Searle on social ontology

Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language made a big impression on the field of the philosophy of language when it appeared in 1969.  But its author, John Searle, thinks the theory of speech acts has a much broader scope than simply the philosophy of language; he thinks it provides a foundation for the philosophy of mind, and -- of particular interest here -- for the philosophy of society.   Two books in the past decade or so have pushed this programme forward -- The Construction of Social Reality (1995) and Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization (2010).  So -- how much insight into the social world can we get from the ideas underlying speech act theory?

Fundamentally, Searle's interest is in the nature of social ontology:

[The philosophy of society is] the study of the nature of human society itself: What is the mode of existence of social entities such as governments, families, cocktail parties, summer vacations, trade unions, baseball games, and passports? (MSW, kindle loc 161)

His answer is categorical and dogmatic; there is precisely one human intentional activity that underlies all of social reality:

Humans have the capacity to impose functions on objects and people where the objects and the people cannot perform the functions solely in virtue of their physical structure. [E.g. a five-dollar bill can't be physically transformed into a grande latte.] The performance of the function requires that there be a collectively recognized status that the person or object has, and it is only in virtue of that status that the person or object can perform the function in question. (kindle loc 194)

Status functions are fundamental, according to Searle, because they are the bearers of rights, obligations, and norms -- what he refers to as "deontic powers." As a member of the American Philosophical Association, I have a right to attend the annual conference, and this right is embodied in the states of intentionality of other actors who recognize that status and the associated right.  "So status functions are the glue that holds society together.  They are created by collective intentionality and they function by carrying deontic powers" (kindle loc 225).

Searle thinks that rules, institutions, and collective intentions are the fundamental "atoms" of social phenomena; and -- this is the dogmatic part -- he thinks that these all depend on one mental action, which he refers to as a Status Function Declaration.  He holds that we cannot understand the working of a rule, a socially embodied obligation, or a socially embodied right, without postulating a commonly recognized Status Function Declaration that establishes that practice.  And, sure enough -- a status function declaration is a form of a speech act.

All institutional facts, and therefore all status functions, are created by speech acts of a type that in 1975 I baptized as "Declarations".... With the important exception of language itself, all of institutional reality, and therefore, in a sense, all of human civilization, is created by speech acts that have the same logical form as Declarations.... Institutional facts are without exception constituted by language, but the functioning of language is especially hard to see. (kindle loc 253, 282, 1683)

So speech acts, and the linguistic intentionality that they express, are the foundation of all social phenomena.  "All of institutional reality is created by linguistic representation" (kindle loc 313).  Voila.

What this all seems to boil down to, is three points: (1) Social interactions always involve language, both internally in thought and externally in communication. (2) The idea of a norm is an inherently social idea that needs to be embodied in the beliefs and attitudes of the individuals in the group through linguistically framed mental representations. (3) Norms need to be shared and publicly articulated if they are to be socially real. Searle represents these three common ideas in a more technical vocabulary: individuals have individual and collective intentionality; individuals have deontic commitments; and deontic commitments result from status function declarations -- speech acts of a specific kind.

Let's consider each of the points. Is intentionality inherently linguistic? Of course adult human intentionality is -- we can always paraphrase a state of consciousness as a linguistic declaration of some sort, and it is common to think of "thought" as internal speech.  But is it possible to imagine purposiveness and intentionality in a non-linguistic species?  Can we find examples of non-human cooperation that appears to presuppose intentionality without language?  The answers to these two questions appear to be affirmative.  Examples of primate problem-solving, group hunting, and simple cooperation in which the behavior of members of a group are oriented to the behavior of others all appear in the animal behavior literature.  (Here is an earlier post on current research on human cooperation that appears to contradict the assumption that intentionality requires language; link.  The post draws on the work of Michael Tomasello and colleagues in Why We Cooperate.)

Is it possible for a group of humans to embody a set of norms of behavior that are not explicitly formulated in language? Again, it seems that we have good empirical and theoretical reasons for thinking that "implicit norms", conventions, and practices exist. Searle himself gives some attention to what we would call "norms by convention", but only to argue that these examples are on their way to full-fledged status function declarations ("pre-institutional examples of the same logical form") (kindle loc 404, 449). But David Lewis's extensive work on the topic in Convention: A Philosophical Study (which Searle does not discuss) gives substantial support for the idea that conventions can emerge within a human group without formal linguistic articulation, and they can persist as a basis for organizing group behavior without requiring "codification" through a speech act. Here is a simple example:

In my hometown of Oberlin, Ohio, until recently all local telephone calls were cut off without warning after three minutes. Soon after the practice had begun, a convention grew up among Oberlin residents that when a call was cut off the original caller would call back while the called party waited. Residents usually conformed to this regularity in the expectation of conformity by the other party to the call. In this way calls were easily restored, to the advantage of all caoncerned.  New residents were told about the convention [deontic speech act!] or learned it through experience [no deontic speech act required!]. It persisted for a decade or so until the cutoff was abolished. (43)

So, according to Lewis, coordination through tacit or implicit convention is a common feature of social life, and it does not require a deontic speech act for its effectiveness. (In fact, Lewis argues that the arrow points the other direction: language presupposes conventions rather than being a necessary condition to the possibility of a convention.) Lewis's analysis is responsive to condition (3) above as well; Lewis has demonstrated how a practice can become "common knowledge" and effective in regulating coordinative and cooperative behavior, without ever having been expressed through a deontic declaration.

So it seems that Searle's insistence on the inescapable role of language and performative speech acts goes beyond what is justified by the facts.  The social is not reducible to a set of logical characteristics of language. That said, it is of course true that human social life -- coordination, planning, strategizing, conspiring, cooperating, and competing -- is enormously dependent on our species' ability to use language to express our thoughts and intentions. But we don't gain very much by paraphrasing social action in the language of speech acts; the real challenge for the social scientist is to explain social outcomes, not to redefine them.

Most fundamentally, we would hope that the philosophy of society or the philosophy of social science will help to formulate better theories and better research questions in the social sciences. The hard part of the social sciences is not arriving at a logical analysis of how institutions and norms can be defined in terms of something else; it is rather the difficult challenge of sorting out real human behavior within a set of institutions and explaining outcomes on that basis. But because of its single-minded focus on a single logical hypothesis, Making the Social World doesn't really do that. It is a formal treatment of the supposed relationship between institutions and speech acts that unfortunately does not provide substantive insight into the workings of real social institutions or human behavior.

Searle on social ontology

Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language made a big impression on the field of the philosophy of language when it appeared in 1969.  But its author, John Searle, thinks the theory of speech acts has a much broader scope than simply the philosophy of language; he thinks it provides a foundation for the philosophy of mind, and -- of particular interest here -- for the philosophy of society.   Two books in the past decade or so have pushed this programme forward -- The Construction of Social Reality (1995) and Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization (2010).  So -- how much insight into the social world can we get from the ideas underlying speech act theory?

Fundamentally, Searle's interest is in the nature of social ontology:

[The philosophy of society is] the study of the nature of human society itself: What is the mode of existence of social entities such as governments, families, cocktail parties, summer vacations, trade unions, baseball games, and passports? (MSW, kindle loc 161)

His answer is categorical and dogmatic; there is precisely one human intentional activity that underlies all of social reality:

Humans have the capacity to impose functions on objects and people where the objects and the people cannot perform the functions solely in virtue of their physical structure. [E.g. a five-dollar bill can't be physically transformed into a grande latte.] The performance of the function requires that there be a collectively recognized status that the person or object has, and it is only in virtue of that status that the person or object can perform the function in question. (kindle loc 194)

Status functions are fundamental, according to Searle, because they are the bearers of rights, obligations, and norms -- what he refers to as "deontic powers." As a member of the American Philosophical Association, I have a right to attend the annual conference, and this right is embodied in the states of intentionality of other actors who recognize that status and the associated right.  "So status functions are the glue that holds society together.  They are created by collective intentionality and they function by carrying deontic powers" (kindle loc 225).

