Sewell, William H. Jr. Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation. The University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Turner, Stephen. The Social Theory of Practices: Tradition, Tacit Knowledge, and Presuppositions. University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Zalk, Sue Rosenberg and Janice Gordon-Kelter, eds. Revolutions in Knowledge: Feminism in the Social Sciences. Westview, 1992.
Hollis, Martin. Reason in Action: Essays in the Philosophy of Social Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Mohr, Lawrence B. The Causes of Human Behavior: Implications for Theory and Method in the Social Sciences. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Gilbert, Margaret. On Social Facts. Princeton University Press, 1989.
Bunge, Mario. Finding Philosophy in Social Science. Yale University Press, 1996.
Barnes, Barry. The Elements of Social Theory. Barry Barnes. Princeton University Press, 1996.
Giddens, Anthony. Politics, Sociology and Social Theory: Encounters with Classical and Contemporary Social Thought. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.
Hands, D. Wade. Testing, Rationality, and Progress: Essays on the Popperian Tradition in Economic Methodology. Lanham, Maryland, 1993.
Gordon, Scott. The History and Philosophy of Social Science. Routledge, London, 1991.
Griffiths, M. R. and J. R. Lucas. Ethical Economics. St. Martin’s Press, 1996.
Renteln, Alison Dundes. International Human Rights: Universalism Versus Relativism. Newbury Park, California: Sage Publications, 1989.
Cohen, G. A. History Labour and Freedom: Themes from Marx. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Scott, James C. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.
Meister, Robert. Political Identity: Thinking Through Marx. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990. Pp. ix, 426.
Gould, Carol C. Rethinking democracy: Freedom and social cooperation in politics, economy, and society. New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
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Bernhardt, Kathryn. Rents, Taxes, and Peasant Resistance: The Lower Yangzi Region, 1840-1950. Stanford University Press, 1992.
Jenks, Robert D. Insurgency and Social Disorder in Guizhou: The “Miao” Rebellion, 1854-1873. University of Hawaii, 1994.
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Ensminger, Jean. Making a Market: The Institutional Transformation of an African Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp. xv, 212.
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Logics of History is a fascinating and insightful book on historical thinking by an innovative historian. William Sewell has made important contributions to French social history. This book marks a return to a field of inquiry that is very much needed: careful, analytical attention to some of the problematic constructs and frameworks that underlie the ways that scholars conceptualize historical change. There is no convenient label for the genre of the book, though each of these has an element of truth: philosophy of history, historiography, social science methodology, meta-history. But the author’s goal is an important one: to shed new light on the concepts, ontological assumptions, and theories through which thinkers attempt to understand the human past in a rigorous way. How can historians and social scientists learn from each other in this enterprise?
It is relevant that Sewell’s academic appointments have included departments of history, political science, and sociology. The author is well situated to reflect insightfully on the many ways in which the social sciences have interacted with the interpretation of history in the past three decades. In his own historical research, Sewell consistently attempts to make use of fruitful and illuminating parts of social theory to make sense of the historical circumstances to which he addresses himself. In treating the more abstract issues of historical reasoning and ontology, his analysis moves back and forth between detailed examples of historical analysis in the social sciences and original analytical treatment of these topics.
The intended audience of the book is a multidisciplinary one. The issues Sewell raises will resonate strongly with historically minded social scientists—scholars who are concerned with analyzing social processes in a variety of settings over an extended period of time. Working historians will find that his treatment of these meta-issues in historiography has great bearing on their own intellectual labors. And scholars interested in the intellectual development of the disciplines of the social sciences in the United States will find in the book a valuable set of observations about how historical sociology, historical social science, and social science history have interacted and developed since the 1960s.
Why do historians and social scientists need such a book? Because the logic and constructs of thinking historically are still only incompletely understood. We will do a better job of understanding and probing the past, if we are more self-conscious about the assumptions and frameworks that we bring to our work. What is a historical “period”? How are large historical constructs to be defined (revolutions, Tudor state, Marseillaise working class)? What is the nature of a historical cause?
Many historians have judged that the social sciences should somehow be relevant to their work of explaining historical outcomes. But what is involved in making use of social science theories in historical research and explanation? It has been evident for several decades that social processes are diverse, contingent, and heterogeneous. So the impulse towards finding general laws of social transformation has been discouraged. But what is to take the place of a generalizing, universalizing approach within a “social science” study of social transformation? The best answer available at present is, an extensive borrowing from a wide range of the human sciences. What can anthropologists tell historians about the challenge of reconstructing the mentalities of people in the past? What can the geographers of place tell us about the logic of trading and transport networks? What can researchers on collective action tell us about some of the factors that may have accelerated or inhibited popular protest in particular historical settings?
The book begins with a reading of the intellectual development of social history as a discipline since the 1960s: the currents of Marxism, anthropology, and feminism, and the themes of underclass history, local meanings, and multiple texts. Later chapters take up the substance of the intellectual challenge of the book: to shed light on some of the core theoretical constructs that are used in historical research. There are chapters on the concepts of temporality, structure, culture, synchrony, the event, and historical duration. The book closes with an essay on a new perspective on the way in which the “social” plays in social science.
A recurring topic in the book is the important category of the historical event. Sewell points out that social scientists often give short shrift to the temporal properties of a set of social changes or processes. In “Three Temporalities: Towards an Eventful Sociology” the author carefully teases apart the different ways in which historically minded sociologists have treated historical processes, and he singles out teleological temporality, experimental temporality, and “eventful” temporality. The first approach places historical events into a supposed necessary series of stages; the second takes events out of historical settings in order to use them as the fodder of quasi-experiments in causal reasoning; and the third approach emphasizes the path dependence of historical sequences. Events in their particular historical settings have causal consequences for the shaping and occurrence of later events. Sewell characterizes events in this way: “Events may be defined as that relatively rare subclass of happenings that significantly transforms structures. An eventful conception of temporality, therefore, is one that takes into account the transformation of structures by events” (100). Sewell returns to his understanding of events in several later essays in the book as well, including “A Theory of the Event” and “Events as Transformations of Structures.”
Other important topics that Sewell considers include the intellectual foundations of our conceptions of structure (“A Theory of Structure”) and culture (“The Concept(s) of Culture”), and the involvement of both these concepts in historical reasoning. In both instances Sewell takes up a large meta-concept within the social sciences, subjects it to careful, analytical attention, and considers how this concept is best used in history.
Logics of History is a pathbreaking book: intelligent, probing, and as good at raising new questions as it is at addressing old ones. It makes a highly original contribution to discussions of the relationships between the social sciences and history that will be of interest to specialists on all sides.
Ethics 1996
Stephen Turner proposes to provide a philosophical analysis of a family of concepts falling under the general heading of “social practice”: the notion of a tacit set of rules, norms, or presuppositions that inform behavior in a given cultural milieu and that are socially authoritative and causally influential. Examples include: skills of the carpenter, passed on from master to apprentice; knowledge of laboratory techniques passed on from senior scientist to graduate student; norms of etiquette and comportment, passed on from adults to children; frameworks of interpretation of literary or religious texts; social practices governing the use and significance of food; and many others. Especially important among such phenomena in Turner’s account are epistemic practices: the notion that knowledge and belief are dependent upon schemes, worldviews, or frameworks that are not themselves amenable to rational standards of assessment.
Turner makes the important point that we need a better conceptualization of the theory of practice. And he offers detailed and provocative analysis of a host of problems raised in this area. Turner’s position is that the concept of practice is seductive but ultimately untenable. The central source of his skepticism has to do with the difficulty of assuring that the “same” practice is transmitted. Where does a social practice reside? How is it transmitted? How do the young absorb the mores of their elders? How are the “rules” of these practices represented internally within the individual? What guarantees that two practitioners—each equally adept—have the same practical knowledge, the same internal grammar? On the basis of skeptical answers to several of these questions, Turner concludes that there is no such thing as a social practice; rather, there are trained similarities of external performance.
Turner’s skepticism about social practices is ultimately unpersuasive. The reality of social customs, norms, mores, assumptions, worldviews, habits—practices, in short—is too compelling to be seriously doubted. The challenge, then, is to provide an account of embodiment and transmission of such skills and knowledge that makes sense of the facts of social experience and addresses the concerns that Turner raises. And in fact, the outlines of such an account are not hard to produce. We might postulate that each individual possesses a “norm inference engine,” on the basis of which the individual observes the social behavior of those around him or her and arrives at a hypothesis about the underlying rule of behavior. As dissonant experience is encountered, the norm inference engine updates its hypotheses. The individual’s conduct is generated through application of the current state of the “social grammar.” A cultural practice is embodied in the ensemble of individual social competences and performances at a given time. Individual social behavior is thus structured by the state of social knowledge embodied in the current generation. These structured behaviors in turn constitute paradigm examples for others—grist for the norm inference engines of other members of the community. Through such mechanisms, a population of practitioners successfully transmit their knowledge to the next generation.
This ultimate disagreement notwithstanding, Turner’s book is a worthwhile contribution. Authors as diverse as Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Bourdieu have made the notion of practice central to their social theories: language, conceptual schemes, and modes of behavior are to be understood as bearing the imprint of social practice. Turner is certainly right in holding that there is no collective entity underlying a social practice—no occult system of mores or traditions that causally interact with individuals. And Turner’s careful efforts to unpack the presuppositions of this concept serve well to clarify our thinking about social practices.
Ethics 1994
This collection attempts to assess the import of recent feminist scholarship for various social science disciplines. A common theme throughout the volume is the importance of distinguishing between two objectives of feminist scholarship: to draw attention to issues pertaining to women’s experience that have often been neglected by traditional scholarship, and to reformulate the concepts, methods, and frameworks in terms of which social science research is conducted in such a way as to provide a better basis for understanding women’s experience. In line with these concerns, many of the essays attempt to document the need for substantial conceptual and methodological reform in the social sciences. Likewise, many of the essays provide detailed and interesting illustrations of some of the shortcomings of traditional research frameworks in various fields. Finally, a good deal of space is expended on detailing the institutional structure of the respective disciplines.
There is much to admire in this volume. This reader is struck, however, by the negative stance taken throughout toward the value of scientific objectivity. But it is possible to be both feminist and empiricist: to maintain both that the social sciences need to do a substantially better job of investigating and comprehending the experience of women and that social science knowledge depends on standards of empirical adequacy that are reasonably independent of one’s prior convictions. And we had better hope that this is possible, if any of our critiques of the status quo are to have any warrant or intellectual conviction.
Ethics 1997
Martin Hollis has made significant contributions over many years to the theory of rationality and the role of this concept within the human sciences. Hollis’s signal contribution is his persistent effort to bring these questions back to philosophy, and to locate the points of intersection between the theory of rationality and a host of important philosophical issues. Particularly important has been his continuing engagement with the topic of “rationality and relativism”—roughly, the question of whether there may be profound differences in the mentality of persons within different cultures, and whether the assumption of individual rationality provides a legitimate lever for overcoming the potential incommensurability of systems of concepts and beliefs in different cultures. Readers will therefore find much to interest them in the essays included in Reason in Action. The essays in this volume were written over a period of almost thirty years; nonetheless, they show a remarkable level of consistency and coherence.
The volume is organized around three themes: the concept of instrumental rationality as a theory of rationality in action; the relations between “roles and reasons” in human action; and the problem of “other cultures, other minds.” The first section discusses foundational issues in the theory of rationality: the problem of rational choice in the face of public goods (“Three Men in a Drought”), the problem of the formation of preferences (“Rational Preferences”), and the problem of strategic rationality (“Moves and Motives”). The problem of preferences is central to the theory of rational action. Given a set of preferences, the rational agent is one who chooses a line of action which maximizes the expected utility of the outcome. But what about the preference system itself? Are there any constraints imposed by reason on one’s preferences? Are preferences truly exogenous? Or can one deliberate among sets of preferences? Can one aim to change one’s preferences? Hollis’s general strategy is to recommend a broader conception of rational agency than the standard theory, by permitting rational agents to deliberate about their preferences; to adhere to moral commitments; and to adopt social identities that affect their choices. “I want to loosen the usual tie between preferences, actions and outcomes by insisting that a rational agent has rational preferences” (p. 54).
To this reader the central section of the book is the most challenging and original. Here Hollis interrogates issues which contrast the notion of the rational actor as a transparent preference-maximizer, with the thicker notion of an actor as the bearer of an identity, a role, or a mask. On the first conception, agents have preferences and an ability to compare consequences of alternative courses of action; they then choose that course which has the prospect of producing the greatest expected utility. On the second conception, agents act out of complex identities which derive from their cultures, the roles they assume, and the masks they wear. Further, such actions are only partially deliberative and calculating. An interesting example which Hollis treats in several essays is the notion of a code of honor. Individuals sometimes appear to act out the implicatures of a code of honor which requires acts that are not narrowly prudent. How are we to understand this phenomenon within the context of a general theory of rational agency? Does the agent freely and autonomously choose the imprudent but honorable course? Is the agent “programmed” by an authoritative normative system? Has the agent adopted a role which compels his/her course of conduct? Hollis’s discussion of these issues is richly informed by historical, anthropological, and literary evidence, and his observations take us to a deeper understanding of the complexities involved.
In the third and final section of the book Hollis returns to the topic of cultural relativism and the related problem of the interpretation of the meaning of human conduct. Here he addresses the issue of cross-cultural rationality. In “Reason and Ritual” he confronts the issue of apparently irrational beliefs to which individuals in various cultures adhere. Here the central claim is that the ethnologist can only interpret the beliefs of members of the other culture if he/she is able to attribute shared standards of rationality to the other. “The assumptions required for identifying everyday empirical beliefs are common perceptions, common ways of referring to things perceived and a common notion of empirical truth. Unless these assumptions work, the anthropologist cannot get a bridgehead” (p. 210). In other words, we cannot maintain a radical relativism of conceptual system and modes of reasoning across cultures, and continue the project of interpreting other cultures. A similar point emerges in “Say It With Flowers”: in order to interpret an individual’s motives in undertaking a given action, we need to know what the person has reason to do (p. 257), and this requires reference to a general and cross-person theory of rationality. “The historian starts by trying an intellectual interpretation [of the actor’s meaning] and, even where only partial explanation results, will have determined what is missing. This is what is involved in making the actors out as rational as possible” (p. 258). The final essay in the book combines themes in the second and third parts, by interpreting the fascinating example of Marcus Atilius Regulus, a Roman general in the First Punic War. Did Regulus act rationally in his decision to keep his oath and return to Carthage to face death by torture? How do “reasons of honor” figure within a general theory of rationality? And how are we to interpret the actions of persons motivated by honor? Hollis’s conclusion is that we must find a way of incorporating principled action into our theory of practical rationality.
In short, Reason in Action is a highly successful volume which will reward the attention of a wide audience of philosophers and social scientists. Hollis sheds important light on foundational problems in the human sciences through his developed discussion of issues of individual rationality, cross-cultural standards of rationality, and standards of interpretation of human action.
American Journal of Sociology 1997
Lawrence Mohr, a political scientist with empirical research interests in organizations and organizational behavior, offers a practitioner’s analysis of some fundamental philosophical issues in the foundations of the social sciences. Two questions loom particularly large for Mohr: What is involved in providing a good causal explanation of social phenomena, and in what sense are intentional human actions “caused”? These are important questions for those of us interested in the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences. Mohr’s treatment, however, adds less to our understanding of these issues than one might hope.
Causal explanation is the central topic. But in addition to an extended discussion of causation, the author provides an analysis of the causes of intentional behavior (do thoughts cause behavior?), an examination of some possible implications of the author’s findings for research methodology, and a discussion of the relationship between explanation and law (chapter 5). Mohr argues that there are strong reasons to doubt in principle whether there could be strong law-like generalizations in the social sciences. This conclusion depends on the fact that social outcomes are the result both of causal processes and “encounters”—chance circumstances that do not fall under lawlike generalizations (pp. 131-132).
Consider first Mohr’s analysis of causation. Mohr argues that current philosophical treatments of causation are unsatisfactory, particularly for the social sciences. He summarizes these theories under a “Humean regularity” view and a “necessary conditions” view. In place of these theories, he argues for a pair of conceptions of causation: physical causation and factual causation. Physical causation, he believes, is the fundamental notion; it involves “a relation between a force on an object and a motion of the same object” (p. 44). More generally, physical causation is mechanical causation, in which the physical characteristics of the causing factor produce or bring about the characteristics of the effect. Mohr regards this as the bedrock causal concept, but observes that many causal ascriptions do not in fact refer to physical cause couples. Instead, many causal ascriptions refer to relations among statements or facts: the fact that the road was slick caused the fact that the accident occurred. This is what Mohr refers to as “factual causation.” Mohr defines factual causation in the following terms: “X was the factual cause of Y if and only if X and Y both occurred and X occupied a necessary slot in the physical causal scenario pertinent to Y” (p. 27). (Parenthetically, it does seem odd to call X the factual cause if it is merely one out of many necessary “slots” in the physical causal scenario.)
In this reader’s view, this analysis of causation fails to illuminate. There are very hard questions to be answered if we are to have a satisfactory analysis of social causation, but the retreat to physical causation seems not to be helpful in attempting to answer such questions. (Does it make sense to ask what was the physical cause of the fall of the Roman Empire?) There is a substantial literature within the philosophy of science on the issues of causation and causal explanation (for example, work by Wesley Salmon, Nancy Cartwright, or Jon Elster). Within the context of the current state of debate, Mohr’s analysis of physical and factual causation appears unhelpful.
Turn now to Mohr’s treatment of the causation of behavior. He asks a simple question—do thoughts (purposes, reasons, wishes, desires) cause behavior (physical movements of the body)? His answer is negative, because we sometimes decide to do X but fail to do so (the irregularity problem). “The connection between our thought categories and the appropriate behaviors does not seem to be necessary or lawlike” (p. 63). He argues that we should here take our cue from the analysis of physical causation that preceded, and look for a set of physical circumstances that could be said to cause behavior. Here the likely suspect is neurophysiology. Agents have brains, and brains are the causal background of behavior. Thus Mohr believes that it is necessary to identify the physiological mechanism that underlies the “reason-behavior” nexus if we are to have adequate causal explanations of behavior at all (p. 58), and he offers the “affect-object” paradigm as the basis of further theorizing in this area (p. 70). This is a highly speculative account of how desire and thought might be embodied within the central nervous system. Here we are in deep and troubled waters, for it seems fairly clear that cognitive science and neurophysiology are still very far from having convincing answers to questions like “what is the physiological basis of thought?”. Fortunately, most other observers have concluded that the sort of inter-theoretic reduction that Mohr aspires to is in fact unnecessary. We can give satisfactory answers to questions like “how do falling interest rates cause rising levels of investment?” without having a neurophysiology of investor decision making. More generally, it is not necessary to reduce causal assertions at one level of description to causal relations at a lower level of description.
In summary, Mohr deserves credit for focusing on a series of issues that are fundamental to our understanding of social research. Mohr’s discussions of many of these issues ask some of the right questions, but his answers are often less than satisfying.
International Studies in Philosophy 1995
This is an intelligent, closely argued and extensively analyzed treatment of the problem of social collectivity. What is a social group? What distinguishes a group from a random set of individuals—e.g. the set consisting of W. V. O. Quine, Madonna, and Napoleon? Is a social class—e.g. the English working class in the 1880s—a social group? Gilbert’s primary contention is that the notion of a collectivitity—individuals constituting a group—is the central feature of social ontology and the chief focus of empirical social science. And she maintains that this concept can best be analyzed by the idea of a “plural subject”—the referent of the first-person plural pronoun, “we”.
The core of Gilbert’s theory of social groups involves the idea of the mutual recognition by a set of persons that they are engaged in some joint actions or beliefs. “A set of people constitute a social group if and only if they constitute a plural subject”; and a plural subject is “a set of people each of whom shares with oneself in some action, belief, attitude, or similar attribute” (p. 204). Gilbert argues that the pronouns “us” and “we” are the linguistic elements through which we refer to plural subjects in English. And she believes that plural subjects exist; they are not fictions or constructions, but agents which have beliefs, perform actions, and succeed or fail in carrying out their intentions. In later chapters Gilbert extends her conception of collectivities and plural subjects by considering several other important social notions: the idea of a social fact in Durkheim’s sense, the idea of a collective belief, and the idea of a social convention. In each case Gilbert argues that the concept of a plural subject supports a plausible and intuitively convincing analysis of the social concept in question. According to Gilbert, “social groups are plural subjects, collective beliefs are the beliefs of plural subjects, and social conventions are the ‘fiats’ of plural subjects” (p. 408). Gilbert’s account of social conventions is developed through extensive discussion of David Lewis’s influential formulation of this concept.
Gilbert argues against the individualism of Max Weber (and by implication, the premises of rational choice theory), by arguing that collectivities are the central subject of the social sciences, and that collectivities cannot be subsumed under (narrowly) individualist concepts. Thus Gilbert suggests that her theory offers support for holism over individualism (p. 3). Does it? I think not. An individualist is free to acknowledge that individuals have beliefs that refer to other persons and groups of persons; the position permits reference to shared purposes and actions involving a collection of persons deliberately orienting their actions towards a shared purpose. What individualism requires is simply that these are all the aggregate results of individual states of mind, and that the behavior of the ensemble is to be explained by reference to the beliefs and intentions of the participants.
An important test case for Gilbert’s account is the problem of collective action. Rational choice theory places much emphasis on public goods problems and the phenomenon of free-riding. How does Gilbert’s conception of plural subjects treat the problem? It appears to this reader that Gilbert makes collective action too easy. Plural subjects (groups) have purposes; individuals within these groups express quasi-readiness to perform their part of the shared action; and—when circumstances are right—the group acts collectively to bring about its collective goals. “The people concerned would be jointly ready jointly to perform a certain action in certain circumstances” (p. 409). She speaks of group will or communal will (p. 410). But the actions of a group are still the result of the choices made by constituent individuals. And however much the individual may align him- or herself with the collective project, the collective behavior is still no more than the sum of the actions taken by particular individuals. Moreover, it is necessary to acknowledge the endurance of private, individual interests that remain prominent for individual agents—with the result that we should expect individuals’ actions to sometimes involve free-riding, defection, and favoring of private over collective interests. It seems to this reader, then, that Gilbert leans too far in the direction of the Rousseauvian “general will” interpretation of social action.
How important for the social sciences is the notion of a social group or collectivity? Gilbert’s view is that this concept is foundational; it is the basis for a unitary definition of the subject matter of the social sciences. This overstates the importance of collectivities, it seems to this reader: there are important instances of social explanation that do not involve analysis of groups in Gilbert’s sense, and whose explanatory frameworks do not refer to groups, their behavior, their shared beliefs, or their collective intentions and self-understandings. A few examples might include neo-malthusian analysis of the relation between economic change and demographic variables; analysis of the effects of changes of the transport system on patterns of settlement and economic activity; and explanation of patterns of historical processes of urbanization in terms of changing economic and political institutions. These examples explain social phenomena as the aggregate result of large numbers of rational individual actions. They commonly refer to impersonal social structures and circumstances that function as constraints and opportunities for individuals. And they make no inherent reference to the forms of group collectivity to which Gilbert refers.
This is a rich book, and one that repays careful reading. It will be of particular interest to philosophers of social science and social philosophers, and the level of philosophical rigor will interest philosophers in other fields as well.
American Journal of Sociology 1999
This is an ambitious book. Mario Bunge is an accomplished and learned philosopher who has written for decades on topics in the philosophy of science, metaphysics, and epistemology. In this work Bunge turns this erudition to the task of constructing a systematic philosophy of the social sciences from first principles. Moreover, he aims to produce a system that will be recognizable to practitioners as addressing conceptual and methodological issues that arise in their work. The results should be of substantial interest to philosophers and philosophically minded social scientists.
Bunge offers a “new, science-oriented philosophical system” (12), within the context of which he looks to redesign the philosophy of social science. Philosophy of social science, according to Bunge, includes answers to questions in seven areas: logic, semantics, epistemology, methodology, ontology, axiology, and ethics. And the standards of evaluation for a proposed philosophy of social science are equally explicit: relevance, intelligibility, exactifiability, internal consistency, external consistency, size and depth, truth, universality, fertility, and originality (11). As this treatment suggests, Bunge brings a Cartesian exactness to his inquiry. His theorizing follows from an exacting analysis and classification of the problems to be considered.
