Who invented the totalitarian state?

 
The world has known ruthless, violent, and murderous rulers for centuries.  Queen Elizabeth ran a secret service that ruthlessly pursued her enemies in the Catholic underground.  Isabella and Ferdinand persecuted and expelled the Jews of Spain.  And the French government was perfectly ready to use deadly force against workers and rebels in Paris in 1848 and 1871.  But the totalitarian state was a creation of the twentieth century.  The fascist states of Italy, Spain, and Germany as well as the Soviet state seem to have been qualitatively different from even the most repressive of their nineteenth century predecessors. By comparison, Bismarck's Prussia, Napoleon III's France, Czar Alexander's Russia, and Victor Emmanuel's Italy were quaint amateur affairs when it came to organized coercion and mass politics.

The differences are striking -- the apparatus of political prisons, the extensive secret police networks, the purposive use of violent organizations, the ideologies of national and ethnic purity.  Most fundamental, though, is the degree and depth of bureaucratic control that the modern totalitarian state achieved.  This is what made the modern fascist or soviet state "total" -- an ability to monitor and intimidate civil society down to the street level.

The distinction between the realm of the state and the realm of civil society has been fundamental to political theory.  Civil society encompasses the private activities of individuals and their associations, and the realm of the state involves the political apparatus of law, enforcement, and coercion.  We can roughly estimate the degree to which the apparatus of the state is able to penetrate down into civil society.  And European states prior to the twentieth century were objectively limited in their capacity to rule civil society.  This is true for the imperial Chinese state in the nineteenth century as well; it was commonly said that the power of the Emperor ended at the yamen wall (or at the county level).  As Mark Allee puts it in Law and Local Society in Late Imperial China: Northern Taiwan in the Nineteenth Century,

The limited effectiveness of yamen runners as police prompted local administrators in Danshui and Xinzhu to search for ways to augment and supplement their runner cadre. In so doing, sub-prefecture and county heads aimed to create more intimate linkages to the people in their jurisdiction and to extend the reach of local government beyond the yamen wall into the countryside. (197)

Weak states have only a limited ability to enforce their will against the mass populations of city and countryside; mechanisms such as tax farming and collective tax liability are therefore called upon in order to secure the resources needed by the central authorities.  And the scope of law and the effective enforcement of laws and decrees is limited as well in a weak state.  European polities of the nineteenth century were generally weak states; Britain, France, Germany, and Italy had central governments with only limited administrative capacity and limited ability to impose their authority at the local level.  But there was a dramatic increase in the beginning of the twentieth century in the administrative capacity of the state and its ability to govern local society.  The scope of the political grew much broader, and the domain of civil society -- the relatively safe and insulated zone of individual activity and choice -- grew more limited.  The creation of the totalitarian state depended on this radical increase in state power and state coercive capacity.

A striking feature of the totalitarian states of the twentieth century is their aggressiveness and brutality towards all opposition.  These fascist states were ruthless and effective in their ability to attack and dismantle oppositional groups -- including communists, labor unions, radical peasants, rent resistance organizations, liberals, and anarchists.  Chuck Tilly's discussion of "trust networks" is relevant here; the balance of power between the trust networks of civil society and the central power of the state apparatus shifted profoundly with the advent of the modern dictatorship; Trust and Rule.

One index of the administrative and coercive capacity of the state is the degree to which it is successful in exacting a greater percentage of the national wealth in taxes.  Weak states are relatively inefficient at collecting taxes.  So careful historical study of systems of taxation is an important contribution to the topic of the power of the state.  Isaac Martin, Ajay Mehrotra, and Monica Prasad's The New Fiscal Sociology: Taxation in Comparative and Historical Perspective provides a good exposure to the field of comparative fiscal sociology. With a foreword and article by Charles Tilly, it examines the ways in which states since the early modern period have intensified their ability to collect tax revenues.

One piece of this new capacity was organizational.  Fascist states in the 1930s created bureaucracies of surveillance, enforcement, punishment, and killing that went vastly beyond the capacity of nineteenth century state organizations.  The organizations of police and army in Italy, Spain, and Germany took major steps forward in size and complexity in the twentieth century.  The personnel of the forces of coercion -- police and other armed state forces such as militias -- were few in the early nineteenth century; but by the middle of the twentieth century these numbers had grown exponentially.

Improved communication and transportation were also key to the possibility of the totalitarian state.  The telephone and the railroad allowed fascist states to collect information quickly and to move their forces around the cities and countryside efficiently; functionally, this meant that rural groups and ordinary people were no longer buffered from the state by poor roads and rudimentary communication.

Another technological advance that was crucial for the totalitarian state was a substantial improvement in the technology of record keeping and retrieval.  James Scott argues that the modern state's imperative to regiment and record its population is fundamental to its capacity to collect taxes and conscript soldiers  -- and therefore fundamental to the nature of modern political power (Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed).  The technology of organized record keeping improved dramatically in the first several decades of the twentieth century -- thus making the state's goal of closely monitoring its subjects more attainable.  (Edwin Black describes the use of IBM punch card systems to manage National Socialist records of Jews and other enemies in IBM and the Holocaust.)  So communication, transportation, and record-keeping were crucial to the creation of the totalitarian state.

Of course greater state capacity is not synonymous with totalitarianism.  Liberal democratic states too increased their capacity to impose their will at the local level.  What distinguished totalitarian regimes was the set of ideological and political goals that fascist states sought to accomplish on the basis of their greater repressive capacity and the cult of violence that each embodied.  Other states took some of these sorts of steps forward in the twentieth century; the "reach of the state" increased dramatically in the United States, France, and Britain as well.  The administrative functions of the state and the ability to extract revenues through taxation increased exponentially.  It would be interesting to compare the total tax percentages in 1860 and 1930 for the United States and France; surely the increase is dramatic.  And likewise, the personnel of these states increased dramatically during the same time period as a percentage of population.  But this broad increase in state capacity did not lead to repression and dictatorship in these countries.

This topic is historically interesting; much turns on how we explain the power and human tragedies associated with Franco's Spain or Mussolini's Italy.  But it is also interesting today when we consider the undisguised efforts of the Iranian state, and its Republican Guard military organization, to dominate the whole of Iranian civil society.  Here too we see the use of surveillance, intimidation, mass arrests, forced confessions, and political murder as tactics in the effort to control civil society.