Searle thinks that rules, institutions, and collective intentions are the fundamental "atoms" of social phenomena; and -- this is the dogmatic part -- he thinks that these all depend on one mental action, which he refers to as a Status Function Declaration.  He holds that we cannot understand the working of a rule, a socially embodied obligation, or a socially embodied right, without postulating a commonly recognized Status Function Declaration that establishes that practice.  And, sure enough -- a status function declaration is a form of a speech act.

All institutional facts, and therefore all status functions, are created by speech acts of a type that in 1975 I baptized as "Declarations".... With the important exception of language itself, all of institutional reality, and therefore, in a sense, all of human civilization, is created by speech acts that have the same logical form as Declarations.... Institutional facts are without exception constituted by language, but the functioning of language is especially hard to see. (kindle loc 253, 282, 1683)

So speech acts, and the linguistic intentionality that they express, are the foundation of all social phenomena.  "All of institutional reality is created by linguistic representation" (kindle loc 313).  Voila.

What this all seems to boil down to, is three points: (1) Social interactions always involve language, both internally in thought and externally in communication. (2) The idea of a norm is an inherently social idea that needs to be embodied in the beliefs and attitudes of the individuals in the group through linguistically framed mental representations. (3) Norms need to be shared and publicly articulated if they are to be socially real. Searle represents these three common ideas in a more technical vocabulary: individuals have individual and collective intentionality; individuals have deontic commitments; and deontic commitments result from status function declarations -- speech acts of a specific kind.

Let's consider each of the points. Is intentionality inherently linguistic? Of course adult human intentionality is -- we can always paraphrase a state of consciousness as a linguistic declaration of some sort, and it is common to think of "thought" as internal speech.  But is it possible to imagine purposiveness and intentionality in a non-linguistic species?  Can we find examples of non-human cooperation that appears to presuppose intentionality without language?  The answers to these two questions appear to be affirmative.  Examples of primate problem-solving, group hunting, and simple cooperation in which the behavior of members of a group are oriented to the behavior of others all appear in the animal behavior literature.  (Here is an earlier post on current research on human cooperation that appears to contradict the assumption that intentionality requires language; link.  The post draws on the work of Michael Tomasello and colleagues in Why We Cooperate.)

Is it possible for a group of humans to embody a set of norms of behavior that are not explicitly formulated in language? Again, it seems that we have good empirical and theoretical reasons for thinking that "implicit norms", conventions, and practices exist. Searle himself gives some attention to what we would call "norms by convention", but only to argue that these examples are on their way to full-fledged status function declarations ("pre-institutional examples of the same logical form") (kindle loc 404, 449). But David Lewis's extensive work on the topic in Convention: A Philosophical Study (which Searle does not discuss) gives substantial support for the idea that conventions can emerge within a human group without formal linguistic articulation, and they can persist as a basis for organizing group behavior without requiring "codification" through a speech act. Here is a simple example:

In my hometown of Oberlin, Ohio, until recently all local telephone calls were cut off without warning after three minutes. Soon after the practice had begun, a convention grew up among Oberlin residents that when a call was cut off the original caller would call back while the called party waited. Residents usually conformed to this regularity in the expectation of conformity by the other party to the call. In this way calls were easily restored, to the advantage of all caoncerned.  New residents were told about the convention [deontic speech act!] or learned it through experience [no deontic speech act required!]. It persisted for a decade or so until the cutoff was abolished. (43)

So, according to Lewis, coordination through tacit or implicit convention is a common feature of social life, and it does not require a deontic speech act for its effectiveness. (In fact, Lewis argues that the arrow points the other direction: language presupposes conventions rather than being a necessary condition to the possibility of a convention.) Lewis's analysis is responsive to condition (3) above as well; Lewis has demonstrated how a practice can become "common knowledge" and effective in regulating coordinative and cooperative behavior, without ever having been expressed through a deontic declaration.

So it seems that Searle's insistence on the inescapable role of language and performative speech acts goes beyond what is justified by the facts.  The social is not reducible to a set of logical characteristics of language. That said, it is of course true that human social life -- coordination, planning, strategizing, conspiring, cooperating, and competing -- is enormously dependent on our species' ability to use language to express our thoughts and intentions. But we don't gain very much by paraphrasing social action in the language of speech acts; the real challenge for the social scientist is to explain social outcomes, not to redefine them.

Most fundamentally, we would hope that the philosophy of society or the philosophy of social science will help to formulate better theories and better research questions in the social sciences. The hard part of the social sciences is not arriving at a logical analysis of how institutions and norms can be defined in terms of something else; it is rather the difficult challenge of sorting out real human behavior within a set of institutions and explaining outcomes on that basis. But because of its single-minded focus on a single logical hypothesis, Making the Social World doesn't really do that. It is a formal treatment of the supposed relationship between institutions and speech acts that unfortunately does not provide substantive insight into the workings of real social institutions or human behavior.

Searle on social ontology

Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language made a big impression on the field of the philosophy of language when it appeared in 1969.  But its author, John Searle, thinks the theory of speech acts has a much broader scope than simply the philosophy of language; he thinks it provides a foundation for the philosophy of mind, and -- of particular interest here -- for the philosophy of society.   Two books in the past decade or so have pushed this programme forward -- The Construction of Social Reality (1995) and Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization (2010).  So -- how much insight into the social world can we get from the ideas underlying speech act theory?

Fundamentally, Searle's interest is in the nature of social ontology:

[The philosophy of society is] the study of the nature of human society itself: What is the mode of existence of social entities such as governments, families, cocktail parties, summer vacations, trade unions, baseball games, and passports? (MSW, kindle loc 161)

His answer is categorical and dogmatic; there is precisely one human intentional activity that underlies all of social reality:

Humans have the capacity to impose functions on objects and people where the objects and the people cannot perform the functions solely in virtue of their physical structure. [E.g. a five-dollar bill can't be physically transformed into a grande latte.] The performance of the function requires that there be a collectively recognized status that the person or object has, and it is only in virtue of that status that the person or object can perform the function in question. (kindle loc 194)

Status functions are fundamental, according to Searle, because they are the bearers of rights, obligations, and norms -- what he refers to as "deontic powers." As a member of the American Philosophical Association, I have a right to attend the annual conference, and this right is embodied in the states of intentionality of other actors who recognize that status and the associated right.  "So status functions are the glue that holds society together.  They are created by collective intentionality and they function by carrying deontic powers" (kindle loc 225).

Searle thinks that rules, institutions, and collective intentions are the fundamental "atoms" of social phenomena; and -- this is the dogmatic part -- he thinks that these all depend on one mental action, which he refers to as a Status Function Declaration.  He holds that we cannot understand the working of a rule, a socially embodied obligation, or a socially embodied right, without postulating a commonly recognized Status Function Declaration that establishes that practice.  And, sure enough -- a status function declaration is a form of a speech act.

All institutional facts, and therefore all status functions, are created by speech acts of a type that in 1975 I baptized as "Declarations".... With the important exception of language itself, all of institutional reality, and therefore, in a sense, all of human civilization, is created by speech acts that have the same logical form as Declarations.... Institutional facts are without exception constituted by language, but the functioning of language is especially hard to see. (kindle loc 253, 282, 1683)

So speech acts, and the linguistic intentionality that they express, are the foundation of all social phenomena.  "All of institutional reality is created by linguistic representation" (kindle loc 313).  Voila.