The book is organized into three parts: “From Fact to Theory,” “From Explanation to Justification,” and “General Philosophical Problems in Social Science.” The first part focuses on problems of explanation and theory. What is a fact? What is a generalization? What is an explanation? Bunge puts it forward that the heart of explanation is systematization: the effort of the scientist to place a given fact within an orderly system or pattern (108 ff.). Systematization may proceed through classification (ranging individuals into groups or classes); more fundamentally, it may proceed through the construction of a theory whose concepts and hypotheses allow the scientist to place the given fact or state within a broader context of law-governed order. The treatment places the notion of nomothetic order at the center of the account. A fact is explained when it is placed within the context of a hypothetico-deductive system of laws and boundary conditions. It is worth noting that Bunge’s account does not give much weight to the concept of social causation; his theory of explanation does not emphasize causal relations as a central basis of social explanation.
Another central concern in Part A is the logic of scientific inquiry. What is involved in formulating a scientific research hypothesis? What is involved in asserting, or assessing, the truth of a hypothesis? How are scientific theories corrected and criticized? Bunge describes what he calls the “methodics” of science in these terms: “the methodics of a scientific approach is constituted by all the relevant scrutable procedures: that is, all the rule-directed procedures that yield objective knowledge and can be justified theoretically as well as empirically” (p. 80). Bunge regards scientific research as a process that is partially rule guided, but ultimately underdetermined by empirical constraints: data filtering and hypothesis formation depend on background assumptions that are not themselves empirically constrained at a particular moment in the history of science.
Part B turns to a treatment of the epistemology of social science: the empirical and logical procedures through which scientific hypotheses and theories are tested or validated. Bunge’s analysis displays an admirable confidence in the objectivity of science and the possibility of rationality and method in the social sciences. Throughout the author endeavors to establish the rational grounds of social science knowledge.
A noteworthy discussion of “upward and downward” explanation of social facts occurs in Chapter 5. Here Bunge addresses issues that fall within the general framework of reductionism and methodological individualism; but he offers a clear, logically articulate account of the relations that obtain between higher-order theory and micro-level events. Bunge distinguishes between macro- and micro-facts in the following terms: “A macro-fact is a fact occurring in the system as a whole. A micro-fact is a fact occurring in or to some or all of the members of the system at the given level” (p. 147). He then distinguishes between “top-down” and “bottom-up” explanations: “A top-down (or micro) explanation of a macro-fact is the deduction of the proposition(s) describing it from propositions describing (micro-) facts in components of the system where the macro-fact occurs” (147). A methodologically individualist explanation, then, is an instance of a “top-down” explanation in Bunge’s parlance, as is an explanation of the properties of a cloud in terms of the properties of the water drops which compose it. Against both individualism and holism, Bunge maintains that adequate social explanation requires both kinds of systematization. Individuals constitute social facts; but individuals act within social contexts. Bunge refers to this alternative as “systemism”—an approach to social explanation that identifies agents within structures as the unit of analysis (264).
There are few traditional topics in the philosophy of the social sciences that do not find at least a few pages of discussion in this book. The topic of verstehen, for example—apparently very distant from the logical positivist tone of much of the book—receives brief but helpful treatment in Chapter 5. Bunge argues that there are two strands of thought underlying the verstehen methodology—Dilthey and Weber—and that Weber’s “rational motivation” interpretation is the superior (154).
An especially original contribution in this part of the book is Bunge’s extensive and useful account of the epistemology of social indicators—e.g. longevity as an indicator of quality of life. The discussion is interesting and original, and raises a topic not often discussed by philosophers, or by social scientists with the philosophical acuity which Bunge brings to the discussion (170 ff.). The general question is this: what are the epistemic features of an adequate social indicator? What conditions must a given indicator satisfy in order for us to be confident that the measure serves to “indicate” an underlying social characteristic? The topic is of importance because it constitutes the empirical link between theory and the social world in most instances: empirical observation in the social sciences depends on construction of indicators that permit the researcher to “observe” social phenomena—poverty, social unrest, prejudice. But it is all too common in social science research that an investigator sets out to probe theoretical property X; asserts that observable property P indicates X; finds that P behaves thus-and-so; and concludes uncritically that X behaves thus-and-so. Before drawing such conclusions, however, it is crucial to establish the conditions of validity and veridicality which pertain to the relation between the indicator and the underlying social characteristic.
In Part C Bunge turns to topics which have often been discussed under the rubric of philosophical problems raised by the social sciences (as opposed to philosophical frameworks which can be applied to the social sciences). Central among these problems are individualism and holism; idealism and materialism; subjectivism and realism; and the status of the assumption of rationality in social science explanations. Here again the careful reader will be repaid with ample philosophical insight into the problems Bunge treats.
As this survey indicates, Finding Philosophy in Social Science is an original and fruitful work. Bunge offers a systematic effort to apply contemporary philosophy of science to the logic of research in the social sciences, and he successfully identifies a handful of intriguing philosophical problems raised by contemporary social science research.
American Political Science Review 1996
These two recent books, both by respected social theorists, offer a valuable look at the development of classical social theory since the middle nineteenth century and its relevance at the end of the twentieth century. In the final years of the twentieth century, it is highly pertinent to ask whether social theorizing largely produced before the end of the nineteenth century can possibly serve to illuminate contemporary society. (By classical social theory these authors mean roughly the theories of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, along with subsequent elaborations and criticisms of these theories.) Are the “classics” of social theory of continuing relevance for our own attempts to understand and explain important social processes? Or have events and ideas superseded them? Giddens and Barnes have each done deep and important work on the traditions of social theory, so one reads these books with interest and high expectation. The books are highly complementary, in that Giddens provides a thoughtful historical discussion of the traditions of social theory, while Barnes offers a developed account of how the currents of this tradition ought to be deployed in contemporary social theorizing. Barnes wishes to provide a synthesis of an adequate social theory, taking account of the theoretical insights of classical social theory as well as well-developed criticisms of those theories.
There are several foundational questions to raise in the context of the topic of these books. What is the intellectual role of social theory? And how should the micro-macro problem be handled in good social research—what is the relationship between the individual level and the social level in social processes, structures, and functions? Barnes offers one possible answer to the first question in the first sentence of his book: “The most widely read theories … are those that serve as the basis for commentary on the nature of present-day industrial societies and on how they are likely to develop and change” (1). Later he writes, “The formulation of links and connections between particulars is what theorizing is” (2). This is to say, evidently, that theory serves to identify the generalized processes which underlie specific social occurrences. Barnes takes explicit issue with what is sometimes referred to as the “toolbox” model of social theory: that social theory identifies a range of distinct social processes and mechanisms, and that the empirical researcher should be broadly acquainted with these theoretical alternatives and choose the theory that best fits the empirical problem that she is currently studying. Against this view, Barnes argues for theoretical unity (33). It bears saying, however, that it may be that social phenomena are in fact diverse, deriving from a number of non-reducible causal processes. In this case, one would be best advised to the more eclectic or pluralistic view of the role of theory. If the social world is causally diverse, then there will be no “grand unification theory” possible in the social sciences.
A similarly foundational question focuses on the “social” in social theory: what is involved in asserting that human beings are social beings? Barnes is at pains to question a broadly individualist answer to this question, according to which social institutions constrain and impel rational individuals who are defined independent from social facts. He argues instead for the irreducibility of the social. (It might be noted that Barnes’s critique does not merely apply to rational choice theorists; he believes that there is a pernicious individualism lying at the foundation of Parsonian sociology as well; pp. 54 ff.) Against these individualistic social theories, Barnes stresses that we must understand individuals as thoroughly socialized: their motives, beliefs, norms, inhibitions, and conceptions of themselves and their relations to others, are thoroughly imprecated in social facts and circumstances. As Barnes puts it, “to insist that we are social creatures and to treat this as a matter of profound and pervasive significance is to announce a strongly anti-individualistic sociological theory” (4). He gives substantial attention to a number of social concepts: norms, groups, movements, practices, knowledge, class, and hierarchy. And he aims to persuade readers that an acceptable social theory will be one which gives full recognition to the supra-individual properties that such concepts invoke.
Barnes appears to believe that familiar problems of suboptimality of rational individual choice in circumstances of interactive action—freerider problems and prisoner’s dilemma problems—indicate a defect in the theory of individual rationality. But it is surely no critique of evolutionary theory to demonstrate that suboptimal adaptations may emerge through natural selection; it is rather a feature of the world that evolutionary theory discerns and explains. Likewise, the fact that rational individuals when placed in a one-time prisoner’s dilemma situation will choose strategies that lead to a predictable suboptimal equilibrium does not refute the theory of economic rationality; it indicates only that individual rationality does not always lead to collective optimality.
Barnes believes that an appropriately constructed theory of the social individual permits a solution to the collective action problem (4, 76-85). Barnes is right in focusing on collective action as a theoretically central problem for the social sciences. But it is a problem for all stripes of social theory, not merely rational choice theory. It is true that unadorned rational choice theory predicts too little collective action. But a lavishly social theory of collective action surely predicts too much collective action. The assumption of social behavior (that is, behavior oriented toward group purposes) makes the problem of collective action too easy. If individuals always choose to act according to their assessment of collective interests, strikes should never collapse, revolutions should never fail, and ground water sources should never be polluted.
Barnes gives substantial attention to the topic of social norms: What is involved in an individual following a norm? He writes, “Conforming to norms is a collective activity” (57). More broadly, Barnes maintains that the phenomenon of normative action gives strong support to the anti-individualist methodology that he favors. This position is unpersuasive, however, in that it appears relatively simple to provide “microfoundations” for the fact that individuals are influenced by norms, practices, and worldviews that extend beyond their own psychological states. To put it crudely, the Parsonian model of the internalization of norms that Barnes criticizes appears to be more credible than Barnes’s own account. In general, this reader judges that Barnes overestimates the difficulties of framing an empirically adequate individualist (or microfoundational) theory of norms and institutions.
In sum, Barnes’s book repays close study. He is a thoughtful commentator on foundational questions in the social sciences, and even if one ultimately disagrees with his position, the reader will learn much from his discussion of these topics.
Turn now to the Giddens volume. This collection of previously published essays provides a fine discussion and commentary on the main contributors to classical social theory—Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Comte, and Parsons, and a suggestive reflection on more recent social theorists—Garfinkel, Habermas, Foucault, and Nietzsche. Giddens has much of interest to say about the development of social theory and sociology over the past century and a half. Giddens himself is a distinguished contributor to this tradition, so his discussion will be sure to interest many readers.
The heart of classical social theory is the trio of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber. Giddens takes pains to scrutinize the routes by which the thought of these thinkers made its way into the English-speaking world of social theory and sociology. Giddens’ treatment of Weber is particularly thorough and useful; he makes a sustained effort to explore the connections between Weber’s intellectual development and the social and political circumstances in which he found himself in Wilhelmine Germany, through an analysis of Weber’s political writings. Giddens also provides a nuanced discussion of the relationship between Marx and Weber (chapter 2). Here the issue largely concerns the status of historical materialism as an explanatory framework. Giddens argues that Marx and Weber in fact shared a good deal of common ground concerning their interpretations of Roman history and pre-capitalist forms of economy and society (pp. 71-74). (Refreshingly, Giddens also defends the view that Marx remains a “classical social theorist,” with important contributions to make to our understanding of the dynamics of modern capitalist society and economy, in spite of the collapse of communism.)
Durkheim’s thought is reconsidered through the lens of his political sociology. Giddens takes the view that other readers have given too little attention to Durkheim’s efforts to make sense of forms of authority in modern society. This concept cuts across typically sociological discussions of order with political discussions of power. Durkheim is most commonly associated with the regulative authority of norms and of organizations of civil society, but Giddens argues that there is equally a concern for the exercise of the coercive power of the state (102-107). Giddens offers the summary assessment: “Durkheim’s sociology had its origins in an attempt to reinterpret the claims of political liberalism in the face of a twin challenge: from an anti-rationalist conservatism on the one hand, and from socialism on the other” (115). Giddens also provides an extended discussion of Durkheim’s relationship to individualism. Durkheim is plainly hostile to methodological individualism as a principle of sociological explanation; less well understood is his relation to “moral individualism.” In Giddens’ telling of the tale, moral individualism is, according to Durkheim, a defining characteristic of modern Western social life. “Respect for the individual, and the concomitant demand for equality, became moral imperatives: as such, they implied that the welfare and self-fulfillment of every member should be sought after” (pp. 121-22).
In a central essay in the volume, “Comte, Popper and Positivism,” Giddens gives an historical treatment of the development of the philosophy of science in relation to sociology. The general framework of the chapter is a careful and developed analysis of positivism as a conception of the methodology of the social sciences. Tracing the concept from Comte through the Vienna school philosophers (Schlick, Neurath, Carnap, and Hahn, for example), to the logical empiricism of Hempel , Oppenheimer, and Nagel, Giddens carefully works through the relationships between philosophical debates about positivism and the development of empirical sociology. This discussion sheds much light on the profound impact which logical positivism had on the formation of sociological thought and method. This chapter by itself would serve as an admirable introduction to the philosophy of science for graduate students in the social sciences.
The final few chapters offer discussion of several important contributors to social theory in the twentieth century—Habermas, Marcuse, Garfinkel, and Foucault. These essays have the feeling of occasion pieces rather than fully developed analysis, but each essay provides some insight into the subject at hand.
In sum, each of these books must be counted at an important contribution to contemporary discussions of social theory. Giddens’ book shows a remarkable erudition in the full range of social theory. Giddens offers insight into the logic of the views he discusses, as well as the complicated relations which obtain among them. The book will appeal as strongly to readers who know a good deal about these traditions as it will to the novice. The Barnes book has a distinctive point of view, and makes a substantive case for a particular approach to social theory. Some readers will find this approach highly congenial to their own work, and others will not. But all will be stimulated by Barnes’s capable argumentation and exposition of the issues. Barnes and Giddens each give evidence to what is surely true: that the traditions of classical social theory continue to provide insight into modern society.
Ethics 1994
This book is a thoughtful, sustained reflection on the suitability of the methodological ideas of Karl Popper and Imre Lakatos in application to the history of economics. As Hands notes, Popper and Lakatos have been the philosophers of science who have had the greatest influence on methodologically minded economists. Wade Hands is himself a methodologically sophisticated economist, and he does a fine job of bridging between current work in philosophy of science and the methodological debates that have occurred within the economics profession in the past fifteen years. The central themes of the book are these: Is it useful to consider whether economic theories are falsifiable? And can we understand the development of economic thought within the framework of Lakatos’s theory of progressive research programs? Hands is in general rather skeptical about the utility of either Popper’s falsifiability criterion (pps. 67 ff.) or Lakatos’s more complex criteria of novelty and progressivity (pp. 61-63) as a basis for evaluating economic thought and theory. Particularly useful are the author’s efforts to consider various methodological maxims in light of specific episodes in recent economic thought. The book is a valuable contribution to the growing literature in the philosophy of economics.
Philosophy of the Social Sciences 1994
It is difficult to characterize the genre of The History and Philosophy of Social Science. The book contains much discussion of many of the great texts and authors in the history of the social sciences—Marx, Spencer, Comte, Durkheim, Weber, Bentham—and yet it is not really a developed history of the social sciences. It is interspersed with discussions of problems of methodology in the social science—the role of laws in social science, the role of modeling, the concepts of progress and order in social theory, the logical character of social and historical explanation—and yet it is something less than a coherent exposition of a theory of the philosophy of social science. It is too long and intricate to be a popular exposition of social theory; and yet it is underdocumented for a scholarly contribution. And finally, it is a dense scholarly book that contains neither footnotes nor bibliography. (Books and articles are referred to only by title and date, internal to the text.) The reader is thus left with a sense of puzzlement about the audience the author has in mind. I can think of only one group: beginning graduate students in social philosophy or political science who want to get a preliminary synopsis of the historical development of the social sciences.
This is a book of almost 700 pages, treating a great variety of topics. So it is perhaps useful to begin by offering a recital of some of the themes Gordon raises:
problematic social concepts—society, science, progress, order (chapters 1, 2, 8, 10)
philosophy of social science themes (chapters 3, 14, 18)
history of economics and political economy (chapters 5, 6, 9, 17)
history of social theory (chapters 11, 12, 13, 15)
history of political theory (chapters 4, 7)
biology and social science (chapter 16)
Given the length of the book, it is impossible to summarize or evaluate all the main points. So a reviewer may perhaps be permitted to turn to a venerable social science technique: sampling.
History of the social sciences. Most of the book falls generally within the history of the social sciences. The author provides an exposition of the central ideas of an imposing list of figures in the history of the social sciences broadly construed. The breadth of knowledge represented is impressive; Gordon writes with confidence on subjects as diverse as Montesquieu’s interpretation of the English Constitution (pp. 82 ff.), Plato’s account of the division of labor (pp. 59 ff.), and Comte’s stages of human evolution (pp. 292 ff.). Most subjects are treated with a broad brush, however: a quick review of the philosophical precursors, a brief account of the intellectual environment, and an account of the theoretical ideas.
Most satisfactory and substantive is Gordon’s exposition of the history of political economy. About 300 pages are devoted to this topic (dispersed over non-consecutive chapters). Gordon provides fairly detailed exposition of the main stages of development of political economy since the seventeenth century: the evolution of classical political economy (Quesnay, Smith, Malthus, Ricardo); Marxist economic theory; the marginalist revolution (Marshall, Pareto); and the Keynsian revolution. It is disappointing, however, that few substantive connections are made between developments in the history of political economy and the other historical topics discussed. Thus Gordon’s exposition of the history of economics as a discipline is essentially free-standing within the book, and one is tempted to think that this material would have been better published separately in a volume devoted to the topic. At the same time, it should be noted that there are already reasonably authoritative books available on this topic: Joseph Schumpeter’s magisterial History of Economic Analysis (Oxford, 1954) and Mark Blaug’s Economic Theory in Retrospect (Irwin, 1968). Gordon offers little on the history of political economy that could not be found in these two books.
The next largest topic treated by Gordon is the history of sociology and social theory: Spencer, Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, as well as a number of lesser figures. Spencer, Durkheim, and Weber each receive exposition of about 25 pages, while Marx’s sociology and economics are treated together in a separate chapter of greater length. The exposition is brief but adequate; Gordon identifies and explains the central ideas of each author fairly clearly and accurately. As is the case in the history of political economy, there already exist a number of standard books on the history and development of sociology and social theory. A History of Sociological Analysis, edited by Tom Bottomore and Robert Nisbet (Basic, 1978), covers the history of sociology in perhaps more insightful terms. And Raymond Aron’s Main Currents in Sociological Thought (Basic, 1965) is a coherent and insightful treatment of the full range of its subject. It is not obvious that Gordon’s book has added much to the existing literature in this area.
Least satisfactory is Gordon’s treatment of the history of political theory. Much of his discussion falls in the domain of political philosophy. In a chapter on political theory and political philosophy (chapter 4) Gordon offers a discussion of the political theories of Plato, Hobbes, Locke, and Montesquieu; later chapters present the thought of Hume and Smith (chapter 7), and Mill (chapter 11). Much of this material is fairly distant from Gordon’s own expertise, and his synthesis is not entirely convincing. Moreover, it is not entirely clear how this material relates to the book as a whole; these traditions of thought do not lead straightforwardly to empirical social science research in the twentieth century.
Though the book is put forward as a history of the social sciences, there are significant omissions. There is almost no discussion of the great eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historians (e.g., Macaulay, Mommsen, or Michelet), little discussion of the emergence of statistical thinking, and no discussion at all of the development of ethnography and anthropology.
Philosophy of social science. Turn now to Gordon’s contribution to topics within the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences. These contributions are somewhat diverse: a discussion of the role of law in social explanation (chapter 3), a brief discussion of the role of models in social science (chapter 6), a discussion of the logic of historical explanation (chapter 14), a discussion of the relation between biology and the social sciences (chapter 16), and a concluding chapter on positivism and its progeny (chapter 18). Are Gordon’s formulations of the issues and concepts accurate? And do his observations shed light on important topics in the philosophy of social science? This reader’s assessment is negative on both questions. These discussions fall short of a full treatment of the philosophy of social science. At no point does the author give a convincing and clear account of what questions a philosophy of social science ought to answer, or how we might go about formulating and criticizing such theories. And there is little effort to join his discussion to contemporary work in the philosophy of social science.
Consider what Gordon has to say about the logical status of social laws (chapter 3). Here Gordon distinguishes between empirical laws (generalizations), analytical laws (deductive inferences), and causal laws (assertions of causal relations among factors). This is not a very convincing taxonomy of different kinds of statements found in social science research. It would be more natural to say that there are empirical assertions, which may be inductive generalizations or causal hypotheses; and there are deductive inferences from empirical assertions, using the formal apparatus of deductive logic and mathematics. Gordon offers no analysis of the substantive question, what is the status of empirical regularities among social phenomena? Do they support counterfactuals or predictions? Are they analogous to laws of nature? Gordon’s discussion of “analytical laws” (roughly, deductive inferences) is problematic as well (pp. 38-43). This discussion fails to give an adequate definition of a valid argument, and it conflates the general property of deductive arguments (validity) with one type of Aristotelian syllogism (modus ponens; p. 40).
Other problems of methodology are treated as well, but generally in ways that will not satisfy philosophers. The topic of the relation between models and the world, for example, is an interesting one in the social sciences—particularly economics. Gordon devotes a short chapter to this problem (chapter 6). He provides a few examples of models drawn from economics (a supply-demand curve and the prisoners’ dilemma), and he makes the point that models abstract from many empirical details of the phenomena being modeled. But he does not take these issues far enough to shed light on the epistemic or methodological problems raised by various modeling techniques. One wants to know more. Are models approximately true? Are they merely instrumental? Do good models permit confident prediction? How is a model validated? Are there multiple standards of adequacy that ought to be imposed on models, or is predictive success the sole criterion?
Likewise, the chapter on the methodology of history (chapter 14) treats a wide range of issues without formulating a clear statement of what the central problems are in this area. There is discussion of the covering law model as a theory of historical explanation; some exposition of Hegel’s philosophy of history; some discussion of the role of understanding in history; and a section on the relation between events and laws. But there is little effort to show how these topics add up to a philosophically insightful analysis of the problem of acquiring and justifying knowledge about the past.
Assessment. This is a flawed book. It lacks focus; it is unnecessarily long; and it is somewhat unclear who its audience is expected to be. The historical chapters add little to the existing literature. The methodological chapters do not add up to a convincing contribution to the philosophy of the social sciences. They are not well integrated with the historical chapters; there is little relation, for example, between Gordon’s discussion of the role of laws in historical explanation (the Hempel debate) and his exposition of social scientists who have put forward law-like explanations of historical changes (Marx or Durkheim). And the lack of full publication information for references is a serious handicap to the reader. The author has simply tried to do too much. The result is an encyclopedic tract that lacks the connective tissue and depth that are needed to produce a coherent and original book.
Ethics 1999
M. R. Griffiths and J. R. Lucas address the intriguing space between the business world and the world of philosophical ethics. They offer to give a fresh look at the normative issues that arise in the everyday exercise of business decision-making with eyes informed both by sophisticated moral philosophy and the day-to-day experience of business life. The authors have thus attempted to write a book somewhat different from the typical work in business ethics. Lucas, an Oxford philosopher, and Griffiths, a senior British management consultant, attempt to provide a nuanced moral and practical framework within the context of which to analyze “ethical business decisions.” The authors attend to a flurry of recurring situational issues confronting the business decision-maker: investment decisions, employment decisions, obligations of truthfulness and fidelity to customers and suppliers, and the like. At a broader level, they consider such topics as the principles that ought to govern taxation and regulation, the obligations of multinational corporations in the developing world, and the standards that ought to regulate wage and salary policies. Throughout they attempt to formulate principles and perspectives on the basis of which to make practical decisions within an ethical framework.