(There is quite a bit of scope for new comparative historical research on this topic.  Chuck Tilly has always emphasized these issues in his analysis of the development of the modern state.  Michael Mann's findings in The Sources of Social Power, Vol. 2: The Rise of Classes and Nation States, 1760-1914 are certainly relevant as well to this line of thought.  But there isn't much empirical detail available at present.  Simply attempting to measure the dimensions highlighted here for a number of countries -- scale of tax collections, size of state apparatus, size and complexity of police organizations, and overall state capacity to regulate local society -- requires research that doesn't appear to exist at present. )

Sewell on history

William Sewell, Jr., is a particularly talented historian of French social history. His study of the guild mentalities of workers in Marseille after the Revolution breaks many preconceptions about "class" and the definition of labor (Structure and Mobility: The Men and Women of Marseille, 1820-1870). But he is also a philosophically minded observer and critic of historical writing. In Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation he offers a singular contribution to historiography by an innovative interdisciplinary historian and sociologist. The book is a contribution to what I would call "applied philosophy of history": careful, analytical attention to some of the problematic constructs and frameworks that underlie the ways in which scholars attempt to characterize and explain historical change. The issues Sewell raises resonate strongly with comparative historical sociologists — scholars who are concerned with analyzing social processes in a variety of settings over an extended period of time.

Why do historians and social scientists need this kind of analysis? Because the logic and constructs involved in thinking historically are still incompletely understood. We will do a better job of understanding and probing the past, if we are more self-conscious about some of the assumptions and frameworks that we bring to our work. What is a historical “period”?  What is an "event"?  How are large historical constructs to be defined (revolutions, Tudor state, Marseillaise working class)?  For that matter -- is there anything of historical importance captured in the snapshot of a Marseille street scene in 1914 pictured above?

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, messy, 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. The social sciences can provide a toolbox of mid-level theories of mechanisms, mentalities, and institutions that can provide resources for historians as they attempt to analyze and explain particular historical episodes.  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?

Some philosophers have offered to shed light on these abstract questions about the ontology of history and the logic of historical explanation through philosophical analysis -- for example, Ian Hacking's Historical Ontology. Sewell’s approach to these meta-historical questions is not from the point of view of philosophy, but rather from that of the methodologically sophisticated practitioner. And the results are noteworthy. Logics of History makes a very substantive contribution to the revitalization of the field of the philosophy of history.

Sewell's volume provides a reading of the intellectual development of social history as a discipline since the 1960s: the currents of Marxism, anthropology, and post-modernism, and the themes of underclass history, local meanings, and multiple texts. Sewell's central goal is 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.

A recurring topic in the book is the question of “temporality”. 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” he 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 “Historical 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 cognition. In both instances Sewell takes up a large meta-concept within the social sciences and subjects it to careful analytical attention. The results are substantial; both essays suggest new ways of thinking of the role of social structures and cultures within historical processes—not as fixed, uniform causal influences, but as flexible and plastic constructs within which historical actors live and act.

These topics are important because their nuances can significantly affect the practitioner’s process of reasoning and inquiry as he or she treats historical processes. If the investigator begins with an assumption of fixed causal laws, then he or she is inclined to regard specific historical developments as instances of historical regularities. If, on the other hand, one approaches historical processes as involving a high degree of contingency and plasticity of historical events and structures, then one will give substantially greater attention to the specifics of the case.

Koestler's nightmares

Image: book burning by National Socialist paramilitaries, 1933

Image: Ukraine peasants fleeing famine

Image: street battle, Spanish Civil War

Arthur Koestler was an articulate witness of the atrocities of the twentieth century; and much of what he witnessed was terrible.  Reading his books gives one an intense and personal vision of fascism, dictatorship, mass murder, starvation, and cruelty on a monstrous scale.  As George Orwell wrote of Koestler's books in 1944, "The subject-matter of all of them is similar, and none of them ever escapes for more than a few pages from the atmosphere of nightmare" (link).  Koestler worked as a Communist journalist in Berlin in the early 1930s during the rise of the brown shirts; he was the first European journalist to travel through the Ukraine to witness the results of famine in Stalin's war against the Kulaks (Lynne Viola, The War Against the Peasantry, 1927-1930: The Tragedy of the Soviet Countryside); and he observed the Spanish Civil War, where he was arrested after the fall of Malaga, imprisoned, and sentenced to death as a Red.  (Here is an earlier post on Koestler.)

These experiences are described in his autobiography, The Invisible Writing, and the narrative of his experiences in Spain is presented in Dialogue With Death.  But Koestler's best known book is a novel, Darkness at Noon, which is the story of the final weeks of life of the fictional Soviet revolutionary Rubashov in Stalin's purges of the 1930s and the Moscow show trials.  After a life as leader, theorist, and agent in service of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party, Rubashov is arrested for fictitious crimes of conspiracy and betrayal against the State.  He is arrested before dawn; it takes him quite a while to find his pince-nez.  He is thrown into a Soviet political prison -- it is reminiscent to him of the fascist prisons in which he had suffered beatings and torture years earlier.  He is brought to confess to these crimes and others under interrogation by his former comrade-in-arms, Ivanov, and the new Soviet thug, Gletkin.  Ivanov is psychologically manipulative; Gletkin is brutal; but both strive to break Rubashov and compel his confession.  They are successful; Rubashov confesses to betraying the Revolution; and like Bukharin, he is convicted and summarily shot in the back of the neck.  Along the way there is quite a bit of debate about history, the individual, the Party, and the Future of Humanity.  The key question of the novel is the puzzle: why did Rubashov confess rather than following the secret advice of the prison barber -- "die in silence!"?

Koestler himself was a committed Communist agent in Berlin in the 1930s; so his descriptions of Rubashov's activities in eastern Europe have the ring of truth -- including Rubashov's betrayals of Richard and Little Loewy in the name of socialism.  The novel recreates the Moscow show trials of 1937 with uncanny insight.  Rubashov is loosely based on Nikolai Bukharin, one of the intellectual and political leaders of the Russian Revolution.  Koestler's novel was written only two years after the trial and execution of these leaders of the Russian Revolution at the hands of Stalin's functionaries.  Here is what he says about the central character:

The characters in this book are fictitious.  The historical circumstances which determined their actions are real.  The life of the man N. S. Rubashov is a synthesis of the lives of a number of men who were victims of the so-called Moscow Trials.  Several of them were personally known to the author.  This book is dedicated to their memory.  Paris, October, 1938-April, 1940

But here is what I find fascinating.  Koestler's fictional recreation of the arrest and trial of the top Party officials, in the person of Rubashov, and the background assumptions and rationalizations assumed by the prosecutors and interrogators, is remarkably close to the historical reality.  Here is Koestler's description of his own arrest and arrival in a Spanish fascist prison in Malaga:

It is a unique sound.  A cell door has no handle, either outside or inside; it cannot be shut except by being slammed to.  It is made of massive steel and concrete, about four inches thick, and every time it falls to there is a resounding crash just as though a shot has been fired.  But this report dies away without an echo.  Prison sounds are echo-less and bleak.

When the door has been slammed behind him for the first time, the prisoner stands in the middle of the cell and looks round. I fancy that everyone must behave in more or less the same way.

First of all he gives a fleeting look round the walls and takes a mental inventory of all the objects in what is now to be his domain:

• the iron bedstead,
• the wash-basin,
• the W.C.,
• the barred window.

