Worlds come apart: Systems theory versus critical theory. Drama in the history of sociology in the twentieth century

This article places an episode in the history of sociological theory into intellectual history in the twentieth century. The perspective is chronological as well as contextual. The themes are two theoretical approaches, both embedded in both American and German history, Parsonian Systems Theory and “Frankfurt School” Critical Theory. The chronology shown spanned mainly from the 1940s to the 1960s. The context of the two theories is a period that is crucial in twentieth century history. The protagonists of the two approaches were, in the 1940s, Americans and Germans exiled in the United States. In the 1950s, both approaches were affected by McCarthyism in different ways. The 1960s, however, were the culmination. The dynamics of the two approaches led into a schism which came into the open on the occasion of the 1964 German Sociology Conference in Heidelberg celebrating Max Weber. The article shows the stages in the evolution of the schism, emulating three acts in a drama. The final split was over whether Weber or Marx should be the classic whose oeuvre was to influence sociological thinking today. My aim is to exemplify how these two authoritative approaches in sociological theory, far from escaping the vagaries and vicissitudes of their times, were embedded in twentieth-century history.     

Musicophilia and the lingua musica in Mumbai

Hindustani art music in the metropolis of Bombay/Mumbai played a significant role in the fashioning of both selves and public spaces from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s. With the fall of Awadh in northern India in 1857 and the dispersal of the court that had inherited Hindustani music from the Mughal empire, the singers, instrumentalists and dancers began to migrate in search of new patrons. Many of them found a foothold in Bombay, which came to occupy a central position in assembling the new structures and spaces of performance, pedagogy, recording and consumption of Hindustani music. I suggest that the passion for Hindustani music was strongly linked to the linguistic diversity of Bombay, and that it was the lingua musica which aided the development of the public domain and its cultural vernacular in the twentieth century. Through their musicophilia, the city’s inhabitants engaged in fashioning a subjectivity that emerged through that which they shared.     

Bequests and family traditions: the case of nineteenth century France

Like father, like son: is the bequest behavior of children “inherited” from that of their parents? Most economic models (altruistic, paternalistic or exchange models) postulate that bequest behavior does not depend per se on parents’ behavior. Yet because of data limitations, few empirical studies have analyzed the link between bequests left and inheritances received. In this paper, we evaluate the effect of inheritance relative to lifetime income on the amount that individuals bequeath, in the case of France. This study uses original historical data including wealth genealogies covering the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries for the Loire Inférieure département. Empirical evidence suggests that the propensity to bequeath is much greater for inheritance than for human resources: a deceased having inherited twice the average wealth leaves 35–60 % more to his own heirs that the average for his generation. In nineteenth century France, bequests are explained more by inheritance received than by personal savings per se.     

Reclamation and reconciliation: land-use history,ecosystem services,and the Providence River

Throughout time, American cities have been consciously or unconsciously designed to provide efficient access to ecosystem services. The land-use history of the Providence River serves to illustrate this point. Transformed through land-filling in the nineteenth century, the construction of a hurricane barrier in the twentieth century, and a civic renaissance in the twenty-first century, the shifting landscape of downtown Providence, Rhode Island, reflects a shifting relationship with the land. The area that was once the Great Salt Cove has undergone numerous iterations in the past 400 years—each of these transformations based upon which ecosystem services were most-valued at the time. In this sense, land-use history can serve as a valuable tool in evaluating the societal relationship between nature and culture.     

A Sociological Look at Biofuels: Ethanol in the Early Decades of the Twentieth Century and Lessons for Today

Abstract This article develops a broad sociological understanding of why biofuels lost out to leaded gasoline as the fuel par excellence of the twentieth century, while drawing comparisons with biofuels today. It begins by briefly discussing the fuel‐scape in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, examining the farm chemurgic movement, New Deal agricultural policies, mechanization trends within agriculture, and, finally, the invention of leaded gasoline. The second half of the article applies insights from that historical analysis to the biofuel craze currently under way. By employing a political‐economy interpretation of the socioeconomic context combined with a path‐dependency‐informed analysis of the technological trajectories, the article reveals the social forces that structured the trends and outcomes in biofuel innovations across the two eras.     

