Pincus re-presented

Several earlier posts have discussed aspects of Steve Pincus's 1688: The First Modern Revolution (link, link). The book provides a major rethinking of the events and significance of England's Glorious Revolution, and it has already made a deep impression within English studies (link). Pincus tells a large, complicated story, spread out over a period of several decades and including important actions, persons, and events in England, Scotland, Ireland, France, and the Netherlands.

Much of the interest of his account is how fundamentally it differs from the received narrative, its novel use of familiar and new resources, and the author's strong ability to link to current work in some areas of the historical social sciences. But here I want to raise a different sort of question: how could we propose to make this story more vivid and comprehensible for the reader? The book is organized as a fairly traditional academic argument, with chapters on Catholic modernity, pre-Revolution policy change, and aspects of the Revolution itself. Pincus marshalls his evidence to tell a significantly different story from the received one. And as an academic work, it is highly readable and logical. But it is from beginning to end a complex canvas, and it is difficult for a non-specialist reader to keep it all in mind. How might an author -- or a producer -- more fully engage the reader's historical imagination in these complex events? How might the material be presented in a way that gives the reader a more comprehensive apprehension of this history of the English Revolution?

One possibility is a very well produced and very long film. A dramatization could serve to give the viewer a more vivid sense of acquaintance with the central actors -- James, Monmouth, William.  Dramatic reconstruction and enactment certainly gives the viewer a more visceral grasp of the historical personnages. But another value of dramatization could be to give the viewer a better grasp of the mass politics of the events -- skirmishes with brigades, vandalism against Catholic churches and property, and a few major battles in Ireland -- and perhaps even a sense of the motives and passions that moved people. Viewers of Battleship Potemkin (link) certainly come away with a more intense set of representations of the Russian revolution of 1905 and some of the personalities than they do from reading Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution.

But the film described here would be very long -- even Sergei Eisenstein's canvas would fall short. (I seem to recall reading a long time ago that Eisenstein once proposed to produce a seven-hour film based on Marx's Capital.) And the academic historian has specific cognitive goals -- to present a narrative of the period, to refute common assumptions ("no mass underclass violence in the Glorious Revolution"), and to present some compelling evidence for the interpretation. So a film probably wouldn't be a satisfactory platform for Pincus's academic goals. He wants to present new knowledge, not an abbreviated and highly selective sketch.

Another possibility that appeals to me is a mutimedia production that is integrated with the existing book. A core element might be an interactive map that the reader can manipulate -- "what was happening in Essex at this time?" -- and that is keyed to the text itself so the reader always has a sense of the geography of the events. This hypertext "rich" document might also include significantly more graphics -- reproduction of key pieces of archival evidence, contemporary paintings and engravings of events, graphs of important population and trade statistics, a snippet of Youtube video in which another major historian of the period offers an alternative reading. (Here is Simon Schama on Anne Boleyn (link)).

Here the idea is that the historian needs some new tools of representation for better conveying to the reader a grasp of the complex, multidimensional argument and narrative. This suggests the value for academic historians of taking very seriously the potential of "rich" media as an integrated platform for conveying arguments and knowledge. And here I'm not thinking simply of pedagogy -- how to get these complexities across to the lay reader -- but new ways of presenting the historian's central ideas and arguments. Perhaps this kind of rich document could actually be a better way of making the case based on narrative, multimedia components, interactive maps, graphics, etc.

One difficulty with this notion is the fact that historians are trained as narrative writers. They have learned to organize their thoughts into arguments, narratives, and chapters, and they expect their readers to do the work of putting it together into an integrated historical presentation. The skills possessed by an Eisenstein or a David Simon, executive producer of The Wire, are substantially different -- more graphical, more attuned to the audience (viewer/reader), and more able to encapsulate their story into a handful of scenes of drama that permit the viewer to connect the dots and arrive at an interpretation of the full story. These are skills that are entirely foreign to PhD training in history.

I suspect that not many academic historians would be especially receptive to these ideas, and sometimes for good reasons. (Simon Schama may be an exception; his efforts with the BBC to put together a serious multi-episode history of Britain indicates a willingness to experiment with new forms of presentation of history; link.) A central part of the resistance from traditional historians might reasonably reflect their core views of what a "history" of something needs to accomplish. The academic historian's primary goals are cognitive and epistemic: offering interpretations, drawing inferences, and providing evidence for their views. Part of the task of a narrative is to distill the complex whole into a comprehensible set of events. Another part is to categorize actions and occurrences. It is to provide a more abstract analysis of the events. And sequential narratives may be thought to be a more-or-less ideal form for this kind of logical, cumulative argument.

All this said, it does seem clear that there are tools for the presentation of knowledge that may prove more helpful than the printed page for synthesizing a large complex story, and it would be very interesting to see what happens when a few innovative academic historians begin thinking along these lines.

Pincus re-presented

Several earlier posts have discussed aspects of Steve Pincus's 1688: The First Modern Revolution (link, link). The book provides a major rethinking of the events and significance of England's Glorious Revolution, and it has already made a deep impression within English studies (link). Pincus tells a large, complicated story, spread out over a period of several decades and including important actions, persons, and events in England, Scotland, Ireland, France, and the Netherlands.

Much of the interest of his account is how fundamentally it differs from the received narrative, its novel use of familiar and new resources, and the author's strong ability to link to current work in some areas of the historical social sciences. But here I want to raise a different sort of question: how could we propose to make this story more vivid and comprehensible for the reader? The book is organized as a fairly traditional academic argument, with chapters on Catholic modernity, pre-Revolution policy change, and aspects of the Revolution itself. Pincus marshalls his evidence to tell a significantly different story from the received one. And as an academic work, it is highly readable and logical. But it is from beginning to end a complex canvas, and it is difficult for a non-specialist reader to keep it all in mind. How might an author -- or a producer -- more fully engage the reader's historical imagination in these complex events? How might the material be presented in a way that gives the reader a more comprehensive apprehension of this history of the English Revolution?

One possibility is a very well produced and very long film. A dramatization could serve to give the viewer a more vivid sense of acquaintance with the central actors -- James, Monmouth, William.  Dramatic reconstruction and enactment certainly gives the viewer a more visceral grasp of the historical personnages. But another value of dramatization could be to give the viewer a better grasp of the mass politics of the events -- skirmishes with brigades, vandalism against Catholic churches and property, and a few major battles in Ireland -- and perhaps even a sense of the motives and passions that moved people. Viewers of Battleship Potemkin (link) certainly come away with a more intense set of representations of the Russian revolution of 1905 and some of the personalities than they do from reading Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution.

But the film described here would be very long -- even Sergei Eisenstein's canvas would fall short. (I seem to recall reading a long time ago that Eisenstein once proposed to produce a seven-hour film based on Marx's Capital.) And the academic historian has specific cognitive goals -- to present a narrative of the period, to refute common assumptions ("no mass underclass violence in the Glorious Revolution"), and to present some compelling evidence for the interpretation. So a film probably wouldn't be a satisfactory platform for Pincus's academic goals. He wants to present new knowledge, not an abbreviated and highly selective sketch.