His next action is invariably to try to pull himself up by the iron bars of the window and look out.  He fails, and his suit is covered with white from the plaster on the wall against which he has pressed himself. (Dialogue with Death, 59)

And now turn to Rubashov's first few minutes in Stalin's jail cell:

Rubashov walked up and down in the cell, from the door to the window and back, between bunk, wash-basin and bucket, six and a half steps there, six and a half steps back.  At the door he turned to the right, at the window to the left.  It was an old prison habit; if one did not change the direction of the turn one rapidly became dizzy. ....  Rubashov stood hesitantly in the middle of the cell, then put his pince-nez on again and propped himself at the window. (Darkness at Noon, 14, 18)

Much of the drama of Darkness at Noon is the series of interrogations Rubashov undergoes, and the mental transformation that they bring about in this courageous man to bring him to confess to the most farfetched and unbelievable crimes.  The transcripts of Bukharin's prosecution exist; Robert Tucker and Stephen Cohen's THE GREAT PURGE TRIAL provides extensive transcripts of the interrogation of Bukharin and other show trial victims.  It is striking to compare the interrogation of Bukharin with the interrogation of Rubashov.  Consider this bit of interrogation of Rubashov, beginning with the voice of prosecutor Ivanov:

"To return to more tangible things: you mean, therefore, that 'we' -- namely, Party and State -- no longer represent the interests of the Revolution, of the masses or, if you like, the progress of humanity."

"This time you have grasped it," said Rubashov smiling.  Ivanov did not answer his smile.
"When did you develop this opinion?"

"Fairly gradually: during the last few years," said Rubashov.

"Can't you tell me more exactly? One year? Two? Three years?"

"That's a stupid question," said Rubashov. "At what age did you become adult? At seventeen? At eighteen and a half? At nineteen?"

"It's you who are pretending to be stupid," said Ivanov.  "Each step in one's spiritual development is the result of definite experiences.  If you really want to know: I became a man at seventeen, when I was sent into exile for the first time." (69)

And now a similar moment in the actual transcripts of the interrogation of Bukharin.

Vyshinsky: Allow me to begin the interrogation of the accused Bukharin. Formulate briefly what exactly it is you plead guilty to.

Bukharin: Firstly, to belonging to the counter-revolutionary "Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites."

Vyshinsky: Since what year?

 Bukharin: Roughly since 1928. I plead guilty to being one of the outstanding leaders of this "Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites." Consequently I plead guilty to what directly follows from this, the sum total of crimes committed by this counter-revolutionary organization, irrespective of whether or not I knew of, whether or not I took a direct part, in any particular act.  Because I am responsible as one of the leaders and not as a cog in this counter-revolutionary organization.

Vyshinsky: What aims were pursued by this counter-revolutionary organization?
Bukharin: This counter-revolutionary organization, to formulate it briefly ...

Vyshinsky: Yes, briefly for the present.

Bukharin: The principal aim it pursued, although, so to speak, it did not fully realize it, and did not dot all the "i's" -- was essentially the aim of restoring capitalist relations in the U.S.S.R. (Tucker, 328)

And now, back to Darkness at Noon and Rubashov; the porter's daughter reads aloud the newspaper account of the last minutes of Rubashov's testimony:

"Asked whether he pleaded guilty, the accused Rubashov answered 'Yes' in a clear voice.  To a further question of the Public Prosecutor as to whether the accused had acted as an agent of the counter-revolution, he again answered 'Yes' in a lower voice ...."

Here seems to be Koestler's own explanation of the puzzle of the confessions:

Some were silenced by physical fear, like Hare-lip; some hoped to save their heads; others at least to save their wives or sons from the clutches of the Gletkins.  The best of them kept silent in order to do a last service to the Party, by letting themselves be sacrificed as scapegoats -- and, besides, even the best had each an Arlova on his conscience.  They were too deeply entangled in their own past, caught in the web they had spun themselves, according to the laws of their own twisted ethics and twisted logic; they were all guilty, although not of those deeds of which they accused themselves.  There was no way back for them.  Their exit from the stage happened strictly according to the rules of their strange game.  The public expected no swan-songs of them.  They had to act according to the text-book, and their part was the howling of wolves in the night.... (DN, 105)

Fiction and reality are deeply intertwined here.  I don't believe that Koestler had access to transcripts of the show trials at the time he wrote Darkness at Noon in 1940, though he had read accounts of the trials.  So the convergence of the fictional Rubashov and the historical Bukharin is remarkable.  And the transformation of Koestler's own experiences -- in Communist activism and in fascist prison under sentence of death -- into the fiction of Rubashov is very striking.

The state prosecutor who conducted the show trial of Bukharin was Andrei Vyshinsky.  Following his success in the show trials, Vyshinsky became a prominent diplomat under Stalin.  And after World War II he served as permanent representative to the United Nations during the period that the Universal Declaration on Human Rights was drafted and adopted.  He led the Soviet Bloc nations in abstention from the vote adopting the Universal Declaration on Human Rights.  Here is a fragment of the outrageous speech he gave on this occasion:

Human rights could not be conceived outside the State; the very concept of right and law was connected with that of the State. (The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Origins, Drafting, and Intent, 21-22)

I am drawn to Koestler's writings -- both his fiction and his autobiographical writings --  in part because he provides such a powerful example of an engaged mind attempting to make sense of the history around him. Much of his work is a first-person effort to "understand society" -- to make sense of the social forces and individual behavior that the twentieth century presented.  George Orwell is another of my favorites in this aspect of literature, including especially Homage to Catalonia and A Collection of Essays; so it is very interesting to me that Orwell wrote the short essay about Koestler mentioned above.  It is also interesting that they were both published in England by Victor Gollancz, along with E. P. Thompson.

(Louis Menand has an interesting profile of Koestler in the New Yorker this month.)

Measuring recession's impact: Michigan

Michigan has been in a rolling crisis since 2002 or so: the state has experienced the loss of manufacturing jobs, mortgage foreclosures, and plummeting state and municipal revenues at a pace that has left the region badly shaken. What have been some of the macro-level effects?  How have population, income, employment, and housing changed since 2000?  In particular, what effects has the recession had on southeast Michigan, where almost half of the state's population lives?

The Southeast Michigan Council of Governments (SEMCOG) has released a preliminary analysis of the data collected in the 2008 American Community Survey (a periodic resurvey conducted by the US Census Bureau; link).  Some of the results are startling. Most dramatic is what has happened to income, but the region also shows important changes in residential occupancy, poverty rates, and unemployment.

The report considers data for seven counties in southeast Michigan -- Livingston, Macomb, Monroe, Oakland, St. Clair, Washtenaw, and Wayne.  (This corresponds loosely to the definition of the Detroit Metropolitan Statistical Area, which consists of the six counties of Lapeer, Livingston, Macomb, Oakland, St. Clair, and Wayne.) The population of this region was 4.8 million in 2008, essentially unchanged since the 2000 census. So the region had not experienced significant net out-migration as of 2008 (post).  But the age structure of the population has changed noticeably, from a median age of 35.2 in 2000 to a median age of 38.1 in 2008.

