gustave, 249250, 257
Lefort, Claude, 6
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 116
Leijonhufvud-Adlersparre, Sophie, 262,
269
Leimar, Maria, 261
Lepsius, M. Rainer, 57
Leuchtenburg, William E., 15
Leuhusen, Carl, 133134
Levi, Giovanni, 62
Lvi-Strauss, Claude, 169
Liberman, Nira, xivxvii
Lieberman, Victor, 188
Light, Donald, 148
List, Friedrich, 136, 141
Locke, John, 20, 99
Lovejoy, Arthur, 125
Lwith, Karl, 92, 9495, 97, 102103
Lbbe, Hermann, 89, 95
Lundahl, Gunilla, 261
Lundell, Jacob, 141142
Luther, Martin, 99
Machiavelli, Niccol, 27, 82
Madison, James, 21, 23, 29
Mahmoody, Betty, 256
Mki, Uskali, 332
Malik, Jamal, 221
Malthus, Thomas Robert, 127130,
135139, 141
Mandeville, Bernard, 134
Mandra / Mantuoluo, 281, 283288
Manet, Edouard, 119
Mann, Michael, 57
Manuel, Frank E., 122
March, James G., 45
Marramao, Giacomo, 89
432
Marshall, Alfred, 340
Martin, Ben R., 372, 381, 383
Martin, David, 101
Martinsen, Kari, 154
Marx, Karl, 55, 64, 97, 111, 197, 340,
342343, 387
Mattsson, Gunilla, 261
Maurras, Charles, 124
Mauss, Marcel, 168, 177179, 205
Mawdudi, Abul Ala, 221
McTaggart, John,197
Mead, George Herbert, 76
Mehring, Reinhart, 93
Meier, Christian, 87
Meiners, Christoph, 195
Melanchthon, Philipp, 96
Menzel, Herbert, 318
Merton, Robert, 7072, 331
Meryon, Charles, 105116, 118119,
121122
Mill, John Stuart, 128, 195
Mills, C. Wright, 57
Mirabeau, Victor de Riqueti de, 134135
Moe, Terry, 74
Moed, Henk F., 379
Molire / Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, 192
Mommsen, Wolfgang, 147
Monastersky, Richard, 378
Montgre, Horace de, 119
Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat
de, 20, 25
Morris, William, 262
Muhammad, 210
Munthe, Axel, 272
Murrin, John, 15
Napoleon Bonaparte, 124
Napoleon III / Louis-Napolon Bonaparte,
105106, 111112, 122123
Narveson, Jan, 402, 408
Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 219, 222
Nelson, Benjamin, 209
Newton, Isaac, 122
Nietzsche, Friedrich, xiii, xviiixix, 88
Nightingale, Florence, 152
Nordencrantz, Anders, 133134
Nordesj, Lena, 261
North, Douglas, 59, 76
Nowotny, Helga, 148
Olsen, Johan P., 45
Olsson, Eva, 261
index
Pannenberg, Wolfhart, 103
Paramrtha / Kulantha, 287288
Parfit, Derek, 400, 405406
Parsons, Talcott, 55, 7071, 76, 82, 175,
201, 231
Pearson, Alan, 153
Persson, Hans Per, 274
Petander, Karl, 133
Peters, Guy, 40
Pissaro, Camille, 119
Pizzorno, Alessandro, 5
Poe, Edgar Allan, 109111, 114115
Pohlig, Matthias, 96
Polanyi, Karl, 64, 153
Polk, James, 29
Power, Michael, 389
Preisandanz, Karin, 196
Quesnay, Franois, 133134
Qutelet, Alphonse, 105
Qutb, Sayyid, 221223
Rabenius, Lars Georg, 135138
Rahner, Karl, 103
Ranke, Leopold von, 53
Rawls, John, 339, 347
Redfield, Robert, 205, 217
Reedijk, Jan, 379
Reitz, Edgar, 234
Rendtorff, Trutz, 97, 103
Ricardo, David, 127130, 135138
