Small state,big revolution: geography and the revolution in Laos

Extant theoretical insights—mostly derived from studies of prominent revolutions in large countries—are less useful when applied to the unfolding of revolutions in small states. To understand why revolutions happened in the latter, a framework is needed that takes into account geography. For small states, geography is more than dotted lines on maps. It is the source of intervention and vulnerability. Deeply mired in history and memory, states’ geographies shape their distinctive identities and have great impacts on national political trajectories, including revolutions. Thus, to provide understanding of revolutions in these countries, no analysis could be complete without taking into account their places, understood in physical, ideational, and historical terms, within their regions and the world. The case of Laos is used to suggest a geographical analysis of revolutions that provides overlooked insights into the origins, processes, and outcomes of revolutions in small, vulnerable states.

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Ideology,cultural frameworks,and the process of revolution

Conclusions: The varying role of culture The English and French revolutions were not the product of uniquely Western crises of capitalism or absolutism. They shared many elements with profoundly similar crises in the Eastern states of the Ottoman Empire and China. The divergence of Eastern and Western civilizations after the mid-seventeenth century thus cannot be simply attributed to a structural difference between Western revolutions and Eastern peasant rebellions or dynastic crises. In terms of institutional changes, particularly changes in local class structure, more extensive changes followed the seventeenth-century crises in Ottoman Turkey and Ming China than followed the English Revolution. The entire question of the divergence of Eastern and Western economic and political development, of Western dynamism and Eastern stagnation in the early modern period, therefore needs reexamination. In particular, the manner in which Western Europe forged ahead of the advanced Eastern civilizations of Islam and China needs to be explained in a way that accommodates the similarities of the seventeenth-century crises in each.Focusing on cultural frameworks and how they governed reactions to state crises and shaped state reconstruction provides an entry point for such an explanation. Different ideological legacies, embedded in state reconstruction after the seventeenth-century crises, profoundly influenced the later divergence of East and West.Discussions of culture and revolutions have been obfuscated by arguments over whether material or cultural and ideological factors are the primary agents of change. Clearly this false dilemma — asking whether history is governed by Marxist materialism or Hegelian idealism — fails to capture historical reality. A number of scholars have tried to overcome this dichotomy. Clifford Geertz, Natalie Davis, and Robert Darnton have turned to deep analysis of texts or events, analysis designed to illustrate the creativity of individuals and groups in producing symbols and actions that both express and shape their material conditions. Other authors — Giddens and Bourdieu — have put forth general theories of culture that stress the ability of individuals to appropriate cultural elements and use them to reconstruct or reinforce material and institutional structures. All of these approaches attempt to free individuals from the determinism of materialist constraints, and also from the mechanical reproduction of a dominant culture. These approaches therefore have the virtue of avoiding either a simple socioeconomic or cultural determination of individual action. Yet they also are almost useless for long-term, causal historical explanation, for they tend to reduce to a halfway house between materialism and idealism, blandly asserting that, in general, individuals respond to both their material and their cultural environments with (more or less) creative responses that both reproduce and alter those environments.But as we have just observed, the creative response to a changing environment is not constant. These theories of culture fail to appreciate temporal variation, that the role of culture may be quite different in particular concrete historical settings. At some times, as in politically stable periods, the level of cultural innovation may be low; at other times, as in prerevolutionary periods, ideological innovation may increase, but chiefly in response to material forces that create a social crisis. At still other times, as during state breakdown and the ensuing struggle for power, ideological creativity may rise to great heights and develop its own dynamics. And in the restabilization of authority after a breakdown, as the ideological creations of the power struggle become embedded in the postrevolutionary cultural framework, cultural patterns and ideologies may dominate the future possibilities for material as well as cultural change.Interestingly, it was precisely those revolutions that failed to overcome traditional rule fully but did experience a phase of creative, tradition-repudating ideology, namely England and France, that left a legacy of fruitful and dynamic tension in postbreakdown society. Although the Puritans and Jacobins faded after the revolutions, a part of their views remained in a rich stock of antitraditional symbols, institutions, and ideals. State reconstructions in those countries thus were continually challenged by claims to principles that hedged absolute authority. In contrast, the ideological response that occurred in tradition-reinforcing cases of state breakdown — as in the Ottoman Empire, China, and Hapsburg Spain — sought to purify and reaffirm traditional institutions. In these cases, the crisis was blamed on deviation from orthodoxy, and the new regimes sought to strip away variety in the extant cultural framework, purging elements perceived as heterodox. The reconstruction of state and social institutions allowed a recovery of traditional prosperity; but the impoverishing of the cultural framework of post-breakdown society reduced the basis for future dynamism and fundamental change. Meiji Japan was a hybrid case, as marginal elites did sweep away certain aspects of the traditional government and its status system, releasing resources for development and imperial expansion. But the Meiji Restoration still was framed in traditional and conservative ideology, which left a legacy of conservative and traditonal emphasis that continued to dominate much of political and social life.In short, theories of culture that simply describe the interaction of individuals with cultural elements in general terms are gravely incomplete. Cultural frameworks act with particular power at the times when states are rebuilt or revised in times of state breakdown or crisis. A more complete theory of culture — whose development has begun in the works of Wuthnow and Swidler — thus must recognize that cultural dynamics vary over time, becoming more fluid and more creative at some times, more rigid and more limiting at others.But in addition, these diverse outcomes suggest that macrosociology has unduly neglected the role of culture in constraining state structure and dynamics, particularly during periods of state crisis and reconstruction. Theories of social change must recognize that at some concrete historical junctures it is material forces, while at other such junctures it is cultural frameworks and ideologies, that play the dominant role in causing and directing change.This essay is an elaboration of chapter 5 of J. Goldstone's Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991).