Another possibility that appeals to me is a mutimedia production that is integrated with the existing book. A core element might be an interactive map that the reader can manipulate -- "what was happening in Essex at this time?" -- and that is keyed to the text itself so the reader always has a sense of the geography of the events. This hypertext "rich" document might also include significantly more graphics -- reproduction of key pieces of archival evidence, contemporary paintings and engravings of events, graphs of important population and trade statistics, a snippet of Youtube video in which another major historian of the period offers an alternative reading. (Here is Simon Schama on Anne Boleyn (link)).

Here the idea is that the historian needs some new tools of representation for better conveying to the reader a grasp of the complex, multidimensional argument and narrative. This suggests the value for academic historians of taking very seriously the potential of "rich" media as an integrated platform for conveying arguments and knowledge. And here I'm not thinking simply of pedagogy -- how to get these complexities across to the lay reader -- but new ways of presenting the historian's central ideas and arguments. Perhaps this kind of rich document could actually be a better way of making the case based on narrative, multimedia components, interactive maps, graphics, etc.

One difficulty with this notion is the fact that historians are trained as narrative writers. They have learned to organize their thoughts into arguments, narratives, and chapters, and they expect their readers to do the work of putting it together into an integrated historical presentation. The skills possessed by an Eisenstein or a David Simon, executive producer of The Wire, are substantially different -- more graphical, more attuned to the audience (viewer/reader), and more able to encapsulate their story into a handful of scenes of drama that permit the viewer to connect the dots and arrive at an interpretation of the full story. These are skills that are entirely foreign to PhD training in history.

I suspect that not many academic historians would be especially receptive to these ideas, and sometimes for good reasons. (Simon Schama may be an exception; his efforts with the BBC to put together a serious multi-episode history of Britain indicates a willingness to experiment with new forms of presentation of history; link.) A central part of the resistance from traditional historians might reasonably reflect their core views of what a "history" of something needs to accomplish. The academic historian's primary goals are cognitive and epistemic: offering interpretations, drawing inferences, and providing evidence for their views. Part of the task of a narrative is to distill the complex whole into a comprehensible set of events. Another part is to categorize actions and occurrences. It is to provide a more abstract analysis of the events. And sequential narratives may be thought to be a more-or-less ideal form for this kind of logical, cumulative argument.

All this said, it does seem clear that there are tools for the presentation of knowledge that may prove more helpful than the printed page for synthesizing a large complex story, and it would be very interesting to see what happens when a few innovative academic historians begin thinking along these lines.

Pincus re-presented

Several earlier posts have discussed aspects of Steve Pincus's 1688: The First Modern Revolution (link, link). The book provides a major rethinking of the events and significance of England's Glorious Revolution, and it has already made a deep impression within English studies (link). Pincus tells a large, complicated story, spread out over a period of several decades and including important actions, persons, and events in England, Scotland, Ireland, France, and the Netherlands.

Much of the interest of his account is how fundamentally it differs from the received narrative, its novel use of familiar and new resources, and the author's strong ability to link to current work in some areas of the historical social sciences. But here I want to raise a different sort of question: how could we propose to make this story more vivid and comprehensible for the reader? The book is organized as a fairly traditional academic argument, with chapters on Catholic modernity, pre-Revolution policy change, and aspects of the Revolution itself. Pincus marshalls his evidence to tell a significantly different story from the received one. And as an academic work, it is highly readable and logical. But it is from beginning to end a complex canvas, and it is difficult for a non-specialist reader to keep it all in mind. How might an author -- or a producer -- more fully engage the reader's historical imagination in these complex events? How might the material be presented in a way that gives the reader a more comprehensive apprehension of this history of the English Revolution?

One possibility is a very well produced and very long film. A dramatization could serve to give the viewer a more vivid sense of acquaintance with the central actors -- James, Monmouth, William.  Dramatic reconstruction and enactment certainly gives the viewer a more visceral grasp of the historical personnages. But another value of dramatization could be to give the viewer a better grasp of the mass politics of the events -- skirmishes with brigades, vandalism against Catholic churches and property, and a few major battles in Ireland -- and perhaps even a sense of the motives and passions that moved people. Viewers of Battleship Potemkin (link) certainly come away with a more intense set of representations of the Russian revolution of 1905 and some of the personalities than they do from reading Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution.

But the film described here would be very long -- even Sergei Eisenstein's canvas would fall short. (I seem to recall reading a long time ago that Eisenstein once proposed to produce a seven-hour film based on Marx's Capital.) And the academic historian has specific cognitive goals -- to present a narrative of the period, to refute common assumptions ("no mass underclass violence in the Glorious Revolution"), and to present some compelling evidence for the interpretation. So a film probably wouldn't be a satisfactory platform for Pincus's academic goals. He wants to present new knowledge, not an abbreviated and highly selective sketch.

Another possibility that appeals to me is a mutimedia production that is integrated with the existing book. A core element might be an interactive map that the reader can manipulate -- "what was happening in Essex at this time?" -- and that is keyed to the text itself so the reader always has a sense of the geography of the events. This hypertext "rich" document might also include significantly more graphics -- reproduction of key pieces of archival evidence, contemporary paintings and engravings of events, graphs of important population and trade statistics, a snippet of Youtube video in which another major historian of the period offers an alternative reading. (Here is Simon Schama on Anne Boleyn (link)).

Here the idea is that the historian needs some new tools of representation for better conveying to the reader a grasp of the complex, multidimensional argument and narrative. This suggests the value for academic historians of taking very seriously the potential of "rich" media as an integrated platform for conveying arguments and knowledge. And here I'm not thinking simply of pedagogy -- how to get these complexities across to the lay reader -- but new ways of presenting the historian's central ideas and arguments. Perhaps this kind of rich document could actually be a better way of making the case based on narrative, multimedia components, interactive maps, graphics, etc.

One difficulty with this notion is the fact that historians are trained as narrative writers. They have learned to organize their thoughts into arguments, narratives, and chapters, and they expect their readers to do the work of putting it together into an integrated historical presentation. The skills possessed by an Eisenstein or a David Simon, executive producer of The Wire, are substantially different -- more graphical, more attuned to the audience (viewer/reader), and more able to encapsulate their story into a handful of scenes of drama that permit the viewer to connect the dots and arrive at an interpretation of the full story. These are skills that are entirely foreign to PhD training in history.

I suspect that not many academic historians would be especially receptive to these ideas, and sometimes for good reasons. (Simon Schama may be an exception; his efforts with the BBC to put together a serious multi-episode history of Britain indicates a willingness to experiment with new forms of presentation of history; link.) A central part of the resistance from traditional historians might reasonably reflect their core views of what a "history" of something needs to accomplish. The academic historian's primary goals are cognitive and epistemic: offering interpretations, drawing inferences, and providing evidence for their views. Part of the task of a narrative is to distill the complex whole into a comprehensible set of events. Another part is to categorize actions and occurrences. It is to provide a more abstract analysis of the events. And sequential narratives may be thought to be a more-or-less ideal form for this kind of logical, cumulative argument.

All this said, it does seem clear that there are tools for the presentation of knowledge that may prove more helpful than the printed page for synthesizing a large complex story, and it would be very interesting to see what happens when a few innovative academic historians begin thinking along these lines.

Why peasant activism?