The most striking change in this period is a dramatic drop in household and per capita income.  In 2000 the median household income was $64,590, which fell to $54,184 in 2008 -- a 16% decline in household income.  And per capita income fell from $40,993 to $34,665 -- a 15% decline in per capita income.  This is a very large decline in a short time. 

The report also documents a wide income gap based on race.  In 2008 median white household income was $63,183, whereas in black households it was $40,021 and in Hispanic households it was $44,548.  White households were about 50% more affluent than black households. 

Both parts of these findings are important.  The overall decline in personal and family income in eight years is quite remarkable; it certainly represents a very significant decline in the standard of living in the region as a result of recession-related job losses and wage cuts.  And the racial disparities indicated by the gaps between white, black, and Hispanic households demonstrate the persistent racial disadvantages that seem to be hard-wired into the region.

The decline in family income has other harmful consequences as well.  The net purchasing power of the region dropped by a significant percentage -- which translates into the loss of revenues for small businesses whose revenues depend on consumer purchases.  And state revenues based on income taxes and sales taxes in the region fell as well by a comparable percentage -- leading to a fiscal crisis for the state and for municipalities.

Not surprisingly, the ACS data demonstrate that there was a significant upsurge in the poverty rate in the region between 2000 and 2008.  In 2000 10.6% of the population lived below the poverty line; and in 2008, this group had risen to 13.9% -- a 31% increase.  The percentage of families with children in poverty rose from 11.5% to 15.7%, an even greater increase than in the general population.

The effects of the foreclosure crisis are visible in this report as well.  Changes in residential vacancy rates are an indicator of rising frequency of foreclosures.  In 2000 there were 106,680 vacant housing units (5.5%).  In 2008 this number had risen to 260,974 units (12.6%).  This reflected large increases in both homeowner and rental vacancy rates over the time period.

Another noteworthy feature of the report is the light it sheds on differences by county in some important variables across the region.  Most striking is the percentage of adults with a college degree.  The region as a whole has 28% of its adults with a bachelor's degree or higher.  And this number has increased from 25% in 2000.  (At the other end of the spectrum, 12.4% of the adult population lacks a high school degree in 2008.)  But this average masks a very wide range of college attainment rates by county, from a low of 13.9% in St. Clair County (the extreme northeast of the map above) to highs of 42.3% in Oakland County and 51.3% in Washtenaw County.  Wayne County has a college completion rate of 19.5%.

Also striking are the income differences across counties.  Median household incomes ranged from a low of $42,376 (Wayne County) to a high of $71,486 (Livingston County).  Washtenaw County (home of Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan) is somewhat anomalous: it has the highest percentage of college-educated adults, but its median household income is in the middle, at $57,848.

Predictably, poverty rates varied across counties as well.  Livingston County had the lowest poverty rate in 2008 (7.6%), while Wayne County had the highest poverty rate by a significant margin (20.1%).  So a person in Wayne County had almost three times the likelihood of living in poverty as a person in Livingston County.  Washtenaw County's poverty rate is also surprisingly high, at 14.6%.

Finally, it appears that the foreclosure crisis had differential impact across the region as well.  Wayne County shows the highest residential vacancy rate in 2008 (17.9%), whereas Livingston, Macomb, Monroe, and Washtenaw Counties fall between 7.6% and 8.6%.  So the residential vacancy rate in Wayne County is at least double that of other parts of the region.

This set of data from the 2008 American Community Survey sheds light on two very important facts.  First, southeast Michigan has suffered deeply and rapidly as a result of the recession.  The loss of jobs and shrinking of business activity resulted in rapid and sharp declines in family income; the recession greatly increased the number of home foreclosures; and it resulted in placing another 155,000 people in poverty -- a 31% increase in the number of people in poverty.  And second, the 2008 data demonstrate that these effects are not uniformly distributed across the region.  Several counties weathered the recession relatively well.  The worst effects have been experienced in Wayne County and the city of Detroit.  And, given the degree of racial segregation that is demonstrated in Southeast Michigan, this implies that the recession had disproportionately harmful effects on the African-American population of the state.

Alleviating rural poverty

What theories and values ought to underlie our best thinking about global economic development?  Along with Amartya Sen (Development as Freedom), I believe that the best answer to the ethical question involves giving top priority to the goal of increasing the realization of human capabilities across the whole of society (The Paradox of Wealth and Poverty: Mapping the Ethical Dilemmas of Global Development). We need to put the poor first.  However, I also believe that our ability to achieve this goal is highly sensitive to the distributive structures and property systems that exist in poor countries.  The property institutions of developing countries have enormous impact on the full human development of the poor.  As a result, ethically desirable human development goals are difficult to attain within any social system in which the antecedent property relations are highly stratified and in which political power is largely in the hands of the existing elites.

The fundamental question of poverty is this: how do people earn their livings? The economic institutions of the given society (property relations and market institutions, for example) determine the answer to this question. An economy represents a set of social positions for the men and women who make it up. These persons have a set of human needs—nutrition, education, health care, housing, clothing, etc. And they need access to the opportunities that exist in society—opportunities for employment and education, for example. The various positions that exist within the economy in turn define the entitlements that persons have—wages, profits, access to food subsidies, rights of participation, etc. The material well-being of a person—the “standard of living”—is chiefly determined by the degree to which his or her “entitlements” through these various sources of income provide the basis for acquiring more than enough goods in all the crucial categories to permit the individual to flourish (Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation). If wages are low, then the consumption bundle that this income will afford is very limited. If crop prices are low, then peasants will have low incomes. If business taxes are low, then business owners may retain more business income in the form of profits, which will support larger consumption bundles and larger savings. There is thus a degree of conflict of interest among the agents within the economic system; the institutions of distribution may favor workers, lenders, farmers, business owners, or the state, depending on their design. And it is very possible for economic development to proceed in a way that gives the greatest benefit to the upper levels of society without leading to much change at the bottom.

Here I want to review an important empirical example of economic development without commensurate gain for the poor of the region: the effects of the Green Revolution in the rice-growing regions of Malaysia. James Scott provides a careful survey of the development process in Malaysia in Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (1985). The chief innovations were these: a government-financed irrigation project making double-cropping possible; the advent of modern-variety rice strains; and the introduction of machine harvesting, replacing hired labor. Scott considers as relevant factors the distribution of landholdings, the forms of land tenure in use, the availability of credit, the political parties on the scene, and the state's interests in development.