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Modularity in philosophy, the neurosciences, and psychiatry

The neurosciences are generating new findings regarding genetic and neurobiological aspects of the pathophysiology of mental disorders. Especially, certain genetic risk factors like neuregulin-1 seem to predispose individuals to a psychotic phenotype beyond the limits of traditional classificatory boundaries between organic psychoses in Alzheimer’s disease, bipolar affective disorder and schizophrenia. Little, however, is known about how such genetic risk factors actually confer an increased risk for psychosis in an individual patient. A gap between neuroscientific findings and psychopathological phenomena exists. The main hypothesis how this gap may be bridged is that mental disorders arise as a consequence of dysfunctions of normal mental functions. Modularity may provide a useful conceptual framework in that temporally and/or spatially stable neural circuits subserve certain physiological functions of the human brain, which become the target of pathophysiological effectors. The idea of a modular construction of the human brain is based on neurobiological evidence regarding the columnar architecture of the cerebral cortex, which provides certain elementary analytical functions. Modular dysfunctions may be assessed with methods of experimental psychopathology, in which subsystems of brain functions are tested with standardized experimental psychological techniques (functional psychopathology). The main questions here are how to define a module, and whether the classical neuroscientific definitions can be used to characterize higher integrative functions of the human brain.     

The managerial revolution,the institutional infrastructure,and the problem of human capital

InScale and Scope, A.D. Chandler explores the role of management in shaping growth and competitiveness in industrialising nations. Chandler views managers as reacting to technological and economic change rather than initiating it, giving little attention to the extent to which growth of modern management and corporate capacities were tied to the emergence of parallel structures in government and society, and the important national differences in the role of public and private sectors in the process. His failure to offer a broad and encompassing paradigm of organisational growth and change produces a celebration of ‘American exceptionalism’ and corporate bigness rather than a genuinely comparative analysis.     

Self-hatred,the right to a life,and the tasks of mid-life

In this article the developmental tasks of mid-life are explored. The difficulty that self-hatred brings to the mid-life passage and the contribution of both separation guilt and survivor guilt to self-hatred are discussed. Clinical work with a mid-life woman struggling to believe that she has a right to a life is presented.     

Networks and the philosophy of noise

Although in communication the message replaces noise, noise is an integral part of the message itself. The post‐war period is one of an intensified attempt to think of communication and noise together, so that the latter does not appear only as the source of disorder but also as the material part of communication. Noise is thus absolutely necessary for communication. On the other hand, in order to make a shared meaning possible, a remarkable part of this noise has to be excluded. Furthermore, communication has to be given a form in order to be distinguished from noise. Yet communication itself cannot be given any single form, for it escapes all formalizations. This movement of sharing and excluding, form‐giving and fleeing from organization, is what determines the field of communication. This article investigates the ways in which this movement has found expression in the writings of Serres, Girard, Latour and Callon.     