I have long been interested in peasant struggles as an historical phenomenon -- for example, the causes and outcomes of the peasant rebellions in China in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Understanding Peasant China: Case Studies in the Philosophy of Social Science).  But it is also true that peasant movements are still visible in contemporary politics in a number of countries.  For example, mobilization by peasants and landless workers in West Bengal against the state's proposed development of a Tata factory led to the project's relocation to Gujarat (link).  In some instances and issues, peasants and other disadvantaged people come together as a mass organization to press their interests and concerns; in other apparently similar instances they do not.  How are we to understand this variation?

People are generally careful about their active political investments, especially when their choices can lead to serious personal consequences.  Are there good reasons for poor people to form and support organizations that seek strategies for expressing their needs and interests? Should they consider supporting demonstrations, strikes, and protests? What is the likelihood that social mobilization of the poor majorities in India, Egypt, or Brazil might lead to improvement in their daily lives?

A first point is fairly obvious. As a low-income society undertakes policies and strategies for growth, there are choices to be made. These choices have differential effects on different social groups.  And poor people and peasants are often at a severe disadvantage in competing over the terms of these choices within the formal institutions of government.  China's decision to create the Three Gorges Yangtze River dam system created many winners; but it also created many millions of low-income losers whose homes and livelihoods were destroyed in the process (link).  Largescale social and economic change is a time when the stakes are exceptionally high, and having a voice is crucial.

A second point has more to do with the "normal" workings of power in a developing state.  Poor people's interests are almost always overlooked or undervalued by official power-holders in developing societies -- a point made thirty years ago by Michael Lipton in Why Poor People Stay Poor: Urban Bias in World Development (1977). And this is often true even within parties that are ostensibly devoted to the poor, like the Congress Party in India. Corruption by leaders and powerful organizations is endemic, and landlords, business owners, and the military almost always wield disproportionate influence in the corridors of power.  So if nothing is done to disturb this "tilt" in the political system, then the outcomes will be unfavorable to poor people.

Third, it is plain that the organized efforts of under-class people can be powerful. Women's organizations advocating for environmental protection or property rights for women can push state and national authorities towards policies they would not otherwise have chosen. (Bina Agarwal has documented these processes in India; for example, here.)  Organizations of landless agricultural workers can pressure the state into adopting reforms and programs that provide some relief for their poverty. Mass mobilization is almost the only way to assert the material interests of the people.

Debal Singha Roy considers these issues in detail with regard to rural India in Peasant Movements in Post-Colonial India: Dynamics of Mobilization and Identity. Here is how Roy puts the point:

Social movements have always been an inseparable part of social progression, and through organized protests and resistance against domination and injustice they pave the way for new thoughts and actions that rejuvenate the process of change and transformation in society.  They bring forth for public scrutiny the hard and hidden realities of social dynamics. (8)

So, according to Roy, popular movements -- e.g. peasants' movements -- can lead to measurable change in favor of the dispossessed. They do so by making injustice visible to the broader society; pressing effectively for social changes that improve the condition of one's group; giving voice to segments of society who are almost always invisible to the middle classes; and asserting one's own agency as a fundamental aspect of being human.  These are all reasons for thinking that social activism and social movements are important.

What about the rest of us? Is activism important in a modern market democracy? Frances Fox Piven argues that these points do indeed apply in modern market democracies as well. In her recent book, Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America, she lays out this case through a new analysis of American policy history.

This book argues that ordinary people exercise power in American politics mainly at those extraordinary moments when they rise up in anger and hope, defy the rules that ordinarily govern their daily lives, and, by doing so, disrupt the workings of the institutions in which they are enmeshed. (kl 23)

Piven's basic view is that the structural inequalities of property and power in market democracies mean that electoral processes are usually tilted against the interests and concerns of poor and middling people. Electoral competitions are generally won by enough candidates reflecting the interests and world views of the powerful, that the perspectives of the poor and disadvantaged in American society rarely prevail in the statehouse or the Congress.  The exceptions occur, she believes, when poor and disadvantaged people find ways of expressing their interests through avenues that threaten to disrupt "business as usual" -- boycotts, strikes, demonstrations, and other activities outside of formal politics. Rights of speech and association underlie many of these strategies, and they express a different aspect of democracy. And these in turn depend upon a combination of mobilization and a moment in time when such collective actions have the potential of creating significant disruption -- when French farmers block roads to protest milk prices, for example.

So it seems that democracy almost requires a dynamic tension between formal representative politics and informal, nonviolent popular politics. What goes on in the state house needs what goes on in the streets of Madison if outcomes fair to ordinary working people are likely to occur.

Why peasant activism?

I have long been interested in peasant struggles as an historical phenomenon -- for example, the causes and outcomes of the peasant rebellions in China in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Understanding Peasant China: Case Studies in the Philosophy of Social Science).  But it is also true that peasant movements are still visible in contemporary politics in a number of countries.  For example, mobilization by peasants and landless workers in West Bengal against the state's proposed development of a Tata factory led to the project's relocation to Gujarat (link).  In some instances and issues, peasants and other disadvantaged people come together as a mass organization to press their interests and concerns; in other apparently similar instances they do not.  How are we to understand this variation?

People are generally careful about their active political investments, especially when their choices can lead to serious personal consequences.  Are there good reasons for poor people to form and support organizations that seek strategies for expressing their needs and interests? Should they consider supporting demonstrations, strikes, and protests? What is the likelihood that social mobilization of the poor majorities in India, Egypt, or Brazil might lead to improvement in their daily lives?

A first point is fairly obvious. As a low-income society undertakes policies and strategies for growth, there are choices to be made. These choices have differential effects on different social groups.  And poor people and peasants are often at a severe disadvantage in competing over the terms of these choices within the formal institutions of government.  China's decision to create the Three Gorges Yangtze River dam system created many winners; but it also created many millions of low-income losers whose homes and livelihoods were destroyed in the process (link).  Largescale social and economic change is a time when the stakes are exceptionally high, and having a voice is crucial.

A second point has more to do with the "normal" workings of power in a developing state.  Poor people's interests are almost always overlooked or undervalued by official power-holders in developing societies -- a point made thirty years ago by Michael Lipton in Why Poor People Stay Poor: Urban Bias in World Development (1977). And this is often true even within parties that are ostensibly devoted to the poor, like the Congress Party in India. Corruption by leaders and powerful organizations is endemic, and landlords, business owners, and the military almost always wield disproportionate influence in the corridors of power.  So if nothing is done to disturb this "tilt" in the political system, then the outcomes will be unfavorable to poor people.

Third, it is plain that the organized efforts of under-class people can be powerful. Women's organizations advocating for environmental protection or property rights for women can push state and national authorities towards policies they would not otherwise have chosen. (Bina Agarwal has documented these processes in India; for example, here.)  Organizations of landless agricultural workers can pressure the state into adopting reforms and programs that provide some relief for their poverty. Mass mobilization is almost the only way to assert the material interests of the people.

Debal Singha Roy considers these issues in detail with regard to rural India in Peasant Movements in Post-Colonial India: Dynamics of Mobilization and Identity. Here is how Roy puts the point:

Social movements have always been an inseparable part of social progression, and through organized protests and resistance against domination and injustice they pave the way for new thoughts and actions that rejuvenate the process of change and transformation in society.  They bring forth for public scrutiny the hard and hidden realities of social dynamics. (8)

So, according to Roy, popular movements -- e.g. peasants' movements -- can lead to measurable change in favor of the dispossessed. They do so by making injustice visible to the broader society; pressing effectively for social changes that improve the condition of one's group; giving voice to segments of society who are almost always invisible to the middle classes; and asserting one's own agency as a fundamental aspect of being human.  These are all reasons for thinking that social activism and social movements are important.