Scott's chief finding is that double cropping and irrigation substantially increased revenues in the Muda region, and that these increases were very unequally distributed. Much of the increase flowed to the small circle of managerial farmers, credit institutions, and outside capitalists who provided equipment, fertilizers, and transport. Finally, Scott finds that the lowest stratum—perhaps 40%—has been substantially marginalized in the village economy. Landlessness has increased sharply, as managerial farms absorb peasant plots; a substantial part of the rural population is now altogether cut off from access to land. And mechanized harvesting substantially decreases the demand for wage labor. This group is dependent on wage labor, either on the managerial farms or through migration to the cities. The income flowing to this group is more unstable than the subsistence generated by peasant farming; and with fluctuating consumption goods prices, it may or may not suffice to purchase the levels of food and other necessities this group produced for itself before development. And these circumstances have immediate consequences for the ability of poor households to achieve the development of their human capabilities. Their nutritional status, their health, their literacy, and their mobility are all directly impaired by the fact of low and unstable household income. Finally, the state and the urban sector benefits substantially: the increased revenues created by high-yield rice cultivation generate profits and tax revenues that can be directed towards urban development.

Scott draws this conclusion:

The gulf separating the large, capitalist farmers who market most of the region's rice and the mass of small peasants is now nearly an abyss, with the added (and related) humiliation that the former need seldom even hire the latter to help grow their crops. Taking 1966 as a point of comparison, it is still the case that a majority of Muda's households are more prosperous than before. It is also the case that the distribution of income has worsened appreciably and that a substantial minority—per­haps 35‑40 percent—have been left behind with very low incomes which, if they are not worse than a decade ago, are not appreciably better. Given the limited absorptive capacity of the wider economy, given the loss of wages to machines, and given the small plots cultivated by the poor strata, there is little likelihood that anything short of land reform could reverse their fortunes. (Scott 1985:81)

This example well illustrates the problems of distribution and equity that are unavoidable in the process of rural development. The process described here is one route to "modernization of agriculture," in that it involves substitution of new seed varieties for old, new technologies for traditional technologies, integration into the global economy, and leads to a sharp increase in the productivity of agriculture. Malaysia was in effect one of the great successes of the Green Revolution. At the same time it created a sharp division between winners and losers: peasants and the rural poor largely lose income, security, and autonomy; while rural elites, urban elites, and the state gained through the increased revenues generated by the modern farming sector.

Gillian Hart, Andrew Turton, and Benjamin White's Agrarian Transformations: Local Processes and the State in Southeast Asia (1989) provides detailed case studies of these sorts of processes of property and power in development in Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

The German debate over method

A prior post described a major debate around 1900 in the French academic world over the terms of exchange among history, geography, and sociology. The debate also involved disagreements among France's academic elites over the structure of the future French university system. This was sometimes referred to as the "new Sorbonne" debate, and it had important implications for future developments in French social and historical thinking (post on French sociology).

Germany underwent its own debates about similar issues at about the same time. At stake was the fundamental question, how should the human sciences be construed? The central axes of these debates were positivism and the search for general causal explanations, and historicism and the search for hermeneutic understanding of specific individuals and historical moments.  The several schools of thought offered very different ideas about how best to understand the social world.  A central point of debate was the famous distinction drawn by Wilhelm Windelband between nomothetic and idiographic sciences.  Fritz Ringer formulates Windelband's distinction (1894) in these terms:

Methodologically, the empirical disciplines in fact fall into two groups: the Gesetzeswissenschaften pursue "nomothetic" knowledge of the general in the form of invariant "laws"; the Ereigniswissenschaften strive for "idiographic" knowledge of singular patterns or events. (Ringer, 32)

Within the terms of this distinction, the historicists were offering idiographic knowledge, whereas the natural scientists were offering nomothetic knowledge.  And the more positivist theorists of the human sciences argued that the social sciences should aspire to the kind of generality and universality that is required by nomothetic science.

These German debates played key roles in the development of twentieth-century sociology.   Just as Durkheim played centrally in the French debate, Max Weber was a key actor in the German debates.  His own treatment of the historical school is contained in several essays in Roscher and Knies and Critique of Stammler, and his later development was deeply influenced by his engagement with these controversies.  (G. H. von Wright's Explanation and Understanding provides a philosopher's analysis of the two traditions.)

Fritz Ringer's Max Weber's Methodology: The Unification of the Cultural and Social Sciences is a good source on the content and importance of the German methodology debate about the cultural sciences.  Ringer attempts to understand the logic of Weber's conception of methodology and theory in sociology through his responses to historicism, positivism, and verstehen theory.  Weber was committed to contributing to a scientific study of society; but what does science require when it comes to human society?  These strands of historical and social thought in German intellectual life imply rather different answers to this question.  And Ringer argues that Weber's methodology is designed to make sense of the valid insights of each current of thought.  Ringer holds that Weber's approach is both causal and interpretive; both general and particular.

Another important study of this set of debates is Woodruff Smith's 1991 book, Politics and the Sciences of Culture in Germany, 1840-1920 (Google Books link).  Here is how Smith describes his subject:

In the nineteenth century, there appeared a new group of academic disciplines that took culture as a primary object of scientific study.  These included anthropology in its many varieties, human geography, culture history, and branches of psychology that focused on culture.  In other fields, the concept of culture became a significant part of the apparatus of interpretation.  Bodies of theory about culture emerged, often overleaping the boundaries between disciplines.  The development of these "cultural sciences" was an international phenomenon to which people of all major European nations and the United States contributed.  But distinctive national approaches also revealed themselves, each largely shaped by the public context of intellectual life in a particular country.

This book is concerned with the cultural sciences in Germany between the 1840s and about 1920.  During those years, German academia exercised its most profound influence on the rest of the world -- an influence that is generally acknowledged in some cultural sciences, for example geography, but to which rather little attention is paid in others, such as cultural anthropology.  In the German intellectual setting, Kulture and Kulturwissenschaft came to have many meanings.  Here we shall concentrate on cultural scientists who believed that they were practicing a nomothetic science (i.e., searching for the laws of human society as revealed in culture) and who regarded culture itself mainly in its anthropological sense. (3)

Ringer is writing as an historian of ideas, and he borrows an important concept from Bourdieu as an intellectual framework for his analysis -- the idea of an intellectual field.  He explains the idea in these terms:

I have elsewhere drawn upon Pierre Bourdieu's writings to define the "intellectual field" as a constellation of positions that are meaningful only in relation to one another, a constellation further charactrized by differences of power or authority, by the opposition between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, and by the role of the cultural preconscious, of tacit "doxa" that are transmitted by inherited practices, institutions, and social relations.  Specifying the vague notion of "context" in this way, one can see that individuals may stand in a variety of specific relationships to their intellectual and social environment. (5)

This concept works well for Ringer's purposes, because it permits analysis of both the intellectual and the institutional settings of the debates that shaped Weber's thinking about the human sciences.  The structure of the university and the relations of power that existed within the academic world are relevant -- as was equally true in the case of the French debate; and the inherent logic and rational force of a given school of thought is determining as well for the formation of the young investigator's understanding of "sociology." To borrow a metaphor from Marx, "intellectuals make their own thoughts, but not in circumstances of their own choosing."  So the concept of intellectual field works well as a framework for the sociology of knowledge.