Blockchains,trust and action nets: extending the pathologies of financial globalization

Blockchains combine digital encryption and time stamping technologies to enable digital exchange to occur in manners celebrated by proponents as ‘trust‐free’. Yet, an increasing range of scholars argue that actual applications of the peer‐to‐peer technology shifts, rather than eliminates, trust. In this article, we draw on organizational theory to argue that efforts to remove trust reorganize the action nets that underpin payment systems in manners that extend rather than eliminate longstanding pathologies afflicting financial globalization. Our analysis supports and extends the critiques that blockchain applications are far from ‘trust‐free’. By tracing how efforts to reconfigure the socio‐technical composition of the humans and objects that underpin payment systems, we illustrate how blockchain applications shift the location and character of the technical vulnerabilities that create market instabilities and concentration, as well as elite‐led governance.     

State and revolution

Conclusion Our brief examination of the conditions underlying the political crises of the Meiji Restoration and the Prussian Reform Movement has tended to reinforce by contrast our central arguments about the causes of revolutionary political crises in France, Russia, and China. Bourbon France, Hohenzollern Prussia, Tokugawa Japan, Manchu China, and Romanov Russia - all became subject to military pressures from more economically developed nations abroad and all experienced in response societal political crises. Yet only France, Russia, and China were plunged into the upheavals of social revolution, while Prussia and Japan, relatively speaking, adapted speedily and smoothly to international exigencies through reforms instituted from above by autocratic political authorities. The different fates of these agrarian monarchical regimes faced with the challenges of adapting to the exigencies of international uneven development can be explained in large part by looking at the ways in which agrarian relations of production and landed dominant classes impinged upon state organizations - though it is also important to assess the severity of the pressures from abroad with which each regime had to cope.In Russia, the revolutionary crisis of autocratic rule and dominant class privilege was due to the overwhelming stress of World War I upon an early-industrializing economy fettered by a backward agrarian sector. The Imperial regime was strong enough to override dominant class interests and enforce modernizing reforms after the shock of defeat in the Crimean War, but it was not able to reorganize agrarian class relations that were inimical to modern economic development or rapid increases in productivity. Even extraordinary successes of state-propelled industrialization were not enough to allow TsaristRussia to make up her economic lag behind the West, and she remained entangled within the European states system as it careened toward World War. By contrast, neither Japan nor Prussia was so agriculturally backward or internationally pressed during early industrialization as Tsarist Russia.Both Bourbon France and Manchu China had fairly prosperous agrarian economies and experienced foreign pressures no greater than those experienced by Tokugawa Japan and Hohenzollern Prussia. Another pattern is the differentiating cause here: specifically, the presence or absence of a landed upper class with insitutionalized political leverage at extralocal levels, over against fiscal and military policing functions centrally organized by royal administrations. If such politically organized and administratively entrenched landed classes were present, as they were in France and China, then the reactions of these classes against autocratic attempts to institute modernizing reforms deposed the monarchies and precipitated breakdowns of administrative and military organizations. This meant that externally induced political crises developed into potentially social-revolutionary situations. But if, as in Japan and Prussia, politically powerful landed classes were absent, so that the oldregime states were more highly bureaucratic, then foreign-induced crises could be resolved through political struggles confined, broadly speaking, within the established governing elite and administrative arrangements. And this precluded the possibility for social revolution from below.Social revolutions in France, Russia, and China were launched, it has been argued here, by crises centered in the structures and situations of the states of the Old Regimes. Still, the actual occurrence of social revolutions in these three countries depended not only upon the emergence of revolutionary political crises, but also upon the conduciveness of the agrarian sociopolitical structures of the Old Regimes to peasant revolts. To go on with the analysis from here, therefore, we would have to reexamine the prerevolutionary societies from the opposite perspective, no longer from the top down with emphasis on the state, the dominant class, and the international context, but from the bottom up with emphasis on the structural situation of the peasants in the agrarian economy and in local political and class relations. While this task cannot be accomplished here, it is undertaken in the larger study of which this analysis is only a part.     