What this all seems to boil down to, is three points: (1) Social interactions always involve language, both internally in thought and externally in communication. (2) The idea of a norm is an inherently social idea that needs to be embodied in the beliefs and attitudes of the individuals in the group through linguistically framed mental representations. (3) Norms need to be shared and publicly articulated if they are to be socially real. Searle represents these three common ideas in a more technical vocabulary: individuals have individual and collective intentionality; individuals have deontic commitments; and deontic commitments result from status function declarations -- speech acts of a specific kind.

Let's consider each of the points. Is intentionality inherently linguistic? Of course adult human intentionality is -- we can always paraphrase a state of consciousness as a linguistic declaration of some sort, and it is common to think of "thought" as internal speech.  But is it possible to imagine purposiveness and intentionality in a non-linguistic species?  Can we find examples of non-human cooperation that appears to presuppose intentionality without language?  The answers to these two questions appear to be affirmative.  Examples of primate problem-solving, group hunting, and simple cooperation in which the behavior of members of a group are oriented to the behavior of others all appear in the animal behavior literature.  (Here is an earlier post on current research on human cooperation that appears to contradict the assumption that intentionality requires language; link.  The post draws on the work of Michael Tomasello and colleagues in Why We Cooperate.)

Is it possible for a group of humans to embody a set of norms of behavior that are not explicitly formulated in language? Again, it seems that we have good empirical and theoretical reasons for thinking that "implicit norms", conventions, and practices exist. Searle himself gives some attention to what we would call "norms by convention", but only to argue that these examples are on their way to full-fledged status function declarations ("pre-institutional examples of the same logical form") (kindle loc 404, 449). But David Lewis's extensive work on the topic in Convention: A Philosophical Study (which Searle does not discuss) gives substantial support for the idea that conventions can emerge within a human group without formal linguistic articulation, and they can persist as a basis for organizing group behavior without requiring "codification" through a speech act. Here is a simple example:

In my hometown of Oberlin, Ohio, until recently all local telephone calls were cut off without warning after three minutes. Soon after the practice had begun, a convention grew up among Oberlin residents that when a call was cut off the original caller would call back while the called party waited. Residents usually conformed to this regularity in the expectation of conformity by the other party to the call. In this way calls were easily restored, to the advantage of all caoncerned.  New residents were told about the convention [deontic speech act!] or learned it through experience [no deontic speech act required!]. It persisted for a decade or so until the cutoff was abolished. (43)

So, according to Lewis, coordination through tacit or implicit convention is a common feature of social life, and it does not require a deontic speech act for its effectiveness. (In fact, Lewis argues that the arrow points the other direction: language presupposes conventions rather than being a necessary condition to the possibility of a convention.) Lewis's analysis is responsive to condition (3) above as well; Lewis has demonstrated how a practice can become "common knowledge" and effective in regulating coordinative and cooperative behavior, without ever having been expressed through a deontic declaration.

So it seems that Searle's insistence on the inescapable role of language and performative speech acts goes beyond what is justified by the facts.  The social is not reducible to a set of logical characteristics of language. That said, it is of course true that human social life -- coordination, planning, strategizing, conspiring, cooperating, and competing -- is enormously dependent on our species' ability to use language to express our thoughts and intentions. But we don't gain very much by paraphrasing social action in the language of speech acts; the real challenge for the social scientist is to explain social outcomes, not to redefine them.

Most fundamentally, we would hope that the philosophy of society or the philosophy of social science will help to formulate better theories and better research questions in the social sciences. The hard part of the social sciences is not arriving at a logical analysis of how institutions and norms can be defined in terms of something else; it is rather the difficult challenge of sorting out real human behavior within a set of institutions and explaining outcomes on that basis. But because of its single-minded focus on a single logical hypothesis, Making the Social World doesn't really do that. It is a formal treatment of the supposed relationship between institutions and speech acts that unfortunately does not provide substantive insight into the workings of real social institutions or human behavior.

Spartacus, Kitty Genovese, and social explanation

What is most interesting in paying attention to social life is noticing the surprising outcomes that often materialize from a number of uncoordinated choices and actions by independent individuals. We want to understand why and how the aggregate-level social fact came to be: was it a set of features of the individual actors' preferences or decision-making?  Was it the unintended result of strategic choices by various actors?  Was it simply the path-dependent and contingent outcome of a serial interactive process?  Was it brought about by structural conditions -- power, wealth, race -- within the context of which actors made their choices?  And what were the mechanisms of constraint, aggregation, contagion, and escalation through which actions and processes at the more proximate level came together into the outcome at the distal level?

Consider a pair of examples. Kitty Genovese is attacked by an assailant over an extended period of time in a dense neighborhood in Queens, many people observe the crime, and no one intervenes.  The woman is eventually murdered.  The question here is, why was there a total absence of intervention by any individual or group in this crime?  And a parallel surprise: General Marcus Licinius Crassus, having trapped the rebellious slave army of Spartacus, announces that the slaves will be spared death if they give up Spartacus for crucifiction.  Spartacus rises to his feet to say, "I am Spartacus." And in minutes the army of men rise as well, all declaring "I am Spartacus."  Here the question is the reverse: why do these men expose themselves to death to stand in solidarity with Spartacus?  In each case, there is an occasion for action presented to a group of individuals, in which members of the group can attempt to save the life of another person.  The collective behavior is fundamentally different in the two cases.   Why so? What are the mechanisms, psychological and social, that led to non-intervention in the first case and fatal solidarity in the second?

We might form a number of hypotheses about both of these cases in order to explain the very different outcomes.  In the Kitty Genovese case, we might cite anomy and anonymity as possible causes of the lack of response by bystanders.  With a low level of civic bonds, perhaps city dwellers have such a low level of emotional involvement with each other that even the slightest effort is unjustified.  Or perhaps it is the fact that each potential responder is anonymous to the others that leads to the result; he/she can make the decision to refrain from offering aid without fear of criticism from others.  Or perhaps collective behavior is strongly influenced by the actions of the first few, with later observers mimicking earlier non-aiders.  So the outcome might have been highly different if the first or second witness had intervened; others might have followed suit.   In the case of Spartacus, we might hypothesize that the bonds of solidarity forged by a history of fighting the Roman army gave the soldiers the moral motivation to support Spartacus; or perhaps it is the publicity of the scene, or the early example of the first few supporters, that spread to the behavior of the others.  Or perhaps it is an expression of fundamental mistrust by the soldiers of the good faith of Marcus Crassus; "he will kill us anyway." With nothing to lose, the army makes its symbolic statement of rejection.  These are each social psychological hypotheses, concerning the ways that individuals choose to involve themselves in an emergency and a situation of potential sacrifice.

Each of these hypotheses represents a social mechanism that can be incorporated into a narrative explaining the aggregate outcome.  In order for such a story to be scientifically compelling, we need to have some way of using empirical evidence to evaluate whether the postulated mechanism actually works in the real world of human behavior.  Is there empirical evidence for a social psychology of mimicry?  Do we have evidence to suggest that members of a crowd are more likely to do X or Y if a few others have already done so?  Is there empirical support for a theory of solidarity as a social motivation: do combat teams, groups of deep-ground miners, or emergency room doctors develop a higher willingness to conform their behavior to the good of the group or of other individuals in the group?  These examples of social mechanisms all fall in the category of putative behavioral regularities, and it should be possible to investigate them experimentally and statistically.