Women on the margins? Intellectual sociability and citizenship in belle époque France

Prosopographic analysis of three gender-inclusive civic associations, the Union pour l'Action Morale (later Union pour la Vérité), the Société de Sociologie de Paris, and the Société pour l’Éducation Sociale, demonstrates that at the turn of the twentieth century intellectual sociability and the networks it fostered enabled certain well-connected women to practice citizenship without the right to vote. If gender inclusive, these enterprises were far from egalitarian. But their social composition and the sociability that characterized them facilitated women's access to the public sphere, an important dimension of citizenship. For this reason, the article concludes, models of citizenship without voting rights that emerged during the period appealed to contemporary women, to whom they seemed much less contradictory than we find them a century later.     

Imaginary Vitebsk: the view from the inside

While the term “imagined geography” most often relates to outsiders, views of an unfamiliar environment, also of interest are the views of insiders whose personalities were formed within and by the social space of their original milieu. Sometimes impressions of the latter were written down during the period they discuss and, thus, present an immediacy that appears to be unmediated. When, however, the insider memoirs were written later, the researcher encounters the additional problem of evaluating the work’s authenticity, due to subsequent views of the memoirist which he adopted from his later environment. In regard to places with an ethnically heterogeneous population like Vitebsk, in the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century ideas about social space were often expressed in terms of ethnic symbolism and reflected values about what was considered prestigious in cultural and social terms and also on the basic distinction between “us” and “them.” The major cultural and social transformations of the first half of the twentieth century seriously altered the “imagined geography” that had been formed under the conditions of traditional society. The present article examines changes in ideas about social space via a case study of the Belarusian city of Vitebsk, which for many people has become a symbol of the traditional Jewish world. However, the article indicates that, despite all the changes, on the eve of the Second World War the city’s Jews continued to view their social and ethnic space in a traditional manner.     

Moral accounting as field foundation in an early modern empire: the English East India Company in the late eighteenth century

Field analysis and the relational approach to historical social-scientific explanation of which it is an instance – helps illuminate the administrative dynamics of empires. While most studies of imperial dynamics emphasize the ‘high imperialism’ of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this article extends field analysis to a crucial case from the second half of the eighteenth century: the English East India Company's transition from a (largely) merchant trading company to a territorial power. In this disordered space of administration, officials struggling with one another for metropolitan recognition provided moral accounts of themselves which, on the one hand, explained their behaviour in terms drawn from abstract, purportedly universal social spaces, and, on the other hand, claimed credibility through a personal ‘interest in disinterest’. I argue that these moral accounts helped delimit the boundaries of and shape the dynamics within a distinctively imperial administrative field. To analyse this transformation, I suggest a synthesis of three varieties of relational analysis: Bourdieu's field theory, Fligstein and McAdam's analysis of strategic action fields, and Padgett and Powell's work on network folding and robust action.     

The Changing Culture of Fatherhood in Comic‐Strip Families: A Six‐Decade Analysis

A content analysis of 490 Father's Day and Mother's Day comic strips published from 1940 to 1999 indicates that the culture of fatherhood has fluctuated since World War II. “Incompetent” fathers appeared frequently in the late 1940s, early 1950s, and late 1960s but were rarer in the late 1950s, early and late 1970s, early 1980s, and early 1990s. Fathers who were mocked were especially common in the early and late 1960s and early 1980s but were less common in the late 1940s, early and late 1950s, and early and late 1970s. Fathers who were nurturant and supportive toward children were most evident in the late 1940s, early 1950s, and early and late 1990s, with the longitudinal pattern resembling a U‐shaped curve. Differences between fathers and mothers also oscillated from one decade to the next.     

Days of Labour: Topographies of Power in Modern Peripheral Capitalism. The Case of The Industrial City of Łódź

The article investigates the city of ?ód? as an exceptional case of a settlement constitutive of different kinds and techniques of power typical of nineteenth century industrial capitalism. We consider Foucault's disciplinary power/biopower through the convergence of the paternalistic gaze of the factory owner, and the Tsarist rule in the Scheibler and Grohman industrial establishment and the nearby workers housing estate. The aim of this article is to investigate a specific locus of peripheral capitalism and the relations accompanying it through the Foucauldian analysis of power. We argue that unique and unstable patterns of correlation of power techniques emerged here. Power is no longer strictly related to the temporal matrix or the functional demands of capitalist production, and only temporarily ossified in contingent configurations. While Foucault's canonical theoretical premises and concepts are of explanatory value, the very relations between them become problematic when confronted with the particular entanglement in ?ód?. Therefore we opt for the new paradigm of power analysis through S. J. Collier's “topological analysis”.     