Structuring the sexual revolution

Conclusion The explosion of sexuality We have seen how ideas of the repression of sexual energies within a sex-economic framework, the revolt of sexuality incarnated in youth and the struggle to control/educate children's sexuality, the revolt of women due to greater independence, and the scientizing of the world of morals were brought together to produce the idea of the sexual revolution - a specific interpretation of undeniable changes in mores and behavior. While it might seem that the net has been cast rather widely in describing this complex of ideas, it is my contention that all these themes, seemingly contradictory though they may be, were present in the thought of those formulating the idea of the sexual revolution. (One statement by Calverton shows the synthesis: In the revolt of youth, connected as it is with the economic independence of modern woman, the bankruptcy of the old system of marriage, the decay of the bourgeoisie as a social class, we have the dynamic beginnings of a sexual revolution growing out of the economic background of social struggle.) But the idea of a sexual revolution had another element, touched upon at the beginning of this essay, namely the belief that a distinction could be made between revolutionary and non-revolutionary times in moral history. This belief was no doubt derived from the Marxist orientation toward revolutionary times that the writers we have studied shared. But can such a discontinuous change, a spurt in evolution in which quantity becomes quality, be supposed to have happened, when we have enough records of people suggesting that there was a sexual revolution - a startling and cataclysmic disruption, to use Schur's words - underway in 1925 (Lindsey), 1927 (Darmstadt et al.), 1929 (Schmalhausen), 1936 (Reich), 1930–1955 (Hirsch), 1956 (Sorokin), 1964 (Schur), and 1966 (Reiss; Kirkendall and Libby)? To some extent, yes. There is indication of great changes in sexual behavior at certain times (though it is hard to separate age, cohort, and period effects); there was an increase in at least educated females' incidence of premarital intercourse in the 1920s. Furthermore, there are clear differences in the amount of attention paid to sexuality, and to sexual mores, during different periods. At the very least, merely the belief that one is in the midst of a sexual revolution is an important datum, for it may point to changes in extremely ideologically sensitive portions of the population (e.g., middle-class women) or to the attempt to legitimize already existing patterns of behavior.However, the writers contributing to the idea of the sexual revolution never gave very plausible explanations as to why the change from normal to revolutionary times should have happened when it did. The suggested causes have generally been continuous, and not immediately preceding the times believed to be sexual revolutions. Women's entry into the labor force followed a roughly exponential curve from 1900 to the present, the orientation of the economy toward service-sector production, as well as the increase in disposable income was, aside from the depression-war period, basically uninterrupted, and the pace of technological change certainly never slackened. The oven-ready idea of the sexual revolution I have made it clear that I think that this idea of a sexual revolution was available for people in the 1960s and 1970s - both as commentators and as actors - to use in interpreting current changes or perceived changes, and that this idea suggested the relevance of certain explanatory factors and not others. Furthermore, this conceptual vocabulary was available to interpret previous changes (such as when Shorter writes of the increase of intimacy in the nineteenth century, The libido unfroze in the blast of the wish to be free, and attributes it to the effects of increased participation in the market). Why were the same causal factors we found given as explanations for the first sexual revolution (change in economic imperatives, emancipation of women due to labor-force participation, new knowledge and contraception, the emancipation of youth due to technological change and independence from adult authority) so often invoked to explain the second sexual revolution? It certainly might be, as Steven Seidman has argued, that there was one century-long revolution involving a constant set of causes. There is, I think, a great deal of truth to this, but we must bear in mind, as Beth Bailey said, that the term sexual revolution is not a mere scholarly classification, but a term used by contemporaries who experienced a period as being different, and there may still be significant discontinuity to explain. I suspect that rather than there being one long revolution (or better, evolution) that had these constant causes, during periods of public display of new sexual mores among the middle class - mores that might have been silently changing for some time - people tended to think in terms of a sexual revolution, and with the idea of the sexual revolution, these supposed causes were predisposed to reappear.The use of the idea of the sexual revolution led to two related confusions, one stemming from the Leninist-voluntarist understanding of what constituted a revolution, and the other from the orthodox-determinist understanding, each confusing sexual change with a model of revolution. The first confusion was between, on the one hand, the importance of widespread change in sexual ethics and behavior, and, on the other, the role of self-professed sexual revolutionaries and reformers. The second was between, on the one hand, the freeing of previously repressed sexuality (again, of women and adolescents), and, on the other, change in the economic substructure.Regarding the first, the term sexual revolution, as we have seen, was coined by self-professed revolutionaries of a distinctly Leninist stripe, self-styled modernists who believed that the force of history was on their side, but who also believed