The topics raised in this book are important ones indeed, and they fall within a field where the level of philosophical discourse is not high. Unfortunately, the authors have an ideological apple to peel: they are very much in favor of the justice, efficacy, and all-round virtues of the market, and very little moved by moral concerns about equality, distributive justice, exploitation, or the positive case for an activist state. The ratio of applause to criticism is quite high when it comes to the basic institutions of the market and the corporation. As a result, the book often says more about the worldview of the (slightly old-fashioned) business person than it does about the moral basis of decision-making in the world of business. Governments are bad, inefficient, and generally overly regulative; free choices within markets are good and beneficent. For example, “There is an inherent tendency for government money to stick to the fingers of government officials handling it.... Governments tend to suffer from megalomania” (p. 179). Much of the commentary in the book might have been more at home in old issues of the Economist than in a work of social philosophy.
The central positive contribution that the authors hope to make is to offer a more nuanced conception of the moral situation of the business decision-maker than is usually provided. The earlier chapters in the book—which are those devoted to the general problem of providing an analytical framework for characterizing the situation of the decision-maker—are insightful and philosophically sophisticated. Here the authors describe the situation of agency in which the business person is located, and they discuss in some useful detail the relationship between prudence, altruism, and cooperation. Likewise, they give a textured conception of the way that values find representation within the process of practical reasoning (pp. 10-11), and they offer a reasonable account of the concept of responsibility in the context of business (chapter 4). On their account, the decision-making position of the business person requires something more than prudence and profit-maximization: cooperation, trust, fair-dealing, and a reasonable concern for others are as much a part of business decision-making as calculated self-interest, on their view (p. 44). These chapters add up to a significant contribution to one aspect of the problem of business ethics: how are we to think about business decision-making that leaves a space for moral considerations?
However, the authors are somewhat less effective when it comes to elucidating the broader ethical problems that arise in the economy and the workplace. For example, their remark that businesses are, so to speak, “artificial families” (p. 20) rings a dissonant note when we consider the range of deformed relations found in many employer-employee relations. Their treatment of corruption (which they appear to regard as solely the province of “third-world” business practices) is similarly undeveloped—they refer to the problem of a multinational executive being confronted with the demand of an under-the-table gift to secure a contract (pp. 177-178), but then have little substantive to say about how he or she ought to think about the issue. Their comment that steep progressive taxation reflects a “communist” principle (p. 155) certainly does not advance the state of our understanding of the relative merits of various alternative ways of allocating tax burdens. And their generally hostile attitude toward trade unions (p. 95) appears to reflect ideology rather than argument.
Significant shortcomings are to be found in their treatment of the modern state and economy. Their treatment of a concern for equality within social and economic institutions is peremptory and negative. “Equality is not only an impracticable, but an incoherent, ideal” (p. 150). This is an odd position for a moral philosopher to take, given several centuries of efforts to articulate a moral theory of social equality. Is the value of equality less coherent than that of liberty, or individual rights, or autonomy? True, it is necessary to specify “equality in what respects?”, but this is not more difficult than the parallel questions, “free in what respects,” or “autonomous with respect to what?”. And if one wants to advocate a plausible form of egalitarianism, surely this would do as a starter: “Citizens ought to be treated equally by the state; citizens ought to have equal opportunities in pursuit of desirable positions within society; and citizens ought to have equal access to the basis prerequisites of a fully developed human life (education, health, nutrition).” One may accept, reject, or refine such a position; but surely it has prima facie credibility and ought to be addressed.
The authors are predictably negative about the use of the power of the state to bring about a redistribution of wealth and income. They assert that the goal of distributive justice is itself an incoherent one: “Even if distributive justice, rather than equality, is the aim, the State cannot distribute national wealth fairly, or adopt an overall incomes policy that is just, because the State does not exist for an agreed, overriding aim” (p. 150). This is dismissively brief in the context of the field of social and political philosophy, where rich and detailed efforts have been made to defining the conditions that establish procedural and distributive justice. Naturally, it remains possible to offer a skeptical position on the issue; but the position needs to be as reflective as possible of the best arguments available on the other side.
The treatment of the developing world is especially crude. They write, for example: “the spectre of uncontrolled population increase seems realised in the Third World” (p. 180). But this statement is contrary to the evidence that most developing countries are moving along a familiar track of demographic transition from a high fertility, high mortality regime to a low fertility, low mortality regime (World Bank, World Development Report 1993 [Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993], p. 30). It is not helpful for Griffiths and Lucas to hold forth on the topic without taking the trouble to understand the empirical processes at work. Likewise, the authors denigrate the quality of economic statistics in modern economies (and historical; pp. 180 ff.); but this is a set of challenges that economic historians have confronted with very substantial rigor. So it is unsatisfactory to simply write off our ability to estimate such quantities as the effective land tax, the rate of inflation, or the standard of living of English workers in the eighteenth century.
A minor concern: the authors generally use the first person singular “I”; but who does this represent? It is tempting to read the bald statements of approval of market institutions and corporate behavior as reflecting the views of Griffiths, the management consultant, rather than Lucas, the philosopher; but there is no specific indication.
In short, the book is admirable for its effort to place the topic of business ethics on a more general and nuanced philosophical level. The problems of applied ethics are severe and unavoidable for practitioners, and the authors make some useful contributions at the level of theory and concept—for example, in their analysis of the role and definition of values, mission, decision-making within the context of practical life. One wishes only that there more care had been given to the analysis of the moral context of business and less of a sense of pre-philosophical commitment to the virtues of the market and unrestrained business choice.
Journal of Asian Studies 1991
A general notion of human rights has played a central role in the theory of international ethics since World War II. Such a theory—as formulated, for example, in the United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights—is designed to provide minimal standards and protections that governments must provide for their citizens. Such rights include civil and political rights (freedom of expression and association, democratic rights of political participation), rights of personal security (freedom from arbitrary arrest, torture, or death), and (perhaps) economic rights (rights to health care, employment, or education). The theory of human rights is not the whole of a theory of international justice; instead, it functions as a baseline set of guarantees that governments are urged to provide for their citizens, on pain of international censure.
The history of human rights institutions and practices in this century raises a number of difficult questions. What is the moral force of an international declaration on human rights? Is the notion of a right itself an ethnocentric Western construct? What if practices in some countries (e.g. the practice of arranged marriage) flatly contravene the declaration— which norm trumps the other? Alison Dundes Renteln takes on several of these topics in this book, organized chiefly around the issue of relativism and universalism. She defends the position that ethical relativism is true as an empirical description of the moral practices of diverse cultures around the world. She takes this to amount to two things: that there is a great deal of moral diversity in different cultures, and that there is no rational ground for maintaining that one culture’s moral ideas are superior to another’s. But if this is so, then what justification can there be for insisting on a doctrine of human rights, since this is, or may be perceived to be, an ethnocentric Western idea at odds with indigenous moral ideas and principles? In some cases Renteln is content to say, so much the worse for human rights: “Women’s rights and children’s rights are problematic because societies do not all believe that these groups deserve special status. So, to assert the existence of universal standards for them is ethnocentric” (p. 60). But she has a more positive response as well. She holds that though there is no philosophical basis for asserting the moral primacy of human rights, it may turn out that there are empirical regularities across the world’s moral cultures that permit us to argue that certain human rights are respected by all cultures. There may be what she calls “homeomorphic” equivalents to human rights in all moral cultures (p. 11). She describes these regularities as empirical universals, and regards it as an important task for ethnography to identify such universals. Renteln illustrates this approach with an extended analysis of principles of retribution in a variety of cultures. She believes that a principle of proportional retribution is a plausible candidate for such a cross‑ cultural universal (p. 95), and one that may support international adherence to some human rights. Her conclusion, then (unless I have misread her) is that the theory of human rights should be restricted to requirements that are in fact respected by all the world’s moral cultures. And she believes that there will turn out to be enough common moral substance to support a contentful doctrine of universal human rights.
These are important issues, and Renteln does us a service in raising them. But her case is flawed by its lack of philosophical depth. (Significantly, much of the philosophical literature that Renteln discusses is from the 1940s and 1950s.) The topics of relativism and universalism have been discussed a great deal in recent years by philosophers and ethicists, and the theoretical issues are more complex than Renteln admits. In particular, the fact of moral diversity across cultures by no means entails the skeptical conclusion that there are no rational grounds for favoring one set of moral principles over another. The task of formulating a rationally supportable theory of universal human rights requires that we sort out acceptable cultural variation in practices, concerning which the theory of human rights should be silent, from valid moral constraints on states—e.g. “no torturing of prisoners”—which can be justifiably imposed whether or not indigenous moral beliefs sanction the practice. So Renteln is overly ready to accept the ethical relativist conclusion without making enough of an effort to canvass the philosophical resources available to support a substantive moral theory of human rights. More satisfactory in this regard are several earlier works on international ethics—e.g., Henry Shue’s Basic Rights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980) and Charles Beitz’s Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).
Political Theory 1990
G. A. Cohen’s previous book, Karl Marx’s Theory of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), set the terms of much subsequent development of analytical Marxism. Cohen’s reconstruction of the main ideas of historical materialism, his interpretation of the primacy of the forces of production over the relations of production, and his argument that historical materialism depends unavoidably on functionalist explanations have permitted a qualitative increase in the level of rigor and clarity with which issues in Marxist theory are discussed. Readers interested in Marxist theory will therefore look to Cohen’s most recent book with anticipation.
History Labour and Freedom (HLF) is a collection of essays that have largely been published since the appearance of KMTH. (Two essays appeared in 1974—prior to KMTH.) Cohen has in most cases brought the arguments up to date and has made efforts to establish the linkages among them more clearly than the original versions might have done. The book is divided into three parts. Part I consists largely of replies to important lines of criticism of some of the central arguments in KMTH; Part II contains some of Cohen’s own second thoughts about and revisions to his theory of historical materialism since the publication of KMTH; and Part III consists of a handful of essays on the circumstances of labor and freedom within capitalism.
Much of the book takes the form of detailed replies to criticism of KMTH. In essay 5 Cohen addresses problems that have been raised by Joshua Cohen, Richard Miller, and Andrew Levine and Erik Olin Wright concerning Cohen’s development thesis (according to which there is an autonomous tendency for the forces of production to expand over time). He reconsiders the problem of fettering—the ways in which a set of relations of production may be said to constrain the further development of the productive forces (essay 6). And he refines his account of the supposed relation between base and superstructure (essay 2). However, the reactive dimension of HLF is perhaps the least absorbing for the typical reader. It falls in the category of “normal science”—refinements of the theoretical structure to take account of subtle difficulties that have arisen. The question that the typical reader will naturally want to answer is this: what is new in Cohen’s thinking about Marxism since KMTH? Though much of HLF is by way of refining the arguments first advanced in KMTH, there are some important new themes and emphases as well.
First, Cohen attaches more importance to individual agency in this book than he did in KMTH. One issue that previously divided Cohen from other analytical Marxists (particularly John Roemer, Jon Elster, and Adam Przeworski) is the importance the latter attached to issues of individual rationality. “Rational-choice” Marxists are particularly concerned to provide micro-foundations for Marxist theory—accounts of the circumstances of choice of representative workers, say, that would make it rational for them to support revolutionary movements. In KMTH Cohen’s general view is to regard these issues as distinctly secondary. It is the macro-level claims of functional relations between forces and relations of production that are at the heart of Marxism, and the “elaborations” that may be provided to underwrite these functional relations are less important. In “Historical Inevitability and Revolutionary Agency” Cohen focuses his attention on the individual-level underpinnings of social change in a useful discussion of the problem of revolutionary motivation. This treatment broadens his account of the processes of historical change to give more attention to the individual-level processes that underlie it.
A second new emphasis in HLF is a more explicit acknowledgement of the partial autonomy of culture from economic structure. Cohen now distinguishes between “restricted” and “inclusive” historical materialism (p. 155-159). Inclusive historical materialism is the view that the development of the forces and relations of production has primacy over other aspects of social life—a view that Cohen appears to have held in KMTH. Restricted historical materialism commits itself to the development thesis for the productive forces and asserts primacy of the productive forces over the relations of production but does not assert a necessary relation between that development and other developments (in particular, cultural development). “Restricted historical materialism does not say that the principal features of spiritual existence are materially or economically explained. It requires of spiritual phenomena only that they do not disrupt the independently determined material and economic sequence” (p. 159). This distinction increases the empirical adequacy of historical materialism by conceding the substantial autonomy of cultural developments; and Cohen makes a plausible theoretical case for limiting historical materialism in this way.
A third new theme in HLF is perhaps the most significant in the development of Cohen’s own political theorizing. This is his argument that classical Marxism is defective in its philosophical anthropology. Marx offers a conception of humanity as homo faber—individuals realize themselves through creative, productive labor. Cohen suggests that this view, though insightful, is insufficient; instead, it is necessary to consider the importance of individual self definition and self knowledge. In “Reconsidering Historical Materialism” (significantly, one of the most recent essays in the book) Cohen writes, “I claim, then, that there is a human need to which Marxist observation is commonly blind, one different from and as deep as the need to cultivate one’s talents. It is the need to be able to say not what I can do but who I am, satisfaction of which has historically been found in identification with others in a shared culture based on nationality, or race, or religion, or some slice or amalgam thereof” (p. 140).
A final theme that finds substantial treatment in HLF is not precisely new, but falls outside the scope of KMTH. This is Cohen’s effort to provide a sustained treatment of the problem of freedom within capitalism. This is a longstanding concern of Cohen’s and finds expression in the final Part of the book. The problem is this: capitalism embodies juridical freedom for workers, but subjects them to economic pressures that might be counted coercive. So in what sense, if any, are workers within capitalism free? For example, Cohen considers whether disadvantaged workers who take hazardous jobs do so because of economic coercion. This issue, Cohen believes, comes down to whether the worker has an acceptable or reasonable alternative to accepting the hazardous job (p. 247).
Unlike KMTH, History Labour and Freedom is not the statement of a major new program for analytical Marxism. A great deal of the book takes the form of highly competent theoretical refinement and replies to criticism rather than major theoretical innovation. But it is a significant contribution to ongoing debates within Marxism nonetheless. Cohen’s discussion of agency, his efforts to come to grips with rational choice Marxism, and his renewed attention to the problem of culture within historical materialism give the reader ample justification for reading the book. And there are enough innovative ideas in play in the recent essays to let us hope that Cohen is proceeding toward a political philosophy of his own to contribute to the foundations of democratic socialism.
Political Theory 1993
This is a book about the experience of domination and indignity that power relations impose upon the powerless. As such it is an important step forward in James Scott’s efforts to provide a language in terms of which to understand underclass politics. In Weapons of the Weak (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) Scott made clear his conviction that it is essential to explore the subjective side of class relations—the experience of subordination and the cultural vocabulary in terms of which subordination is lived in particular social circumstances. In this book Scott furthers this concern through a careful analysis of the symbolic politics of resistance. Scott’s central innovation in this work is his distinction between public transcripts (“the open interaction between subordinates and those who dominate;” p. 2) and hidden transcripts (“discourse that takes place ‘offstage,’ beyond direct observation by powerholders;” p. 4). Postulating that there is a sharp divide between the behavior, language, and customs that dominated groups assume in public, and the language, jokes, and criticisms that structure their lives within the back streets, slave quarters, or rice paddies of their within-group experience, Scott attempts to provide tools for excavating the latter.
Both public transcripts and hidden transcripts have effects on the everyday politics of power. The public transcript is by way of a libretto for the dominated, a stylized public performance through which they adopt the forms of deference and respect for the powerful that are needed to avoid punishment. But Scott maintains that this performance is only skin-deep. The dominated are by no means taken in by their own affirmations of the justice and good manners of their masters, and behind the scenes we may expect to hear much raucous laughing, merciless lampooning, and bitter criticism. “Offstage, where subordinates may gather outside the intimidating gaze of power, a sharply dissonant political culture is possible. Slaves in the relative safety of their quarters can speak the words of anger, revenge, self‑ assertion that they must normally choke back when in the presence of the masters and mistresses” (p. 18). It is Scott’s aim to shed light on this hidden transcript, with the idea that an understanding of this level of consciousness of the dominated is much closer to the reality of their lived experience and provides a better basis for understanding their political behavior.
A particularly striking feature of this book is Scott’s deliberate effort to couch the argument at a distance from primary source material. Scott’s previous books were strongly rooted in Southeast Asia and extensive rural fieldwork. This book isn’t about Malaysian land tenure or American slavery; it is about the experience of domination and resistance, with striking illustrations drawn from a broad range of social settings. This approach allows Scott the level of abstraction needed to make the general points he wants to make; at the same time, it is convincingly connected to a wealth of historical material on slavery, feudalism, and peasant life. Crucial in this context is Scott’s ability to use both Asian and European historical materials. Scott has succeeded in arriving at a level of discussion that allows him to fruitfully analyze and interpret processes of social life drawn from Malaysia, Russia, India, England, Chile, and the U.S. without a Eurocentric slant.
The framework of public and hidden transcripts imposes a serious methodological constraint, however: How is the investigator to gain access to the hidden transcript, since it is generally members of the dominating group who observe and record the behavior of the dominated groups? Is it not inevitable, then, that historical sources will present only the public transcript, leaving the hidden transcript permanently unavailable to the investigator? Scott demonstrates (as other scholars concerned with popular culture and underclass politics have shown as well) that the voice of the powerless is audible, if faint, in the historical record. He draws fluently on a mass of empirical and historical material concerning a variety of social arrangements embodying the fabric of domination and resistance—European feudalism, American slavery, Asian land tenancy relations, and prisons, labor camps, and public schools. And he makes effective use of available sources that give relatively direct expression to the voices of dominated groups—slave narratives, peasant testimony, and folk stories and legends.
In addition to these varied empirical sources, Scott also skillfully employs a number of literary works to better understand the feel of the hidden transcript. Scott has identified dozens of texts—works by George Eliot, George Orwell, Euripedes, Brer Rabbit, Milan Kundera, Jean Genet, Emile Zola, and many others—in which the divide between the public and hidden transcripts is directly at issue. These sources have some evidentiary value; for example, Scott writes of George Eliot, “Such were Eliot’s powers of observation and insight into her rural society that many of the key issues of domination and resistance can be teased from her story of Mrs. Poyser’s encounter with the squire” (p. 7). But more important is their expository value. They permit Scott to communicate to the reader his view of the way the hidden transcript works; this rich understanding can then be deployed to interpret the empirical and historical evidence.
Scott’s contention that the hidden transcript is clear-sightedly critical of existing relations of domination inevitably comes into conflict with theories of ideology and hegemony, according to which dominated groups come to share the values and perceptions of the dominant group. Scott argues— successfully, in my view—that what is taken as hegemony of dominant-group ideas is in fact often only an uncritical observation of the performance of the public transcript, and that the dominated are perfectly capable of formulating their own criticisms of the social relations in which they find themselves. “A combination of adaptive strategic behavior and the dialogue implicit in most power relations ensures that public action will provide a constant stream of evidence that appears to support an interpretation of ideological hegemony” (p. 70). Scott’s discussion of alternative theories of quiescence (chapter four) is substantial and convincing; if his arguments are accepted, then a major rethinking of the role of ideology in class societies is required.
Scott’s concern with interpreting the symbolic and cultural content of resistance has strong affinities with interpretive sociology and the work of Geertz, Turner, and others. At the same time, Scott has always been concerned with identifying commonalities and general features of social life. He does not adopt the position of so many anthropologists, that the experience of the particular culture under scrutiny are unique and sui generis. Instead, he is interested in identifying common threads that recur in a variety of societies and cultures—threads created by the commonalities of human experience and the social relations of domination and exploitation that recur across cultures. So this is a very interesting and important project: to provide a basis for a more abstract and generalizing description of the subjective side of social life—the lived experience of domination, exploitation, and repression.
In short, Domination and the Arts of Resistance is an important contribution to the study of the politics and lived experience of power. It provides an important new paradigm in terms of which we can conceptualize the experience and agency of domination. It weaves together an imposing body of empirical and historical scholarship. And it makes engaging use of literary sources in developing the central theoretical construct and giving it nuance and shading. The product is a compelling and richly textured argument that will be essential reading for anyone concerned with the politics of domination and subordination.
Ethics 1992
Robert Meister takes up the very contemporary issue of political identity in this work, with the overall effort of finding within Marx’s own theorizing a basis for a richer conception of the subjective side of politics. Orthodox Marxism had, most would agree, an overly mechanical conception of political identity in terms of class position. Post-Marxist critics have focused on the many forms and origins of political identity: various kinds of non-economic domination, religious traditions, ethnic-group loyalties, and the like. Meister argues that Marx’s own critical writings lend support to this non-economistic conception of the political. Given that many who think about this topic today tend to distinguish sharply between “interest”-based and “identity”-based theories of political behavior, this is an engaging effort.
Meister’s reading of Marx emphasizes the critical and methodological sides of Marx’s work, returning frequently to the Hegelian origins of some Marxian ideas. For this reader the most interesting chapters are those in which Meister addresses problems of democracy: the relation between suffrage and equality (chapter 6), the character of group identity formation (including nationalism and ethnic identity; chapter 7), and the relation between public and private interests, and various levels of group interests (chapter 8). The book shows a high degree of scholarship; it moves easily from detailed discussion of Marx’s writings to analysis of Marx’s contemporaries to the large recent literature on these topics. Marx’s writings continue to be a source of insight into the workings of modern capitalist society, and Meister’s book succeeds in suggesting some new perspectives on these insights.
Philosophical Review1991
With this work Carol Gould presents a noteworthy contribution to the theory of democracy. The book provides a sustained argument for extending the institutions of democratic self-regulation beyond the sphere of politics into economic self-management; and it provides a careful reconsideration of most of the strands of democratic theorizing that have unfolded in the past several decades. Gould’s arguments are grounded in a theory of positive human freedom that owes much to Marx’s early writings, but is responsive as well to a wide spectrum of recent writings on freedom.
The central argument is that democracy depends ultimately on the right of self-development, and that this right has far-reaching consequences for most of the arrangements of modern social life. In particular, Gould argues that the values of self-development and positive freedom mandate economic democracy and workers’ self-management. But she also extends her analysis into the theory of human rights (chapter 7), the management of technology (chapter 10), the democratic personality (chapter 11), and the implications of democratic theory for international relations (chapter 12). The breadth of the book, and the variety of topics which it considers, precludes a complete discussion here; so I will focus on several topics of central interest.
Gould’s argument is grounded on her theory of freedom as self‑ development. She characterizes this conception as “the freedom to develop oneself through one’s actions, or as a process of realizing one’s projects through activity in the course of which one forms one’s character and develops capacities” (p. 40). This conception involves several dimensions: capacity for choice, absence of constraining conditions, and the availability of means (p. 40). Joining the old debate over positive and negative freedom, Gould attempts to show that the value of individual self-development within reciprocal social relations entails a right to a family of positive freedoms.
Coordinate with freedom, on Gould’s account, is the value of equality. Equality too depends on the conditions of self-development. “I shall argue here that justice should be interpreted as a principle of equal rights to the conditions of self-development, or equal positive freedom” (p. 60). (She returns to two paradoxes that appear to flow from this conception in chapter 5.) The other basic value that Gould develops is reciprocity. At its core, reciprocity refers to “the reciprocal recognition [by persons] of their equal agency” (p. 72). This conception goes beyond the instrumental reciprocity described by Robert Axelrod and others, in that it involves each agent’s taking seriously some of the interests of other agents—what Gould refers to as “common interests.” Common aims are those “whose achievement realizes a common good or satisfies a common interest, which is not merely an aggregation of particular goods or individual interests” (pp. 74-75).
The requirement that political and economic institutions should be arranged democratically flows from these conceptions of freedom and equality, according to Gould. She argues for a regulative principle of democracy: “every person who engages in a common activity with others has an equal right to participate in making decisions concerning such activity” (p. 84). This principle has implications for both political and economic arrangements. In politics Gould argues that decision-making should be participatory when possible and representative when not. And economic institutions should be based on a principle of self-management.
Gould’s account of economic justice and worker self-management is probably her most important theme. She holds that a serious shortcoming of most contemporary theories of justice is their sole focus on distributive outcomes. Gould argues, however, that the particular arrangements and decision-making processes that give rise to the distributive outcomes are equally the subject of the theory of justice. In particular, the requirements of democracy, freedom, and equality have implications for the organization of economic activity. “I propose a conception of economic justice in which the right to participate in economic decision-making in the production process, that is, workers’ self-management, is understood as a requirement of justice” (p. 133). Gould requires that self-management should be focused at the level of the firm (p. 144): workers within a given unit of production make the decisions concerning “planning and organization of production, . . . as well as rates of production, allocation of work, working hours, work discipline” (p. 144); and workers within a given unit would determine income and investment policy as well.
