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Rook Reviews /1121 "Reflexively Modern." However, When I Called Our Pre-Postmodern Plumber, He Chuckled and Said, "It Don't Work 'Round Here

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Rook Reviews /1121 Rook Reviews /1121 "reflexively modern." However, when I called our pre-postmodern plumber, he chuckled and said, "It don't work 'round here ... but if you want me to put one in, I will. No guarantee, though. "T had spent much time and hope planning my emancipation from The Dead Hand of Tradi- tion, with the aid of an expensive computer and a stack of printer paper. Yet obdurate structure, social and physical, had the last laugh. And it al- ways will. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/sf/article/75/3/1121/2233538 by guest on 01 October 2021 Social Revolutions in the Modern World. By Theda Skocpol. Cambridge University Press,1994.354 pp. Reviewer: DANIEL CHIROT, University of Washington Theda Skocpol's essays in Social Revolutions in the Modern World have al- ready been reviewed by such noted social scientists as Charles Tilly and Francis Fukuyama. Ten of the twelve essays were published in the 1970s and early 1980s, two are from the late 1980s, and only the conclusion was written for this book. Moreover, neither social revolutions nor historical sociology as it was practiced during the 1970s and 1980s are among Skocpol's main interests these days. Rather, the history of social welfare in the U.S. and contemporary policy controversies about health care are the focus of her attention. Why, then, is it important to discuss this book once more? Because it more or less unwittingly marks the death of a type of so- ciology that once attracted some of the best minds in the discipline but that contained within itself contradictions that could not be resolved. How that happened is worth knowing. Rereading the older essays in the book is a reminder of how refreshing, intelligent, thorough, and professionally courageous they were. This is es- pecially true of her critiques of two of the leading icons in historical soci- ology at that time, Barrington Moore and Immanuel Wallerstein. In her 1973 critique of Moore's already classic work on political modernization and revolution, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Skocpol did something very few young scholars could have done. She acknowledged the greatness of the book and her debt to Moore, her teacher at Harvard, but at the same time she exposed what was almost its fatal flaw. By re- maining so closely tied to traditional Marxist class analysis, Moore ne- glected the role of the state administration and rulers, who could be and often were independent actors with their own interests; and he entirely overlooked the international setting in which modernization occurred. These were precisely the points she would make in her own 1979 book, Stafes and Social Revolutions. Moore also took the impulse to economic de- velopment for granted, thus missing the key ingredient in the important modern revolutions, namely, the failure of old regimes to keep up with the most advanced, and therefore most threatening parts of the world. Thus, as 1122 / Social Forces 75:3, March 1997 she puts it, "Social Origin's [sic] entire structure of assumptions and sequence- explanations collapses." She was absolutely right. Skocpol herself would go on in States and Social Revolutions and in some of the essays in this collection (especially the one co-authored with Ellen Kay Trimberger) to posit an evolutionary-functionalist argument: So- cieties ruled by classes and systems unable to keep abreast of international competition and directly threatened by that lag were the ones ripe for revolution. Revolution was not, as traditional Marxists had claimed, the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/sf/article/75/3/1121/2233538 by guest on 01 October 2021 exclusive or even primary product of internal class conflicts set off by commercialization and economic modernization. Yes, such processes en- gendered discontent and conflict, but these were endemic in agrarian states anyway, and their presence could hardly explain why, in some cases, there were revolutions, while in most there were not. Nor were the immediate winners of revolutions likely to be the vanguard representatives of the next ruling class, but rather, in the case of France, Russia, and China, a newly invigorated and nationalist state bureaucracy whose chief accomplishment would be massive military mobilization of the nation. Skocpol would cer- tainly deny that she is an evolutionary functionalist, because in the 1970s, and to some extent to this day, this was viewed as the theoretical stance of an older generation of "reactionaries" in sociology. Nevertheless, that is the essence of her argument. Her 1977 review of Immanuel Wallerstein's sanctified first volume on the birth of The Modern World System was considerably more devastating than her criticism of Moore because it exposed its essential argument as a sham rather than as a fruitful error. Wallerstein's argument, she found, turned