in the utility of forceful agitation by the vanguard for reform. The most important effect of the adoption of the idea of revolution was to preserve this double-idea: a revolution implied both widespread or secular change (in contrast to the rebellion of a few pioneers) and also a radical overturning of previously existing order (along the lines of the programme of the rebels and pioneers). Because of this understanding of what a sexual revolution should be, sociologists and other social analysts could, on the one hand, dismiss claims that there had been a sexual revolution by pointing to the incomplete overthrow of monogamous, heterosexual marriage as the dominant pattern and norm. On the other hand, discussions of the sexual revolution tended to focus on the avant-garde of sexual nonconformism, assuming that there was some important connection between the struggles of far-sighted rebels and the secular change that undoubtedly occurred. But this voluntarist-Leninist understanding of what constitutes revolution was complimented by the other side of the concept of sexual revolution, namely revolution as inevitable secular change deeply rooted in changing economic imperatives. Like the modernists, analysts of the second sexual revolution have tended to assume that if anyone's sexuality was liberated, it was that of women and youth. Even among those who noted the equivocal nature of the freedom granted by increased permissiveness, the fundamental notion of (women's and youths') sexuality waiting to be freed (or even better, waiting for the right moment to free itself) narrowed the range of what substructural changes would be pointed to - they were those that would, it was believed, make it less costly for a pre-existing female or youthful desire for extramarital sex to be expressed. So once again, women's entry into the paid labor force was taken to explain the sexual revolution (for example, Ira Reiss: Economic autonomy reduces dependence on others and makes sexual assertiveness a much less risky procedure). However there was a catch - sociologists knew that female labor-force participation had been rising at a relatively stable (though exponential) rate since the first World War. While the 1960s did see an increase in the rate of change, it was not so large as to explain a revolution.. So explanations turned to the category of working women that seemed to be growing the fastest, namely working mothers. Unfortunately, there are some obvious problems with pointing to the significance of working mothers. The first is, of course, that it simply doesn't fit well with the idea that independent income leads to fearless sexual experimentation, which remained the dominant explanatory model. (For example, while D'Emilio and Freedman point to the importance of the rise in working mothers, recognizing that women without children had been steadily entering the labor force for some time, the influence of women's work that they speak of seems to assume singleness, not motherhood.) Ira Reiss tried to solve this problem by claiming that the employed mother played a key role in the sexual revolution that began in the late 1960s, because (1) her children had a greater variety of role models and were therefore more autonomous, and (2) they had a more expanded notion of female autonomy. This, however, undermines the argument connecting independence and assertiveness: if having a working mother expands a son's vision of women's autonomy, then why would assertiveness on women's part still be risky? But if having a working mother only expands a daughter's vision of women's autonomy, then her sexual autonomy would still be risky, and so this factor makes no difference.The second problem with emphasizing the increase in working mothers as opposed to single women is that even here careful scrutiny of the numbers belies the argument being made. If the significance of employed mothers comes from the role models they present to their young children who are learning gender roles, it is in the 1950s (at the latest) that this increase must have taken place (and thus the growth of labor-force participation of mothers with young children in the late 1960s is irrelevant). But the percentage of women with young children who were in the labor force only grew by one fourth over the decade. The bulk of the increased labor-force participation in this period came from women over forty-five - they may have been mothers, but their children were not so impressionable. The other deep change in the substructure that supposedly accounts for the sexual revolution has to do with a shift in the economy from production to consumption. This confused thesis generally and quite incorrectly maintains that there was an identifiable shift in the emphasis of the economy from savings to consumption, and that capitalism's need to find new markets explains bar culture and adult bookstores. This major shift seems to have occurred in the 1920s to cause the first sexual revolution, (D'Emilio and Freedman, Kevin White), reappeared in the 1950s to prop up the nuclear family with a new domesticity (Seidman), and then finished things off in the sixties and seventies as the completion of the turn towards consumerism (in Weeks's words), led to the increased permissiveness associated with the sexual revolution and the rise of the sexual marketplace (Weeks, Seidman). It is beyond the scope of this article to explain the genesis of this particular idea; suffice it to say that it comes from the basic dialectical materialist assumption that a revolution in sex must at least directly parallel changes in the requirements of the economic substructure.Of course, it wasn't simply changes in the economy that made sexual assertiveness less risky according to explanations of the second sexual revolution; it was also new contraceptive technology and knowledge. The sexual revolution probably could not have occurred without the pill, writes Linda Grant; the pill liberated women's desires, turning [women] into sexual beings. Were