The historicist tradition included writers such as Ranke, Roscher, Knies, Schmoller, and Sombart.  (Joseph Schumpeter offers some notes on the historicist school in his massive volume on the history of economics, History of Economic Analysis (IV:4); Google Books link.)  Historicists reject the idea that the social sciences (or economics) should aspire to the discovery of universal laws of society or universal and unchanging human institutions.  The concrete study of specific economic institutions of the past -- economic history -- is a more insightful way of understanding the workings of economies than pure mathematical theories of competitive equilibria that are intended to apply in all times and places.  Johann Gustav Droysen was a particularly articulate critic of the positivist strand of thought.  "[Droysen's] main argument had to do with the divide between the search for regularities and the historian's predominant concern with the interpretive understanding of the unique and particular" (Ringer, 12).  Instead of general laws and uniform structures, the historicists argue that human society illustrates historical particularity and individuality -- in structures and institutions as well as persons.

Often this insistence on historical particularity converged with the hermeneutic view that social understanding always involves the interpretation of meaningful human action and motivation.  (Here is an earlier post on interpretation theory, and here is a post on the ways in which Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor have adapted these ideas.)  Wilhelm Dilthey (1883) argued that the human sciences were profoundly different from the natural sciences because they involved interpretive understanding of human action rather than mechanical explanation of a system of causes.  Ringer observes, further, that another of the founders of modern sociology, Georg Simmel, arrived at a very similar theory of verstehen in the 1890s, and that Simmel's influence on Weber was greater than that of Dilthey.  Even more important for Weber, though, was a book by Heinrich Rickert, The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Science: A Logical Introduction to the Historical Sciences (1902).  Rickert's theories reconsider the distinction proposed by Windelband, proposing that the distinction between nomothetic and idiographic knowledge does not correspond to the distinction between natural and social knowledge. 

The positivist framework became important in German intellectual life in the middle of the nineteenth century, though Ringer observes that "positivism" in the Comtean sense had virtually no advocates in German intellectual life prior to the Vienna Circle (post).  But there was a current of thought in Germany in the late nineteenth century that took its lead from the logic of the natural sciences and attempted to apply this model to the human sciences. Mid-century philosophers such as Friedrich Albert Lange advocated for a philosophy that combined the methods of the natural sciences with a neo-Kantian metaphysics (19).  Ringer singles out a stratum of what he calls "scientist-philosophers" -- Rudolf Virchow, Wilhelm Ostwald, Friedrich Ratzel, Adolf Bastian, Karl Lamprecht, and Wilhelm Wundt, as a group of intellectuals who brought the epistemic values of the natural sciences into an effort to construct the human sciences (20).  If there is to be such a thing as a social science, positivism maintains that it should have the same logical characteristics as natural sciences like physics and chemistry; and this was taken to mean that it should seek out lawlike generalizations that are independent of space and time.

One important voice representing a broadly naturalistic perspective on the social sciences was Carl Menger.  His critique of the historicist school from the point of view of pure economic theory is an important stage in the debate.

Our cognitive interest is directed either at the concrete phenomena in their position in space and time and at their concrete interrelationships, or else ... at the recurrent patterns in which they appear.  The former research direction aims at knowledge of the concrete or, more correctly, the individual, the latter at knowledge of the general. (Investigations into the Methods of the Social Sciences, quoted in Ringer, 16)

It appears that we could summarize the development of the two traditions as including a few branching streams of thought:

• Positivism =====> science seeks to discover universal laws 
•                   =====> science offers causal explanations
  
  Historicism =====> the historical and human sciences study particular human institutions in specific historical settings 
  
•                    =====> the human sciences proceed through systematic interpretation of the subjective meanings and intentions of individual actors

The two major ideas associated with historicism can certainly be separated; one can accept the point that institutions are historically variable without accepting the unavoidably hermeneutic nature of social knowledge; and one could be a thorough-going hermeneutic without committing to the point about the historical boundedness of institutions or human nature.  And there is a similar disconnect on the side of positivism; as Ringer points out, it is possible to be a causalist without assuming that causes are ahistorical and universal.  One might take the view that a given kind of cause has a set of social powers within the context of one set of institutions but not another -- in the context of the Roman empire but not in the context of British colonialism. So both schools of thought have important distinctions collapsed within them.

Fundamentally we might say that these debates raised a small number of key questions: Is there a sharp distinction between the natural and social sciences?  Is causation relevant to the interpretation of human affairs?  Is there a distinctive method of interpretation of human action that underlies the scientific study of society and culture?  Are there laws that govern social phenomena?  Should the social sciences make use of universal concepts that apply in all times and places, or should its concepts be tailored to specific historical settings?  In what ways are "history" and "nature" distinguished?  Taking positions on these topics also sets the parameters for the kind of research and knowledge the social scientist will pursue.

From the vantage point of the present, it seems that we can provide some fairly compelling answers to these questions.  Social institutions are plastic, heterogeneous, and contingent; so the historicists were right about this point.  Human action and human nature are historically conditioned as well, in the concrete and ordinary sense that "character," "motivation," "knowledge," and "identity" are all historical products; once again, the historicists were right.  The social sciences do not need to discover universal, timeless laws of society; such a quest is futile and inspired by a bad philosophy of science.  So the positivists and naturalists were wrong on this point, and the historicists were closer to the truth.

But this doesn't mean that we are forced to conclude that the social sciences are idiographic and particularistic.  Rickert was right in doubting the sharp distinction between human action and the natural world; it is entirely coherent to assert that human mentality and action are natural phenomena.  And there is plenty of room in the human sciences for a causal analysis of social change and social persistence.  But we should not understand these causal judgments as resting on an as-yet unknown set of causal laws.  Instead, we are better off working with an ontology of causal mechanisms, embodied in institutions and actions of persons.  And, finally, we are not forced to choose between idiographic and nomothetic science; instead, the social sciences should aspire to an empirical analysis of the world that is sensitive to the particularity of social institutions and identities, while at the same time discovering the limited generalizations that are made possible through the discovery of common social mechanisms.  In a sense, we might say that current historical sociology represents the resolution of these debates that took place in Germany in the 1870s through 1920s.  Researchers such as Tilly, Moore, Steinmetz, Adams, and Skocpol have made a great deal of progress in defining the balance between the particular and the general in their studies of complex historical processes.

(These historicism debates have also been of interest in recent Japanese social science research.  An interesting pair of contributions from a Japanese perspective are Yuichi Shionoya's The Soul of the German Historical School: Methodological Essays on Schmoller, Weber and Schumpeter and  The German Historical School: The Historical and Ethical Approach to Economics.)

Current historical sociology: George Steinmetz

George Steinmetz, professor of sociology at the University of Michigan, is a leading scholar in the contemporary field of historical sociology.  His most recent book is The Devil's Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa, and his volume The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences: Positivism and Its Epistemological Others is a major contribution to current debates on the methods and aims of the social sciences today.  Here is a video interview and conversation I conducted with George at the University of Michigan this month.  Quite a few of George's academic papers are available on his website.