Ricoeur, Paul, 102
Ringer, Fritz, 186
Roberts, Melinda, 400, 408409
Rosenau, James, 251253, 255
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 99
Rudolph, Lloyd, 217
Rudolph, Suzanne, 217
Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, 57, 74
Rushdie, Salman, 245, 253254, 256
Ruskin, John, 262, 270
Saint-Simon, Claude Henri de, 122
Salais, Robert, 61
Salvius, Lars, 133
Sam ghapla, 281284, 288
Sartorius, Georg, 135
arvavarman, 284285
Sawai Jaisimh, 190
Sawilla, Jan Marco, 9697
Say, Jean Baptiste, 136138
Scheffer, Carl Gustaf, 134135
Schelling, Thomas C., 327
 index
Schelsky, Helmut, 147
Schiavone, Aldo, 230
Schleissing, Stephan, 87, 96
Schlzer, August Ludwig, 9697
Schluchter, Wolfgang, 57, 186
Schmidt, Manfred, 56
Schmitt, Carl, 11, 9293
Schmoller, Gustav, 59
Schndelbach, Herbert, 100
Schumpeter, Joseph, 64
Scott, Peter, 148
Scott, Winfield, 29
Seidman, Steven, 79
Seifert, Arno, 96
Selim I, 216217
Sen, Amartya, 46
Sengzong / Master Zong, 285
Sewell, William, 247251, 253254, 256
Sher, Irving, 378
Sma Qin, 296
Simmel, Georg, 55, 73
Singer, Milton, 217
Skinner, Alex, 103
Skinner, Quentin, 229
Skocpol, Theda, 56, 74
Skuncke, Marie-Christine, 261
Smith, Adam, 64, 134138, 141
Solow, Robert, 6566
Sombart, Werner, 59
Sophocles, 399400
Soyinka, Wole, 253
Spengler, Oswald, 168
Srinivas, Mysore N., 217218
Stephens, John D., 74
Stiglitz, Joseph E., 46
Stockhorst, Stefanie, 96
Strth, Bo, 102
Streeck, Wolfgang, 57
Suleyman I, 216
Swedberg, Richard, 60
Swift, Jonathan, 353
Taine, Hippolyte, 4445
Tambiah, Stanley, 249251, 253, 256257
Tamm, Ebba, 263
Tarde, Gabriel, 189
Tarschys, Daniel, 48
Tegnr, Esaias, 131
Thatcher, Margaret, 389
Thelen, Kathleen, 56
Thomas Aquinas, 214
Thomas, William I., 69
Thomasius, Christian, 134
433
Thompson, Stith, 302
Thucydides, 200
Tilly, Charles, 57
Tiryakian, Edward, 218
Tooze, Adam, 61
Toynbee, Arnold, 172, 183
Troeltsch, Ernst, 206208, 219
Trope, Yaacov, xivxvii
Turner, Victor, 249
Udhn, Lars, 331
Uthman ibn Affan, 206
Vlmki, 193
Van de Walle, Steven, 42
Van Dooren, Wouter, 42
Van Gogh, Vincent, 118, 120
Vararuci, 286
Vogt, Peter, 87
Wagner, Richard, 114
Weber, Max, 17, 5355, 57, 73, 76, 103,
177178, 185186, 201, 205210,
212213
Weiss, Carol H., 42
Wellhausen, Julius, 206, 210
Wendi (Emperor) of the Song, 286
Wendt, Alexander, 76
West, Edward, 127
Whitley, Richard, 372, 381, 383
Wicksell, Knut, 130
Wiggins, David, 411
Wildavsky, Aaron, 48
Winch, Donald, 126
Wittrock, Bjrn, 33, 48, 57, 64, 143,
185186, 205, 208, 227228, 244,
312, 351, 355, 388, 394395, 412
Wolff, Christian, 134
Wordsworth, William, 194
Wright, George Henrik von, 171, 317
Wrigley, Anthony, 128
Wudi (Emperor) of the Liang, 283285,
287
Xie Lingyun / Duke Xie, 284285
Yack, Bernard, 100
Yijing, 288290
Yongming, 286
Zabel, Hermann, 89, 97
Zhang Fan, 288
Zhisheng, 284
434 index