Literary perceptions of the aborigine after 1838∗

This paper traces the emergence in nineteenth‐century ethnographic thought of a three‐tiered classification of society and history following the appearance of Auguste Comte's Cours de philosophie positive (1830–1842). Adaptations of Comte's new formula to a variety of historical and social settings in fictional and other prose works paved the way for its eventual use by Achebe as the ground plan for his interpretation of the African past in Things Fall Apart. Works paving the way for this reconstruction include novels and other texts by D. H. Lawrence and various early twentieth and nineteenth century novelists as well as the ethnographic, critical and scholarly work of Matthew Arnold, Sir Edward Tylor, and Jane Harrison. Perceptions of the hunter‐gatherer phase of African social organization and the nineteenth‐century use of the term ‘aborigine’ to designate this ancient condition of society are suggested as the probable origins of a much used, versatile paradigm. Its applicability to the southern African situation in Bessie Head's Maru stems, it is suggested, from the origin of the three‐tiered system itself in early processes of communication between Europe and southern Africa.     

The Italo-Abyssinian Crisis and the Shift from Slave to Refugee

Britain's role as the leading anti-slavery force throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century defined humanitarian action and rhetoric with regard to Africa in this period. At some point in the twentieth century, however, the primary victim group – and focus of humanitarian action – in Africa came to be defined as refugees. This article argues that this was a result of the use of anti-slavery rhetoric in the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, and the corresponding shift in British humanitarian and foreign policy circles to the use of the language and policies previously aimed at African slaves in describing and aiding refugees from the Abyssinian crisis.     

Ethnic return migration: an Estonian case

Recently there has been growing interest among scholars in ethnic return migration. This article examines return migration during the post World War 2 period of descendants of Estonians who emigrated to Russia at the end of the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth century.
A case of return migration of West-Siberian Estonians from the Omsk province is used as an example. Structuration theory is adopted and return migration is treated as a behavioural norm that evolves, spreads and becomes embedded within an ethnic minority living outside its homeland.
The research shows that in the case of West-Siberian Estonians the main carrier of the migration behavioural norm is a generation. The behavioural norm of Estonians born in the 1910s-1920s has been return migration to Estonia, while the migration behaviour of the 1930s-1940s and the 1950s-1960s generations can be characterized by urbanization in West Siberia.
Behind these inter-generation differences in migration behaviour can be found the different socialization of the generations, appearing largely on the level of practical consciousness.
The results give reason to assume that ethnic return migration over a long period depends neither directly nor indirectly on momentary environmental changes, but rather on changes in people's values, habits, identity etc., which in the case of an ethnic minority living outside its historical homeland may be followed generation by generation.     

Nativist Cosmopolitans: Institutional Reflexivity and the Decline of "Double-Consciousness" in American Nationalist Thought

Debate in the field of historical sociology on the subject of American citizenship and nationality tends to support one of two theories. The exceptionalist argument holds that American nationalist discourse has historically been based on the universal ideals of liberty enshrined in the Constitution, and has been inclusive in character. Critics contend that this was not the case – arguing that the narrative of American national identity has typically been grounded on exclusive ethno‐cultural criteria like race, religion or language. This essay attempts to demonstrate that the truth encompasses, yet transcends, both positions. This is not because there were conflicting parties in the nineteenth century nationality debate – indeed, there was a great deal of elite consensus as to the meaning of American nationhood prior to the twentieth century which simultaneously affirmed both the universalist and particularist dimension of Americanism. How to explain this apparent contradiction, which Ralph Waldo Emerson termed “double‐consciousness?” This paper suggests that the nineteenth century popularity of dualistic statements of American nationhood, and the eclipse of such conceptions in the twentieth, is a complex sociological phenomenon that can only fully be explained by taking into account the development of institutional reflexivity in the United States.     