The challenge of explanation for any social outcome, we might say, is that of constructing an interpretation of the states of minds of a set of actors; the constraints and opportunities within which they choose a course of action; and the interactions that are created as they act within a common environment, leading to the outcome in question.  This is what we can refer to as an aggregative explanation, and it lies at the heart of Thomas Schelling's methodology in Micromotives and Macrobehavior.  As Schelling points out, sometimes the explanation turns on specific features of agency (the actors' preferences or their modes of decision-making), and sometimes it turns on the specifics of the environment of choice (the fact that the outcome of action is a public good).  But in general, explanation proceeds by showing how agents with specific features, acting within a social and natural environment with specific characteristics, bring about specific kinds of outcomes.

This, in a nutshell, represents a simple but powerful statement of a philosophy of social explanation.  It also represents the rudiments of a social ontology: higher-level social features are composed of the actions and states of agency of a set of actors within the context of locally embodied rules, norms, and expectations.  This is what I refer to as "methodological localism":

This theory of social entities affirms that there are large social structures and facts that influence social outcomes. But it insists that these structures are only possible insofar as they are embodied in the actions and states of socially constructed individuals. The “molecule” of all social life is the socially constructed and socially situated individual, who lives, acts, and develops within a set of local social relationships, institutions, norms, and rule. (link)

Social explanations derive their force from empirical research into the nature of the actor, the nature of the locally embodied social environment, and the processes of aggregation through which actions by multiple actors coalesce into social outcomes.  The explanation satisfies us when it demonstrates the pathways through which individuals, constituted as they are found to be, located in institutions of the sort described, contribute to collective outcomes of the kinds described.

Spartacus, Kitty Genovese, and social explanation

What is most interesting in paying attention to social life is noticing the surprising outcomes that often materialize from a number of uncoordinated choices and actions by independent individuals. We want to understand why and how the aggregate-level social fact came to be: was it a set of features of the individual actors' preferences or decision-making?  Was it the unintended result of strategic choices by various actors?  Was it simply the path-dependent and contingent outcome of a serial interactive process?  Was it brought about by structural conditions -- power, wealth, race -- within the context of which actors made their choices?  And what were the mechanisms of constraint, aggregation, contagion, and escalation through which actions and processes at the more proximate level came together into the outcome at the distal level?

Consider a pair of examples. Kitty Genovese is attacked by an assailant over an extended period of time in a dense neighborhood in Queens, many people observe the crime, and no one intervenes.  The woman is eventually murdered.  The question here is, why was there a total absence of intervention by any individual or group in this crime?  And a parallel surprise: General Marcus Licinius Crassus, having trapped the rebellious slave army of Spartacus, announces that the slaves will be spared death if they give up Spartacus for crucifiction.  Spartacus rises to his feet to say, "I am Spartacus." And in minutes the army of men rise as well, all declaring "I am Spartacus."  Here the question is the reverse: why do these men expose themselves to death to stand in solidarity with Spartacus?  In each case, there is an occasion for action presented to a group of individuals, in which members of the group can attempt to save the life of another person.  The collective behavior is fundamentally different in the two cases.   Why so? What are the mechanisms, psychological and social, that led to non-intervention in the first case and fatal solidarity in the second?

We might form a number of hypotheses about both of these cases in order to explain the very different outcomes.  In the Kitty Genovese case, we might cite anomy and anonymity as possible causes of the lack of response by bystanders.  With a low level of civic bonds, perhaps city dwellers have such a low level of emotional involvement with each other that even the slightest effort is unjustified.  Or perhaps it is the fact that each potential responder is anonymous to the others that leads to the result; he/she can make the decision to refrain from offering aid without fear of criticism from others.  Or perhaps collective behavior is strongly influenced by the actions of the first few, with later observers mimicking earlier non-aiders.  So the outcome might have been highly different if the first or second witness had intervened; others might have followed suit.   In the case of Spartacus, we might hypothesize that the bonds of solidarity forged by a history of fighting the Roman army gave the soldiers the moral motivation to support Spartacus; or perhaps it is the publicity of the scene, or the early example of the first few supporters, that spread to the behavior of the others.  Or perhaps it is an expression of fundamental mistrust by the soldiers of the good faith of Marcus Crassus; "he will kill us anyway." With nothing to lose, the army makes its symbolic statement of rejection.  These are each social psychological hypotheses, concerning the ways that individuals choose to involve themselves in an emergency and a situation of potential sacrifice.

Each of these hypotheses represents a social mechanism that can be incorporated into a narrative explaining the aggregate outcome.  In order for such a story to be scientifically compelling, we need to have some way of using empirical evidence to evaluate whether the postulated mechanism actually works in the real world of human behavior.  Is there empirical evidence for a social psychology of mimicry?  Do we have evidence to suggest that members of a crowd are more likely to do X or Y if a few others have already done so?  Is there empirical support for a theory of solidarity as a social motivation: do combat teams, groups of deep-ground miners, or emergency room doctors develop a higher willingness to conform their behavior to the good of the group or of other individuals in the group?  These examples of social mechanisms all fall in the category of putative behavioral regularities, and it should be possible to investigate them experimentally and statistically.

The challenge of explanation for any social outcome, we might say, is that of constructing an interpretation of the states of minds of a set of actors; the constraints and opportunities within which they choose a course of action; and the interactions that are created as they act within a common environment, leading to the outcome in question.  This is what we can refer to as an aggregative explanation, and it lies at the heart of Thomas Schelling's methodology in Micromotives and Macrobehavior.  As Schelling points out, sometimes the explanation turns on specific features of agency (the actors' preferences or their modes of decision-making), and sometimes it turns on the specifics of the environment of choice (the fact that the outcome of action is a public good).  But in general, explanation proceeds by showing how agents with specific features, acting within a social and natural environment with specific characteristics, bring about specific kinds of outcomes.

This, in a nutshell, represents a simple but powerful statement of a philosophy of social explanation.  It also represents the rudiments of a social ontology: higher-level social features are composed of the actions and states of agency of a set of actors within the context of locally embodied rules, norms, and expectations.  This is what I refer to as "methodological localism":

This theory of social entities affirms that there are large social structures and facts that influence social outcomes. But it insists that these structures are only possible insofar as they are embodied in the actions and states of socially constructed individuals. The “molecule” of all social life is the socially constructed and socially situated individual, who lives, acts, and develops within a set of local social relationships, institutions, norms, and rule. (link)

Social explanations derive their force from empirical research into the nature of the actor, the nature of the locally embodied social environment, and the processes of aggregation through which actions by multiple actors coalesce into social outcomes.  The explanation satisfies us when it demonstrates the pathways through which individuals, constituted as they are found to be, located in institutions of the sort described, contribute to collective outcomes of the kinds described.

Spartacus, Kitty Genovese, and social explanation

What is most interesting in paying attention to social life is noticing the surprising outcomes that often materialize from a number of uncoordinated choices and actions by independent individuals. We want to understand why and how the aggregate-level social fact came to be: was it a set of features of the individual actors' preferences or decision-making?  Was it the unintended result of strategic choices by various actors?  Was it simply the path-dependent and contingent outcome of a serial interactive process?  Was it brought about by structural conditions -- power, wealth, race -- within the context of which actors made their choices?  And what were the mechanisms of constraint, aggregation, contagion, and escalation through which actions and processes at the more proximate level came together into the outcome at the distal level?

Consider a pair of examples. Kitty Genovese is attacked by an assailant over an extended period of time in a dense neighborhood in Queens, many people observe the crime, and no one intervenes.  The woman is eventually murdered.  The question here is, why was there a total absence of intervention by any individual or group in this crime?  And a parallel surprise: General Marcus Licinius Crassus, having trapped the rebellious slave army of Spartacus, announces that the slaves will be spared death if they give up Spartacus for crucifiction.  Spartacus rises to his feet to say, "I am Spartacus." And in minutes the army of men rise as well, all declaring "I am Spartacus."  Here the question is the reverse: why do these men expose themselves to death to stand in solidarity with Spartacus?  In each case, there is an occasion for action presented to a group of individuals, in which members of the group can attempt to save the life of another person.  The collective behavior is fundamentally different in the two cases.   Why so? What are the mechanisms, psychological and social, that led to non-intervention in the first case and fatal solidarity in the second?