This is part of an ongoing series of interviews I am conducting with innovative social scientists.   The goal of the series is to provide a forum in which some very innovative and productive thinkers are able to reflect on some of the ideas and perspectives that are creating innovative work in sociology today.  Visit my research page for links to prior interviews.  All the videos are available on YouTube.

Messy regional problems and collaborative leaders

Regions are highly complex social formations: millions of people, thousands of businesses, hundreds of non-profit organizations, and lots of problems.  Some problems are relatively simple to deal with.  If the local river is being polluted by sanitary system overflows during heavy storms, the solution is costly but straightforward: the region needs to invest in a sewer separation infrastructure project.  

What is more difficult for a region to handle is a situation where it is confronted by a complex of problems that are substantially inter-related and that fall outside the scope of traditional policy-making organizations.  These are sometimes referred to as "wicked" problems, and they are difficult both scientifically and practically.  They are difficult scientifically because it is hard to trace the various interlinked forms of causation that have created the problem.  And they are difficult practically because their solution requires the cooperation of groups and actors whose interests and understandings of the situation are often at odds.  And this cooperation may need to persist over a very extended period of time -- longer than the attention span of many of the politicians, business leaders, and university presidents who have taken an interest in the problem.

Take the problem of job losses in the Detroit metropolitan region.  This is a situation that is caused by a complex set of conditions and occurrences of long and short duration: business decisions about plant closings, national trends in consumer behavior, the financial crisis of 2008, family traditions of college attendance, cultural expectations about blue-collar and white-collar work, patterns of racial segregation, fiscal problems for state and local governments, and deterioration of the natural and built environment.  This problem is particularly difficult to deal with for several important reasons:

• the causes of the problem are interdependent
• high unemployment itself reinforces some of the causes of rising unemployment
  
• the policies that would reverse job losses are not easy to identify or implement
• solutions fall outside the scope of authority of the individual decision-making organizations
• solutions may require legislative action, business decisions, and mass behavioral changes that are difficult to elicit or coordinate
  

Solutions that have been proposed include --

• increase the percentage of college-educated adults
• make the metropolitan area more attractive to talented young people
• encourage entrepreneurship 
• create a more business-friendly environment
• lower the tax burden on businesses
• restructure state and municipal government to reduce public costs
  
• encourage investment in high-tech industries such as alternative energy and bioengineering
• create an "arts corridor" that links Motown and the design talents of the auto industry
  

But notice this important fact: these recommendations do not add up to a coherent and actionable strategy.  This is true for several reasons.  The relationship between the factor and the intended result is not a certain one in any of these cases; the actors who would need to take concrete actions in order to bring the factor into being are different in most of these cases; each intervention is costly, so we can't actually do all of these at once; the operational timeframes of these strategies are very different, from months to decades; and some of the strategies here would interfere directly with the efficacy of others.
 
More abstractly, interventions that might have a positive effect on employment may be difficult to achieve for a number of different reasons:

• they require coordinated action by multiple actors: for example, the legislature, the county executive, and several major corporations; and coordination is difficult to achieve
  
• the promising interventions may be conditional on achievement of several other difficult actions as well by other actors
• there may be a "blocking" actor whose interests would be harmed by the intervention in spite of its otherwise positive effects

It seems evident that a region that faces "wicked" and strongly interlinked problems like these needs to manage to create a plan for addressing the problem and a coalition of actors who have the resources and decision-making authority to take the steps specified by the plan.  The plan needs to be based on the best possible analysis of the economic and social effects of various interventions, based on sound social science and social policy analysis.  The actors might include: a group of legislators and the governor and mayor; multiple business groups; a cohesive set of labor leaders; and a few regional foundations which are prepared to commit significant resources to the plan.

Every step of this description poses new challenges for the region, because essentially we are faced with a public-goods problem at the level of a large, complicated public with a number of independent actors: there are costs associated with the formulation of a plan and the marshalling of a coalition, and the benefits of the effort will be broadly shared by the public as a whole.  So no single organization or actor has an incentive to play the lead as agent of change, and the incentives for collaboration are weak as well.

This is where "leaders" come in.  One would hope that a region has a cohort of individuals and organizations with a specific set of characteristics:

• an evidence-based vision concerning the way forward -- the changes that are needed in order to address the problem and the sorts of interventions that would bring these changes about
  
• a broad conception of the balance of public and private interests
• a willingness to engage in costly collaborations that promote the public good
• a practical ability to create and sustain collaborations among other powerful actors
• access to the resources of an organization: money, staff, prestige, and influence with other actors
  

The traditional categories of leaders are easy to understand.  Their positions might include "elected official," "corporate CEO," "non-profit CEO," "foundation president," "newspaper publisher," "labor leader," or "university president."  These individuals stand at the head of formal organizations, and their organizational positions give them ready-made channels of influence on public policy.  Their experiences in leading their organizations may also give them a degree of insight into how to approach the broad problems that a region often faces -- disaster recovery, loss of major industries, a rising trend in social or ethnic conflict.

Some of these leaders are officially charged with the responsibility of formulating strategies and policies that will assist in the solution of problems; so mayors and governors need to be actively involved in the formulation of plans for dealing with these sorts of challenges.   But most of these leaders are not charged in this way; instead, their formal responsibilities include specific organizational goals: "maximizing stockholder value," "achieving the philanthropic goals established by the board of directors," "increasing readership and advertising revenues," "protecting the interests of the members."  There will always be a wide distribution of balance points between private and public interest that are chosen by these leaders; some are more public-spirited, and some are more single-minded about the interests of the organization they lead.

In addition to these traditional categories, there are sometimes leaders in a complicated community who don't fit into the usual boxes.  They don't have executive authority in corporations, foundations, or labor unions, and they aren't elected to positions of official leadership.  What they do have is a set of assets that fall in the category of social capital:

• a big rolodex filled with relationships to powerful and influential people
  
• a strong and positive reputation in the leadership community
• an ability to be persuasive in dealing with a wide range of actors
• a passionate commitment to "making the region better"
• a philosophy of collaboration that they can make compelling to other actors
  

We might call this kind of leader a "high-level socially connected broker" (HLSCB) -- a person who is well positioned to broker relationships among other powerful "elite" actors.  The influence these leaders wield does not derive from the dollars they can commit from their own organizations (foundations, corporations), or the votes they can marshall (labor unions, student organizations), or the direct legislative influence they can wield (lobbyists, large law firms, business associations).  Instead, their influence stems from ideas, passion, and relationships, and their ability to facilitate durable collaboration among actors with somewhat divided interests.  The size of the rolodex is a measure of the density of the networks within which this actor functions; the HLSCB is unusually rich in a set of network relationships that permit him/her to make contact with an unusually large number of other influential actors.  And the HLSCB has a set of personality characteristics that lead him/her to make use of the networks and personal charisma he/she possesses to form working coalitions dedicated to solving difficult problems.  These leaders can be successful in helping a region address its wicked problems -- and perhaps more successful than the more traditional varieties of leaders are likely to be.