Gould appears to regard these requirements as embodying the central concerns of democratic socialism because they abolish the exploitation of labor by capital. However, the arrangements Gould describes are compatible with continuing exploitation—in this case, exploitation of labor-intensive industries by capital-intensive industries. Here John Roemer’s general theory of exploitation is applicable: it is not the market in labor power but rather the differential distribution of property that gives rise to exploitation (A General Theory of Exploitation and Class [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982]). So if we imagine an economy populated by worker-managed firms in which there are unequal capital endowments per worker; and if we suppose that each firm aims to maximize its rate of profit; then on Roemer’s line of reasoning, we should expect that resource-rich firms will derive incomes above the social average, while resource-poor firms will derive below-average incomes. This circumstance presents a problem for any theory of decentralized market socialism, but it is a particular problem for Gould because she appears to assume that the economic institutions she describes are preclude exploitation.
Some mention should be made here of Gould’s view of the proper method of justification for political philosophy. She holds that an ethical theory may be justified or criticized through consideration of the “social ontology” on which it depends: the assumptions about human nature and social relations that are presupposed by the theory. In this way Gould hopes to steer a course between foundationalism and subjectivism in ethics (pp. 114 ff.). This approach requires that we evaluate the social ontology presupposed by alternative ethical theories, and choose that theory with the most satisfactory social ontology. It would appear, however, that Gould attaches too much justificatory strength to considerations of social ontology. She writes, for example, that “the value of reciprocity has its ontological ground in the relational character of individuals, specifically, their interdependence in realizing their projects and satisfying their needs” (p. 131). The latter characteristic, however, could equally be said to ground a Smithian model of rationally self-interested individuals realizing their shared interests through a market mechanism. Gould’s social ontology does not uniquely determine a particular set of values—whether freedom, equality, reciprocity, or democracy. And presumably there are other social ontologies that are equally compatible with these values. So it appears that the social ontology gambit does not take us very far in terms of justifying a particular moral theory.
Rethinking democracy is a substantial addition to the literature on democracy and democratic socialism. Gould offers powerful arguments for the extension of democratic institutions to the economy and the workplace. The detailed engagement with contemporary debates within political theory is impressive, and the developed theory of freedom and democracy that Gould puts forward will warrant serious attention by political philosophers.
Philosophy of the Social Sciences 1992
Ernest Gellner has been an interested observer of Soviet social science for at least two decades, and this volume represents some of the fruits of his observations. The book takes its lead from a number of recent Soviet publications in anthropology and related disciplines. The social sciences in the Soviet Union have awakened from their long dogmatic Stalinist slumber, and much interesting work is being done. So the Western reader will be very interested in Gellner’s findings. But this is not the limit of the book’s appeal, for a number of important themes in the philosophy of social science emerge out of the essays as well. Gellner is an acute reader with a lively interest in theoretical controversies, so his reading of these Soviet developments adds up to a significant contribution to social theory.
Gellner is at his best in identifying the underlying frameworks of analysis and explanation that are implicit in current Soviet social science; he also does an admirable job of relating developments in Soviet ethnography and historical studies with British anthropology. A central theme—perhaps the central theme—is the role of Marxist theory, and the theory of historical materialism in particular, within contemporary Soviet social science. Gellner’s chief finding is that Marxism continues to define the central terms of the paradigm, but that a much wider range of theoretical controversies— sometimes penetrating to the heart of the Marxist framework—is possible in comparison to previous decades. Moreover, Marxism now does not function merely as an ideological constraint on social research, but rather as a research framework suggesting lines of investigation and explanatory schemata. Gellner finds that the central contrast between Soviet and British anthropology concerns the distinction between static, functionalist analysis and historical, evolutionary analysis of social forms. (He characterizes this distinction as “functionalist” and “evolutionist” approaches to anthropology. One might complain, however, that this is a somewhat old-fashioned view of British anthropology, since much current work in Britain is substantially more historically minded than this description would suggest.) Gellner suggests that the Marxist framework of social forms (modes of production) serves at least as well as the dominant British paradigm of Malinowskian functionalism to organize thinking about non-Western societies.
Gellner’s treatment is especially appealing for its non-chauvinist tone; he is not concerned to establish the superiority of one paradigm over the other, but rather—based on a long personal experience of Soviet social science—to lay out some of the central features of the Soviet paradigm.
A central topic of interest that divides British and Soviet thinking about social science is this: to what extent is it fruitful to search for general patterns of social development, and to what extent should anthropology, history, and related disciplines restrict themselves to the particular historical processes found in particular social circumstances? Gellner reminds us that Malinowskian anthropology on the whole favors the latter, whereas Soviet scholarship appears still to prefer the former (while acknowledging the ubiquity of alternative pathways of development, underdetermination of social change, repetitive cycles, and stochastic events).
Many of the essays revolve around the problem of the status of primitive societies. Are they classless? Do they have political institutions? Is there a single theoretical framework in terms of which to understand pre-modern societies? The problem of pre-modern societies is particularly important in Soviet studies, Gellner asserts, because of the normative role that the notion of “primitive communalism” plays within Marxism. Gellner discusses recent Soviet controversies over the Asiatic Mode of Production, feudalism in Africa, pastoralism, and ethnic identity. And he discusses recent efforts within Soviet anthropology to provide a more adequate basis for understanding pre-capitalist societies by acknowledging that the relations of production are not primary in every society: primitive societies are characterized by “natural” relations of domination (kinship) and pre-capitalist societies are characterized by “political” relations of domination (relations of coercion).
A striking omission in the book is any extended discussion of the quality and character of Soviet fieldwork. The topics considered are largely theoretical problems about how best to view human communities within a historical context; but the empirical core of anthropology must surely involve detailed study of particular communities. In his discussion of Soviet treatments of nomadism (chapter 5) or of modern ethnicity (chapter 6), for example, the central themes have to do with the role of these categories within classical historical materialism. But there is no suggestion of extensive fieldwork performed by Soviet investigators, either within the Soviet Union itself or in other places, in which the particulars of nomadic communities or ethnic groups are explored. Likewise, in his survey of Soviet debate over whether the concept of feudalism can be applied to African societies (chapter 4), there is no indication of detailed, first-hand ethnographic investigation of any particular African community. Instead, the Soviet arguments appear to be based largely on historical evidence. If Soviet anthropology is weak on empirical ethnographic research (perhaps for institutional or political reasons), then this is surely an important defect in the discipline; if, on the other hand, there is extensive Soviet fieldwork available, it should be treated in the context of this book.
An unexpected strength of the book is the contribution it makes to current discussions within analytic Marxism—though Gellner himself is far from a Marxist. Gellner treats the problem of the relation between the forces and relations of production, and between these factors and culture; he addresses the problem of the “relative autonomy” of the state; and he is sensitive to the problem of providing an account of the social mechanisms through which postulated functional relationships obtain (for example, between the needs of the productive forces and the characteristics of the system of property relations). Readers who have followed these issues through the writings of G. A. Cohen, Jon Elster, and others will find much of interest here.
In short, this is a book that justifies a close reading. It is a highly absorbing description of current Soviet thinking on a range of related topics that will be of interest to all of us interested in knowing what Soviet social science is up to today. And it adds up to an extended and penetrating discussion, from one essay to another, of a number of important foundational topics in the social sciences—for example, the status of materialist explanation, the character of social development, the assumptions we must make in thinking about pre-modern societies, the role of generalization in social science, the relation between synchronic and diachronic studies, or the relations between coercion and production. In the end the book is a highly engaging piece of philosophy of social science as well as an introduction to current Soviet social theorizing.
Economic Development and Cultural Change 1992
Loren Brandt argues for a major reinterpretation of the performance of the Chinese rural economy in the late Qing and Republican periods. Many observers have regarded this period as one of agricultural stagnation, falling real rural incomes, worsening tenancy relations, and increasing rural inequalities. These unfavorable economic developments are often taken as setting the stage for the successful peasant revolution in China. Brandt argues against each of these assertions. He holds that commercialization progressed rapidly during this period, bringing greater integration between domestic and international markets in rice, cotton, and other important commodities; and that commercialization in turn induced growth in agricultural output, improvement in the agricultural terms of trade, rising real incomes for farmers and laborers alike, and a probable overall reduction in the range of income inequalities in the countryside of central and eastern China. In fact, Brandt draws a parallel between the performance of the Chinese rural economy during this period of rapid commercialization and its performance during the period of the post-Mao rural reforms; in each case, he asserts, the gains were the result of greater market activity and specialization.
These are important and controversial claims; if sustained, they require a significant reevaluation of the state and direction of change of the Chinese rural economy in the early twentieth century. Brandt’s position depends on several legs: his argument for the extensive integration of rural China into the world economy, his argument that rural wages and labor productivity were rising in this period, and his argument that income inequalities probably improved somewhat throughout this period. How convincing are Brandt’s arguments for these claims? I will argue that the evidence that Brandt puts forward, while suggestive, falls far short of clinching his case; so the debate will continue.
Price integration Brandt makes the strongest case for the first point— China’s extensive commercialization and integration into the world economy. Brandt concedes that only a small fraction of China’s economy depended on internationally traded goods, but he argues that the small volume was sufficient to link commodity prices to international levels rather than domestic demand. Surveying rice price data for South China, Siam, Burma, India, and Saigon (the latter being the chief rice exporting markets in Asia), he finds that there are high and rising price correlations between South China and each of the major exporting markets (19). And he finds, further, that the interior Chinese economy showed similar integration with respect to rice prices. Without providing comparable detail Brandt suggests that these results obtain as well in markets for cotton and wheat—supporting the contention that the Chinese rural economy was highly commercialized, reasonably competitive, and extensively integrated into the international economy. Brandt’s arguments here are fairly convincing, and he has marshalled useful price data on Asian rice marketing that will be of use to other scholars as well. At the same time, this is the least novel portion of the argument; few would disagree with the conclusion that the Chinese rural economy was price-responsive and competitive in the period in question. And the well-documented shock to the Chinese economy produced by the Great Depression—through its disruption of cotton prices—would be unintelligible except on the assumption that Chinese cotton markets were integrated with international prices. (Philip Huang discusses this aspect of Chinese commercialization in The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China; 1985:128.)
Output Let us turn now to a more controversial part of Brandt’s argument: his contention that output outpaced population growth during this period (106 ff.) and that rural real wages and labor productivity were rising significantly. Brandt argues, contrary to much received opinion, that per capita output was rising in the farm economy during this period: “Between the 1890s and 1930s, agricultural output in Central and East China increased more than two times the estimated rate of population growth of 0.6 percent per annum” (178)—or in other words, a 1.2% increase in output, accumulating to an increase of 70 percent over the forty-five year period. Is this a credible conclusion? Brandt holds that other interpreters have been misled by the fall in grain commerce flowing from the Middle and Upper Yangzi paralleled by a rise in foreign rice imports (39). He believes that this shift represents a reorganization of Chinese agricultural markets rather than a decline in agricultural product. Because of shifts in international rice prices, South China came to import for its urban rice consumption from Indochina and Siam rather than the Yangzi (51). But Brandt estimates that this drop in rice trade between the Yangzi and South China was more than matched by an increase in demand in Yangzi cities, resulting by the 1920s in an increase in demand of more than 20 million piculs of rice (53). This argument, however, depends entirely on estimates of rising demand (through rising urban and non-agricultural populations); it would be more convincing if it were supported as well by some direct estimate of rice output. Aggregate output is affected by two chief variables: amount of acreage sown and changes in labor productivity. Dwight Perkins judged that productivity remained constant and rice acreage declined between 1914-1918 and 1931‑ 1937, resulting in a decline in domestic rice production of about 5.8 percent for China as a whole and 11.9 percent for East and Central China (Perkins 1969:276). However, these declines are offset by substantial increases in wheat cultivation (Perkins 1969:250), implying a small net increase in grain production. Brandt disputes Perkins’s rice production data, largely on the ground that it is implausible that there was a drop in cultivated acreage in the early twentieth century. However, Perkins’s data does not have this implication; Brandt ignores Perkins’s data on wheat cultivation showing that wheat acreage increased more than the amount of decline in rice cultivation. And Brandt’s positive case is weak, since he does not provide any direct evidence of rising rice output in the region, and (as he himself notes), there are alternative possible explanations that could account for the required increases in rice marketing (54). His case is unconvincing, therefore; his arguments do not establish that there was an increase of per capita rice output between 1915 and 1936. This does not show that there was not such an increase; it may have been so, but the data offered in this study does not establish it.
Real wages A particularly important part of Brandt’s argument is his analysis of farm wages. Brandt argues that real farm wages were rising during the period; that farm wages were closely linked to other forms of employment; and that it is reasonable to conclude on the basis of these points that rural welfare was rising during the period. The data that Brandt employs here takes the form of scattered cross-sectional studies of wages for seasonal and long-term agricultural laborers. Upon inspection this data is inadequate to the task, however. The Royal Asiatic Society compiled wage data for 1888 in fifteen places; there is cross-sectional data for about 700 counties for the 1930s; and the Buck surveys reported time series wage data for about 100 counties in the 1930s. Brandt converts the data from each of these sources into grain-equivalence wages (piculs of rice). Between three and four piculs of rice are required for subsistence. On the basis of the Royal Asiatic Society reports Brandt concludes that the grain equivalent of the cash component of the annual agricultural wage for the 1880s was about 5 piculs; for the 1930s he finds that the corresponding value was between 4.21 piculs (Sichuan) and 13.86 piculs (Shandong), with a mean of 9.87 piculs (table 5.2, pp. 114-115). This suggest a rough doubling of the rural real wage and an annual increase of about 1.5 percent—or does it? First, these data sources are not particularly convincing, particularly for the earlier period. The 1888 estimate depends on an extremely small data set on the basis of which to estimate the level of the wage for rural China (fairly casual observations in fifteen locations, only six of which provide data on the annual wage). And since this data does not allow Brandt to estimate the value of in-kind payments (which were substantial), it is impossible to estimate the total value of the wage. The 1930s data are more extensive but show substantial variance, suggesting that the data is not particularly reliable (it is hard to imagine that the real farm wage—and on Brandt’s argument, rural welfare as well—in Shandong would be three times that in adjacent Henan). Here too the problem of the value of in-kind payments arises; if in-kind payments declined in value in the later period (as would be expected with the advance of commercialization), then comparison of changes in the cash component overestimates the increase in the wage. If, for example, the value of in-kind payments declined from 60 percent to 40 percent of the wage, then a doubling of the cash wage represents only a 33 percent increase in the total wage. (Brandt considers the problem posed by in-kind payments, but does not take it seriously enough.) So it is hard to regard these data sets as establishing reasonable estimates of the farm wage for either period; the most they allow us to conclude is that it is unlikely that the real wage fell during this period.
The final source that Brandt analyzes on this topic is the time series data collected by John Lossing Buck in the 1930s. This data was collected by a number of investigators in about 100 places in China for the time period 1901-1933. Investigators were asked to collect the recollections of three well-informed villagers in 1933 on the level of the cash farm wage for this time period. Brandt normalizes these cash estimates using his own price index and then computes growth rates for each place surveyed by regressing the resulting real wages against time. He finds a range of positive growth rates for twenty-one out of twenty-nine places, with an average rate of growth for all places of .9 percent. Over a period of forty-five years this would result in a 50 percent increase in the real wage. If taken at face value this is a significant, though hardly startling, improvement in the real wage. However, it is difficult to take this finding at face value. First (as Brandt himself acknowledges), the data themselves are questionable, since they rely on the recollections of observers over a thirty-year lapse of time. Second, this data reports only the cash component of the wage; so if there was a decline in the value of in-kind payments, this data will overestimate the rate of increase in the total wage. Finally, other researchers have arrived at substantially lower estimates of growth on the basis of the same data. Thomas Rawski analyzes the same data using the same regression technique but a different price series; his estimates for the provinces included in Brandt’s study (Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui, Jiangxi, Hupeh, and Hunan) imply average growth rates of -.03% (1901-1933), .43% (1914-1933), and .13% (1925-1933). Aggregating these rates over a forty-five-year period, these values imply a fall of one percent, a rise of 21 percent, and a rise of 6 percent depending on the time period considered. In the best case, then, Rawski’s analysis implies a growth rate less than half that estimated by Brandt; in the worst case his data implies a slight drop in the real farm wage in East and Central China.
There are enough uncertainties in these calculations of the behavior of the real rural wage, therefore, to make Brandt’s conclusion that the real wage was rising significantly largely unconvincing; it may have been so, but this data does not establish the point. If anything, reconsideration of this data appears to imply that any increase in the rural real wage was less than .5 percent per year over the forty-five year period in question, and may have been zero. Rawski’s estimate of an average rate of growth of the real wage of about .4 percent is more credible on the basis of this evidence; but the uncertainty of the available evidence affects his conclusion equally severely.
We might also consider what implications a slow rise in the real farm wage (if established) would have for the state of rural welfare. For it is possible for the farm wage to rise slowly while average rural income is falling—if, for example, there is less employment overall, fewer days worked, or a larger pool of unemployed or underemployed rural people. In other words, a slow improvement in the farm wage paid is consistent with the common perception of a general worsening of rural conditions in the first several decades of the twentieth century.
Productivity What inferences about productivity does this analysis of farm wages permit? Brandt reasons along neo-classical lines: the wage is determined by the marginal product of labor; if wages are rising, we can infer that the marginal product is rising, from which Brandt infers in turn that the average product (a measure of productivity) was rising as well. And in a competitive labor market with few barriers between types of employment, the level of the farm wage ought to be closely correlated with the returns to other forms of labor—with the result that we can conclude that other forms of rural income were rising as well. On the basis of this line of reasoning, Brandt estimates that labor productivity increased between 40 and 60 percent during the time period (132)—suggesting that the rural economy was improving rather respectably during the period.
Brandt also makes an attempt to provide an indirect estimate of changes in labor productivity by estimating population growth, agricultural labor force growth, and output; this permits him to infer a growth rate in labor productivity (130 ff.). Assuming that per capita consumption remained constant, Brandt estimates that labor productivity must have increased 16.5 percent between 1893 and 1933. This is a figure substantially lower than that implied by his analysis of real wage data (between 40 and 60 percent)— which might lead one to conclude that the real wage estimates are flawed. Brandt, however, does not draw this conclusion; instead he postulates that output must have risen more rapidly than population increase, leading to rising per capita consumption of rice. And he computes that a 50 percent increase in labor productivity would correspond to a 63 percent increase in output—an annual increase of 1.21 percent. This calculation is the basis for his conclusion that output increased at about double the rate of population increase in the period (.6 percent). But note how highly conjectural this line of thought is; it would seem more reasonable to conclude that labor productivity did not increase as rapidly as Brandt’s wage data implies. And if per capita grain consumption tended to decline during this period—as some observers believe that it did—then even the modest 16.5 percent increase in productivity disappears; a constant level of productivity implies a fall of 14 percent in per capita consumption, given the population data that Brandt employs.
A careful reading of Brandt’s arguments on these points suggests, then, that the increase in labor productivity, if any, was small, and that Brandt’s upbeat appraisal of the improving state of the rural economy during these decades is unsubstantiated.
Distributive consequences Turn finally to Brandt’s interpretation of the distributive performance of the commercializing Chinese economy. He argues that commercialization of the rural economy had the effect of significantly narrowing income inequalities in rural China (138), by increasing the demand and opportunities for labor. And he denies the common view that land concentration was increasing during this period. He maintains that the relative share of income flowing to the bottom of the income distribution (tenant farmers, small owner-farmers, landless workers, peddlers, handicraft workers) improved during this period relative to landlords (169-70). However, he provides surprisingly little support for this conclusion, devoting well over half the relevant chapter to a discussion of patterns of farm household behavior across large and small farms. He counts the increases in the rural real wage discussed above as probably raising the lower quintiles of income earners relative to the top quintile; as we found above, however, he appears to substantially overestimate the magnitude of this increase. Second, he doubts the common belief that land holdings became more stratified during this period, and he believes that the terms of tenancy had improved for the tenant by the 1930s, reducing the effective rent from about 50 percent of output to about 40 percent (table 6.20, p. 171)—thus improving tenant incomes at the expense of landlords. And he holds that the increasing opportunities for sideline activities (textiles, refining oils, sericulture, etc.) primarily benefitted the poorest strata. These claims do not receive much empirical support, however. For example, his discussion of the data about rural labor, landlessness, and tenancy is unconvincing. Brandt accepts the National Land Commission estimate (1934) that only 1.57 percent of rural households were pure farm‑ laborer households; Joseph Esherick shows convincingly, however, that this figure is substantially too low and argues for an estimate of 8 percent in this category (based on Chinese surveys and economic gazetteers from the 1930s), and Thomas Wiens reports an average of 10 percent.
Conclusion Brandt’s arguments for improving productivity, output, real wages, and inequalities are unconvincing, and his view of the Chinese rural economy experiencing substantial improvement in these decades is unsubstantiated. In each case the empirical arguments that Brandt constructs are too soft to justify the strong conclusions that he draws. And Brandt’s case is monochromatic in its sole attention to available quantitative data on wages, prices, volume of trade, and the like. There is no attempt to buttress or test the economic interpretation that he offers through consideration of more qualitative information that is available concerning the state of the rural economy in these years (village studies, travelers’ reports, and the like). Many readers will prefer an approach that makes an effort to construct an interpretation of the Chinese economy that balances quantitative and qualitative data; in this regard Philip Huang’s work—which Brandt sharply criticizes—holds the higher ground.
In spite of these reservations, Brandt’s book is a welcome addition to the literature on the early twentieth-century Chinese economy. Brandt has assembled a case for a more positive assessment of China’s agricultural economy than much of the current literature would suggest, and his claims will stimulate further research and analysis of this important period in China’s recent economic history.
Social Science Quarterly 1991
In Daughters of the Canton Delta Janice Stockard describes a distinctive and largely undocumented form of marriage practice in the Canton Delta, which she calls “delayed transfer marriage.” In this non-orthodox form of marriage brides separated from their husbands after the third day of marriage to return to live with their natal families, and were permitted to live separately for the first three years of marriage (p. 4). Stockard advances an explanation of the incidence of anti-marital forms of marriage in this region based on the economic environment created by commercialized sericulture. Young women could earn high incomes as full-time silk reelers‑ -if they could remain mobile and free from childcare and domestic responsibilities. This gave them a fairly strong incentive to seek out culturally acceptable options that would delay or eliminate the need to enter into the role of wife and mother. The book is largely based on interviews with elderly women living in Hong Kong in the 1980s from villages in the Canton Delta. This gives Stockard evidence of the character and distribution of marital practices extending back to the 1920s; she supplements these interviews with data drawn from European observers in the late nineteenth century and official gazettes from the same period (1860-1930).
An extreme form of delayed marriage that Stockard calls “compensation marriage” is an arrangement in which the woman refuses to consummate her marriage, agreeing instead to provide cash compensation to the groom’s family (48). (Compensation permitted the groom to acquire a secondary wife.) This form of marriage provided the bride with spiritual security (affiliation to a male descent line), while permitting her to continue her independent life and job. Compensation ($300) represented about two years’ wages as a silk reeler (52). Stockard also details “spirit marriage” (in which the woman chooses to marry a dead man) and spinsterhood (in which the woman takes a formal vow of celibacy and continues to live within her natal family). These marriage forms were apparently limited to a region containing parts of seven counties in the Canton Delta, embracing a population of several million in the early twentieth century. These anti‑ marital forms were thus a variation from the standard “major” marriage of Imperial China that affected only a small fraction of the society.