What about the rest of us? Is activism important in a modern market democracy? Frances Fox Piven argues that these points do indeed apply in modern market democracies as well. In her recent book, Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America, she lays out this case through a new analysis of American policy history.

This book argues that ordinary people exercise power in American politics mainly at those extraordinary moments when they rise up in anger and hope, defy the rules that ordinarily govern their daily lives, and, by doing so, disrupt the workings of the institutions in which they are enmeshed. (kl 23)

Piven's basic view is that the structural inequalities of property and power in market democracies mean that electoral processes are usually tilted against the interests and concerns of poor and middling people. Electoral competitions are generally won by enough candidates reflecting the interests and world views of the powerful, that the perspectives of the poor and disadvantaged in American society rarely prevail in the statehouse or the Congress.  The exceptions occur, she believes, when poor and disadvantaged people find ways of expressing their interests through avenues that threaten to disrupt "business as usual" -- boycotts, strikes, demonstrations, and other activities outside of formal politics. Rights of speech and association underlie many of these strategies, and they express a different aspect of democracy. And these in turn depend upon a combination of mobilization and a moment in time when such collective actions have the potential of creating significant disruption -- when French farmers block roads to protest milk prices, for example.

So it seems that democracy almost requires a dynamic tension between formal representative politics and informal, nonviolent popular politics. What goes on in the state house needs what goes on in the streets of Madison if outcomes fair to ordinary working people are likely to occur.

Why peasant activism?

I have long been interested in peasant struggles as an historical phenomenon -- for example, the causes and outcomes of the peasant rebellions in China in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Understanding Peasant China: Case Studies in the Philosophy of Social Science).  But it is also true that peasant movements are still visible in contemporary politics in a number of countries.  For example, mobilization by peasants and landless workers in West Bengal against the state's proposed development of a Tata factory led to the project's relocation to Gujarat (link).  In some instances and issues, peasants and other disadvantaged people come together as a mass organization to press their interests and concerns; in other apparently similar instances they do not.  How are we to understand this variation?

People are generally careful about their active political investments, especially when their choices can lead to serious personal consequences.  Are there good reasons for poor people to form and support organizations that seek strategies for expressing their needs and interests? Should they consider supporting demonstrations, strikes, and protests? What is the likelihood that social mobilization of the poor majorities in India, Egypt, or Brazil might lead to improvement in their daily lives?

A first point is fairly obvious. As a low-income society undertakes policies and strategies for growth, there are choices to be made. These choices have differential effects on different social groups.  And poor people and peasants are often at a severe disadvantage in competing over the terms of these choices within the formal institutions of government.  China's decision to create the Three Gorges Yangtze River dam system created many winners; but it also created many millions of low-income losers whose homes and livelihoods were destroyed in the process (link).  Largescale social and economic change is a time when the stakes are exceptionally high, and having a voice is crucial.

A second point has more to do with the "normal" workings of power in a developing state.  Poor people's interests are almost always overlooked or undervalued by official power-holders in developing societies -- a point made thirty years ago by Michael Lipton in Why Poor People Stay Poor: Urban Bias in World Development (1977). And this is often true even within parties that are ostensibly devoted to the poor, like the Congress Party in India. Corruption by leaders and powerful organizations is endemic, and landlords, business owners, and the military almost always wield disproportionate influence in the corridors of power.  So if nothing is done to disturb this "tilt" in the political system, then the outcomes will be unfavorable to poor people.

Third, it is plain that the organized efforts of under-class people can be powerful. Women's organizations advocating for environmental protection or property rights for women can push state and national authorities towards policies they would not otherwise have chosen. (Bina Agarwal has documented these processes in India; for example, here.)  Organizations of landless agricultural workers can pressure the state into adopting reforms and programs that provide some relief for their poverty. Mass mobilization is almost the only way to assert the material interests of the people.

Debal Singha Roy considers these issues in detail with regard to rural India in Peasant Movements in Post-Colonial India: Dynamics of Mobilization and Identity. Here is how Roy puts the point:

Social movements have always been an inseparable part of social progression, and through organized protests and resistance against domination and injustice they pave the way for new thoughts and actions that rejuvenate the process of change and transformation in society.  They bring forth for public scrutiny the hard and hidden realities of social dynamics. (8)

So, according to Roy, popular movements -- e.g. peasants' movements -- can lead to measurable change in favor of the dispossessed. They do so by making injustice visible to the broader society; pressing effectively for social changes that improve the condition of one's group; giving voice to segments of society who are almost always invisible to the middle classes; and asserting one's own agency as a fundamental aspect of being human.  These are all reasons for thinking that social activism and social movements are important.

What about the rest of us? Is activism important in a modern market democracy? Frances Fox Piven argues that these points do indeed apply in modern market democracies as well. In her recent book, Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America, she lays out this case through a new analysis of American policy history.

This book argues that ordinary people exercise power in American politics mainly at those extraordinary moments when they rise up in anger and hope, defy the rules that ordinarily govern their daily lives, and, by doing so, disrupt the workings of the institutions in which they are enmeshed. (kl 23)

Piven's basic view is that the structural inequalities of property and power in market democracies mean that electoral processes are usually tilted against the interests and concerns of poor and middling people. Electoral competitions are generally won by enough candidates reflecting the interests and world views of the powerful, that the perspectives of the poor and disadvantaged in American society rarely prevail in the statehouse or the Congress.  The exceptions occur, she believes, when poor and disadvantaged people find ways of expressing their interests through avenues that threaten to disrupt "business as usual" -- boycotts, strikes, demonstrations, and other activities outside of formal politics. Rights of speech and association underlie many of these strategies, and they express a different aspect of democracy. And these in turn depend upon a combination of mobilization and a moment in time when such collective actions have the potential of creating significant disruption -- when French farmers block roads to protest milk prices, for example.

So it seems that democracy almost requires a dynamic tension between formal representative politics and informal, nonviolent popular politics. What goes on in the state house needs what goes on in the streets of Madison if outcomes fair to ordinary working people are likely to occur.

Connecting the dots

There isn't very much transparency about the deep structure of almost any complex modern society. For most people their primary impressions of the society's functioning comes from the mass media and their own personal experiences.  We each see the limited bits to which we are fairly directly exposed through our ordinary lives -- the newsroom if we happen to be a beat reporter, the university if we are professors, the play-and-learn center if we are in the business of preschool education.  We gain a pretty good idea of how those networks of institutions and organizations work. But it's very difficult to gain a birds-eye picture of the social system as a whole.

The most basic goal of Marx's economic programme was to demystify the workings of the political economy of capitalism.  He wanted to sweep aside the appearances that capitalism presents and to lay bare the underlying social relations of inequality and exploitation that really constituted the causal core of the system. (This is the point of his theory of the fetishism of commodities; link.) And he believed that active systems of ideology and false consciousness conspired to conceal these workings from ordinary participants. In particular, he wanted to demonstrate the process through which wealth is created within capitalism, and the relations of inequality through which its benefits are distributed.  It is a class-based analysis, and Marx proposes to the proletariat (and the rest of us) that we look for the class mechanisms of our ordinary economic experiences.