We might form a number of hypotheses about both of these cases in order to explain the very different outcomes.  In the Kitty Genovese case, we might cite anomy and anonymity as possible causes of the lack of response by bystanders.  With a low level of civic bonds, perhaps city dwellers have such a low level of emotional involvement with each other that even the slightest effort is unjustified.  Or perhaps it is the fact that each potential responder is anonymous to the others that leads to the result; he/she can make the decision to refrain from offering aid without fear of criticism from others.  Or perhaps collective behavior is strongly influenced by the actions of the first few, with later observers mimicking earlier non-aiders.  So the outcome might have been highly different if the first or second witness had intervened; others might have followed suit.   In the case of Spartacus, we might hypothesize that the bonds of solidarity forged by a history of fighting the Roman army gave the soldiers the moral motivation to support Spartacus; or perhaps it is the publicity of the scene, or the early example of the first few supporters, that spread to the behavior of the others.  Or perhaps it is an expression of fundamental mistrust by the soldiers of the good faith of Marcus Crassus; "he will kill us anyway." With nothing to lose, the army makes its symbolic statement of rejection.  These are each social psychological hypotheses, concerning the ways that individuals choose to involve themselves in an emergency and a situation of potential sacrifice.

Each of these hypotheses represents a social mechanism that can be incorporated into a narrative explaining the aggregate outcome.  In order for such a story to be scientifically compelling, we need to have some way of using empirical evidence to evaluate whether the postulated mechanism actually works in the real world of human behavior.  Is there empirical evidence for a social psychology of mimicry?  Do we have evidence to suggest that members of a crowd are more likely to do X or Y if a few others have already done so?  Is there empirical support for a theory of solidarity as a social motivation: do combat teams, groups of deep-ground miners, or emergency room doctors develop a higher willingness to conform their behavior to the good of the group or of other individuals in the group?  These examples of social mechanisms all fall in the category of putative behavioral regularities, and it should be possible to investigate them experimentally and statistically.

The challenge of explanation for any social outcome, we might say, is that of constructing an interpretation of the states of minds of a set of actors; the constraints and opportunities within which they choose a course of action; and the interactions that are created as they act within a common environment, leading to the outcome in question.  This is what we can refer to as an aggregative explanation, and it lies at the heart of Thomas Schelling's methodology in Micromotives and Macrobehavior.  As Schelling points out, sometimes the explanation turns on specific features of agency (the actors' preferences or their modes of decision-making), and sometimes it turns on the specifics of the environment of choice (the fact that the outcome of action is a public good).  But in general, explanation proceeds by showing how agents with specific features, acting within a social and natural environment with specific characteristics, bring about specific kinds of outcomes.

This, in a nutshell, represents a simple but powerful statement of a philosophy of social explanation.  It also represents the rudiments of a social ontology: higher-level social features are composed of the actions and states of agency of a set of actors within the context of locally embodied rules, norms, and expectations.  This is what I refer to as "methodological localism":

This theory of social entities affirms that there are large social structures and facts that influence social outcomes. But it insists that these structures are only possible insofar as they are embodied in the actions and states of socially constructed individuals. The “molecule” of all social life is the socially constructed and socially situated individual, who lives, acts, and develops within a set of local social relationships, institutions, norms, and rule. (link)

Social explanations derive their force from empirical research into the nature of the actor, the nature of the locally embodied social environment, and the processes of aggregation through which actions by multiple actors coalesce into social outcomes.  The explanation satisfies us when it demonstrates the pathways through which individuals, constituted as they are found to be, located in institutions of the sort described, contribute to collective outcomes of the kinds described.

New thinking about the Red Guards

Andrew Walder has spent almost all of his academic life, on and off, studying the Chinese Cultural Revolution.  In Fractured Rebellion: The Beijing Red Guard Movement (2009) he offers some genuinely new insights into this crucial and chaotic period of China's revolutionary history.  Some historians have focused on the political motivations of Mao and other top leaders in the party; others have examined the economic and social cleavages that existed in China only a decade and a half into its Communist Revolution.  Walder is interested in a much more grass-roots question: what were the motivations, calculations, and states of mind of the "foot soldiers" of the CR, the Red Guards in the earliest years of the upheavals?  And why did the political activism of the CR devolve almost inevitably into intense factionalism between groups whose ideologies seemed virtually indistinguishable -- loyalty to Mao, defense of the revolution, attacks on treacherous leaders?  Walder is a political sociologist, and he wants to understand the dynamics of mobilization and affiliation that led to the group violence and inter-group factionalism in the early years of this period.

Here is an example of the kind of factionalism that most interests Walder:

Chapter 8 examines the puzzling disintegration of the rebel movement in January 1967, soon after the decisive victory over its opponents.  Why did the victorious rebel coalition rapidly split into two opposing camps?  In their earlier attacks on ministries and commissions, rebels stayed within separate bureaucratic hierarchies.  Work teams were dispatched down these hierarchies to the schools under them, and the pursuit of work teams led rebels directly back up this hierarchy to the ministry or commission that sent them.  When these rebels moved to seize power in national and municipal agencies, however, they crossed into different bureaucratic hierarchies.  Rebel groups from different schools who went to the same organs of power turned quickly from allies into competitors.  These competitive rivalries were exacerbated by deep splits that had earlier developed among rebel forces in the two largest and most important campuses, Beijing and Quinghua universities.  The splits at Beida and Qinghua served as a wedge to divide rebel forces citywide, as factions of different schools aligned themselves with one or another faction at these two large campuses.  The resulting split between "Heaven" and "Earth" factions crippled the student movement and frustrated the CCRG until the very end. (26-27)

Walder suggests that earlier scholars have sought to understand the motivations and factions of China's young people in terms of the class position of the participants and the pervasive political indoctrination of youth that had been ubiquitous in the 1950s and 1960s.  Factions existed, according to this line of thought, either because different groups had different interests, or they had different political theories and ideologies ("conservative" and "radical").  Walder finds these explanations unsatisfactory, since they apply equally to both sides in all the factions -- and so he wants to identify some other feature of the political landscape that would explain the behavior and the factionalization.  And, unlike the scholars of the 1970s and 1980s who had to largely speculate about these issues, Walder takes advantage of primary sources that allow the researcher to get a great deal of information about the participants in their own words, and in their relationships to other activists.

Walder also questions the relevance of the core assumptions of social mobilization theory for the Cultural Revolution -- the idea that social movements need to be understood in terms of grievances, resources, and the state's ability to resist group demands.  Fundamentally his objection is that this theory doesn't help to explain the early months of the Cultural Revolution because all the postulated conditions were present in 1966, and mobilization did in fact occur (14).  But it occurred in a very distinctive way that resource mobilization theory seems not to prove a basis for explaining -- the constant fissioning of a group of activists into two or more factions, bitterly opposed to each other.  It appears, then, that resource mobilization theory lacks the tools necessary to explain this specific pattern of mobilization -- radicalization followed by bitter factionalism.