Stockard persuasively establishes the existence and range of a set of non‑ standard marriage practices in the Canton Delta; but she is also interested in explaining the presence of these practices. Her goal is to explain the emergence and persistence of anti-marital practices as the result of social and economic factors in the Canton Delta—in particular, the economic advantages flowing to women workers in silk-reeling factories. Explanation in this context requires at least two efforts: first, an explanation of the cultural origins of the complex of anti-marital practices; and second, an account of the social factors led to the apparent rapid expansion of these practices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Stockard’s answers to these questions are straightforward. She believes that the historical occurrence of non-major forms of marriage in this region, including delayed transfer marriage, reflects the infusion of non-Han customs into a Han world. She notes that three ethnic groups in the Canton Delta that practiced delayed transfer marriage were all Tai-speaking groups (170). And on the second point, she believes that the rapid expansion and proliferation of anti-marital forms in the late nineteenth century reflected a massive change in the local economy from agriculture to commercial sericulture. The demand for skilled unattached young women as silk reelers created a set of economic opportunities which led women to aggressively seek out anti-marital strategies, including delayed transfer marriage, compensation marriage, and spirit marriage. “Like compensation marriage, sworn spinsterhood may have been the efflorescence and specialization of a traditional institution, adapted to meet the needs of women in the early twentieth century” (129).
Stockard describes the technical characteristics of commercialized sericulture in sufficient detail to make plausible the connections she draws between silk reeling and anti-marital bias. The technical characteristics of the silk reeling task favored young childless women; it also provided high income to the young women who were employed in the silk filatures. Mechanization of reeling further accentuated this bias in favor of unmarried women (150). Mobility is required in the silk reeler because she must move from place to place as the harvest progresses (151). And steam filatures gave (and required) full-time, full-season employment (because of the capital investment). “The demand for a mobile labor force favored the labor of bridedaughters, who as older, natolocally resident daughters encountered fewer restrictions on their mobility and were already . . . committed to marriage” (159). These features favored the unmarried woman over the wife (149)—thus giving young women a direct material incentive to evade major marriage.
This story shows why the expansion of employment in silk-reeling increased the incentives to avoid marriage. It doesn’t explain the origin of the anti-marital bias, however. And in fact, Stockard does not have much to say on the subject of the origin of anti-marital bias. She provides evidence of such bias—e.g. in the form of suicides by unhappy brides-to-be, but little analysis of the origin of the underlying attitudes. There is surprisingly little material from Stockard’s informants on this topic, but the reader is curious to know why young girls in this region were as commonly opposed to the idea of marriage as they evidently were. Stockard’s discussion of the institution of “girls’ houses” (31 ff.) goes some distance in this direction, but more detail would be welcome.
Stockard puts her explanatory claim in the form of a functional hypothesis: non-major marriage forms served the labor needs of the system of commercialized sericulture. But the claim can be translated into more plausible non-functionalist idiom as well, as a structured change in the environment of choice within which young Cantonese women made life choices; when they were presented with greater incentives to evade major marriage, they did so. Stockard links her explanatory strategy to Pierre Bourdieu’s conception of practice, and the parallel is apt; Stockard’s is an attractive illustration of the attempt to understand social outcomes as the interactive result of individual strategies and changing social contexts.
This is an especially engaging book, combining as it does careful ethnography and a sustained effort to explain the cultural patterns that it uncovers. Stockard’s provocative hypothesis about the economic influences on this important cultural variable will not persuade every reader, but anyone with an interest in village culture in South China will find much to appreciate in the book.
Economic Development and Cultural Change 1992
This useful volume is a collection of essays on Chinese agricultural development in the 1980s, written under the auspices of the European Conference on Agricultural and Rural Development in China. With contributors from Britain, France, Denmark, Holland, Germany, and the United States, it represents a European perspective on the prospects and obstacles for rural development in China in the 1990s. And it contains a good deal of data and analysis that will be of use to other researchers concerned with China’s economy. Events are changing rapidly in rural China in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and too little is known about government policies and local economic conditions. This book is therefore a welcome addition to the literature.
Claude Aubert frames the collection by providing a synopsis of the agricultural slowdown that began to appear at the end of the 1980s. The early 1980s witnessed a substantial increase in farm output, peaking in 1984, as a result of the rural reforms (and auspicious weather), but this increase flattened out and reversed toward the end of the decade (Table 1, p. 17). This pattern is particularly pronounced in the production of foodgrains, with a rise from 283 million tons in 1977 to a peak of 407 million tons in 1984, falling to 394 million tons in 1988. These trends are paralleled by changes in rural incomes. Aubert provides data showing that real peasant incomes increased steadily from 1977 through about 1985, and have remained about constant since then. One significant factor in this slowdown is the occurrence of a string of weather disasters—drought in the north and flooding in the northeast. But Aubert suggests that there is an institutional side to these factors as well: the impact of flooding and drought may well have been worsened by a reduced ability by the Chinese state to maintain water-control infrastructure (p. 18). By privatizing much of the rural economy, the process of reform may have imposed such stringent fiscal constraints on local and regional authorities as to make it impossible for them to adequately maintain irrigation and flood control systems. But the author argues that economic policy and institutions were more important in explaining this decrease in output. In particular, grain price policy has had a substantial effect on cropping patterns and intensity. Stagnant grain prices (largely state-determined) gave farmers the incentive to shift production into other more profitable crops. The obvious solution to this problem is price reform in agriculture; but such reforms are probably unlikely, given the massive effect they would have on urban food prices (p. 25). Along these lines, Aubert documents a thorough-going urban bias on the part of the Chinese government that involves a decided slant against agriculture and rural producers in favor of industrial development and the interests of urban consumers. Jorgen Delman complements this empirical account with a summary description of China’s agricultural development policies in the 1980s and the assumptions that Chinese policy makers have made in projecting agricultural trends into the next decade.
The second section of the volume includes a pair of essays on the state’s relation to the rural economy. Vivienne Shue documents the Chinese state’s limited capacity to impose policies on the countryside. She argues that the extensive vertical integration created by the Maoist state was in fact rather limited in its grasp: thinly staffed agencies, a cellularization of the rural economy, and limits on information-gathering led to sharp constraints on the state’s ability to implement economic policies (pp. 61-63). Paradoxically, she argues that the post-Maoist state, simultaneous with its implementation of economic reforms and greater scope for market activity in the rural economy, has “thickened” its role in rural society through the increased importance of state agencies in coordinating commerce and enterprise, its role in providing technical expertise, and so forth (p. 66). Shue’s study concludes with a useful two-county comparison of state-society relations. This part of the collection also includes an essay by Delia Davin on current population policies. She documents the evolution of the one-child family policy and has particularly interesting observations on the gender-role implications of these policies.
The most original sections of the volume examine the distributive and welfare effects of the rural reforms of the 1980s. Much has been written about the efficiency-enhancing effects of the reforms. But what has been most impressive about China’s economic policies since 1949 is China’s consistent effort to reduce inequalities and to enhance the welfare of the poor. It is reasonable to speculate, however, that both distributive equity and welfare will have suffered during the reform period (as Jean Dreze and A. K. Sen argue in their discussion of Chinese health statistics from the mid-1980s); it is likely that there will have been fewer resources available to local and regional authorities to support health and education systems, and it is plausible that the emergence of winners and losers in service and rural industry will have increased disparities of income and wealth in the countryside. Little information is yet available about the effects of the recent reforms on these goals, so these sections of the current volume will be of special interest to China scholars.
Two essays consider the new distributive characteristics of the post-reform rural economy. Flemming Christiansen focuses on the periurban economy—those rural areas in the catchment basins of urban markets. These areas have an ambiguous status within the legal and administrative system, being neither wholly rural nor wholly urban. Christiansen documents fairly substantial stratification emerging as a result of differential labor resources available to the household and differential opportunities at the time of the implementation of reforms (p. 101). He finds moreover that labor markets are strongly affected by registration status, local patronage, marriage networks, and the like—with consequences for the stratification of income. Ole Odgaard treats the distributive effects of the small private enterprises permitted by the rural reforms, based on fieldwork in Xincun village, Wenjiang county. He arrives at two interesting findings: first, not unexpectedly, there is a rapid increase in income stratification, and the variance of income between rich and poor rural households is explained by the distribution of non-agricultural employment (transport, industry, commerce, and service; p. 109)—not by differences in agricultural incomes. And second, through a careful analysis of the different kinds of taxes and levies that small enterprises pay he finds that there is a substantially higher effective rate of taxation than was previously believed—with attendant redistributive effects through government’s ability to fund development finance and to provide for social welfare (e.g. education and health). (In the thirty-eight enterprises that he surveys he finds an average tax rate of 45.5 percent; p. 113.) Odgaard concludes that there are substantial financial resources available to local governments for development and welfare expenditures (p. 115). This is a striking and important finding, if substantiated, since it runs contrary to the common view that the rural reforms have seriously undermined local and regional government’s ability to fund such programs. However, Odgaard’s data are probably too limited to provide strong support for the conclusion as a generalization about China’s rural economy as a whole. And in any case, Odgaard documents only one side of the claim—the higher than expected rate of taxation through informal and local levies. But he provides little data to show that these funds are in fact being expended for social welfare and development investment programs. The possibilities of rent-seeking, corruption, and diversion of public funds for private purposes remains significant.
The next section of the book contains several essays that are particularly useful for understanding the extent and nature of rural poverty in China in the 1980s. Johannes Kuchler provides a useful summary of China’s efforts to formulate a program of rural-poverty alleviation in the 1980s. This essay also gives some idea of the geography of poverty in China. It contains a map detailing the distribution of poor counties across the face of China, as identified by Chinese poverty program criteria in 1986 (p. 130). Athar Hussain reviews the state of rural social welfare in the 1980s. Hussain notes two important characteristics of rural poverty in China: first, that it continues to exist, and second, that it is primarily regional rather than stratificational or intra-local. Hussain finds that official rural social programs are surprisingly sparse, and that the relative success that China has had in preventing largescale rural deprivation turns more on its rural economic development programs and the availability of land to all the rural poor (p. 139). The paucity of formal social welfare programs was exacerbated by the collapse of the system of collectivized agriculture, which had the effect of risk-spreading and income-assurance in face of natural or family disasters (p. 141). (Note, however, that there appears to be some tension between this common view of the reforms and Odgaard’s conclusions about effective revenue collection above.) Both essays provide previously unavailable information about the extent of rural poverty in China and the institutions and programs that the state has employed to address these problems.
The final section of the book focuses on problems of environment and land and water management. Eduard Vermeer chronicles the experience of land and water management in Fujian since the revolution within a historical perspective on these issues in previous centuries. Fujian shows a net decline in farm land over the past three decades, along with a slower net decline in food grain production per capita (Table 1, p. 160). Thiagarajan Manoharan looks more closely at the experience of irrigation management following decentralization. This essay is rich in institutional detail, describing the organizational and fiscal characteristics of irrigation systems in China, with particular emphasis on the experience of the last decade.
The book also contains a useful appendix and map by Walter H. Aschmoneit providing a technique for estimating relative levels of poverty across the map of China. Aschmoneit has extracted county-level data on eight categories of information from the Population Atlas of China (drawn from the massive population census of 1982): gross value of industrial and agricultural output per capita, rate of employment, rate of industrial workforce, rate of illiteracy, rates of middle school and university graduates, infant mortality rate, and death rate. He then constructs an index value for each county (the Life-Quality Index) in which values of these parameters are standardized by using the relative deviation of the value from the mean for that parameter across all of China. This data is compiled in a large color map which gives a graphic representation of the geography of poverty in China in the 1980s. The map is in the same format as those provided in the Population Atlas, permitting comparison of these patterns with other variables. The details of this index will be of interest to specialists; one would like to know, for example, how this index compares with the Physical Quality of Life Index, which uses several of the same variables but a different technique of aggregation. And it would be useful to consider the correspondence between this county data set and that used to construct the poverty map in Kuchler’s essay. Visually there appear to be some significant discrepancies between quality of life values and poverty as measured by income; for example, there is a cluster of poor counties in Shandong that have only slightly below average quality of life. Whatever its adequacy in fine detail, Aschmoneit’s analysis gives a highly useful impression of the distribution of poverty across the face of China in the early 1980s. The general pattern can be described briefly. Eastern China on the whole shows higher values of life-quality than western China; the highest values are found around a handful of coastal cities (Tianjin, Shanghai, Fuzhou, Hong Kong); and the extremes of poor quality of life are concentrated in the southwest and west.
It is interesting to compare this pattern with the distribution of famine deaths following the Great Leap Forward. County-level data are unavailable, but Xizhe Peng has arrived at provincial estimates of excess mortality due to famine between 1958 and 1962. Peng’s findings broadly correspond to Aschmoneit’s results. With a few important exceptions, the provinces worst affected by famine show up again among the poorest areas of China in the 1980s. Peng reports changes in crude death rates for 1958-62 that range from relatively slight famine effects in Shanxi (.226) to extremely high increases in crude death rates in Sichuan (9.095). (A change in crude death rate of 1 for a given year represents a 100 percent increase in the death rate for that year over the base year 1957. The values given here are the sums of increases for each province over the five-year period.) The worst-affected provinces are Sichuan (9.095), Guizhou (4.667), Gansu (4.264), Guangxi (3.183), Hunan (2.528), Henan (2.163) and Shandong (2.058). This corresponds to a famine belt ranging from Guangxi in the south to Gansu in the northwest, with an eastern pocket of famine in east-central China (Anhui). When we turn to Aschmoneit’s map we find a similar list of provinces with the lowest life-quality index values for the 1980s: Yunnan, Guangxi, Guizhou, Sichuan, Hunan, Gansu, and Shaanxi—a “poverty” belt ranging from the southwest to the northwest. There are some noteworthy differences that emerge as well; for example, there were significant famine deaths in the northeast of China (Shandong, Hebei, Henan), whereas these areas show average values for life quality in the 1980s.
Specialists concerned with Chinese economic development will certainly want to make use of this volume, which provides data not easily available in other sources; and it should be of interest to agricultural development researchers in other areas of the world as well.
American Historical Review 1993
In this work Kathryn Bernhardt provides a highly valuable study of the social and economic history of the Lower Yangzi through tumultuous times: the Taiping rebellion, the collapse of the Qing, and the Republican period. The focus of the book is the fiscal regimes and strategies of peasant resistance in Lower Yangzi China since 1840. But the author provides a highly readable narrative of the economic and social history of this period and place as well.
Bernhardt characterizes the struggle between the state, landlords, and peasants over the surplus as a zero-sum three party contest: taxes or rents could could only increase at the expense of decreases in peasant consumption. Landlords and the state had some interests in common—thus the state had an interest in aiding the collection of rents. And peasants had sharp conflicts of interest with both state and landlord: taxes and rents were directly related to consumption levels. The book makes a thorough effort to reconstruct as far as the sources permit the overall patterns of landownership, tenancy arrangements, and tax institutions in the period. A central finding is that there is a marked trend of increasing state involvement in rent relations throughout the Republican period, both in the form of rent collection institutions (pp. 165 ff.) and in regulations that set rent ceilings and abatement requirements (pp. 172 ff).
The organizing theme of the book is the continuing significance of collective rent resistance throughout the late-Qing and Republican periods in the lower Yangzi. Peasants were confronted with classic problems of collective action. In spite of these obstacles, however, Yangzi peasants engaged in a century-long pattern of periodic collective resistance. Bernhardt documents a sizeable increase in tenant collective action between 1912 and 1936 (p. 189). Moreover, in the lower Yangzi this increase took the form of rent resistance rather than tax resistance (contrary to what we might expect on the basis of current thinking about the process of state-building). Particularly useful is the author’s description of some of the organizational forms around which rent resistance took place: lineage ties, temple societies, and cooperative labor practices in the Qing, and larger-scale peasant associations as well as traditional organizational forms in the Republican period (p. 194).
Bernhardt argues that the Taiping rebellion was a central turning point in the struggle over the harvest in this region of China. She maintains (contrary to Philip Kuhn, for example) that landlords’ position with respect to peasants was weakened as a consequence of Taiping ideology and institutional changes (p. 9). Moreover, the Taipings’ leveling ideology left traces in peasant politics that endured into the twentieth century (p. 115) and prepared the ground for Communist mobilization efforts. Bernhardt concludes that landlords were the net losers throughout this period: real rents declined as consumption and tax levels increased. And this decline had significant consequences for the Communist Party’s fortunes: “When the Communist Party gained control of the region in 1949, it confronted not a strong landed elite, but one that had already been seriously weakened by greater state intrusion and growing tenant political power” (p. 11).
The book is a worthy addition to the growing literature on the social and economic processes that underlay the tumultuous political events of twentieth-century China. It provides a well-documented and insightful perspective on state-society relations in rural China.
American Historical Review 1998
The mid-nineteenth century witnessed a number of major peasant rebellions in several regions of China—the White Lotus sectarian rebellions, the Taiping rebellion, the Muslim rebellions, and the Miao rebellion in Guizhou. Most of these episodes have received substantial scholarly study by western scholars, but the Miao rebellion has yet to be fully examined. Robert Jenks aims to fill this gap with the current volume. Jenks’s work is based on careful study of archives in the national Palace Museum Archives in Taiwan. These sources permit Jenks to assemble a reasonably detailed view of the sequence of events, the cultural and economic background of the rebellion, and the motives and fates of some of the central leaders of the rebellion. The magnitude of the rebellion is significant. Over a twenty-year period, the rebellion led to the deaths of as many as 4,900,000 people. So it is important to have a clear understanding of the causes and character of this rebellion, if we are to have a reasonably full view of the character and diversity of peasant rebellion and unrest in Qing China.
Jenks attempts to provide a detailed narrative of the events of the Miao disorders, lodged within an explanatory framework intended to explain the basis of mobilization and unrest. Jenks points out that it is in some ways misleading to refer to this period as one rebellion (implying a unified mobilization and leadership); instead, the period consists of a congeries of semi-independent periods of unrest and localized disturbance (p. 5). Among the factors which Jenks identifies as explanatory variables of the disorders are ethnic frictions (pp. 41 ff.), moral economy considerations (pp. 76, 103, 167-68), economic deprivation, exploitation, and excessive taxation (pp. 69-71, 81-82, 98), weakness of government capacity, both administrative and military (pp. 82-83, 116-117), opium cultivation (p. 23), folk religion (pp. 69-72), and ecological factors (pp. 11-17). None of these factors plays a dominant role in Jenks’s analysis; instead, he interprets the several stages of unrest and mobilization based on the factors which seem to emerge as most salient through the primary sources. For this reason the book gives the impression of a programmatic effort, in which the first efforts at explanation are laid out on the canvas, inviting further exploration by the next generation of scholarship. A central heuristic in Jenks’s narrative is his effort to track the movements of various important leaders and the groups which they drew around themselves through the gazeteers represented in the archival sources. (Most of these stories end in the capture and execution of the leader.)
It might be noted that the archival basis of this study has one important deficiency: Jenks conducted the primary research at a time when provincial and national archives in the People’s Republic of China were inaccessible. Were the study replicated today, PRC sources would certainly shed new light on the period. This being said, the sources available to the author appear to be complete enough to constitute a basis for confident judgment about the central particulars.
Jenks’s book provides a complement to the very lively literature on Chinese rebellion that has developed in the past twenty years. The book serves as a preliminary survey of the terrain of the Miao rebellion, rather than a fully developed treatment. Jenks has identified the main contours of the rebellion and a large number of factors that influenced the course of events, and has prepared the ground for more probing studies in the future. As the China field has witnessed in the treatment of the White Lotus rebellions and the Taiping rebellion, long periods of rebellion and unrest provide a profitable lens through which to examine popular culture and local histories. The constellations of folk religion, state-local relations, the dialectic of repression and self-defense, and local patterns of property and taxation provide a rich field within which to attempt to understand the outcomes of mobilization and collective action which emerge across the map of China in the nineteenth century. Thanks to Jenks’s efforts in this volume, we may hope that more scholars will bring a second wave of attention to the study of the disorders in Guizhou.
Economic Development and Cultural Change 1994
Interpretations of relations between China’s state and its peasantry have been construed in very different ways—from close and harmonious unity, to fractious conflict, to relative independence of peasants from the reach of the state. In this highly insightful book Jean Oi provides us with a detailed analysis of the local politics of collective agriculture in Maoist China that may significantly alter our understanding of state-society relations in China. Using as her central theoretical idea the concept of socialist clientelism, Oi analyzes the particular institutions through which the chief economic processes of collective agriculture took place in China. The central issue is the division of the harvest: through what policies, institutions, and local arrangements did the state take grain “surpluses” from the rural economy? This is perhaps the most fundamental material issue in the Chinese rural economy for both parties: the state was dependent on its ability to extract grain from the countryside for urban consumers, while the material welfare of villages rose or fell depending on the degree of exaction in place in a given season and place. And the state, in turn, was politically dependent on support from the peasantry for its policies more generally; it could not afford, therefore, to appear rapacious. Oi argues that the pattern and net effect of the division of the harvest depended crucially on the web of personal relationships and clientelistic practices that were embodied in the commune system. And she maintains that the state was remarkably successful in achieving the grain policies it set out to pursue.
The first five chapters provide a detailed account of the Chinese state’s grain procurement policies through the 1970s. Here she describes the system of taxation, forced sales, “voluntary sales,” and local grain reserves through which the state secured access to a sizable proportion of the harvest. She pays particular attention to the issue of the size of the peasant’s share of the harvest (it was effectively a residual after the state and commune’s share) and the determinants of individual peasant income. Of some interest in this context is her finding that the work-point system within collective farms had relatively minor impact on peasant incomes. She finds that the share of collective income distributed through work-points was usually small; it took the form of distribution of residual cash income, which was often zero; and it could not generally be converted into grain (pp. 36-42). So the bulk of peasant income came in the form of a basic grain ration: a per capita quantity of grain calculated to meet minimum annual needs. In these chapters Oi gives considerable attention as well to the strategies of implementation through which the state attempted to secure an adequate level of compliance.
The next two chapters turn to an account of the strategies available to work teams and individuals to evade the state’s exactions: “hiding grain, falsifying accounts, illegally using funds” (p. 115). (These represent the benign side of corruption, on her account: adaptations that made the official policies of the state endurable at the rural level.) It is in this context that clientelism is evident; local parties, whether peasants, team leaders, or higher-level cadres, fall within a complex web of personal relationships to persons higher or lower in the hierarchy, and each works to cement relations with and benefit from the “patron.” The final two chapters consider the post-Mao reforms and the clientelism still associated with the administration of the rural economy. Here Oi argues that although the post-Mao reforms increased commercialization and enterprise-level economic activity, it did not eliminate the advantaged position of cadres and other officials in the assignment of access to inputs, markets, jobs, and the like. The result is that clientelistic relations continue to play a central role in the Chinese economy.
There are several central insights about China’s political system that organize much of Oi’s discussion. First, there is a substantial degree of slippage between centrally-formulated state policy and locally-implemented state practices. It is through a complex network of local agents of the state—cadres, commune and brigade leaders, inspection teams, granary officials, and the like—that the state exercises its power. Further, these agents have a certain degree of freedom; they are not marionettes of the state, but rather rational agents possessed with private interests and opportunities. Thus the Chinese state is confronted with a classic “principal-agent” problem (though Oi does not make explicit use of the political-science literature on this point). The result is that the state can only imperfectly implement the policies it designs; more generally, it must design policies in light of a realistic understanding of the system of agents through which policies will be implemented (pp. 3-4). This means that local agents—whether local officials or individual actors concerned to secure their own welfare—have substantial opportunities for choosing strategies that influence the outcome of policies as implemented. This observation makes analysis of the political and material circumstances of the agents (cadres) crucial: what are their local interests, and how do they behave? Here Oi’s view is that a central factor within the local politics of China’s agricultural policy is what she calls “socialist clientelism.” It is a system in which “personal ties, informal influence, and personal authority” are critical for accomplishing one’s purposes—getting fertilizer, obtaining more advantageous grain quotas, obtaining permission to pursue an urban job. And what is distinctive about socialist clientelism is the circumstance that the chief “patrons” are “local political officials on whom the peasants economically and politically depend” (p. 152). Moreover, Oi believes that this feature is not a cultural inheritance specific to China, but rather a systemic consequence of the economic arrangements of a communist system: “As long as China or any other communist system is characterized by a scarcity of goods, a centralized distribution system, and unequal access to and personalized control over allocation of goods and opportunities, there will be clientelist politics” (p. 10).
Oi’s analysis, then, gives central place to the local politics of grain policy; team leaders and brigade and commune cadres are the central agents in the account. These are officials at the bottom end of the administrative hierarchy; they represent the point of interface between the state and the peasant village. They have substantial responsibility concerning the organization of production, the assessment of harvests, the assignment of grain quotas to work teams and households, the allocation of inputs, and the assignment of credit and welfare assistance. This gives these agents the opportunity to differentially favor and disfavor those below them; this means, in turn, that lower-level agents have an interest in cultivating relationships with team leaders and cadres. These relationships may begin in kinship or friendship, but they are cemented through reciprocal exchange of services: access to a tractor in a timely way, a gift of a choice piece of pork at the time of slaughter.