What is unsatisfying about Marx's theory in the current context is that in the end it isn't really very much of an empirical demonstration.  It is an abstract model of how the theorist thinks capitalism works, rather than a detailed empirical exposure based on rigorous and diverse data that demonstrates the flows that he postulates.  It offers a schema for connecting the dots of our ordinary experience, but it doesn't actually carry out the effort.

Other researchers have done so, of course; researchers who demonstrate the widening inequalities of income and wealth that market democracies contain, the consequences of these inequalities for people at both ends of the divide, the often degrading conditions of work that the majority of the working population experience, and so forth.  So on the dimension of wealth, income, and privilege, it isn't too difficult to gather the information we need to better understand our current economic realities based on information that is readily available; but most Americans don't seem to bother to do so. The ease with which the right has succeeded in setting the terms of popular ideas about organized labor, racial inequalities, and immigration bears that out. Lies and slogans replace honest factual argument.

And what about the other large determinant of outcomes in modern society, the workings of political power? Here too there are founding theorists who sought to lay bare the "real" workings of power in a market democracy.  Foucault is one; Domhoff and Mills sought to do so a generation earlier.  The goals of C. Wright Mills (The Power Elite; link) and G. William Domhoff (Who Rules America? Challenges to Corporate and Class Dominance; link) were similar to Marx's, but in the sphere of political power within a democracy.  They wanted to demonstrate how the language of pluralism and representative democracy works to conceal a system of power and influence that was anything but egalitarian. They wanted to shred the ideologies and obscurantist narratives that conceal these political realities.

But, like Marx to some extent, their writings too remained schematic. They offered a framework for thinking about political power that was radically different from that of the pluralists. But they didn't really provide a detailed empirical exposure of the workings of this system in real time.  So here again, we'd like to have an organized way of connecting the dots within the contemporary world.  How do corporations use lobbying firms and campaign PACs to shape policy and legislation to their liking? How is it going on today? And, as is the case of the domain of economic inequalities, there are plenty of sources today shedding light on aspects of these processes.  But these political realities seem if anything, even more difficult to perceive.

The blog Naked Capitalism approximates the kind of dot-connecting that I'm describing, with specific application to the financial industry. Here a group of very expert observers are taking the trouble to track the complexities and the hidden interests involved in the financial industry, and to try to make sense of what they find in an honest way. I. F. Stone was a one-man dot-connector in the 1960s when it came to the Indochina War (Best of I. F. Stone). The opening chapter of Frances Fox Piven's Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America does a good job of sketching out the influence systems that set the planets in motion in American democracy. And Bob Herbert's last column for the New York Times does it as well (link).  We need exactly these kinds of effort in other areas too -- defense contracting, influence peddling, the pharmaceutical industry, news media, ...  We need help connecting the dots of how our society works, who pulls the strings and who benefits.

Blogging, critical journalism, and crusading thinkers like I. F. Stone and Frances Fox Piven can help a lot. And, by the way, it must be done in a way that is committed to high standards of empirical fidelity; it needs to inspire the kind of trust that Stone was able to do fifty years ago. And maybe, with the makings of a more truthful shared understanding of how our society actually works, we will succeed in creating a politics that transforms it.

Connecting the dots

There isn't very much transparency about the deep structure of almost any complex modern society. For most people their primary impressions of the society's functioning comes from the mass media and their own personal experiences.  We each see the limited bits to which we are fairly directly exposed through our ordinary lives -- the newsroom if we happen to be a beat reporter, the university if we are professors, the play-and-learn center if we are in the business of preschool education.  We gain a pretty good idea of how those networks of institutions and organizations work. But it's very difficult to gain a birds-eye picture of the social system as a whole.

The most basic goal of Marx's economic programme was to demystify the workings of the political economy of capitalism.  He wanted to sweep aside the appearances that capitalism presents and to lay bare the underlying social relations of inequality and exploitation that really constituted the causal core of the system. (This is the point of his theory of the fetishism of commodities; link.) And he believed that active systems of ideology and false consciousness conspired to conceal these workings from ordinary participants. In particular, he wanted to demonstrate the process through which wealth is created within capitalism, and the relations of inequality through which its benefits are distributed.  It is a class-based analysis, and Marx proposes to the proletariat (and the rest of us) that we look for the class mechanisms of our ordinary economic experiences.

What is unsatisfying about Marx's theory in the current context is that in the end it isn't really very much of an empirical demonstration.  It is an abstract model of how the theorist thinks capitalism works, rather than a detailed empirical exposure based on rigorous and diverse data that demonstrates the flows that he postulates.  It offers a schema for connecting the dots of our ordinary experience, but it doesn't actually carry out the effort.

Other researchers have done so, of course; researchers who demonstrate the widening inequalities of income and wealth that market democracies contain, the consequences of these inequalities for people at both ends of the divide, the often degrading conditions of work that the majority of the working population experience, and so forth.  So on the dimension of wealth, income, and privilege, it isn't too difficult to gather the information we need to better understand our current economic realities based on information that is readily available; but most Americans don't seem to bother to do so. The ease with which the right has succeeded in setting the terms of popular ideas about organized labor, racial inequalities, and immigration bears that out. Lies and slogans replace honest factual argument.

And what about the other large determinant of outcomes in modern society, the workings of political power? Here too there are founding theorists who sought to lay bare the "real" workings of power in a market democracy.  Foucault is one; Domhoff and Mills sought to do so a generation earlier.  The goals of C. Wright Mills (The Power Elite; link) and G. William Domhoff (Who Rules America? Challenges to Corporate and Class Dominance; link) were similar to Marx's, but in the sphere of political power within a democracy.  They wanted to demonstrate how the language of pluralism and representative democracy works to conceal a system of power and influence that was anything but egalitarian. They wanted to shred the ideologies and obscurantist narratives that conceal these political realities.

But, like Marx to some extent, their writings too remained schematic. They offered a framework for thinking about political power that was radically different from that of the pluralists. But they didn't really provide a detailed empirical exposure of the workings of this system in real time.  So here again, we'd like to have an organized way of connecting the dots within the contemporary world.  How do corporations use lobbying firms and campaign PACs to shape policy and legislation to their liking? How is it going on today? And, as is the case of the domain of economic inequalities, there are plenty of sources today shedding light on aspects of these processes.  But these political realities seem if anything, even more difficult to perceive.

The blog Naked Capitalism approximates the kind of dot-connecting that I'm describing, with specific application to the financial industry. Here a group of very expert observers are taking the trouble to track the complexities and the hidden interests involved in the financial industry, and to try to make sense of what they find in an honest way. I. F. Stone was a one-man dot-connector in the 1960s when it came to the Indochina War (Best of I. F. Stone). The opening chapter of Frances Fox Piven's Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America does a good job of sketching out the influence systems that set the planets in motion in American democracy. And Bob Herbert's last column for the New York Times does it as well (link).  We need exactly these kinds of effort in other areas too -- defense contracting, influence peddling, the pharmaceutical industry, news media, ...  We need help connecting the dots of how our society works, who pulls the strings and who benefits.