Walder's explanation is a novel one.  He argues that factionalization was a consequence, not of class differences or ideological disagreements between individuals, but simply of the early choices that various individuals made early in the period.  A central feature of this period was the fact of denunciation -- denouncing past or current leaders for disloyalty to the revolution or other ideological errors.  And these denunciations within the universities were highly consequential: "by mid-July 55 percent of all university party first secretaries and 40 percent of all general branch secretaries had been labeled anti-party reactionaries and placed in category 4" (57).  The rapid proliferation of denunciations meant that persons close to the denounced leader needed to decide -- should they join the denunciation or should they refrain?  The work teams that were sent into Beijing's elite universities in June 1966 (Peking University, to begin with) were forced to make choices in light of radical students' denunciation of top university officials; lower officials had to make similar choices; and activist student leaders had to decide whether to support or oppose the activities of the work teams.  And, Walder argues, this choice was fateful and enduring.  It meant that the individual would be shunted into this group or that group, with further decisions cementing the affinity with the group.

Another way of stating the argument is that factional identities and the common interests that define them are the product of political interactions rooted in specific contexts whose properties must be researched, not simply assumed.  Individual decisions -- to join factions, to oppose or support a work team -- are not the product of prior socialization or social ties but are actdively shaped by political encounters.  The focus is on the interactions that generate choices and outcomes, not the prior statuses of individuals or their preexisting social and political ties. These processes determine when prior social statuses or network ties are activated in a conflict, and when they are not. (13)

In other words, Walder argues that the fact of pervasive factionalization in the Cultural Revolution does not reflect fundamental underlying disagreements or contradictions between the factions; it does not reflect prior sociological distinctions among the participants; but rather reflects the emergence of separate networks of political affiliation from which there was no exit.

Chapter 3 describes how the work teams split university power structures into warring factions, with a focus on the issues that bred conflict between work teams and militant students.  Only in rare and fleeting circumstances were the issues of contention about attacks on the incumbent power structure -- a question that might distinguish "conservative" from "radical" political orientations.  Instead, they were usually about the work team's authority over student actions and the physical control of officials held for interrogation, and about heavy-handed work-team punishment of students who proved hard to control. (24)

This is a fascinating micro-sociology of a crucial span of a few months of violent upheaval in a single city.  It helps to explain a particularly pervasive feature of a broad and chaotic period of political unrest in China -- the constant factionalism that occurred at virtually every level of conflict.  It introduces an innovative model of political behavior (path-dependent choices by individuals leading to a durable configuration of political affiliations).  And it provides a new avenue through which the methods of network analysis can be fruitfully used to explain complex social processes.  It is a valuable contribution to the new wave of scholarship that is currently underway about the Cultural Revolution.  (Other contributions to this new scholarship are included in Esherick, Pickowitz, and Walder, eds., China's Cultural Revolution As History.)

A side note, not crucial to Walder's argument but interesting nonetheless, is the apparently simple question of when the Cultural Revolution took place.  It is conventional by many historians to date the CR to the years 1966-1976.  In 1966 the Red Guard movement erupted with wall posters and virulent activism in Beijing, among high school and university students.  And in 1976 Mao died, the Gang of Four were arrested, and the disruptions of the decade were decisively put aside.  But Walder dates the CR to a much shorter period, 1966-68, beginning with the same Red Guard explosion that occurred in 1966 but ending in 1968 when Mao unleased the military to put down the radical activists: "Not until August 1968 were the flames of China's Cultural revolution extinguished by the imposition of a harsh regime of martial law" (1).

New thinking about the Red Guards

Andrew Walder has spent almost all of his academic life, on and off, studying the Chinese Cultural Revolution.  In Fractured Rebellion: The Beijing Red Guard Movement (2009) he offers some genuinely new insights into this crucial and chaotic period of China's revolutionary history.  Some historians have focused on the political motivations of Mao and other top leaders in the party; others have examined the economic and social cleavages that existed in China only a decade and a half into its Communist Revolution.  Walder is interested in a much more grass-roots question: what were the motivations, calculations, and states of mind of the "foot soldiers" of the CR, the Red Guards in the earliest years of the upheavals?  And why did the political activism of the CR devolve almost inevitably into intense factionalism between groups whose ideologies seemed virtually indistinguishable -- loyalty to Mao, defense of the revolution, attacks on treacherous leaders?  Walder is a political sociologist, and he wants to understand the dynamics of mobilization and affiliation that led to the group violence and inter-group factionalism in the early years of this period.

Here is an example of the kind of factionalism that most interests Walder:

Chapter 8 examines the puzzling disintegration of the rebel movement in January 1967, soon after the decisive victory over its opponents.  Why did the victorious rebel coalition rapidly split into two opposing camps?  In their earlier attacks on ministries and commissions, rebels stayed within separate bureaucratic hierarchies.  Work teams were dispatched down these hierarchies to the schools under them, and the pursuit of work teams led rebels directly back up this hierarchy to the ministry or commission that sent them.  When these rebels moved to seize power in national and municipal agencies, however, they crossed into different bureaucratic hierarchies.  Rebel groups from different schools who went to the same organs of power turned quickly from allies into competitors.  These competitive rivalries were exacerbated by deep splits that had earlier developed among rebel forces in the two largest and most important campuses, Beijing and Quinghua universities.  The splits at Beida and Qinghua served as a wedge to divide rebel forces citywide, as factions of different schools aligned themselves with one or another faction at these two large campuses.  The resulting split between "Heaven" and "Earth" factions crippled the student movement and frustrated the CCRG until the very end. (26-27)

Walder suggests that earlier scholars have sought to understand the motivations and factions of China's young people in terms of the class position of the participants and the pervasive political indoctrination of youth that had been ubiquitous in the 1950s and 1960s.  Factions existed, according to this line of thought, either because different groups had different interests, or they had different political theories and ideologies ("conservative" and "radical").  Walder finds these explanations unsatisfactory, since they apply equally to both sides in all the factions -- and so he wants to identify some other feature of the political landscape that would explain the behavior and the factionalization.  And, unlike the scholars of the 1970s and 1980s who had to largely speculate about these issues, Walder takes advantage of primary sources that allow the researcher to get a great deal of information about the participants in their own words, and in their relationships to other activists.

Walder also questions the relevance of the core assumptions of social mobilization theory for the Cultural Revolution -- the idea that social movements need to be understood in terms of grievances, resources, and the state's ability to resist group demands.  Fundamentally his objection is that this theory doesn't help to explain the early months of the Cultural Revolution because all the postulated conditions were present in 1966, and mobilization did in fact occur (14).  But it occurred in a very distinctive way that resource mobilization theory seems not to prove a basis for explaining -- the constant fissioning of a group of activists into two or more factions, bitterly opposed to each other.  It appears, then, that resource mobilization theory lacks the tools necessary to explain this specific pattern of mobilization -- radicalization followed by bitter factionalism.

Walder's explanation is a novel one.  He argues that factionalization was a consequence, not of class differences or ideological disagreements between individuals, but simply of the early choices that various individuals made early in the period.  A central feature of this period was the fact of denunciation -- denouncing past or current leaders for disloyalty to the revolution or other ideological errors.  And these denunciations within the universities were highly consequential: "by mid-July 55 percent of all university party first secretaries and 40 percent of all general branch secretaries had been labeled anti-party reactionaries and placed in category 4" (57).  The rapid proliferation of denunciations meant that persons close to the denounced leader needed to decide -- should they join the denunciation or should they refrain?  The work teams that were sent into Beijing's elite universities in June 1966 (Peking University, to begin with) were forced to make choices in light of radical students' denunciation of top university officials; lower officials had to make similar choices; and activist student leaders had to decide whether to support or oppose the activities of the work teams.  And, Walder argues, this choice was fateful and enduring.  It meant that the individual would be shunted into this group or that group, with further decisions cementing the affinity with the group.