At the same time, the position of these agents is not without constraint. Team leaders must succeed in generally reaching their quotas, cadres must be attuned to the fit between their decisions and the party line, and in general there are constraints imposed from above on the outer bounds of the possible. But Oi’s point is that there is still ample room for cadres and team leaders to show favoritism; and this leaves open the likelihood that they adopt a pattern of cultivating personal relations of reward and punishment with the agents below them.
Oi’s findings concerning the politics of grain and state-society relations contrast with a good deal of work on Chinese agriculture that has emphasized the planning apparatus and higher-level decision making. Against the totalitarian model of communist politics, Oi argues that the actual outcomes depend a good deal on the strategies chosen by local agents: cadres, team leaders. and peasants. She directs our attention to what we might call the “microfoundations” of state-society relations: the particular processes and institutions through which the state pursues its goals. To the extent that some observers have taken the implementation of central policy as transparent and unproblematic, Oi’s account is a valuable corrective. She sheds much-needed light on the network of political and personal relationships at the village level through which policies are implemented or subverted.
At the same time, Oi’s approach differs as well from that taken recently by Vivienne Shue. Shue argues in The Reach of the State (Stanford, 1988) for a view of the state according to which the Chinese state was very limited in its ability to impose policies on the countryside. Oi argues, however, that local politics made its influence felt at the margin, not at the core of policy. She maintains that the state was fairly successful in its grain policies, both through its direct procurement and its preemption of the system of local grain reserves (chapter four). The options for evasion that were available to teams and individuals did not have the effect of seriously impeding the state’s ability to extract grain in approximately the quantities it needed (66 ff.).
Some comment is needed on the empirical sources on which Oi’s analysis depends. The book is based on a wide range of Chinese sources: contemporary newspaper accounts, neibu [internal-use only] documents, and the author’s own visits to China in the 1980s. But the source of the greatest evidentiary value in Oi’s construction is a series of about 80 extended interviews with expatriate Chinese men and women, conducted in Hong Kong in the 1980s (1980 and 1985). Oi located a large number of potential interviewees through several newspaper advertisements; she selected from among these according to her evaluation of the amount and quality of information each could provide about specific aspects of the Chinese system of collective agriculture. Oi provides an extensive description of her interviewing techniques and a discussion of the various forms of bias that such interviews may present. The result is a highly convincing portrait of the chief characteristics of the local politics of the collective system.
In sum, State and Peasant in Contemporary China is an empirically rich and theoretically insightful effort to make sense of the politics of grain in China. The reader is left with a clear and convincing understanding of how the system worked and how it served (and failed to serve) the interests of the various agents: the state’s interest in grain procurements, the cadre’s interest in doing an acceptable job of managing production (and thus preserving the privileges and powers associated with his position), and the peasant’s interest in protecting his subsistence security. The book will be mandatory reading for scholars concerned with Chinese collective agriculture. More broadly, it will be useful for political scientists concerned with state-society relations in China: the bureaucratic and political instrumentalities through which the center attempts to impose its will on society. And it will repay close reading by students of comparative politics. To what extent are Oi’s findings reproduced in Eastern European and Soviet communist systems? How robust is the concept of socialist clientelism? Oi has done us a service by making available such a detailed and convincing study of the case of China.
American Historical Review 1995
Y. K. Wou’s treatment of the Chinese Communist movement in Henan sets a high standard for scholarship in the field. Wou’s book has many merits: meticulous use of a variety of under-studied archives, effective and knowledgeable deployment of the theoretical ideas that have come to shape current thinking about peasant mobilization, and an admirable ability to weave together an account of this 25-year period that makes sense of the story.
The book begins its treatment of the mobilization that led to the Communist Revolution with the May 30th Movement in 1925. Focused on Henan Province, Wou attempts to uncover the complex set of factors that permitted the Communist Party to mobilize mass support for its program. He emphasizes organizational and political factors in his account: the strategies and organizational resources through which the CCP was able to move ordinary workers and peasants from concern with local interests to adherence to a national program. Wou provides fascinating detail concerning Communist efforts to mobilize miners and workers, Red Spears and bandits, and peasants in Henan Province. The book makes plain the daunting challenges confronting Communist cadres in their efforts to mobilize support at the village level: mistrust of outsiders, the entrenched political power of elites, and the localism of peasant interests in the region. Wou describes a social-political environment in the countryside that is reminiscent of Philip Kuhn’s account of the processes of local militarization during the Taiping Rebellion—one in which elite-dominated militias had evolved as an institution of self-defense against bandits and sectarian organizations. One of the most interesting and surprising findings that Wou puts forward is his contention that mobilization in Henan was not centered in remote and backward border areas, but rather included both remote and commercialized peasant villages (p. 129).
Wou makes an effort to crack the riddle of peasant mentality in China. Are peasants inherently conservative? Are they latently revolutionary, awaiting only the clarion call of revolution? Both, and neither, appears to be Wou’s assessment (p. 161). Wou finds a popular equalitarianism within Chinese peasant culture that provides a basis for Communist mobilization around an ideology of redistribution (p. 151); but equally he finds an entrenched hierarchicalism within Chinese popular culture that made subversion of elite power more difficult for Communist cadres (p. 135).
The second half of the book treats the substantially changed political environment created for the CCP by the Sino-Japanese War. Guomindang power virtually collapsed in the province, and the Japanese occupied eastern Henan in 1938. The three-way struggle between the Japanese, the Guomindang, and the Communist Party gave the Party new opportunities for mobilization against both its enemies. Here again, however, Wou makes the important point that structural circumstance—military fragmentation of society, in this case—only provides the opening to successful mobilization, not its sufficient condition. The organizational and strategic competence of the CCP was needed in order to make effective use of these new opportunities for mobilization. Successful play of the game of coalition politics gave the CCP important advantages during this period, and created a position of strength that contributed substantially to post-war success of the movement.
A central tenet of Wou’s analysis is the importance of Communist efforts to improve material conditions of life for the populations it aimed to mobilize. Famine relief, formation of production cooperatives, and revival of the silk industry represented efforts by the Party to demonstrate its ability to provide tangible benefits for local communities (pp. 314-326). These efforts had at least two beneficial effects: they provided material incentives to prospective followers, and, less tangibly, they enhanced confidence among villagers in the competence and endurance of the Party.
In short, this is a highly successful book. The author does an admirable job of drawing together a wide range of sources to construct a narrative of the process of revolutionary mobilization in Henan Province. Along the way he illuminates many of the issues of collective action and revolutionary politics that have enlivened much of the recent literature on peasant politics. Mobilizing the Masses is a singularly capable contribution to our understanding of the century’s most enduring revolutionary movement.
Ethics and the Environment 1997
This path-breaking volume offers a developed account on the basis of which to put forward judgments of gender justice in the developing world. The editors and contributors attempt to find a basis for offering judgments of the justice of the social and economic circumstances of women in many developing countries that avoid both cultural relativism and a superior moral “colonialism.” The book results from one of a series of important conferences organized by the World Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER) of the United Nations University. Philosophers and development specialists combine to provide insight into both theory and practice in the area of development ethics. There are essays by philosophers on ethical issues pertaining to gender in development, and there are regional perspectives on these issues for several contemporary developing countries (China, Mexico, India, Bangladesh, and Nigeria). The list of contributors is impressive indeed, as is the level of discussion embodied in the essays. The book makes a profound contribution to ongoing discussions of the role of gender in development, the conditions of women in the developing world, and the moral basis for making judgments about such circumstances.
The volume flows from the “capabilities” approach to the analysis of quality of life. Advocated and developed by Amartya Sen in a variety of writings, this approach attempts to define well-being in an objective way, by identifying a set of core human capabilities that are critical to full human functioning and assessing well-being (and the success of development policies) by the degree to which the individual is in circumstances which lead to the realization of these capabilities. The approach is studiedly critical of standard utility and preference-satisfaction approaches to the measurement of well-being. Along with its predecessor volume, The Quality of Life (Nussbaum and Sen, eds., 1993), the book provides a superb basis for discussions of justice and morality within the context of economic development policy. (It should be noted that the Human Development Report, published annually by the United Nations Development Programme, offers development statistics for about 150 countries that are designed to provide empirical information about quality of life in developing countries. The methodology of these reports is very much influenced by the capabilities theory advanced by Sen, Nussbaum, and others.)
The core of the theory is a principled account of a set of fundamental human capabilities which are held to be essential to a good human life. The Aristotelian origins of the approach are manifest. Martha Nussbaum’s essay, “Human Capabilities, Female Human Beings,” provides an effective exposition of the theory (as does David Crocker’s piece). It is Nussbaum’s contention that we can say a great deal about what is needed for a good human life; and this account is substantially independent of cultural variations (that is, human beings have the same capabilities for functioning in a wide variety of social and cultural settings). The capabilities involved in a good human life may be listed and justified, and the resulting list can serve as both a guide and a critical standard for development policy. Nussbaum devotes much care to the composition of this list; in brief, it includes:
Nussbaum characterizes the significance of this list in these terms: “My claim is that a life that lacks any one of these capabilities, no matter what else it has, will fall short of being a good human life” (p. 85). Further, she maintains that the list, and its associated argumentation, ought to be taken seriously by development theorists in the design of development strategies. Public policy must be guided by a conception of the human good that gives the policy maker strong guidance in selecting goals and priorities for the development process. “The basic claim I wish to make . . . is that the central goal of public planning should be the capabilities of citizens to perform various important functions” (p. 87).
The overall thrust of this theory is compelling and persuasive, and a powerful basis for formulating a development ethics. At the same time, the ultimate force of the theory rests upon the details. Nussbaum’s formulation of the list of essential human capabilities is intended to be controversial, and it is. For example, Susan Wolf questions the claim that each of these capabilities is essential to a good human life; is it the case that the person lacking even one of these admittedly valuable capabilities would be said to be incapable of a good human life? As Wolf puts it, are we forced by this theory to judge that Stephen Hawking or Stevie Wonder have lives that “fall short of being a good human life” because of a lack of mobility or sight? One might rather borrow Hilary Putnam’s concept of a “cluster term” (Putnam 1975, pp. 50-54), and judge that all of these features are important in constituting a full and good human life, but none is essential.
More basically, one can question the composition of the list. Are there capabilities listed here that might legitimately be eliminated from some alternative conceptions of the good human life? Could one not imagine a culture in which sobriety and seriousness are valued to the extent that an ability to laugh is rather a disfiguring element of character instead of a capability to be realized? Is a moral culture that is indifferent to natural beauty necessarily one in which an essential human capability has been stifled? And are there important capabilities lacking from the list? Walt Whitman celebrates the capability of loafing by the side of the road, “observing a spear of summer grass”; can Nussbaum give a convincing philosophical reason from excluding this capability from her list? The philosophical point here is that the list of capabilities that constitute the basis of a good human life cannot be arbitrary or simply the expression of one’s own tastes; there need to be good and compelling reasons for including or excluding given capabilities from the list. Nussbaum extends a good deal of philosophical effort in responding to such basic concerns, but this is where the philosophical sparks will fly.
A special value of the book is its status as a sustained response to the ethical relativism that is so often involved in contemporary debates. Essays by Nussbaum, Jonathan Glover, Hilary Putnam, Onora O’Neill, and Seyla Benhabib provide strong responses to the relativist view that we can say nothing universal about human rights or justice and that discussions of such issues must be premised on local or traditional understandings. The capabilities approach attempts to provide a reasoned basis for an account of a good human life that can guide policy and produce criticism of existing social arrangements in various times and places. One basic conclusion that comes from a close reading of the volume is that relativism and moral localism have strongly reactionary undercurrents, and have debilitating effects on our ability to judge and act in the face of appalling historical circumstances. If we must defer to local practice and moral beliefs, then there are many cultural circumstances in which it is impossible to criticize such practices as enforced female illiteracy, denial of female rights to work outside the home, or footbinding.
The empirical contributions of the volume need to be recognized as well. Martha Chen’s case study of women’s right to employment in India and Bangladesh is a highly insightful analysis of the economic circumstances of rural women in South Asia. She offers a very clear analysis of the relationship between traditional values governing women’s roles in South Asia, and the desperate circumstances that such roles often create for rural women (especially widows). Nkiru Nzegwu argues, by contrast, that there are powerful currents within Igbo traditions (Nigeria) that enhance the economic status of women. “Women’s independence was fostered by cultural traditions that placed a premium on female assertiveness and collectivity, and did not define power as socially deviant” (p. 447). On this account, then, there are important cultural resources within Igbo tradition that serve to improve the condition of women in rural Nigeria. (As Nussbaum notes in her introduction, however, aggregate quality of life statistics for women in Nigeria present a different picture; p. 12.)
In short, Women, Culture and Development is mandatory reading for anyone concerned with the normative basis of economic development policy. It provides a thoughtful, philosophically sophisticated basis for assessing the goals and successes of development strategies in various parts of the world, and it offers important empirical insight into the conditions of women in the developing world. The editors and contributors have made a profound contribution to debates in this area.
References
Nussbaum, Martha C., and Amartya Sen, eds. 1993. The Quality of Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Putnam, Hilary. 1975. Mind, Language, and Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
United Nations Development Programme. 1995. Human Development Report 1995. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
For interpretations along these lines see Dwight Perkins, Agricultural Development in China (Chicago: Aldine, 1969); Philip Huang, The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), Kang Chao, Man and Land in Chinese History: An Economic Analysis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), and Carl Riskin, China’s Political Economy: The Quest for Development Since 1949 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). Arguments similar to Brandt’s have been put forward by Ramon Myers, The Chinese Peasant Economy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970) and Thomas Rawski, Economic Growth in Prewar China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
Rawski 291-298. Rawski too concludes that real wages were rising during the period, but more slowly than Brandt’s estimate; he suggests an average annual rate of increase of about .4 percent.
Joseph Esherick, “Number Games: A Note on Land Distribution in Prerevolutionary China,” Modern China 7 (1981): 387-411, esp. 402; Thomas Wiens, The Microeconomics of Peasant Economy: China, 1920-1940 (New York: Garland, 1982), p. 78. Given its relevance to Brandt’s topics, it is surprising that he does not cite Esherick’s article. Philip Huang also makes an effort to estimate the extent of hired labor in North China, and arrives at a rough estimate of 14 to 17 percent of farm work being performed by hired labor (Huang 1985:80).
Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen, Hunger and Public Action (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 215-221.
Population Census Office of the State Council of the People’s Chinese Academy of Sciences, eds., The Population Atlas of China (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1987).
Xizhe Peng, “Demographic Consequences of the Great Leap Forward in China’s Provinces,” Population and Development Review 13 (1987), pp. 639-670. Peng’s data imply a peak crude death rate in 1960 of 54 per thousand in Sichuan—almost five times China’s average rate prior to the famine and over twice China’s crude death rate for 1962. Guizhou’s CDR is only slightly below this figure for 1960, and Peng judges that Anhui experienced mortality comparable to Sichuan, but exact data are unavailable.
Journal of Asian Studies 1994
Robert Netting offers a fascinating and wide-ranging analysis of the economics, ecology, and viability of smallholding farming. He defines smallholders as “rural cultivators practicing intensive, permanent, diversified agriculture on relatively small farms in areas of dense population” (p. 2). Netting is concerned to offer a detailed analysis of the ecological and institutional circumstances within which this specialized form of agriculture takes place; significantly, much of the agriculture of East, South, and Southeast Asia falls under this description. Netting’s study is cross-cultural, drawing on the agrarian histories and current practices of a variety of places: for example, Nigeria, Switzerland, China, Russia, and the United States.
A central focus of Netting’s analysis is on the relation between the property rights and incentives involved in smallholding, on the one hand, and associated effects of cultivation under such a regime on land and water conservation, on the other. The central point is that smallholders with secure tenure have a prominent interest in adopting techniques that permit sustainable use of soil and water (chapter 6). Netting’s discussion is the more interesting in that he attends to the positive incentive benefits of both private property regimes and of common property resource regimes—each of which is invoked by smallholding farming systems in different areas of the world (pp. 172 ff.). Netting demonstrates that successful systems of intensive agriculture often embody elements of both private property and common property resource management (fisheries, water resources, forests, grazing land, etc.). Reflecting his own previous work and that of other current researchers (e.g. Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), Netting emphasizes the importance and viability of common property resource management regimes in a variety of smallholding communities. Netting points out that there are rather specific criteria that must be met if a given resource is amenable to a common-property regime: for example, the resource must be relatively low in value (e.g. unimproved grazing lands), it must be such that the common-property holding community can exclude outsiders, and it must be possible to monitor participants’ use of the resource (pp. 172-178).
The book reports a wealth of fascinating data on the micro-economy of a variety of smallholder farming systems. Netting analyzes household studies—drawn from a wide variety of geographical settings—of labor use, energy use, household size and output, farm size, and many other variables characterizing the smallholder farm economy. These discussions lead Netting quite naturally into discussion of the patterns of resource allocation that emerge. Netting’s data strongly support the idea that smallholders make finetuned and economically rational decisions about the allocation of their scarce resources—with important consequences for efficiency and output.
A central variable in all of Netting’s discussion is the relationship between population change, technological change, and local ecology (chapter 9). Netting documents the capacity of intensive agricultural systems to push yields forward to keep pace and even exceed the rate of population increase—a conclusion that finds illustration in long stretches of China’s agricultural history (see, for example, Dwight Perkins’ treatment of this process in Agricultural Development in China, 1368-1969; Chicago: Aldine, 1969). The example of China’s smallholding rural economy receives substantial attention from Netting, and this discussion is well-informed by much of the recent literature on the Chinese rural economy.
Particularly interesting are Netting’s tentative conclusions about the potential for smallholding as a basis for sustainable agriculture in the future. Netting does not accept the common assumption that large-scale commercial farming unavoidably drives out smallholding. He offers the view that “smallholder intensive systems achieve high production, combine subsistence and market benefits, transform energy efficiently, and encourage practices of stewardship and conservation of resources” (p. 320). These advantages suggest that smallholding will continue to exist and perhaps increase, not as a backward anomaly in a modernizing world, but as an ecologically and economically viable basis for crop production. On Netting’s view this is particularly likely to be true in those regions where the man-land ratio is high and where intensive cultivation is needed to achieve the high land productivity levels needed to support a dense population.
This book is an important contribution to the literature on agrarian relations in the contemporary world. It is a tour-de-force, comparable in its importance to the study of peasant agriculture to the work of A. V. Chayanov, Clifford Geertz, or Theodore Schultz. Given the social, cultural, and economic importance of peasant farming in almost all regions of Asia, scholars of agrarian Asia will find this book of the greatest interest.
Economic Development and Cultural Change 1994
The cattle-herding economic regime of the Orma pastoralists of Kenya underwent substantial changes in the 1970s and 1980s. Common grazing practices began to give way to restricted pasturage; wage labor among herders came to replace familial and patron-client relations; and a whole series of changes in the property system surrounding the cattle economy transpired as well. Were these changes simply the consequence of economic modernization—the yielding of inefficient economic institutions to more efficient? It has become clear in recent work in development theory that such an appeal to the imperatives of modernization is fundamentally unhelpful. It is necessary to ask, at least, through what processes might this “economic modernization” have taken place.
Jean Ensminger entertains these questions from the perspective of the “new institutional economics” (NIE). Building on the theoretical frameworks of Douglass North and others, she undertakes to provide an analysis of the functioning of traditional Orma cattle-management practices and an explanation of the process of change and dissolution that these practices underwent in the decades following 1960. The book is marked by a superb combination of close ethnographic detail and sophisticated use of theoretical ideas. Ensminger offers an exemplary instance of theoretical analysis and explanation of complex local phenomena.
The new institutional economics is essentially a marriage of the familiar assumptions of rational choice theory with the observation that “institutions matter”—that is, that the behavior of rational individuals depends critically on the institutional constraints within which they act, and the institutional constraints themselves are underdetermined by material and economic circumstances. The approach pays close attention to the importance of transaction costs in economic activity (the costs of supervision of a work force, for example, or the cost of collecting information on compliance with a contract). One can attempt to understand the choice of one set of institutions rather than another (one system of property rights, for example), as the result of a political process in which rational agents behave strategically in lobbying for one or another set of institutions based on their assessment of the benefits of the alternatives, their fitness with a set of value commitments, and other considerations.
Topics of central concern to the practitioners of NIE include principal-agent problems (the costs of assuring that one’s agents are performing their functions according to the interests of the principal); the design of alternative systems of property rights; collective action problems; and mechanisms of collective decision-making. In each instance the analysis is designed to illuminate the ways in which institutional arrangements have been selected (or have evolved) in such ways as to respond to an important element of transaction costs. It bears pointing out that this approach does not assume that “optimal” institutions emerge, since the actual institutions selected depend on the distribution of political power across groups and their antecedent interests. This point is richly born out in Robert Bates’s important arguments concerning government agricultural policies in other parts of Africa.
How successful is the NIE approach in explaining the changes in the Orma cattle regime identified by Ensminger’s study? This question suggests several others: To what extent is there a well-defined explanatory hypothesis at work here? To what extent does this hypothesis accord with the observed processes? And to what extent is this hypothesis superior to other available alternatives in accounting for the data? Let us consider one case in slight detail: Ensminger’s treatment of the terms of employment of cattle herders in mobile cattle camps (pp. 114-121). The traditional employment practice takes the pattern of an embroidered patron-client relation. The cattle owner provides a basic wage contract to the herder (food, clothing, and one head of cattle per year). The good herder is treated paternally, with additional “gifts” at the end of the season (additional clothing, an additional animal, and payment of the herder’s bridewealth after years of service; p. 117). The relation between patron and client is multistranded, enduring, and paternal. Ensminger understands this traditional practice as a solution to an obvious principal-agent problem associated with mobile cattle camps. Supervision costs are very high, since the owner does not travel with the camp. The owner must depend on the herder to use his skill and diligence in a variety of difficult circumstances—rescuing stranded cattle, searching out lost animals, and maintaining control of the herd during harsh conditions. There are obvious shortterm incentives and opportunities for the herder to cheat the employer—e.g. allowing stranded animals to perish, giving up on searches for lost animals, or even selling animals during times of distress. The patron-client relation gives the herder a longterm incentive to provide high-quality labor, for the quality of work can be assessed at the end of the season by assessment of the health and size of the herd. The patron has an incentive to cheat the client—e.g. by refusing to pay the herder’s bridewealth after years of service. But here the patron’s interest in reputation comes into play: a cattle owner with a reputation for cheating his clients will find it difficult to recruit high-quality herders.
This account serves to explain the evolution of the patron-client relation in cattle-camps on the basis of transaction costs (costs of supervision). Arrangements will be selected that serve to minimize transaction costs. In the circumstances of traditional cattle-rearing among the Orma the transaction costs of a straight wage-labor system are substantially greater than those associated with a patron-client system. Therefore the patron-client system is selected. The hypothesis would predict that if transaction costs change substantially (through improved transportation, for example, or through the creation of fixed grazing areas), that the terms of employment would change as well (in the direction of less costly pure wage-labor contracts). And in fact this is what Ensminger finds among the Orma. When villages begin to establish “restricted grazing areas” in the environs of the village (pp. 134-141), it is feasible for cattle owners to directly supervise the management of their herds; and in these circumstances Ensminger finds an increase in pure wage labor contracts.
This is a credible explanation; Ensminger makes a convincing case for the difference in relative costs of the two systems. What is more difficult to assess is the availability of alternative hypotheses. Might it be held, for example, that the prevalence of patron-client relations is the consequence of traditional Islamic values, for example (as suggested by the idea that additional payments take the form of zakat, or traditional Islamic charity)—so that it is the disappearance of patronage that demands explanation, not its currency at a given time? And what assumptions are we to make about the “microfoundations” of the patronage system: have agents selected this system so as to minimize costs? Has it evolved through some process of social selection that is sensitive to transaction costs? Is it a happy accident that patronage minimizes transaction costs? These are questions that neither Ensminger’s account nor the underlying NIE literature permit us to answer. And yet without answers to these questions it is less than transparent what the explanatory import is of the fact of minimized transaction costs.