Blogging, critical journalism, and crusading thinkers like I. F. Stone and Frances Fox Piven can help a lot. And, by the way, it must be done in a way that is committed to high standards of empirical fidelity; it needs to inspire the kind of trust that Stone was able to do fifty years ago. And maybe, with the makings of a more truthful shared understanding of how our society actually works, we will succeed in creating a politics that transforms it.

Connecting the dots

There isn't very much transparency about the deep structure of almost any complex modern society. For most people their primary impressions of the society's functioning comes from the mass media and their own personal experiences.  We each see the limited bits to which we are fairly directly exposed through our ordinary lives -- the newsroom if we happen to be a beat reporter, the university if we are professors, the play-and-learn center if we are in the business of preschool education.  We gain a pretty good idea of how those networks of institutions and organizations work. But it's very difficult to gain a birds-eye picture of the social system as a whole.

The most basic goal of Marx's economic programme was to demystify the workings of the political economy of capitalism.  He wanted to sweep aside the appearances that capitalism presents and to lay bare the underlying social relations of inequality and exploitation that really constituted the causal core of the system. (This is the point of his theory of the fetishism of commodities; link.) And he believed that active systems of ideology and false consciousness conspired to conceal these workings from ordinary participants. In particular, he wanted to demonstrate the process through which wealth is created within capitalism, and the relations of inequality through which its benefits are distributed.  It is a class-based analysis, and Marx proposes to the proletariat (and the rest of us) that we look for the class mechanisms of our ordinary economic experiences.

What is unsatisfying about Marx's theory in the current context is that in the end it isn't really very much of an empirical demonstration.  It is an abstract model of how the theorist thinks capitalism works, rather than a detailed empirical exposure based on rigorous and diverse data that demonstrates the flows that he postulates.  It offers a schema for connecting the dots of our ordinary experience, but it doesn't actually carry out the effort.

Other researchers have done so, of course; researchers who demonstrate the widening inequalities of income and wealth that market democracies contain, the consequences of these inequalities for people at both ends of the divide, the often degrading conditions of work that the majority of the working population experience, and so forth.  So on the dimension of wealth, income, and privilege, it isn't too difficult to gather the information we need to better understand our current economic realities based on information that is readily available; but most Americans don't seem to bother to do so. The ease with which the right has succeeded in setting the terms of popular ideas about organized labor, racial inequalities, and immigration bears that out. Lies and slogans replace honest factual argument.

And what about the other large determinant of outcomes in modern society, the workings of political power? Here too there are founding theorists who sought to lay bare the "real" workings of power in a market democracy.  Foucault is one; Domhoff and Mills sought to do so a generation earlier.  The goals of C. Wright Mills (The Power Elite; link) and G. William Domhoff (Who Rules America? Challenges to Corporate and Class Dominance; link) were similar to Marx's, but in the sphere of political power within a democracy.  They wanted to demonstrate how the language of pluralism and representative democracy works to conceal a system of power and influence that was anything but egalitarian. They wanted to shred the ideologies and obscurantist narratives that conceal these political realities.

But, like Marx to some extent, their writings too remained schematic. They offered a framework for thinking about political power that was radically different from that of the pluralists. But they didn't really provide a detailed empirical exposure of the workings of this system in real time.  So here again, we'd like to have an organized way of connecting the dots within the contemporary world.  How do corporations use lobbying firms and campaign PACs to shape policy and legislation to their liking? How is it going on today? And, as is the case of the domain of economic inequalities, there are plenty of sources today shedding light on aspects of these processes.  But these political realities seem if anything, even more difficult to perceive.

The blog Naked Capitalism approximates the kind of dot-connecting that I'm describing, with specific application to the financial industry. Here a group of very expert observers are taking the trouble to track the complexities and the hidden interests involved in the financial industry, and to try to make sense of what they find in an honest way. I. F. Stone was a one-man dot-connector in the 1960s when it came to the Indochina War (Best of I. F. Stone). The opening chapter of Frances Fox Piven's Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America does a good job of sketching out the influence systems that set the planets in motion in American democracy. And Bob Herbert's last column for the New York Times does it as well (link).  We need exactly these kinds of effort in other areas too -- defense contracting, influence peddling, the pharmaceutical industry, news media, ...  We need help connecting the dots of how our society works, who pulls the strings and who benefits.

Blogging, critical journalism, and crusading thinkers like I. F. Stone and Frances Fox Piven can help a lot. And, by the way, it must be done in a way that is committed to high standards of empirical fidelity; it needs to inspire the kind of trust that Stone was able to do fifty years ago. And maybe, with the makings of a more truthful shared understanding of how our society actually works, we will succeed in creating a politics that transforms it.

Andreas Glaeser on agency

Andreas Glaeser is another gifted contemporary sociologist who takes a different approach to providing a sociological analysis of agency. Glaeser's most recent scholarship is a careful and detailed study of the end of communism in the German Democratic Republic.  This research appears in a book that is just now being published, Political Epistemics: The Secret Police, the Opposition, and the End of East German Socialism.  (Glaeser provides several chapters and related materials here on his research page at the University of Chicago.) The work is concrete, historically situated, and close to the ground in the sense that it pays close attention to the ideas, emotions, and mental frameworks of the various actors as expressed in Glaeser's interviews with them. But along the way he develops a powerful framework for understanding some of the fundamental concepts and theoretical frameworks that are employed by sociologists when they attempt to understand individual and collective behavior.  Here is the publisher's description of the book:

What does the durability of political institutions have to do with how actors form knowledge about them? Andreas Glaeser investigates this question in the context of a fascinating historical case: socialist East Germany’s unexpected self-dissolution in 1989. His analysis builds on extensive in-depth interviews with former secret police officers and the dissidents they tried to control as well as research into the documents both groups produced. In particular, Glaeser analyzes how these two opposing factions’ understanding of the socialist project came to change in response to countless everyday experiences. These investigations culminate in answers to two questions: why did the officers not defend socialism by force? And how was the formation of dissident understandings possible in a state that monopolized mass communication and group formation? He also explores why the Stasi, although always well informed about dissident activities, never developed a realistic understanding of the phenomenon of dissidence.

Out of this ambitious study, Glaeser extracts two distinct lines of thought. On the one hand he offers an epistemic account of socialism’s failure that differs markedly from existing explanations. On the other hand he develops a theory—a sociology of understanding—that shows us how knowledge can appear validated while it is at the same time completely misleading.

And here is the abstract that Glaeser provides for the first chapter at the link above:

ABSTRACT: On the basis of ethnographic data gathered during 11 months of field study in two east German police precincts, four processes of identity construction are analysed which link selves to space and thereby to one of the main aspects of material culture. These processes are (1) the tropic (as opposed to literal) reading of space, producing a complex web of identifications through a play of metonymy, synecdoche, metaphor, ellipsis and hyperbole; (2) the writing of space as a material inscription of self in small spatial contexts such as neighbourhoods, cities and regions; (3) the placement of self into larger spatial wholes such as neighbourhoods, cities and regions; (4) the anchoring of life-stories and narrated life experiences in significant time-space combinations or chronotopes. The paper argues that identities are not only constructed in interaction with other actors but also in "dialogue" with material culture and spatial practices. It argues also that the spatial dimension of identity brings to the fore the fact that identities are not only knowable, but that they can be experienced. Through space, identities become sensualised.