Another way of stating the argument is that factional identities and the common interests that define them are the product of political interactions rooted in specific contexts whose properties must be researched, not simply assumed.  Individual decisions -- to join factions, to oppose or support a work team -- are not the product of prior socialization or social ties but are actdively shaped by political encounters.  The focus is on the interactions that generate choices and outcomes, not the prior statuses of individuals or their preexisting social and political ties. These processes determine when prior social statuses or network ties are activated in a conflict, and when they are not. (13)

In other words, Walder argues that the fact of pervasive factionalization in the Cultural Revolution does not reflect fundamental underlying disagreements or contradictions between the factions; it does not reflect prior sociological distinctions among the participants; but rather reflects the emergence of separate networks of political affiliation from which there was no exit.

Chapter 3 describes how the work teams split university power structures into warring factions, with a focus on the issues that bred conflict between work teams and militant students.  Only in rare and fleeting circumstances were the issues of contention about attacks on the incumbent power structure -- a question that might distinguish "conservative" from "radical" political orientations.  Instead, they were usually about the work team's authority over student actions and the physical control of officials held for interrogation, and about heavy-handed work-team punishment of students who proved hard to control. (24)

This is a fascinating micro-sociology of a crucial span of a few months of violent upheaval in a single city.  It helps to explain a particularly pervasive feature of a broad and chaotic period of political unrest in China -- the constant factionalism that occurred at virtually every level of conflict.  It introduces an innovative model of political behavior (path-dependent choices by individuals leading to a durable configuration of political affiliations).  And it provides a new avenue through which the methods of network analysis can be fruitfully used to explain complex social processes.  It is a valuable contribution to the new wave of scholarship that is currently underway about the Cultural Revolution.  (Other contributions to this new scholarship are included in Esherick, Pickowitz, and Walder, eds., China's Cultural Revolution As History.)

A side note, not crucial to Walder's argument but interesting nonetheless, is the apparently simple question of when the Cultural Revolution took place.  It is conventional by many historians to date the CR to the years 1966-1976.  In 1966 the Red Guard movement erupted with wall posters and virulent activism in Beijing, among high school and university students.  And in 1976 Mao died, the Gang of Four were arrested, and the disruptions of the decade were decisively put aside.  But Walder dates the CR to a much shorter period, 1966-68, beginning with the same Red Guard explosion that occurred in 1966 but ending in 1968 when Mao unleased the military to put down the radical activists: "Not until August 1968 were the flames of China's Cultural revolution extinguished by the imposition of a harsh regime of martial law" (1).

New thinking about the Red Guards

Andrew Walder has spent almost all of his academic life, on and off, studying the Chinese Cultural Revolution.  In Fractured Rebellion: The Beijing Red Guard Movement (2009) he offers some genuinely new insights into this crucial and chaotic period of China's revolutionary history.  Some historians have focused on the political motivations of Mao and other top leaders in the party; others have examined the economic and social cleavages that existed in China only a decade and a half into its Communist Revolution.  Walder is interested in a much more grass-roots question: what were the motivations, calculations, and states of mind of the "foot soldiers" of the CR, the Red Guards in the earliest years of the upheavals?  And why did the political activism of the CR devolve almost inevitably into intense factionalism between groups whose ideologies seemed virtually indistinguishable -- loyalty to Mao, defense of the revolution, attacks on treacherous leaders?  Walder is a political sociologist, and he wants to understand the dynamics of mobilization and affiliation that led to the group violence and inter-group factionalism in the early years of this period.

Here is an example of the kind of factionalism that most interests Walder:

Chapter 8 examines the puzzling disintegration of the rebel movement in January 1967, soon after the decisive victory over its opponents.  Why did the victorious rebel coalition rapidly split into two opposing camps?  In their earlier attacks on ministries and commissions, rebels stayed within separate bureaucratic hierarchies.  Work teams were dispatched down these hierarchies to the schools under them, and the pursuit of work teams led rebels directly back up this hierarchy to the ministry or commission that sent them.  When these rebels moved to seize power in national and municipal agencies, however, they crossed into different bureaucratic hierarchies.  Rebel groups from different schools who went to the same organs of power turned quickly from allies into competitors.  These competitive rivalries were exacerbated by deep splits that had earlier developed among rebel forces in the two largest and most important campuses, Beijing and Quinghua universities.  The splits at Beida and Qinghua served as a wedge to divide rebel forces citywide, as factions of different schools aligned themselves with one or another faction at these two large campuses.  The resulting split between "Heaven" and "Earth" factions crippled the student movement and frustrated the CCRG until the very end. (26-27)

Walder suggests that earlier scholars have sought to understand the motivations and factions of China's young people in terms of the class position of the participants and the pervasive political indoctrination of youth that had been ubiquitous in the 1950s and 1960s.  Factions existed, according to this line of thought, either because different groups had different interests, or they had different political theories and ideologies ("conservative" and "radical").  Walder finds these explanations unsatisfactory, since they apply equally to both sides in all the factions -- and so he wants to identify some other feature of the political landscape that would explain the behavior and the factionalization.  And, unlike the scholars of the 1970s and 1980s who had to largely speculate about these issues, Walder takes advantage of primary sources that allow the researcher to get a great deal of information about the participants in their own words, and in their relationships to other activists.

Walder also questions the relevance of the core assumptions of social mobilization theory for the Cultural Revolution -- the idea that social movements need to be understood in terms of grievances, resources, and the state's ability to resist group demands.  Fundamentally his objection is that this theory doesn't help to explain the early months of the Cultural Revolution because all the postulated conditions were present in 1966, and mobilization did in fact occur (14).  But it occurred in a very distinctive way that resource mobilization theory seems not to prove a basis for explaining -- the constant fissioning of a group of activists into two or more factions, bitterly opposed to each other.  It appears, then, that resource mobilization theory lacks the tools necessary to explain this specific pattern of mobilization -- radicalization followed by bitter factionalism.

Walder's explanation is a novel one.  He argues that factionalization was a consequence, not of class differences or ideological disagreements between individuals, but simply of the early choices that various individuals made early in the period.  A central feature of this period was the fact of denunciation -- denouncing past or current leaders for disloyalty to the revolution or other ideological errors.  And these denunciations within the universities were highly consequential: "by mid-July 55 percent of all university party first secretaries and 40 percent of all general branch secretaries had been labeled anti-party reactionaries and placed in category 4" (57).  The rapid proliferation of denunciations meant that persons close to the denounced leader needed to decide -- should they join the denunciation or should they refrain?  The work teams that were sent into Beijing's elite universities in June 1966 (Peking University, to begin with) were forced to make choices in light of radical students' denunciation of top university officials; lower officials had to make similar choices; and activist student leaders had to decide whether to support or oppose the activities of the work teams.  And, Walder argues, this choice was fateful and enduring.  It meant that the individual would be shunted into this group or that group, with further decisions cementing the affinity with the group.

Another way of stating the argument is that factional identities and the common interests that define them are the product of political interactions rooted in specific contexts whose properties must be researched, not simply assumed.  Individual decisions -- to join factions, to oppose or support a work team -- are not the product of prior socialization or social ties but are actdively shaped by political encounters.  The focus is on the interactions that generate choices and outcomes, not the prior statuses of individuals or their preexisting social and political ties. These processes determine when prior social statuses or network ties are activated in a conflict, and when they are not. (13)

In other words, Walder argues that the fact of pervasive factionalization in the Cultural Revolution does not reflect fundamental underlying disagreements or contradictions between the factions; it does not reflect prior sociological distinctions among the participants; but rather reflects the emergence of separate networks of political affiliation from which there was no exit.