A centrally important issue facing any treatment of a nomadic livestock regime is the “tragedy of the commons.” If grazing land is common property and limited in extent, how can the regime avoid over-grazing, as each herder brings more and more animals to the pasture? The result ought to be serious overuse of the common resource, leading to extinction of the regime. However, pastoralists have succeeded in managing “common-property resources” for many generations. So the theoretically interesting issue is how such cultures succeed in evading the tragedy of the commons, and through what mechanisms use of common-property resources is limited to sustainable levels. Ensminger addresses this issue briefly, with two observations. First, at various historical periods the Orma did not confront a limited common resource in pasturage, since it was feasible to expand the range area as the herd size increased. And second, she emphasizes the circumstance that it is access to water, not pasture, that is the controlling factor on herd size in pastoral Africa; and water was not a common property resource. Instead, access was limited by private owners of wells.
In sum, Making a Market is a valuable contribution both to area studies of East Africa and to the growing literature of applied institutional economics. For readers interested in getting a feel for the value of the NIE approach in application to concrete historical processes, Ensminger’s book offers a good place to begin. This reader concludes that the NIE approach represents a significant improvement in explanatory power over more spartanly neo-classical approaches to the explanation of economic development. And for those whose primary interests focus on processes of political and economic change in twentieth century Africa, the book is equally valuable.
Economic Development and Cultural Change 1993
There was a peasant-based political movement in Nicaragua that preceded the anti-Somoza struggle of the 1970s and its guiding inspiration was not Sandino. The history of this movement is almost unknown. In this highly interesting and well-executed book Jeffrey Gould provides a historical reading of the development of a worker and peasant movement in Nicaragua that integrates a narrative of the emergence of estate-based capitalist agriculture and food processing industries with a closely detailed account of the politics of land and labor. His treatment covers the period 1912-1979 (the date of the successful Sandinista revolution). It is not a history of the Sandinista movement, however, but instead a detailed interpretation of the workers’ and peasants’ movements that developed in Nicaragua prior to and alongside of the Sandinistas. Basing his treatment on oral history sources as well as estate, government, and labor archives, Gould provides an informative and theoretically useful treatment that sheds light both on Nicaragua’s own agrarian history and the processes of peasant politics in other parts of the world as well.
Much of the narrative revolves around the processes of commercialization of agriculture—marked by the expansion of operations of the San Antonio sugar mill (ISA) in Chichigalpa—and the strategies of adjustment and resistance adopted by peasants and workers in response. The central contests that drive Nicaragua’s rural politics throughout the period include struggles over ownership and use of land; workers’ efforts to gain union rights and a code of labor; and a state-society competition through which workers and peasants attempted to evade or defeat predatory state policies. The ISA mill, the largest manufacturing enterprise in Nicaragua since the 1920s, imposed a fundamental reorganization on the rural economy, as its owners acquired more and more land for sugar cultivation at the expense of peasant household farming. Likewise, the introduction of largescale sugar refining technologies forced substantial changes in the organization of work and the conditions of wage labor. Moreover, the mill owners were very closely allied with the Conservative regime (and later the Somoza regime), extracting monopolies and favorable labor legislation from the state. This combination of economic changes and state-business political arrangements created a rapidly changing environment for workers and campesinos; Gould’s aim is to recover the changing stages of consciousness and political attitudes among these groups.
Gould places peasant and worker consciousness at the center of his story. He works on the assumption that agents within this historical process made their own history, though not in circumstances of their own choosing; and that a central part of mobilization was the construction of an explicit and developed worldview of the system within which agents found themselves. He is concerned with uncovering “a qualitatively new collective understanding of their social world” (p. 6), as a critical element of the process of mobilization and political struggle. An important part of this process of conceptualization of the social world takes the form of a struggle between hegemony and counter-hegemony: between a system of beliefs that essentially favor elites, versus beliefs that provide the basis for criticism and struggle against exploitative social relations. On his account, the campesino-worker movement took shape as individuals and organizations struggled to arrive at a new understanding of the economic realities and class interests that were defined by the development of agro-export agriculture (p. 119).
Thus one of Gould’s chief aims is to arrive at an understanding of the lived experience of the campesino movement in Nicaragua. And this requires that he find some form of access to the campesino’s voice. Gould has attempted to do so through extensive oral-history interviews with survivors of the period under discussion. This material is highly successful; the reader gains a vivid impression of the everyday experience of struggles that occurred five or six decades ago. In his interviews with elderly campesinos and workers who lived through this period of Nicaraguan history, he has succeeded in finding informants who participated in these events at various levels, and their testimony offers vivid insight into events of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.
Consistent with this concern with the lived experience of this period, Gould pays considerable attention to the politics of symbol and popular culture. One of the special strengths of the book, in fact, is the author’s ability to weave together the material and social underpinnings of the story—the processes of technological change in sugar processing and the growing importance of international market conditions affecting Nicaraguan agriculture—with the ways in which these structural processes were experienced and transformed into political consciousness in both workers and peasants.
Gould finds a worldview among workers and campesinos during this period that is more complex than one might expect. On the one hand the myths and practices of corporate paternalism had some grip on workers and peasants within the orbit of ISA. On the other hand, the concentration of sugar workers permitted the emergence of a fairly effective and militant labor organization (pp. 38 ff.). And the political ideology of the Liberal movement in Nicaragua had substantial resonance with these workers in the 1920s; the Liberal revolution (1926-27) found substantial support among these groups.
Gould’s account of the relationship between the Nicaraguan labor movement and the regime of Anastasio Somoza García (1936-1956) is particularly interesting. Gould points out that the Somoza regime had an ambiguous relationship to capital and labor. It continued the government’s clientelistic policies toward ISA, adopting policies that favored the interests of the owners. At the same time, however, Somoza legalized the labor movement, in the expectation of being able to control the agenda of the movement and gain its political support. Thus the Somoza regime made prolonged and sometimes successful attempts at hegemony within the labor movement, before finally veering to the right in the late 1940s and arriving at a strategy of repression of the labor movement.
To Lead as Equals is valuable from several perspectives. From the point of view of Nicaraguan social history it is an important contribution to the existing literature. The success of the Sandinista revolution largely eclipsed the other social forces that were active in Nicaragua throughout the first half of the twentieth century; Gould does an admirable job of identifying and chronicling the several waves of mobilization among workers and peasants during this period that were largely independent of the Sandinista movement. But the book is also valuable from the point of view of our theoretical understanding of the politics of agrarian societies: Is there a moral economy of agrarian society? Do class-based alliances have natural salience as a basis for political action? What are some of the connections between technological change and social and political processes (reform politics, new class identities, land occupations)? Gould provides a narrative that illustrates many of these processes in the context of agrarian Nicaragua.
Gould’s framework of explanation of the process of politicization and mobilization that he describes is sensitively eclectic. Two frameworks in particular find substantial use. First, much of Gould’s narrative emphasizes the centrality of exploitation and class in social history. He pays close attention to the processes of economic and technological change that drove a whole complex of social changes within agrarian Nicaragua. Second, and perhaps even more important in Gould’s analysis, are some of the ideas of the moral economy approach to peasant politics: the idea that peasant communities are uneasily regulated by a set of normative assumptions about the central material issues that arise within the community. Gould’s use of theoretical ideas is convincing and sensitive. Theoretical constructs are used here in support of analysis of the available historical record, rather than driving the analysis to a preordained conclusion.
Gould makes a case for a moral economy analysis of campesino village culture in Nicaragua in the first half of the twentieth century. Patron-client relations had possessed a paternalistic character, but lost this character through the advance of agro-capitalism. Landlords worked to shed their customary obligations, while campesinos sought to retain and extend an operative sense of community solidarity. These campesinos, Gould asserts, had a conception of property that was to some degree communal: “The San Jose peasants valued the well-being of their community over their own profits” (p. 120). But there is a twist in the story that Gould tells: whereas the moral economy approach generally asserts that the norms described are actually to be found within village life, Gould uses this approach more as a theory of the popular discourse—the revolutionary appeals made by campesinos—rather than as a description of the actual social relations of the hacienda. This popular discourse had political consequences, however: “The elite’s demonstration that it was unable to perform its traditional functions, coupled with the campesinos’ strengthened conviction of their rights, forced the terratenientes (landlords) onto the defensive, after decades of almost unquestioned authority” (135).
Gould offers a number of interesting observations about these political processes that appear relevant for other agrarian regimes as well: the importance of intra-elite conflicts in creating a space for a campesino-based political movement (116); the significance of differences in goals and organizational basis of urban and rural workers, and the importance of linkages between labor and campesino movements (e.g. chapter 8); the role of the political entrepreneur within agrarian popular politics (p. 122); and the importance of symbolic politics and popular culture (p. 135).
In sum, this is a valuable and informative book. It sheds important light on an underdocumented period of Central American social history, and it makes convincing efforts to make sense of the shifting political and social consciousness of the campesinos and workers and their movements during this period. It should be of interest to both students of Latin America and to those interested in processes of agrarian change more generally.
Economic Development and Cultural Change 1997
This is a book with a large thesis and an underdeveloped empirical case. The thesis is important, and one which squarely challenges much of the best current thinking about revolution. As Colburn puts it, “The central argument of the study is that prevailing interpretations of revolutions have slighted the importance of ideas to which revolutionary elites of our era have been beholden, and the ability of those elites to change the course of history” (p. 5). Few today would challenge the importance of the role of party, organization, and leadership in the emergence of revolutions, and plainly ideology is an important factor in each of these forms of agency. But Colburn goes further: “It has been this intellectual culture, I will argue, much more than the imperatives of social structure, that has provided the logic of contemporary revolutions” (p. 14). So ideas matter much more than the “imperatives of social structure” in the occurrence and dynamics of revolution. This is a much more provocative thesis; but Colburn’s case is sketchy.
If Colburn’s argument is found convincing, then the whole family of theories that emphasize structural factors in the occurrence and course of revolution will need rethinking — theories that explain the occurrence of revolution as the effect of class conflict, social unrest, state-society relations, international conflict, or inexorable processes of political and social modernization. For Forrest Colburn argues that it is a shared and diffused revolutionary ideology that largely accounts for the character of revolutions in the 20th century. This is an ideology that travels under the flag of Marxist-Leninism. It is an ideology articulated by European radical intellectuals and politicians in the 20th century, an ideology incorporated and appropriated by revolutionary leaders in the post-colonial world, and an ideology that framed and guided a whole ensemble of political action. Associated with this ideology are a wide range of tools of revolution—strategies for mobilization, rhetoric against the existing state and social order, schemes for transforming existing social relations, and a vision of a socialist future toward which revolution is aimed. And Colburn maintains that this ideology was remarkably successful in motivating and guiding both revolutionary elites and the masses they led in the design and implementation of revolutions in dozens of countries.
The book is put forward as a comparative study of a large number of twentieth century revolutions in poor countries. Colburn’s treatment proceeds through chapters on the intellectual environment and political culture of the (usually student) leadership of the movements under study; the suite of strategies that were used to seize power in the various cases; the attempts at state-building undertaken by these revolutionaries; characteristics of administration in revolutionary states; and the behavior of these states in the conduct of war. Two concluding chapters analyze the period in which the Marxist-Leninist ideas that underlay so many of these movements began to fray, and offer a series of theoretical conclusions based on the study. “Ideas matter,” is the mantra of Colburn’s book—they matter in the timing, appeal, strategy, tactics, longterm plans, and the overall unfolding of events in the course of 20th century revolutionary movements. And, he believes, they matter more than any set of conjunctions of structural factors.
This is an argument to be taken with the greatest degree of seriousness. Let us begin with the obvious: the flat impossibility of explaining any twentieth century revolution without appeal to both types of factors. Would a Marxist-Leninist ideology set down in a radical party in Canada have led to revolution in that country in 1968? No matter how disciplined, articulate, and capable the leadership of such a party might have been, the answer is almost certainly and emphatically negative. And why not? Because the material conditions on the basis of which mass mobilization might take place did not exist in Canada; because the Canadian state was in full possession of its powers of compromise, accommodation, and — if necessary — repression to easily defeat such a movement; and because there was no external factor — e.g. a taxing and soon-to-be-lost war — which would have weakened the state’s capacities. In other words—because the necessary structural conditions for revolution did not exist in Canada in 1968, an ideology of class conflict and popular mobilization would not have succeeded in bringing about largescale activism on the part of the Canadian populace.
But likewise, one can ask whether structural conditions and “weak state” factors were sufficient to guarantee the success of revolution in China in the 1930s and 1940s. Once again, the answer is plainly negative. Had the Communist party not had capable leadership, a competent and widespread organization, a coherent plan of mobilization and struggle, and an ability to solve the implicit principal-agent problem inherent in the use of isolated cadres in pursuit of a central party goal — if, that is, we were to imagine China in the 1930s and 40s without Mao and the Chinese Communist Party — then surely one would predict that the Guomindang would easily have reunited China under an authoritarian capitalist regime following the defeat of Japan in 1945. No party, no revolution. And the CCP’s leadership was plainly in the “vogue” of Marxist-Leninist revolution. In other words, absence of the ideational and agent-centered factors embodied in the CCP and its ideology would have led to the failure of revolution in China.
What, then, is the issue? The inadequacy of a purely structural Marxist theory of revolution has long been recognized; the simple Marxist logic leading from crisis in the mode of production to emergence of a revolutionary class with the means and goal of smashing the old regime — is plainly inadequate. What is needed, rather, is an account of the “microfoundations” of revolution — the processes and mechanisms through which the structural conditions of a society in crisis are transformed into a successful revolutionary movement. Plainly organization, leadership, and the availability of a coherent ideology are essential parts of such a story. On this approach, Colburn’s book represents a laudable effort to lay out one complex of microfoundations of revolution. To suggest more, however, is to overstate the case: ideational factors do not by themselves constitute a sufficient basis for explaining any largescale revolutionary movement.
The book presents itself as a comparative study of some twenty-two countries. The author believes that careful examination of these cases shows important parallels among them. How convincing is Colburn’s case? What sort of evidence is he able to muster? To start, it might be observed that there is a degree of mismatch between the sweeping nature of Colburn’s conclusions and the relatively scanty amount of empirical detail he musters in discussion of the cases. Unfortunately, a book of 105 pages cannot begin to do justice to such a comparison; and so the conclusions Colburn draws are unavoidably under-supported. The chapter on the political culture of contemporary revolutions (chapter 2) provides a few paragraphs on the shaping intellectual experiences of the leaders of revolutions in Ethiopia, China, Vietnam, Cuba, Mozambique, Cambodia, Iran, and Afghanistan. Revolutionaries of the 1940s through 1970s read Marxism; they were influenced by a reasonably coherent radical critique of the modern world system (late capitalism, imperialism, exploitation); and their own plans, goals, aspirations, and policies were influenced by this theory. But there is nothing startling in this set of truths. How important were other sources of radicalism or nationalism in these various leaders—might not Ho Chi Minh have pursued his own indigenous struggle of national liberation even in the absence of exposure to Marxism? In a book of 105 pages, it is plainly impossible to treat so many cases in exhaustive detail. But one would be more convinced if the argument were somewhat more deeply involved in analysis of the cases.
One of the cases that Colburn examines is that of China. This is appropriate, since China’s revolution is surely the most important and most enduring of the century. But Colburn treats China’s revolution with a broad brush. His account depends entirely on a secondary literature—and in most cases, not the most appropriate secondary literature. There is a rich and illuminating stream of books and articles that have shed much light on all aspects of China’s revolution—from its origins in the 1930s to the seizure of power in the 1940s to the design and implementation of policy through the 60s, 70s, and 80s. But Colburn makes no use of this literature, referring instead to a few summary treatments of the revolution. It is difficult to see, then, how Colburn’s case can be thought to find support from the example of the Chinese Revolution. And in fact, careful study of the Chinese Revolution suggests a more complicated and nuanced story than is offered by Colburn’s analysis. First, virtually all studies make it plain that structural factors were critical in the causal processes leading up to the revolution and the turns of policy during the first two decades of Communist rule. In his treatments of Communist base areas in eastern and central China, Yung-fa Chen makes a strong case to the effect that the CCP’s mobilization strategies depended on a class- and exploitation-based appeal; but it was the real persistence of exploitation, domination, and humiliation in Chinese rural society made such mobilization efforts successful. And second, it is plain that Maoism itself became part of the complex of ideas that influenced revolutionaries in other arenas; but this demonstrates that Chinese revolutionaries were not simply in the thrall of a foreign, European ideology.
It is also significant that China is frequently an exception to the generalizations that Colburn advances concerning revolutions in poor countries. For example, he disputes the “romanticized” notion that revolutionary movements depend on an alliance between guerrillas and peasants (p. 46), arguing instead that revolutionaries are forced to weld together “a broad coalition of groups”. But from the late 1930s forward China’s revolutionary party did in fact orient its strategies toward peasants, and derived its political and military power from the support of the peasantry. (There was, of course, a tactical effort on the part of the CCP to appeal to a variety of rural groups—e.g. bandits, rich peasants, martial arts followers, and others. But the central thrust was toward poor peasants.) A related important exception has to do with Colburn’s conception of the role of class in the formation of revolutionary movements; he writes that “strictly speaking, they have not been class revolutions” (p. 64), but rather anti-colonial struggles. This generalization, once again, applies badly to China. The CCP came to power on the basis of a program of political and economic revolution, and offered a straightforward challenge to existing class relations. Finally, Colburn suggests that revolutionary movements commonly fail in poor countries because “poor countries are simply unable to carry out ambitious development programs without a large infusion of foreign assistance” (p. 70); but China is plainly a poor country which did exactly that. Given China’s importance in the politics of the post-colonial world, a theory of revolution in poor countries that fails to apply to China seems to have a heavy burden of proof elsewhere. It almost suggests that Colburn’s case ought to be restricted to revolutions in small, poor countries.
It is worth wondering too whether Colburn himself takes ideas seriously enough. For he treats the political theory of Marxism as a vogue, a trend, a fashion — not as a serious effort to make sense of the systems of economic inequality, political power, and social coercion that so characterizes the twentieth century world—rich and poor. Marxism is a diagnosis of the human cost of capitalism and imperialism, and of the social sinews of power and privilege which make a class-stratified society run. The Marxist conclusion that development, modernization, and democratization require substantial change in the power relations of poor societies is not a chimera. Nicaragua in 1979 was in fact a society in which political power was brutally wielded from the center, in naked support of the economic interests of a small circle of families; Nicaraguan farmers and workers were in fact confined to a narrow circle of poverty, ignorance, and feeble political resources; the grinding, pervasive power of the sugar and coffee companies did in fact wield the upper hand; and the prospect for a gradual, peaceful yielding of power was virtually nil. And so the credentials of Marxism as a diagnosis of the underlying social relations perhaps ought not be dismissed as mere “vogue”.
These points notwithstanding, the book represents a provocative and knowledgeable contribution to current debates over the explanation of revolutions in the twentieth century.
Philosophical Review 1994
Is Marxist theory destined to slide into a permanent eclipse as a consequence of the demise of communism in the past five years? Wright, Levine, and Sober give evidence that it is not. They argue for the continuing salience of a Marxist theory of history, and through the lucidity of their analysis of a range of problems they demonstrate the ongoing vitality and importance of analytical Marxism.
The book is organized around problems of social explanation and historical materialism that have been prominent within analytical Marxism for the past ten years or so. The first part focuses on problems within historical materialism: the meaning of the claim that material factors exert primacy over elements of “superstructure” and the supposedly functionalist character of the central claims of historical materialism. This discussion is framed by Gerald Cohen’s reconstruction of Marx’s theory in Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Princeton University Press, 1978). The second part of Reconstructing Marxism is concerned with two important problems of methodology and explanation: the status of methodological individualism within Marxism and the logic of claims of causal primacy (both central topics in formulating the meta-theory of historical materialism).
The authors argue for the importance of “reconstructing” Marxism. What does this amount to? To start with, it continues within the general perspective of analytical Marxism. As they put it, “Analytical Marxism above all aspires to clarify rigorously foundational concepts and assumptions and the logic of theoretical arguments built on those foundations” (p. 3). Besides its emphasis on clarity, analytical Marxists have generally taken an eclectic stance on central topics in Marxist theory. No central doctrines are canonical (including the labor theory of value); there is no distinctive Marxist method for social science; and the test of adequacy for those Marxist theories and assumptions that are to survive are the familiar standards of empiricist philosophy of science: empirical adequacy, fruitfulness as a program of research, inter-theoretical support, and the like. And finally, the authors of Reconstructing Marxism make a strong case for limiting the scope and determinacy of explanatory claims within Marxism.
The theory of historical materialism has received a great deal of attention since the publication of Gerald Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History. What do Wright, Levine, and Sober have to add to this debate? The central conclusion of their chapter on Cohen’s theory is that Cohen’s primacy thesis—the idea that growth of the productive forces exerts explanatory primacy over the relations of production—cannot be sustained (p. 44). They gloss this negative conclusion as undercutting the deterministic character of historical materialism, advocating “a more complex model of historical trajectories” (p. 46). This leads to their most general and important recommendations for restructuring historical materialism: limit the scope and ambitions of the theory, and make room in the theory for the unmistakable evidence of historical contingency, not only in details but in trajectory. Thus they prefer weak historical materialism to strong (that is, they advocate dropping the idea that the theory provides sufficient conditions for historical change; p. 90), and they prefer restricted to inclusive materialism (that is, they prefer to restrict the scope of historical materialism to “those non-economic institutions that bear on the reproduction of the economic structures themselves;” p. 96). These are salutary recommendations, and very much in line with other recent work in the area (including Gerald Cohen himself in Marx, Labour and Freedom [Oxford University Press, 1988]).
The topic of the relation between methodological individualism and Marxism has been much debated in recent discussions. So-called “rational-choice Marxists” have argued that Marx’s foundational arguments—particularly his explanations of the economic logic of capitalism and his explanations of class politics—depend on assumptions about individual rationality that differ little from those made by neoclassical economists and orthodox political scientists. What is distinctive to Marx’s explanations, on this approach, is not his conception of individual agency, but rather his substantive hypotheses about the institutional arrangements that define the environment of choice within different class societies. Moreover, this approach has emphasized the need for “microfoundational” explanations within Marxism: explanations of macro-level patterns that identify the micro-level pathways through which these patterns emerge. (Adherents to this approach include John Roemer, Jon Elster, and Adam Przeworski, among others.) The authors of this book weigh in on the debate by arguing against methodological individualism as a canon of social science explanation (chapter 6), on the ground that this position is inherently reductionist. They deny that social properties can be reduced to ensembles of individual properties, even though social properties supervene upon individual properties. In the end, however, they endorse the call for microfoundations (pp. 120-121), since they rightly conclude that the demand for microfoundations for macro-explanations is not a demand for reduction of social laws to individual laws.
A particular strength of the book is the evolutionary perspective that Elliott Sober brings to the substantive issues of social methodology that are addressed here. The question of the relation between Marx’s theories and Darwin’s has fascinated readers for a century. But much of this discussion has focused on the possible intellectual relations between Marx and Darwin: what did Marx make of the theory of evolution? Did Darwin read Capital? (I have always thought that some of Marx’s comments about species have more a Lamarckian than Darwinian cast. Consider, for example, Marx’s comment in the introduction to the Grundrisse: “Human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape. The intimations of higher development among the subordinate animal species, however, can be understood only after the higher development is already known.”)
As interesting as these concerns are, even more challenging for philosophers is the question of the logical relations between evolutionary theory and historical materialism. Do the two theories offer similar explanations (pp. 56 ff.)? Is the theory of evolution a historical theory (pp. 48-51)? The authors argue for one particularly important difference between these two theories concerning the scope of explanation intended by each: historical materialism is concerned to explain largescale epochal changes, whereas evolutionary theory is generally concerned to explain particular events (p. 54). On this line of thought, historical materialism is macro-history, while evolutionary theory is micro-history.