The topic of "agency" comes out of this research very directly and immediately: why did the various actors choose to live and act as they did?  Why were Stasi agents so complex in their behavior -- neither passive puppets of the regime nor hidden activists within the state?  What were the "epistemics" on the basis of which they and other social actors acted -- the assumptions about themselves and the world that framed their choices?  These questions lead Glaeser to attempt to arrive at a better and more satisfying account of the forms of consciousness, locatedness, and feeling that create the individual's field of choice.

Here is how Glaeser describes his current thoughts about agency and the questions that will guide his next program of research:

I have begun researching and writing a third book with the working title Agency, Institutions and Understanding: A Sociology of Liberation. With it I aim to offer a fundamental critique of the schizoid contemporary social imaginary that flip-flops between ontological individualism categorically asserting persons’ power to act on the one hand and structural determinism which pays no heed to individual actors in whatever form or shape on the other. Instead I aim to show how agency does not only vary historically and situationally but how it can be cultivated by individuals and collectivities from within a realistic understanding of the operation of institutional arrangements. Thus I aim to rejuvenate and reposition an older normative understanding of the task of the social sciences as a reflexive enterprise in the service of emancipatory politics.

Against the "schizoid" opposition of pure subjectivity of the individual actor and pure objectivity of social structures, Glaeser prefers a stance that allows him to weave together the social situatedness of the actor -- in very concrete spatial and social-relationship terms -- with the thoughts, motives, and impulses that lead them to act as they do.  Here is a nicely concrete description of how he proceeds to investigate these states of social consciousness:

The social arenas I have chosen to study identity formation through acts of identification are two police precincts in what used to be East Germany. The first is Precinct 66 (southern Kopenick) in the southeastern corner of Berlin, the second is Potsdam in the state of Brandenburg just outside Berlin . The ethnographic material on which this paper is based was collected during 11 months of ethnographic fieldwork, consisting chiefly in participant observation of all sorts of police practices (patrol car shifts, neighbourhood beat patrols, administrative work, social events , etc.). Another important source of data was open-ended tape-recorded biographical interviews. The rationale for choosing the Berlin police is that identity is a hotly contested issue between former West Berlin and former East Berlin police officers, who have had to cooperate after the unification of Germany into one unified All-Berlin police corps. The second fieldsite was primarily chosen to establish a backdrop for Berlin, which is in many ways a special case. (link, 8)

Like the arguments of Martin and Dennis considered in an earlier post, Glaeser is led to a position that negates the traditional strong distinction between agent and structure. Like them, his work brings him into close relationship to the micro-sociologies of ethnomethodology, phenomenological sociology, and interactionist sociology. Unlike rationalist approaches that exclusively emphasize discursive states of mind -- reasons, beliefs, goals -- Glaeser positions his actors in terms of their discursive, emotional, and kinesthetic representations of their situation.Glaeser refers to his approach as hermeneutic. The work is ethnographic in detail; but the goal is plainly sociological. He wants to provide a detailed analysis of the modes of understanding that constitute the position from which concrete individuals construct their activities and choices. And he wants to understand the complex social world that was East Germany at the end of socialism.

Andreas Glaeser on agency

Andreas Glaeser is another gifted contemporary sociologist who takes a different approach to providing a sociological analysis of agency. Glaeser's most recent scholarship is a careful and detailed study of the end of communism in the German Democratic Republic.  This research appears in a book that is just now being published, Political Epistemics: The Secret Police, the Opposition, and the End of East German Socialism.  (Glaeser provides several chapters and related materials here on his research page at the University of Chicago.) The work is concrete, historically situated, and close to the ground in the sense that it pays close attention to the ideas, emotions, and mental frameworks of the various actors as expressed in Glaeser's interviews with them. But along the way he develops a powerful framework for understanding some of the fundamental concepts and theoretical frameworks that are employed by sociologists when they attempt to understand individual and collective behavior.  Here is the publisher's description of the book:

What does the durability of political institutions have to do with how actors form knowledge about them? Andreas Glaeser investigates this question in the context of a fascinating historical case: socialist East Germany’s unexpected self-dissolution in 1989. His analysis builds on extensive in-depth interviews with former secret police officers and the dissidents they tried to control as well as research into the documents both groups produced. In particular, Glaeser analyzes how these two opposing factions’ understanding of the socialist project came to change in response to countless everyday experiences. These investigations culminate in answers to two questions: why did the officers not defend socialism by force? And how was the formation of dissident understandings possible in a state that monopolized mass communication and group formation? He also explores why the Stasi, although always well informed about dissident activities, never developed a realistic understanding of the phenomenon of dissidence.

Out of this ambitious study, Glaeser extracts two distinct lines of thought. On the one hand he offers an epistemic account of socialism’s failure that differs markedly from existing explanations. On the other hand he develops a theory—a sociology of understanding—that shows us how knowledge can appear validated while it is at the same time completely misleading.

And here is the abstract that Glaeser provides for the first chapter at the link above:

ABSTRACT: On the basis of ethnographic data gathered during 11 months of field study in two east German police precincts, four processes of identity construction are analysed which link selves to space and thereby to one of the main aspects of material culture. These processes are (1) the tropic (as opposed to literal) reading of space, producing a complex web of identifications through a play of metonymy, synecdoche, metaphor, ellipsis and hyperbole; (2) the writing of space as a material inscription of self in small spatial contexts such as neighbourhoods, cities and regions; (3) the placement of self into larger spatial wholes such as neighbourhoods, cities and regions; (4) the anchoring of life-stories and narrated life experiences in significant time-space combinations or chronotopes. The paper argues that identities are not only constructed in interaction with other actors but also in "dialogue" with material culture and spatial practices. It argues also that the spatial dimension of identity brings to the fore the fact that identities are not only knowable, but that they can be experienced. Through space, identities become sensualised.

The topic of "agency" comes out of this research very directly and immediately: why did the various actors choose to live and act as they did?  Why were Stasi agents so complex in their behavior -- neither passive puppets of the regime nor hidden activists within the state?  What were the "epistemics" on the basis of which they and other social actors acted -- the assumptions about themselves and the world that framed their choices?  These questions lead Glaeser to attempt to arrive at a better and more satisfying account of the forms of consciousness, locatedness, and feeling that create the individual's field of choice.

Here is how Glaeser describes his current thoughts about agency and the questions that will guide his next program of research:

I have begun researching and writing a third book with the working title Agency, Institutions and Understanding: A Sociology of Liberation. With it I aim to offer a fundamental critique of the schizoid contemporary social imaginary that flip-flops between ontological individualism categorically asserting persons’ power to act on the one hand and structural determinism which pays no heed to individual actors in whatever form or shape on the other. Instead I aim to show how agency does not only vary historically and situationally but how it can be cultivated by individuals and collectivities from within a realistic understanding of the operation of institutional arrangements. Thus I aim to rejuvenate and reposition an older normative understanding of the task of the social sciences as a reflexive enterprise in the service of emancipatory politics.