out to be both teleological and tautological. "Repeatedly," she writes, "he argues that things at a certain time and place had to be a certain way to bring about later states or developments that accord with what his system model of the world capitalist economy requires or predicts." Thus, when certain facts fit his requirements, he includes them. But when they do not, Wallerstein leaves them out "or (more frequently) they are discussed, perhaps at length, only to be explained in ad hoc ways and/or treated as 'accidental' in relation to the supposedly more fundamental connections emphasized by the world-systems theory." This statement comes about as close to an accusation of fundamental intellectual dishonesty as it is possi- ble to make without actually calling it that. But she then retreats and in- stead ascribes Wallerstein's methodological obfuscation to the fact that he was so eager to discredit modernization theory that he feli into the trap of using its categories and ways of thinking. However grave some of their errors, without Moore and Wallerstein, there would not have been the "historical sociology" of the 1970s and 1980s, at least not as we knew it. It is true that were other established mas- ters in the field (who get criticized much less in Skocpol's essays): Rein- hard Bendix, Shmuel Eisenstadt, Eric Wolf, Charles Tilly. Yet, none of them had the electrifying impact on graduate students and young scholars that Moore and Wallerstein had. In exposing their basic errors, therefore, Book Reviews / 1123 Skocpol actually exposed the contradictions that ultimately would under- mine the whole enterprise. Now, two decades later, with the war In Viet- nam a historical memory, with revolutionary communism dead, and with American sociology ever more concerned with internal social problems of race and gender, the ideological enthusiasm that once papered over these fundamental flaws has been stripped away. Revolutionary Marxist histori- cal sociology is on its death bed. Skocpol was not, however, willing to take on, or even recognize the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/sf/article/75/3/1121/2233538 by guest on 01 October 2021 basic reason for this failure. Nor is she prepared to do so now. Moore and Wallerstein, and in fact the entire field of historical sociology they in- spired, began and remained an essentially anti-American, anti-bourgeois movement for whom empirical analysis was only a means to a greater ideological goal. Skocpol, whose devotion to very high professional stan- dards are unquestionable, and within the ranks of historical sociology al- most unmatched, could not confront this ideology head on because it would have alienated her from the field and from her generation of intel- lectuals. To resolve this contradiction in her otherwise exceptionally per- ceptive evaluation of others in the field, she convinced herself that ideol- ogy is unimportant, both for social revolutions, and therefore, presumably, for historical sociology itself. Moore's conviction that communism was the only good path toward modernization in the twentieth century came out most clearly in his com- parison of India and China. India's suffering without end was contrasted to China's brutal but efficient revolutionary modernization. What Moore missed because of his ideological blinders was that India's slow economic growth for decades after independence was caused by its autarkic and so- cialist policies, not by the absence of revolution, and this was a function of its leaders' ideological convictions. Meanwhile, China's supposed suc- cesses had, by the time he wrote his book, already caused some 30 million completely needless deaths through starvation during the Great Leap For- ward, also because of the ideological fantasies of its leaders. China would not become an economic successes until Mao had almost wrecked the country during the Cultural Revolution, and the surviving leaders after his death drastically changed course. Wallerstein's ideology was more coherent than Moore's. He wanted to promote world socialist revolution and expose capitalism as an unnatural and evil system. It was therefore impossible to discuss the rise of capital- ism as if it were fundamentally anything more than a system of efficient piracy. This is why, for example, his model required the seventeenth cen- tury Netherlands to be ruled by a strong state, even though one did not exist there. Wallerstein could not accept the notion that there is something inherently dynamic and creative about societies in which entrepreneurs have great freedom to engage in their business. Wealth could only result from organized force used to systematically exploit the weak. There fol- lowed a whole series of distortions — including a complete neglect of the roots of European scientific and technological progress. These mistakes 1124 / Social Forces 75:3, March 1997 were not just a matter of falling into the trap of using the categories of his theoretical opponents, but were the logical consequence of his original ideological intent.
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