sexuality truly lurking under its cover, trying to get out, this would make sense, but as Bailey and Reiss remind us, Kinsey found that moral reservations, not fear of pregnancy, were the biggest factor in leading women not to have premarital sex. While there is no need to ignore the differences between the pill and previous forms of contraception, those previous forms seemed effective enough for analysts of the 1920s to attribute that sexual revolution to them, and effective enough to lead to a dramatic decrease in birth-rate before the invention of the pill.Finally, the conception of sexuality wanting to be let out led once more to the assumption that scientific information about the body and sexuality was inherently pro-sexual, and that this new information (now it became Masters and Johnson, or Kinsey, instead of Freud) increased sexual permissiveness. This emphasis on the effects of scientific knowledge also seems quite misplaced; it is more likely, as Gagnon and Smith have argued, that the significant knowledge was social knowledge, that is, knowledge of what people were already doing that destroyed the pluralistic ignorance (in Allport's term) that supported the idea of stability in sexual mores and behavior. (The emphasis on scientific knowledge as being inherently liberatory was a particularly interesting bit of cultural amnesia, for in the nineteenth-century European scene, those seeking sexual liberation did so not through a scientific discourse, but through a discourse of sin and the transcendence of morality. The significance of such non-scientific attention to sexuality on the history of behavior was erased by the modernist mind.)To summarize, the idea of a sexual revolution to some degree preserved a protean explanatory framework merely through its juxta-position of sexual and revolution, where revolution had vaguely Marxist-Leninist connotations. This framework naturally unfolded when people began to ask what had caused the revolution, and whether or not there truly was a revolution, and has since become the dominant framework for interpreting sexual change. A perfect example is the work of Steven Seidman, one of the foremost sociological analysts of sexual history, and someone who tends to be wary of simplistic materialist explanations. He discusses the entrance of women into the paid labor force, arguing that the contradiction between their growing economic empowerment and political subordination prompted women's demands for social and sexual autonomy including the legitimation of eroticism. Then he concludes, Capitalism, changing gender roles [due to the above], technological changes in contraception and birth control, and the broader processes of social and political liberalization contributed to the making of the twentieth century American intimate culture. Yet, social change is not the result of abstract social processes, but is merely made by people ... [and so] the roles of sex reformers and rebels were critical to sexual change in twentieth century America. Aside from the appended effects of general social liberalization (which might be seen as making the more materialistic causes redundant), we see the usual suspects despite any clear reasons why any of them are linked to their effects (why, for example, would economic empowerment lead women to call for the legitimation of eroticism?).This explanation is only comprehensible against the background of an understanding of what a sexual revolution is, i.e., one coming from the combination of Marxist-Leninist and Freudian-vitalist ideas leading to the expectation of witnessing a combination of deep, long-term, secular economic effects and the sudden discontinuous self-freeing of the repressed sexuality of youths and women. This is not simply the tendency of the sociological imagination to link any and all things to the development of capitalism, for the emphasis on discontinuity led analysts then to look for local causes (often those associated with sexual rebels - a prime example is the influence of the civil-rights movement or the second World War) to explain the timing. In both the case of the fundamental economic causes and that of the local sparks, there was a parochial attempt to explain changes that were clearly international with causes that were purely national in scope (the arguments based on economic change cannot be applied to Weimar Germany, for example). Finally, while substantiating such a claim would certainly be outside of the bounds of this article, I suggest that it is quite plausible that the preexisting idea of what a sexual revolution is affected not only how later analysts interpreted the second sexual revolution, but also how people as actors interpreted changes they lived through. While actors probably did not stress continuous economic factors as did later analysts, for both, when cultural elements were taken into account, it was the discovery of new scientific information that had (naturally) set sex free at last (many contemporary accounts by protagonists of the sexual revolution stress the illuminating information from Masters and Johnson - in contrast to the repressive effects of Freudianism!). The sexual revolution was about knowledge, liberation of the body, and economic change - not changing values or other cultural elements (even though, as we have seen above, it seems most likely that it was precisely cultural values that changed, since moral reservations were the biggest check to female premarital sex before the second sexual revolution). And sociological analysis has shared this blindness - only a few (Daniel Bell for one) argued that autonomous cultural developments were revolutionizing society. When we take a step back, sociologists have been satisfied with extremely vague and dubious explanations as to the relationship between economic development and sexual revolutions - explanations that seem to have a great deal of truth in them, but that are grounded in particular constructions of what a sexual revolution should look like.