Zia ul Haq, Muhammad, 221222 Zickerman, Tage, 267

Zickerman, Lilli, 261268, 271273, Zorn, Anders, 266, 269, 272, 276
276278 Zorn, Emma, 272
 INTERNATIONAL COMPARATIVE
SOCIAL STUDIES

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In modern research, breaking boundaries between the different social sciences

is becoming more and more popular. Discussions in which different disciplines
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Brills International Comparative Social Studies focuses on presenting the results
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other social scientists.

1. Wilson, H.T. Bureaucratic Representation. Civil Servants and the Future of

Capitalist Democracies. 2001. ISBN 90 04 12194 3
2. Rath, J. Western Europe and its Islam. 2001. ISBN 90 04 12192 7
3. Inayatullah, S. Understanding Sarkar. The Indian Episteme, Macrohistory and
Transformative Knowledge. 2002. ISBN 90 04 12193 5 (hardcover) /
ISBN 90 04 12842 5 (paperback)
4. Gelissen, J. Worlds of Welfare, Worlds of Consent? Public Opinion on the Welfare
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5. Wilson, H.T. Capitalism after Postmodernism. Neo-Conservatism, Legitimacy, and
the Theory of Public Capital. 2002. ISBN 90 04 12458 6
6. Roulleau-Berger, L. Youth and Work in the Post-Industrial City of North America
and Europe. With an Epilogue by Saskia Sassen. 2003. ISBN 90 04 12533 7
7. Aalberg, T. Achieving Justice. Comparative Public Opinion on Income Distribution.
2003. ISBN 90 04 12990 1
8. Arnason, J.P. Civilizations in Dispute. Historical Questions and Theoretical
Traditions. 2003. ISBN 90 04 13282 1
9. Falzon, M.-A. Cosmopolitan Connections. The Sindhi diaspora, 1860-2000. 2004.
ISBN 90 04 14008 5
10. Ben-Rafael, E. and Y. Sternberg (eds.). Comparing Modernities: Pluralism Versus
Homogenity. Essays in Homage to Shmuel N. Eisenstadt. 2005. ISBN 90 04 14407 2
11. Douw, L. and K-b. Chan (eds.). Conflict and Innovation. Joint Ventures in China.
2006. ISBN 90 04 15188 5
12. Smith, J. With an Introduction by S.N. Eisenstadt. Europe and the Americas.
State Formation, Capitalism and Civilizations in Atlantic Modernity. 2006.
ISBN 978 90 04 15229 8
13. Ben-Rafael, E., M. Lyubansky, O. Glckner, P. Harris, Y. Israel, W. Jasper and J.
Schoeps. Building a Diaspora. Russian Jews in Israel, Germany and the USA.
2006. ISBN 978 90 04 15332 5
14. Arjomand, S.A. (ed.). Constitutionalism and Political Reconstruction. 2007.
ISBN 978 90 04 15174 1
15. Kwok-bun, C., J.W. Walls and D. Hayward (eds.). East-West Identities.
Globalization, Localization, and Hybridization. 2007. ISBN 978 90 04 15169 7
16. Meulemann, H. (ed.). Social Capital in Europe: Similarity of Countries and
Diversity of People? Multi-level Analyses of the European Social Survey 2002.
2008. ISBN 978 90 04 16362 1
17. Roberts, C.W. The Fifth Modality: On Languages that Shape our Motivations
and Cultures. 2008. ISBN 978 90 04 16235 8
18. Rakel, E.P. Power, Islam, and Political Elite in Iran. A Study on the Iranian
Political Elite from Khomeini to Ahmadinejad. 2009. ISBN 978 90 04 17176 3
19. Ben-Rafael, E. and Y. Sternberg (eds.), with Judit Bokser Liwerant and Yosef
Gorny. Transnationalism. Diasporas and the Advent of a New (Dis)order. 2009.
ISBN 978 90 04 17470 2
20. Stefan, A.M. Democratization and Securitization. The Case of Romania. 2009.
ISBN 978 90 04 17739 0
21. Amineh, M.P. and Y. Guang (eds.). The Globalization of Energy. China and the
European Union. 2010. ISBN 978 90 04 18112 0
22. Smith, K.E. Meaning, Subjectivity, Society. Making Sense of Modernity. 2010.
ISBN 978 90 04 18172 4
23. Ben-Rafael, E. and Y. Sternberg (eds.). World Religions and Multiculturalism. A
Dialectic Relation. 2010. ISBN 978 90 04 18892 1
24. Joas, H. and B. Klein (eds.). The Benefit of Broad Horizons. Intellectual and
Institutional Preconditions for a Global Social Science. Festschrift for Bjrn Wittrock
on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday. 2010. ISBN 978 90 04 19284 3