American-British Sporting Rivalries and the Making of the Global Sports Industry

Abstract

This article examines a key aspect of American sports history within a transnational context. Whilst the internal histories of American sport are exceedingly rich and voluminous, our general understanding of the nation’s contribution to the international, global scene is less well-known. The postcolonial rivalries between American and British sports communities fuelled the development of what became open, international cup competitions in such sports as tennis and golf which bolstered an emerging global industry in the first half of the twentieth century. The transnational process of initial American imitation and absorption of British models have been well documented within the scholarly literature and debates in American Studies for decades; however, the gradual reversal of this imitative process to a more reciprocal relationship has received far less attention (especially within sports history). The authors show how the Davis Cup competition is an example of the way in which Americans indigenised a cultural sporting import, namely tennis; created a nationalistic, international sporting competition; and effectively exported it back to Britain within the wider context of a burgeoning, imperial rivalry on the world stage between these two, rival sporting nations. This process not only expanded the worldwide consumption of sport but spreads a spirit of cultural emulation within twentieth-century global consumer culture. This transnational perspective also illuminates the thorough de-provincialising of the notion of “American Exceptionalism” within the field. When, for example, the respective imperial histories of the two nations are considered comparatively, the “American” story does not look so “exceptional” after all. Though American exceptionalism adapted some British sports to suit American sensibilities, the sporting cultures of the two nations and within their zones of influence remained similar in many respects. This was particularly true in amateur sports such as tennis, rowing and track and field (athletics to the Brits) as well as in the sport of golf. In the twentieth century, many sports adapted as focus shifted from nationalism and national worth towards professionalism and international spectacle.     

DEEWAANA (the mad one): the lover of music

The notion of deewaanapan or madness (as in being crazy about something) is deployed in this essay to make sense of musicophiliac behaviour in twentieth century Mumbai. I argue that new insights into the formation of ‘publics’ in the non-western metropolis can be gained through a focus on phenomena that embody ‘social subjectivity’. A major phenomenon of this kind is the devotion to Hindustani or North Indian classical music which spread through Mumbai starting from the late nineteenth century. The affective response of musicophiliacs is forged not in solitude but in a space of sociality. This idea also encompasses the actual performance of the khayal genre which became prominent in the twentieth century. The khayal represented a sense of intimacy and interiority which also needs to be understood as ‘social’ and ‘public’.     

Sport in Modern European History: Trajectories,Constellations, Conjunctures1

This essay reviews sport-related articles that have previously appeared in the JHS, alongside a range of other historical works, and in so doing recognizes the importance of persisting themes in the socio-cultural, historical analysis of sport. Such themes have appeared in wide-ranging socio-historical and figurational work, and also underpin the contributions to this special issue: they include the dynamics of cultural importation, diffusion and appropriation; and the cultural significance of sport in wider status and power relations. Emphasizing the compatibility of the historical and the sociological imaginations, and confirming recent positions on the integration of the cultural and the social in historical work, the article goes on to contextualize the place of sport in Europe in the period from the later decades of the nineteenth century into the fourth decade of the twentieth century. Referencing classic debates on historical method and periodization – particularly Braudel's discussions of event, conjuncture, and longue durée– the article identifies core conjunctural features of European sport in the period: internationalism/early globalization; increasing forms of mediatization; emergent individualism; and commercialized consumption and celebrity.     

Student Unrest in the Nineteenth Century: A Sociological Case Study

This paper examines student unrest at a single university in the late nineteenth century as a case study of the general student rebellion common in land-grant schools during that period. A conceptual framework exploring the relationship between an emerging student culture, traditional educational philosophy, and contemporary trends of economic and demographic change is used to interpret these historical data. Students actively sought university experiences that would facilitate movement into occupational roles expanding as a result of these trends. The unwillingness of the university to facilitate this movement resulted in two student rebellions, which in turn forced the university into accepting a previously rejected student culture. These case study data suggest that rural populations during the late nineteenth century used land-grant colleges and universities as avenues for upward mobility, often against the wishes of campus administrators. Comparisons are made between student unrest during this period and the 1960s.     

The romantic self and the politics of internet commercialization

This essay looks at some examples of ways that certain pre-existing imaginary forms of ‘selfhood’ have been culturally mapped onto historically pivotal moments in the Internet’s development. It focuses less on how technologies have shaped culture than on the reverse: on certain ways that culture has shaped society’s embrace of the Internet. What the Internet is and will come to be, the essay suggests, is partly a matter of who we expect to be when we sit down to use it. Specifically, it looks at two key examples of ways that certain pre-existing imaginary forms of selfhood – ways of understanding oneself as a self – have been culturally mapped onto historically pivotal moments in the Internet’s development: the initial explosion of the Internet in the early 1990s and its supporting ethos exemplified by Wired magazine, and the Open Source Movement in the late 1990s. The essay suggests that significant parts of the culture of computing have been not only individualist, but also composed of two distinct if intertwined strands of individualism, romantic and utilitarian, and that their difference has political significance. Like its ancestor, the 1960s counterculture, the case of the computer culture suggests that romantic individualism stands in a tangential relation to capitalist property relations (and the utilitarian ‘I’ they imply), sometimes working in concert with markets and privatization, as was the case in the early 1990s, and sometimes working to call them into question, as was the case towards the end of the 1990s.