Chapter 3 describes how the work teams split university power structures into warring factions, with a focus on the issues that bred conflict between work teams and militant students.  Only in rare and fleeting circumstances were the issues of contention about attacks on the incumbent power structure -- a question that might distinguish "conservative" from "radical" political orientations.  Instead, they were usually about the work team's authority over student actions and the physical control of officials held for interrogation, and about heavy-handed work-team punishment of students who proved hard to control. (24)

This is a fascinating micro-sociology of a crucial span of a few months of violent upheaval in a single city.  It helps to explain a particularly pervasive feature of a broad and chaotic period of political unrest in China -- the constant factionalism that occurred at virtually every level of conflict.  It introduces an innovative model of political behavior (path-dependent choices by individuals leading to a durable configuration of political affiliations).  And it provides a new avenue through which the methods of network analysis can be fruitfully used to explain complex social processes.  It is a valuable contribution to the new wave of scholarship that is currently underway about the Cultural Revolution.  (Other contributions to this new scholarship are included in Esherick, Pickowitz, and Walder, eds., China's Cultural Revolution As History.)

A side note, not crucial to Walder's argument but interesting nonetheless, is the apparently simple question of when the Cultural Revolution took place.  It is conventional by many historians to date the CR to the years 1966-1976.  In 1966 the Red Guard movement erupted with wall posters and virulent activism in Beijing, among high school and university students.  And in 1976 Mao died, the Gang of Four were arrested, and the disruptions of the decade were decisively put aside.  But Walder dates the CR to a much shorter period, 1966-68, beginning with the same Red Guard explosion that occurred in 1966 but ending in 1968 when Mao unleased the military to put down the radical activists: "Not until August 1968 were the flames of China's Cultural revolution extinguished by the imposition of a harsh regime of martial law" (1).

Steve Pincus on revolution

Steve Pincus offers a sweeping and compelling reinterpretation of the English Revolution in 1688: The First Modern Revolution. Along the way he provides a review of existing theories of revolution -- Skocpol, Huntington, Barrington Moore, and Goldstone, in particular (chapter 2). Pincus's definition of revolution goes along these lines:

Revolutions thus constitute a structural and ideological break from the previous regime. They entail changes to both the political and socioeconomic structures of a polity. They involve an often violent popular movement to overturn the previous regime. Revolutions change the political leadership and the policy orientations of the state. And revolutionary regimes bring with them a new conception of time, a notion that they are beginning a new epoch in the history of the state and its society. (kindle loc 549)

Pincus criticizes each of the prevailing theories of revolution. Fundamentally Pincus's criticism is that these theories share a common error of conceptualization: they work on the assumption that revolutions are the outcome of a conflict between a rigid, conservative, and exhausted state, on the one hand, and a movement of modernizers, on the other. Tocqueville embodies this assumption in his own history of the French Revolution -- the defenders of the Ancien regime are defeated by economic and social reformers (Ancien Regime and the French Revolution). But Pincus argues that the historical reality was quite different, in France, Russia, China, the Ottoman Empire, and England.

In all cases the old regime had ceased to exist before the revolution. Revolutions, then, do not pit modernizing elements against defenders of the traditional order. Instead revolutions occur only after the regime in power has set itself on a modernizing course. State modernization itself cannot occur without prior socioeconomic modernization. But that socioeconomic modernization is a necessary though not a sufficient cause of state modernization. It is for that reason that revolutions are the often-violent working out of competing state modernization programs. (kindle loc 613)

So it is fissures and catalysts created by the state's own processes of modernization that create the impetus towards revolution, according to Pincus. But what is modernization? Here is Pincus's brief account:

By state modernization I mean a self-conscious effort by the regime to transform itself in fundamental ways. State modernization will usually include an effort to centralize and bureaucratize political authority, an initiative to transform the military using the most up-to-date techniques, a program to accelerate economic growth and shape the contours of society using the tools of the state, and the deployment of techniques allowing the state to gather information about and potentially supporess social and political activities taking place in a wide range of social levels and geographical locales within the polity. (kindle loc 613)

But not all modernizing states result in revolution; so what factors make revolution more likely? Pincus mentions Sweden, Denmark, and Meiji Japan as historical examples of societies with modernizing states and no revolution. Pincus thinks the answer lies in the degree to which the modernizing state is able to keep credible control of the apparatus of social order.

Revolutions are more likely in situations in which the modernizing regime is not clearly perceived to have a monopoly of the forces of violence.... When the modernizing state quickly demonstrates its control of resources and disarms the opposition, as in seventeenth-century Denmark and Sweden or late-nineteenth-century Japan, revolutions do not occur. (kindle loc 699)

So the causal narrative the Pincus offers goes along something like these lines:

• The state initiates a process of reform and modernization.
• There are multiple visions of what "modernization" ought to look like for the polity, both within the state and outside the state.
• These multiple visions have the capacity to create advocates and processes of collective mobilization outside the state within civil society.
• One or more parties in civil society gain the intention and the resources to challenge the state.
• The state marshalls its forces to repress opposition.
• If it lacks sufficient capacity to intimidate or repress opposition, revolution occurs.

What this narrative discounts is quite a bit of what other theories of revolution place in the foreground -- under-class revolt, state breakdown, demographic change, ideological conflict, the disruptive social effects of war, and fiscal crisis, to name several. Pincus is too good a historian to truly overlook these factors, and they all come into his narrative of the English Revolution. But when it comes to offering a "theory" of revolution, Pincus is led down the same rhetorical path as the authors he criticizes: he wants to identify a single factor that "explains" the occurrence of revolution. Within the viewpoint of that single factor, he is willing to interweave the "secondary" factors mentioned here; but there is an intellectual desire to identify a single, most-important factor. And this seems misguided.

Better is the approach taken by McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly in Dynamics of Contention. Fundamentally, they reject the impulse towards any kind of single-factor theory of revolution or any other kind of contentious politics. They argue that these large social outcomes are the result of the concatenation of a diverse range of social mechanisms and processes, none of which is paramount.

To call the events of 1789 "contentious politics" may seem to demean a great revolution. This book aims to demonstrate that the label "contentious politics" not only makes sense but also helps explain what happened in Paris and the rest of France during that turbulent summer. ... Further [the book] shows how different forms of contention -- social movements, revolutions, strike waves, nationalism, democratization, and more -- result from similar mechanisms and processes. It wagers that we can learn more about all of them by comparing their dynamics than by looking at each on its own. Finally, it explores several combinations of mechanisms and processes with the aim of discovering recurring causal sequences of contentious politics. (4)

Revolution is an instance of what McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly call "transgressive contention" (7), but there are important examples of transgressive contention that are not revolutionary -- for example, the American civil rights struggle, cycles of protest in Italian cities, the Mau Mau rebellion, and other examples.

So Dynamics of Contention offer a serious methodological alternative to all of the theories of revolution mentioned here: rather than looking for a small number of structural characteristics that "cause" or "inhibit" revolution, we are better served by moving down to the meso- and micro-levels of mobilization, claim-making, repression, state building, tax collecting, and ideological competition that constitute the real causal stuff of revolution and contention.

It is worth observing, further, that the Dynamics of Contention approach -- identifying discrete mechanisms and processes of contentious politics -- offers vastly better resources for investigating and explaining the wave of revolts, uprisings, and popular movements that are taking place today across the Middle East than any single theory of revolution would provide.  The processes of grievance-making, group mobilization, communication, escalation, brokerage, and state tactics of repression that MTT describe are of obvious relevance in trying to understand the last few months of unrest in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, and other countries. In particular, none of the macro-theories -- class conflict, state breakdown, or crises of the modernizing state -- seem to shed much light on these events.  What is occurring seems to be much more akin to the path-dependent, multi-causal kind of process that McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly describe.

(McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly have been discussed several times here, including link, link.)