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Transforming habit: revolution,routine and social change

Compelling recent scholarly work has explored the crucial role affect, emotion and feeling might play in activating radical social and political change. I argue, however, that some narratives of ‘affective revolution’ may actually do more to obscure than to enrich our understanding of the material relations and routines though which ‘progressive’ change might occur and endure in a given context – while side-stepping the challenge of how to evaluate progress itself in the current socio-political and economic landscape. Drawing on the work of Eve Sedgwick, John Dewey, Felix Ravaisson and others, this article asks whether critical work on habit can provide different, and potentially generative, analytical tools for understanding the contemporary ethical and material complexities of social transformation. I suggest that it habit’s double nature – its enabling of both compulsive repetition and creative becoming – that makes it a rich concept for addressing the propensity of harmful socio-political patterns to persist in the face of efforts to generate greater awareness of their damaging effects, as well as the material forms of automation and coordination on which meaningful societal transformation may depend. I also explore how bringing affect and habit together might productively refigure our understandings of ‘the present’ and ‘social progress’, as well as the available modes of sensing, instigating and responding to change. In turning to habit, then, the primary aim of this article is to examine how social and cultural theory might critically re-approach social change and progressive politics today.     

The place of South African philosophy in the future of South African philosophy

The title of my paper reads like an oxymoron if not downright confusion. However, it is not meant to be an oxymoron and it does not betray my private confusion. It is deliberate and perhaps a bit political. These two words “South Africa” rightly conjure up an image of things that are either in the south of Africa or things that are African in the south. I find the first image deserving of attention for my purposes. Juxtaposing the concerns of academic philosophy in South Africa (the country) alongside the ordinary reference of the term South Africa (and resultant expectations), I seek to argue that the practice of philosophy in South Africa does not sufficiently show South African characteristics. I specifically argue that the practice of philosophy in South Africa is far removed from the place in which it operates. While there are historical reasons to explain this state of affairs, the future of philosophy in this place can only be secured by an active renunciation of the status quo accompanied by a deliberate responsiveness to the philosophical needs of South Africa. It is incumbent on the dominant philosophers to make this renunciation and foster deliberate responsiveness.     

Theories of collective action and the Iranian revolution

Most analyses of the collective actions that led to the Iranian revolution rest upon one of two classical models: social breakdown or social movement. These explanations emphasize such factors as the politicization of recently uprooted migrants, the growth of a new middle class opposing autocracy, the authority of the clergy, and specific aspects of Shiite Islam. Conflicts of interest, capacity for mobilization, coalition formation, and the structure of opportunities that shaped the collective actions of various groups and classes are ignored or downplayed. This paper argues that mobilization and collective action against the monarchy resulted from the adverse effects of state development policies on bazaaris, industrial workers, white-collar employees, and professionals. Bazaaris' mobilization provided an opportunity for other social groups and classes to oppose the government. A coalition of disparate interests, led by Ayatollah Khomeini, brought down the monarchy.Iran's two major twentieth-century revolutions, and especially the second, appear so aberrant. They do not fit very closely widespread ideas of what modern revolutions should be like. Yet there is no doubt that the Islamic revolution in 1978–79 provided a thoroughgoing overthrow of the old political, social, and ideological order (Keddie, 1983:580).