Against the "schizoid" opposition of pure subjectivity of the individual actor and pure objectivity of social structures, Glaeser prefers a stance that allows him to weave together the social situatedness of the actor -- in very concrete spatial and social-relationship terms -- with the thoughts, motives, and impulses that lead them to act as they do.  Here is a nicely concrete description of how he proceeds to investigate these states of social consciousness:

The social arenas I have chosen to study identity formation through acts of identification are two police precincts in what used to be East Germany. The first is Precinct 66 (southern Kopenick) in the southeastern corner of Berlin, the second is Potsdam in the state of Brandenburg just outside Berlin . The ethnographic material on which this paper is based was collected during 11 months of ethnographic fieldwork, consisting chiefly in participant observation of all sorts of police practices (patrol car shifts, neighbourhood beat patrols, administrative work, social events , etc.). Another important source of data was open-ended tape-recorded biographical interviews. The rationale for choosing the Berlin police is that identity is a hotly contested issue between former West Berlin and former East Berlin police officers, who have had to cooperate after the unification of Germany into one unified All-Berlin police corps. The second fieldsite was primarily chosen to establish a backdrop for Berlin, which is in many ways a special case. (link, 8)

Like the arguments of Martin and Dennis considered in an earlier post, Glaeser is led to a position that negates the traditional strong distinction between agent and structure. Like them, his work brings him into close relationship to the micro-sociologies of ethnomethodology, phenomenological sociology, and interactionist sociology. Unlike rationalist approaches that exclusively emphasize discursive states of mind -- reasons, beliefs, goals -- Glaeser positions his actors in terms of their discursive, emotional, and kinesthetic representations of their situation.Glaeser refers to his approach as hermeneutic. The work is ethnographic in detail; but the goal is plainly sociological. He wants to provide a detailed analysis of the modes of understanding that constitute the position from which concrete individuals construct their activities and choices. And he wants to understand the complex social world that was East Germany at the end of socialism.

Andreas Glaeser on agency

Andreas Glaeser is another gifted contemporary sociologist who takes a different approach to providing a sociological analysis of agency. Glaeser's most recent scholarship is a careful and detailed study of the end of communism in the German Democratic Republic.  This research appears in a book that is just now being published, Political Epistemics: The Secret Police, the Opposition, and the End of East German Socialism.  (Glaeser provides several chapters and related materials here on his research page at the University of Chicago.) The work is concrete, historically situated, and close to the ground in the sense that it pays close attention to the ideas, emotions, and mental frameworks of the various actors as expressed in Glaeser's interviews with them. But along the way he develops a powerful framework for understanding some of the fundamental concepts and theoretical frameworks that are employed by sociologists when they attempt to understand individual and collective behavior.  Here is the publisher's description of the book:

What does the durability of political institutions have to do with how actors form knowledge about them? Andreas Glaeser investigates this question in the context of a fascinating historical case: socialist East Germany’s unexpected self-dissolution in 1989. His analysis builds on extensive in-depth interviews with former secret police officers and the dissidents they tried to control as well as research into the documents both groups produced. In particular, Glaeser analyzes how these two opposing factions’ understanding of the socialist project came to change in response to countless everyday experiences. These investigations culminate in answers to two questions: why did the officers not defend socialism by force? And how was the formation of dissident understandings possible in a state that monopolized mass communication and group formation? He also explores why the Stasi, although always well informed about dissident activities, never developed a realistic understanding of the phenomenon of dissidence.

Out of this ambitious study, Glaeser extracts two distinct lines of thought. On the one hand he offers an epistemic account of socialism’s failure that differs markedly from existing explanations. On the other hand he develops a theory—a sociology of understanding—that shows us how knowledge can appear validated while it is at the same time completely misleading.

And here is the abstract that Glaeser provides for the first chapter at the link above:

ABSTRACT: On the basis of ethnographic data gathered during 11 months of field study in two east German police precincts, four processes of identity construction are analysed which link selves to space and thereby to one of the main aspects of material culture. These processes are (1) the tropic (as opposed to literal) reading of space, producing a complex web of identifications through a play of metonymy, synecdoche, metaphor, ellipsis and hyperbole; (2) the writing of space as a material inscription of self in small spatial contexts such as neighbourhoods, cities and regions; (3) the placement of self into larger spatial wholes such as neighbourhoods, cities and regions; (4) the anchoring of life-stories and narrated life experiences in significant time-space combinations or chronotopes. The paper argues that identities are not only constructed in interaction with other actors but also in "dialogue" with material culture and spatial practices. It argues also that the spatial dimension of identity brings to the fore the fact that identities are not only knowable, but that they can be experienced. Through space, identities become sensualised.

The topic of "agency" comes out of this research very directly and immediately: why did the various actors choose to live and act as they did?  Why were Stasi agents so complex in their behavior -- neither passive puppets of the regime nor hidden activists within the state?  What were the "epistemics" on the basis of which they and other social actors acted -- the assumptions about themselves and the world that framed their choices?  These questions lead Glaeser to attempt to arrive at a better and more satisfying account of the forms of consciousness, locatedness, and feeling that create the individual's field of choice.

Here is how Glaeser describes his current thoughts about agency and the questions that will guide his next program of research:

I have begun researching and writing a third book with the working title Agency, Institutions and Understanding: A Sociology of Liberation. With it I aim to offer a fundamental critique of the schizoid contemporary social imaginary that flip-flops between ontological individualism categorically asserting persons’ power to act on the one hand and structural determinism which pays no heed to individual actors in whatever form or shape on the other. Instead I aim to show how agency does not only vary historically and situationally but how it can be cultivated by individuals and collectivities from within a realistic understanding of the operation of institutional arrangements. Thus I aim to rejuvenate and reposition an older normative understanding of the task of the social sciences as a reflexive enterprise in the service of emancipatory politics.

Against the "schizoid" opposition of pure subjectivity of the individual actor and pure objectivity of social structures, Glaeser prefers a stance that allows him to weave together the social situatedness of the actor -- in very concrete spatial and social-relationship terms -- with the thoughts, motives, and impulses that lead them to act as they do.  Here is a nicely concrete description of how he proceeds to investigate these states of social consciousness:

The social arenas I have chosen to study identity formation through acts of identification are two police precincts in what used to be East Germany. The first is Precinct 66 (southern Kopenick) in the southeastern corner of Berlin, the second is Potsdam in the state of Brandenburg just outside Berlin . The ethnographic material on which this paper is based was collected during 11 months of ethnographic fieldwork, consisting chiefly in participant observation of all sorts of police practices (patrol car shifts, neighbourhood beat patrols, administrative work, social events , etc.). Another important source of data was open-ended tape-recorded biographical interviews. The rationale for choosing the Berlin police is that identity is a hotly contested issue between former West Berlin and former East Berlin police officers, who have had to cooperate after the unification of Germany into one unified All-Berlin police corps. The second fieldsite was primarily chosen to establish a backdrop for Berlin, which is in many ways a special case. (link, 8)

Like the arguments of Martin and Dennis considered in an earlier post, Glaeser is led to a position that negates the traditional strong distinction between agent and structure. Like them, his work brings him into close relationship to the micro-sociologies of ethnomethodology, phenomenological sociology, and interactionist sociology. Unlike rationalist approaches that exclusively emphasize discursive states of mind -- reasons, beliefs, goals -- Glaeser positions his actors in terms of their discursive, emotional, and kinesthetic representations of their situation.Glaeser refers to his approach as hermeneutic. The work is ethnographic in detail; but the goal is plainly sociological. He wants to provide a detailed analysis of the modes of understanding that constitute the position from which concrete individuals construct their activities and choices. And he wants to understand the complex social world that was East Germany at the end of socialism.