Why is this an interesting set of topics for UnderstandingSociety?  For several important reasons: it casts a spotlight on some of the most difficult types of problems that a region can face; it highlights some of the reasons that actors in a single sector are unlikely to be able to solve such problems; it underlines the question of motives and incentives for leaders and stakeholders that plague efforts to solve these types of problems; and it postulates one of the conditions that may be most important for securing meaningful collaboration around efforts to solve these large problems.  And it would appear that the broker-leader is one of those ingredients for successful collaboration.

Styles of epistemology in world sociology

One of the basic organizing premises of the sociology of science is that there are meaningful differences in the conduct of a given area of science across separate communities, all the way down.  There is no pure language and method of science into which diverse research traditions ought to be translated.  Rather, there are complex webs of assumptions about ontology, evidence, observation, theory, method, and reasoning; and there are highly significant differences in the institutions through which scientific activities are undertaken and young scientists are trained.  Sociologists and philosophers such as Thomas Kuhn, David Bloor, Paul Feyerabend, Bruno Latour, and Wiebe Bijker have attempted to lay out the reasons for thinking these forms of difference are likely to be ubiquitous, and several of them have done detailed work in specific areas of scientific knowledge to demonstrate some of these differences.  (Here is a post on Kuhn's approach to the history of science.)

In this vein is a genuinely fascinating and important article by Gabriel Abend with the evocative title, "Styles of Sociological Thought: Sociologies, Epistemologies, and the Mexican and U.S. Quests for Truth" (Sociological Theory 24:1, 2006).  Abend attempts to take the measure of a particularly profound form of difference that might be postulated within the domain of world sociology: the idea that different national traditions of sociology may embody different epistemological frameworks that make their results genuinely incommensurable.  Abend offers an empirical analysis of the possibility that the academic disciplines of Mexican and U.S. sociology embody significantly different assumptions when it comes to articulating the role and relationships between "evidence" and "theory."  Here is how he summarizes his findings:

[The] main argument is that the discourses of Mexican and U.S. sociologies are consistently underlain by significantly different epistemological assumptions. In fact, these two Denkgemeinschaften are notably dissimilar in at least four clusters of variables ... : their thematic, theoretical, and methodological preferences; their historical development and intellectual influences; the society, culture, and institutions in which they are embedded; and the language they normally use.(2)

The core of Abend's analysis is an empirical study involving content analysis of four leading sociology journals in Mexico and the U.S. and sixty articles, randomly chosen through a constrained process.  He analyzes the articles with respect to the practices that each represents when it comes to the use of empirical evidence and sociological theory.  And he finds that the differences between the Mexican articles and the U.S. articles are highly striking.  Consider this tabulation of results on the question of the role of evidence and theory taken by the two sets of articles:

His central findings include these:

• U.S. and Mexican sociologists have very different understandings of "theory" and the ways in which theories relate to data.  U.S. sociologists conform to Merton's idea of "theories of the middle range" in which a theory relates fairly directly to empirical observations through its deductive consequences.  Mexican sociologists tend to use theories and theoretical concepts as ways of interpreting or thematizing large social phenomena.
  
• U.S. sociologists see the burden of their work to fall in the category of testing or confirming sociological hypotheses.  Mexican sociologists see the burden of their work in detailing and analyzing complex social phenomena at a fairly factual level.  "93 percent of M-ART are principally driven by the comprehension of an empirical problem" (10).
  
• U.S. sociologists are strongly wedded to the hypothetico-deductive model of confirmation and explanation.  This model plays very little role in the arguments presented in the sample of articles from Mexican sociologists.
• U.S. and Mexican sociologists have very different assumptions about "scientific objectivity".  U.S. authors aspire to impersonal neutrality, whereas Mexican authors embrace the fact that their analysis proceeds from a particular perspective.
• U.S. authors attempt to exclude value judgments; Mexican author incorporate value judgments into their empirical analysis.  "Among U.S. sociologists, the standard reference is Weber’s purportedly sharp distinctions between value and fact, Wertfreiheit (value freedom or ethical neutrality) and Wertbezogenheit (value relevance or value relatedness), and context of discovery and context of justification" (22).   Concepts such as "oppression," "exploitation," and "domination" are used as descriptive terms in many of the Mexican research articles.
  

Here is a striking tabulation of epistemic differences between the two samples:

Abend believes that these basic epistemological differences between U.S. and Mexican sociology imply a fundamental incommensurability of results:

To consider the epistemological thesis, let us pose the following thought experiment. Suppose a Mexican sociologist claims p and a U.S. sociologist claims not-p.  Carnap’s or Popper’s epistemology would have the empirical world arbitrate between these two theoretical claims. But, as we have seen, sociologists in Mexico and the United States hold different stances regarding what a theory should be, what an explanation should look like, what rules of inference and standards of proof should be stipulated, what role evidence should play, and so on. The empirical world could only adjudicate the dispute if an agreement on these epistemological presuppositions could be reached (and there are good reasons to expect that in such a situation neither side would be willing to give up its epistemology). Furthermore, it seems to me that my thought experiment to some degree misses the point. For it imagines a situation in which a Mexican sociologist claims p and a U.S. sociologist claims not-p, failing to realize that that would only be possible if the problem were articulated in similar terms. However, we have seen that Mexican and U.S. sociologies also differ in how problems are articulated—rather than p and not-p, one should probably speak of p and q.  I believe that Mexican and U.S. sociologies are perceptually and semantically incommensurable as well. (27)

Though Abend's analysis is comparative, I find his analysis of the epistemological assumptions underlying the U.S. cases to be highly insightful all by itself.  In just a few pages he captures what seem to me to be the core epistemological assumptions of the conduct of sociological research in the U.S.  These include:

• the assumption of "general regular reality" (the assumption that social phenomena are "really" governed by underlying regularities)
  
• deductivism 
• epistemic objectivity
• a preference for quantification and abstract vocabulary
  
• separation of fact and value; value neutrality

Abend is deliberately agnostic about the epistemic value of the two approaches; he is explicit in saying that he is interested in discovering the differences, not assessing the relative truthfulness of the two approaches.  But we cannot really escape the most basic question: where does truth fall in this analysis?  What is the status of truth claims in the two traditions?  Are there rational grounds for preferring one body of statements over the other, or for favoring one of these epistemologies over its alternative north or south?

This is important and original work.  Abend's research on this topic is an effort well worth emulating; it adds a great deal of depth and nuance to the effort to provide a philosophy of sociology.  I hope there will be further analysis along these lines by Abend and others.

(There is a lot of social observation and theory in the image above -- and no pretense of academic objectivity.  Class opposition, global property systems, and a general impression of deep social conflict pervade the image.)