This way of contrasting the two theories is perhaps overdrawn, however, since the general framework of historical materialism—the salience of technology and class, the causal importance of the system of surplus extraction, the relations between economic interests and political power—has provided a research program within which much detailed historical research has taken place. Indeed, one might well take the “reconstructing Marxism” line argued elsewhere in the volume more seriously in this context, and maintain that the most important use of historical materialism is not at the level of epochal history, but rather in guiding research leading to explanations of middle-level historical change. On this approach, historical materialism ought not be understood as a template of historical change, to be applied mechanically to any and all social systems without empirical investigation. What survives from the Marxist program, and what still offers promise as a research strategy for historical explanation, is the framework of analysis in terms of property arrangements, surplus-extraction systems, class, and class conflict.
Philosophical Books 1993
Is there a role for Marxist theory within social philosophy after the collapse of the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe (the “Post-Leninist” world)? Keith Graham maintains that there is such a role, and that it continues to be an important one. Marx’s central insights—his materialism, his focus on the social means of production as a central constraint on individuals and social change, his articulated theory of class, and his attention to patterns of exploitation—are important analytical frameworks that may be applied both to existing capitalist societies and to post-communist and post-capitalist societies of the future.
The book is generally couched within the framework of analytical Marxism, and offers thoughtful discussion of positions of Gerald Cohen, John Roemer, Adam Przeworski, Jon Elster, Erik Olin Wright, and many others. Much of the book takes the form of a critical exposition of what Graham regards as the central components of Marx’s social theory: Marx’s theory of human nature and the human condition; his general theory of history; his theory of capitalist society; and his practical proposals for change (p. 5). This taxonomy corresponds roughly to that employed by most other commentators on Marx (in particular, Allen Wood’s treatment in Karl Marx [Routledge, 1981]). Graham places materialism at the center of Marx’s theory of humankind; Marx’s discussions of alienation and freedom find no expression in his account.
Graham’s chief disagreement with analytical Marxism is its emphasis on individualism and rational choice as a basis on which Marxist explanations can proceed. Graham is prepared to endorse a notion of practical collective identity (pp. 27 ff.) as a component of individual motivation (that is, individuals have some practical motivation to act in pursuit of the interests of the groups with which they identify). As Graham notes, this concept makes it possible to answer free-rider arguments about class politics (perhaps too easy). This reader is persuaded that some such notion is needed in order to account fully for observed patterns of collective action. But it must be noted that it is notoriously difficult to give a theoretically convincing account of this component of individual motivation.
Graham exerts himself in the final chapter to argue that Marx’s conception of a post-capitalist society is not the brutal and bureaucratized dictatorships that Communist regimes became. His defense is, if anything, less convincing that it might be; Marx’s common affirmation of “true democracy,” his criticisms of the anarchists on the basis of their appeal to violence, and his emphasis on the ultimate value of individual freedom all give grounds for a robust defense of democratic socialism as an embodiment of Marx’s social theory.
There is much to admire in Karl Marx Our Contemporary. It is clearly argued; it makes a creditable attempt to find philosophical unity in Marx’s work; and it does a good job of addressing the existing literature. Its importance is somewhat diminished, however, by the availability of a number of comparable books by Allen Wood, Jon Elster, John Roemer, Richard Miller, and others. Readers of the literature within analytical Marxism over the past ten years will find little here that would count as an original contribution to these debates.
Ethics 1990
Given the current ferment in the socialist world, both economic and political, there is a need for a good introduction to the topic of socialism. Regrettably Bernard Crick’s somewhat idiosyncratic Socialism covers less of the ground than one would like. Crick’s book treats socialism largely as a topic in the history of ideas, emphasizing the non-Marxist origins of socialism. The author provides a sketchy description of the origins of socialist thinking in such figures as Rousseau, Babeuf, Owen, Morris, Fourier, and Marx. And he alludes to some of the historical antecedents of socialism—largely the political revolutions of the eighteenth century. (Curiously, he does not discuss the economic changes that shaped socialism— new technologies, factory production, and a mass industrial working class.) Crick spends what is probably an excess of space on English socialists, and he concludes with a loosely structured essay on the values underlying democratic socialism. The book does not provide any discussion of the economics of socialism; the political and economic institutions through which a socialist state might realize its values; the prospects for a peaceful transition to socialism; or the implications of democratic institutions for socialist society today. These are the difficult questions, and the literature still needs a work that treats them in an accessible way for non-specialists.
Philosophical Books 1991
There has been much discussion of the role of the individual in Marx’s theory of history and society in recent years. Louis Althusser and structuralist Marxists argue that there is no place for individualism within Marxism; whereas Jon Elster and analytic Marxists attempt to show that Marxism depends on a form of individualism in its style of explanation. Ian Forbes argues that both positions are incorrect. Marx is certainly opposed to liberal individualism, but not to the importance of the individual in society. At the same time, Forbes concludes that the methodological individualism offered by Elster and others is unmotivated within Marxism. (His arguments against this position are cursory and miss the plausible core of “rational-choice” Marxism; this is a position pertaining to the logical characteristics of social explanation—not a theory of social ontology.) Forbes argues for a form of Marxian individualism, according to which individuals are placed within the context of historical development. On Forbes’s account, Marx’s conception of the individual is based on the idea of potential or capacity—a potential that can be forwarded or impeded by social relations. Individuals are historical agents—with the implication that they can autonomously affect social processes. At the same time, however, individuals derive their personhood from the particular material and social circumstances into which they are born—with the implication, then, that social circumstances cannot be reduced to facts about non-social individuals. Forbes’s analysis is organised around three historical stages of the human individual, corresponding to pre-capitalist society, capitalist society, and communist society. The author does a creditable job of pulling together a more or less coherent conception of the individual out of Marx’s varied writings, and this interpretation has the merit of helping to bridge the schism between the “humanist” Marx and the Marx of historical materialism.
Science and Society 1991
There is a recurring tendency within Marxism for a fascination with pseudo-philosophy to crowd out serious analysis of social and historical processes. Resnick and Wolff, regrettably, succumb to this tendency in Knowledge and Class. These are talented Marxist economists who have made significant contributions in the past—for example, in their work on the economics of colonialism. In their more recent work, however, they appear to have been beguiled by the charms of Parisian philosophy and post‑ modernist jargon to the detriment of substantive analysis.
The authors’ goals are ambitious; they seek to provide a reformulation of Marxian theory that avoids economic determinism and what they call “essentialism”—any approach that holds that “any apparent complexity—a person, a relationship, a historical occurrence, and so forth—can be analyzed to reveal a simplicity lying at its core” (2-3). In discussing relations between the state and the enterprise, for example, they write, “The overdetermination of each process engenders the contradictions and thus changes embedded in each. Further, each site is overdetermined by all others in the social formation” (164). Many philosophers of science would hold, however, that the central goal of explanation is precisely to identify a simple underlying process that gives rise to a given phenomenon or pattern; so to renounce “essentialism” in all its forms is to forswear explanation. Resnick and Wolff prefer a worldview in which everything depends on everything else; on their view, then, it is simpleminded to attempt to discover causal relations among social phenomena. “Instead, the presumption is that every element in the context of any event plays its distinctive role in determining that event” (3). This philosophical stance may have the intellectual fascination of a Rubik’s cube or a hall of mirrors; but it does not constitute the basis of an intelligible analysis, a chief goal of which is to sort out credible causal relations among social factors. Resnick and Wolff’s position appears to have the unfortunate implication that social science is impossible; explanation, generalization, and prediction fall by the way. This is a particularly odd gloss on Marxian social method, given Marx’s own commitment to materialist explanation of historical processes and his sustained respect for empirical investigation of social change.
Another unattractive feature of the book is its woolly relativist tone. Consider a representative assertion along these lines: “Each theory contains its own indexes of truth and falsity; truths are plural and conceptualized differently by and within each distinct theory” (6). These are issues that have been dealt with seriously and carefully by philosophers (for example, in Rationality and Relativism, edited by Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982]). Without heed to the very difficult problems that arise in attempting to formulate a relativist theory of knowledge, Resnick and Wolff write glibly about the relativity of every standpoint, including their own; but this fashionable post-modernist stance is scarcely intelligible.
These critical comments have a practical import: the reader may prefer to begin the book about halfway through, skipping the exhausting discussion of the appropriate method and stance for Marxist theory in the first two chapters. (This advice applies also to the Epilogue, in which the authors entertain such engaging issues as “What is a Book?”) The substantive analysis in the book begins in chapter three, in which Resnick and Wolff attempt to reformulate a Marxian theory of class. They define the concept of class as “one distinct process among the many that constitute social life . . . in which unpaid surplus-labor is pumped out of direct producers” (115). A class, then, is not a group of persons sharing a position in a set of property relations, but rather a social process to which individuals relate in multiple ways. The authors emphasize the importance of a distinction between “fundamental” classes and “subsumed” classes—those involved directly in the production of surplus value, versus those involved only in the distribution of already appropriated surplus value (118). The industrial capitalist personifies a fundamental class; whereas the private owner of land personifies a subsumed class. Resnick and Wolff also address the problem of distinguishing between productive and unproductive labor. Intuitively, the factory worker is involved in productive labor, whereas the sales representative is involved in unproductive labor. Resnick and Wolff attempt to capture this distinction by holding that productive labor is that which gives rise to surplus value, whereas unproductive labor is that which produces no surplus value (133). This way of drawing the distinction is unpersuasive, however; it implies that the self-employed artisan within a capitalist economy is an unproductive laborer. The original distinction is intended to capture the idea that there is human activity involved in the production and circulation of commodities in capitalism that does not add value to the commodity—for example, the activity of writing the advertising jingles needed to sell the product. But it is plain that self-employed artisans do add value to their products (value that is reflected in the price of these products), so it is counterintuitive to classify them as unproductive workers. And in fact the authors soon undercut their own distinction, writing that “unproductive labor is what makes possible the receipt of distributed shares of that surplus value by subsumed classes” (134); this comment plainly characterizes agents within the process of circulation, not artisan workers.
In chapter four Resnick and Wolff offer an analysis of the capitalist industrial enterprise. The authors define an enterprise as a place where a number of persons are involved in the production of capitalist commodities (166), and they characterize it as a site at which multiple class and non-class processes occur (164). A first task, then, is to analyze the varieties of class structure found in capitalist enterprises. They consider the role of managers, owners and financiers, and fiscal agents of the state as prominent recipients of income through the enterprise; each category receives income through distinct channels and possesses a distinctive range of powers within the enterprise. Curiously, there is virtually no discussion of wage earners in this chapter.
Turn finally to Resnick and Wolff’s analysis of the capitalist state. The state too is a site of class and non-class processes (231). After a recital of a series of functions performed by the capitalist state, the authors turn to an analysis of the class structure of the state—that is, the class processes within the institutions of the state and social roles of the various agents within those institutions (members of Congress, the president, ministers, heads of bureaus, etc.). And they consider the relation between the state’s fiscal capacity and the sources of surplus value that are the origin of the state’s revenues.
These topics—class, enterprise, and state—are certainly central concerns within Marxist theory. Have Resnick and Wolff shed new light on them? And has the elaborate philosophical framework criticized above been used to advantage? Briefly, no and no. The philosophical framework, with its anti-essentialism, overdetermination, and relentless relativism, simply creates an almost impassible wall of jargon. And the substantive discussion of class, enterprise, and the state boils down to a soup of truisms and implausible assertions. This reader, at least, would have been happier with a more substantive and less philosophical book by Resnick and Wolff. Let us put aside this hyper-theoretical contemplation and resume discussion of the very substantive empirical and theoretical problems that confront Marxism today.
Review of Radical Political Economics 1990
Kevin Brien offers an ambitious effort to reconstruct Marx’s work as a coherent system. Rejecting the common view that Marx’s early and later writings contain important methodological and substantive differences (i.e., between the philosophical and the scientific Marx), Brien argues that Marx’s materialism is the direct outgrowth of his conception of human freedom as self-directed activity. He argues that the conception of human activity (“being-in-the-world”) that is contained in Marx’s early writings is also central to historical materialism and Marx’s analysis of capitalism in Capital. And he asserts that this conception is fundamental even to Marx’s empirical and historical writings.
Brien’s central topic is the concept of freedom in Marx’s system. He attempts to show how a complex notion of freedom as self-realizing activity underlies Marx’s theory of alienation, his theory of historical materialism, and his analysis and critique of capitalism. Brien distinguishes among three strands of concepts of freedom: freedom-as-spontaneity, freedom-as‑ transcendence, and freedom-as-a-mode-of-being. Freedom-as-spontaneity springs from the contrast between freedom and determinism; freedom-as‑ transcendence is the idea of human self-creation through a process of becoming (15); and freedom-as-mode-of-being refers to the attainment of self-fulfillment as a result of practical activity (127). Brien attempts to show that the latter two concepts represent a powerful and distinctive conception of positive freedom in Marx’s writings, and undergird his main critical ideas.
The author introduces the concept of “being-in-the-world” as a means of explicating Marx’s conception of human activity. This notion is intended to bring together the subjective and objective aspects of human existence in a way that fruitfully explicates Marx’s conception of the relation between human beings and their natural and social environment. Marx himself does not use this concept; instead, the idea derives from Heidegger. But Brien does an effective job of using this concept to knit together Marx’s conceptions of praxis, alienation, and self-realization. And he deploys this concept to offer a credible interpretation of Marx’s development of the main ideas of historical materialism. This discussion is perhaps the most convincing in the book; Brien shows himself to be a capable philosopher in working out the implications of this conception of human activity.
This line of argument represents a defensible treatment of Marx’s humanism and the development of the version of historical materialism contained in The German Ideology. However, the account is less credible as an interpretation of Marx’s empirical and historical writings. Brien tries too hard for theoretical unity within Marx’s corpus. As a result, he is led to treat all of Marx’s important writings as deriving from a single well-worked‑ out philosophical theory or worldview, and he eventually constructs a philosophical reading of Marx’s later writings that slights their empirical scientific achievements. But the mature Marx is more subtle and more eclectic than that; Marx’s theory of capitalism is multistranded, and Marx is fully prepared to incorporate novel insights from diverse sources. Thus the Hegelian dialectical reasoner that we find in Brien’s reading of Marx is some distance from the flexible, theoretically innovative and empirically sensitive investigator that we find in Capital.
Brien also attempts to explicate Marx’s method as a social scientist. He places a version of a dialectical method at the center of Marx’s science. And he maintains—building on arguments by Bertell Ollman—that Marx’s social ontology depends essentially on the concept of internal relations. Neither thesis is convincing, however. Brien reconstructs Marx’s conception of scientific explanation as “dialectical”; but he summarizes his interpretation as a combination of covering-law and genetic explanations (34-41). This is a plausible view of Marx’s explanatory practice, but it is difficult to see why this should be described as a “dialectical” model of explanation. And the concept of “internal relations” remains an unnecessarily obscure one; it should be possible to express the idea that social phenomena are interrelated without having to postulate conceptual connections among phenomena and events.
Brien’s treatment is somewhat marred by its complete neglect of several important strands of contemporary Marxist thought. His analysis of historical materialism is contiguous with current discussions by G. A. Cohen, Jon Elster, John McMurtry, John Roemer, and Richard Miller, but Brien does not cite or discuss these authors. And his central topic—the concept of freedom in Marx—has been extensively discussed by George Brenkert (Marx’s Ethics of Freedom; Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983); but, once again, Brien does not even cite Brenkert. These omissions are symptomatic of a total neglect of contemporary work within analytical Marxism; but debates in this area have important implications for his own topics and ought to have been considered.
These criticisms notwithstanding, the book is a useful contribution to the Marx literature. Brien offers a highly competent analysis of some of Marx’s central ideas; and he has put forward an interpretation of Marx’s system that hangs together in an admirably consistent way. My chief objection to the argument as a whole is its tendency to reconstruct Marx as a philosopher rather than an empirical social scientist. This is a reconstruction that will appeal to many readers; but it is one that detracts from the substance of Marx’s contributions to our understanding of the workings of the capitalist system—not as a philosophical construct, but as a contingent system of historically specific structures that can only be known through detailed empirical investigation.
Philosophical Books 1989
Organized as a chronological discussion of Marx’s writings, this book is a careful and detailed reading of much of Marx’s work, from the familiar to the obscure. The author describes the book as an examination of the theory of scientific knowledge put forward by Marx. More accurately, however, the book is about the supposed philosophical foundations of Marx’s work— primarily Marx’s relationship to Hegelian philosophy—and not its standing as empirical science. Murray holds that “if we compare Marx’s science to any other, it must be to Hegel’s philosophical science” (221). According to Murray, Marx’s conception of “science” is wissenschaft—”reflective, methodologically disciplined knowledge” (235:n1), and has little or nothing to do with the empiricist conception of science as a system of beliefs to be justified on the basis of empirical observation (xiii). In line with this interpretation, Murray argues there is no sharp methodological or substantive divide in Marx’s work from early to late.
Murray’s reading of Marx therefore emphasizes the conceptual over the empirical. Thus he treats the concept of value as a philosophical construct derived from Hegel’s theory of essence (161) with no attention to Marx’s use of this concept as a category of economic analysis, and his brief treatment of the concept of capital dwells on its relation to Hegel’s logic, with no attention to Marx’s efforts to analyze capitalism as a historically specific empirical phenomenon. There is no discussion of Marx’s sustained efforts to use the tools of classical political economy to solve outstanding empirical problems (e.g., the tendency of the rate of profit to fall); the character of Marx’s empirical reasoning; or Marx’s efforts to understand the historical origins of capitalism. Symptomatically, Murray treats the highly abstract first four chapters of Capital as the core of Marx’s mature scientific practice, with no attention at all to the much more empirically detailed analysis provided later in Capital: Marx’s analysis of the division of labor, machinery, the working day, and the process of primitive accumulation. Perhaps predictably given its Hegelian orientation, Murray ignores the important work that has been done within “analytical Marxism” in recent years on the topics discussed here—e.g. work by G. A. Cohen, Jon Elster, John McMurtry, John Roemer, Allen Wood, or William Shaw.
This book will be read with interest by philosophers congenial to the Hegelian interpretation of Marx, who will find much able and learned discussion of these aspects of Marx’s writings. It will be less persuasive to those philosophers who view Marx as an empirical social scientist aiming to discover the contingent features of capitalism as an economic system through empirical investigation.
Science and Society 1994
Is there a place for Marxist theory in the late twentieth century? What is the salience of a theory developed in the mid-nineteenth century—with its rapid industrialization, visible change in class structure, and laissez-faire states in capitalist societies—for the post-modern world? Much of the intellectual power and appeal of classical Marxism stemmed from the framework it offered for analysis of the social and economic structures of the capitalist world: the relation between technology and property, the politics of class, the dynamics of the capitalist mode of production, and the functional relation between the capitalist economy and the capitalist state. Historical materialism and Marxist economics—in this reader’s opinion, at least—constituted the greatest and most penetrating contribution of Marxist theory. And yet those theories were both formulated in terms of, and found their most secure application to, the industrialization and political transformation of nineteenth-century Britain.
In the twentieth century two things have changed. First, the focus of much Marxist thought has shifted from the material to the cultural: studies of ideology, culture, and the customs of class have replaced analysis of the social and economic structures of capitalism. Marxism has become “post-modern.” And second, the world has changed. Capitalism has proven more adaptable and more flexible than classical Marxism supposed, the autonomy of culture and politics from narrowly defined economic structures has expressed itself emphatically, democratic capitalist states have shown greater ability to adopt social welfare policies that serve working class interests than the classical Marxist theory of politics would allow; and—most significantly—the “workers’ states” of the twentieth century have shown themselves to be utter failures: economically disastrous, anti-democratic, politically repressive, and often murderously willing to sacrifice today’s workers for the greater good of socialism.
In light of these profound changes, it is inevitable that one should ask: What is there of value in Marxist theory for the self-understanding of citizens of the late twentieth century? In what ways do the theories of Marx and Engels still illuminate the social world more profoundly than other social theorists of the previous century? Is there any reason any longer to affirm that Marxist theory is anything but an anachronism?
Roger Gottlieb’s Marxism: Origins, Betrayal, Rebirth is a sustained attempt to address some of these issues. Gottlieb affirms the continuing significance of Marxism, both as an analytical basis for understanding our social world and as an important component of progressive politics. And at the same time, he acknowledges and probes the intellectual and political shortcomings of Marxism as it has been historically presented to us in the past century.
Gottlieb begins with his own précis of the original theory, providing brief expositions of Marx’s theories of human nature, historical materialism, ideology, alienation, capitalist economy, politics, and socialism (chapter 1). These presentations are necessarily elliptical, given the range of topics covered. He then offers an account of what he regards as the basic flaws of Marxism: its incipient “positivism”, its search for laws of history, and its sometimes failure to recognize the individual as an agent (chapter 2). Here Gottlieb joins a long line of twentieth-century Marxists (e.g. Albrecht Wellmer) who challenge the “scientism” of Marx and advocate instead a Marxism of freedom and agency. In this reader’s assessment, these criticisms of classical Marxism miss the mark. Marx’s own efforts were very much addressed to the problem of providing an objective and empirically supported analysis of the dynamics and characteristics of capitalist society; to dismiss those ambitions as “scientism” or “positivism” is to throw out too much of value in Marx’s work.
Gottlieb next turns to an assessment of some of the political movements that emerged from classical Marxism: the social-democratic movements of western Europe and Soviet Communism (chapters 3-4). Both receive poor marks—social democracy is a plague and Soviet Communism s the “death” of Marxism. In Gottlieb’s assessment, both movements were dead-ends; neither led to a politics of liberation that genuinely advanced the goals of human emancipation. Both discussions are brief, however; once again, the reader with any acquaintance with the issues is unlikely to learn very much from the discussion.
The second half of the book turns to the “rebirth” of Marxism: current trends of thought that Gottlieb believes to give new life to a Marxist perspective on the contemporary world (chapters 5-6). He begins with Western Marxism, by which he really means the Critical Theory school (Horkheimer, Marcuse, Adorno, Korsch, Lukács). The central insight emphasized here is the primacy of identity, consciousness, and agency for Marxist theory. Against the “positivist” assumptions of the social-scientific Marxists, the Critical Theory Marxists emphasize the processes of identity formation and self-consciousness that proceed within modern society. The emphasis here is on emancipation, not structure. Gottlieb turns next to socialist-feminism and the efforts a variety of feminist theorists have made to make use of some Marxist ideas. It is argued that classical Marxism overlooked altogether the problem of the oppression of women; by incorporating analysis of gender politics and culture into our conception of the social world, we have a better basis for understanding the oppressiveness of modern society.
The final three chapters of the book turn to contemporary issues and criticisms of Marxism. Gottlieb considers first some of the economic and political structures of contemporary capitalism that appear to force some revision of classical Marxist theory (chapter 7). These include the phenomenon of “monopoly capitalism;” the fiscal crisis of the state; the problem of legitimation; and the characteristics of global capitalism. He then turns to what he calls “current radical critics” of Marxism (chapter 8), including Anthony Giddens, Stanley Aronowitz, Nancy Chodorow, Gerald Cohen, and post-modern critics (Foucault, Derrida). (These authors would be better described as friendly critics.) These authors have offered important criticisms, qualifications, and bits of theory to the corpus of Marxism, and Gottlieb is right to direct attention to their writings. The book closes with a somewhat surprising discussion of the need for some recognition within Marxism of “the resources and insights of spirituality” (chapter 9).
As argued in the opening paragraphs of this review, the topic of Gottlieb’s book is of central importance to all of us who regard Marxism as an important intellectual and political resource in today’s world. And Gottlieb has touched on many of the right issues: the relation between Marxist theory and Soviet practice, the significance of social democracy, the role of agency and emancipation within Marxism, and the ways in which Marxist theory needs to be extended to take account of forms of oppression not highlighted in the classical theory. This reader remains somewhat frustrated at the sketchiness of much of the discussion. More substantively, this reader places a higher value on the economic and political insights of classical Marxism, as well as the aspiration to a Marxist social science, than Gottlieb does. The book gives the appearance of throwing out altogether most of classical Marxism—the theory of historical materialism, the economics of capitalism, the structural theory of class (in short, the “positivist” inheritance of Marxism)—replacing them with a philosophy of human nature that derives from the Frankfurt school rather than from Marx. These concerns notwithstanding, the book makes a contribution to the now-growing literature on the future of Marxism and one which many readers of Science and Society will find sympathetic.
Douglass North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Robert Bates, Markets and States in Tropical Africa: The Political Basis of Agricultural Policies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).
The reader who is interested in a much broader treatment of common-property management regimes is directed to Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).