Trajectories

Newsletter of the ASA Comparative and Historical Sociology Section Vol 30 No 1 · Fall 2018

Chair's Message Towards New Interactions of (Historical) Time and (Comparative) Space Fatma Müge Göçek experience of politics, culture, University of Michigan and economics in the American Rust Belt. In addition, there is I want to thank you all once coverage of the 2018 CHS Mini­ again for electing me the chair of Conference and the 2018 the section; I am very honored. Mentoring Event carried out with The Trajectories team has done the Transnational and Global an excellent job in putting Sociology Section. together the Fall 2018 issue, discussing some of what Thinking about what to write transpired in the subfield of here took me back to my comparative historical sociology graduate student years in the during the last annual meeting. 1980s when I first joined the Specifically, two sessions are CHS section as a young highlighted: one on the sociology sociologist­in­the­making from of slavery and the longue durée Turkey. Theda Skocpol’s honoring Orlando Patterson, and structural model was still the the other on the logics and lived rage, gradually counterbalanced Trajectories Time and Space

by William Sewell Jr.’s interpretivist approach to naturalized and normalized social relations often the past and other societies. The nature of my laden with social power. research in the Ottoman archives made me more attuned to the Sewell take and I still remember the excitement with which I attended ASA "...we are just beginning to during that decade as we saw the world through discover what new analytical those frameworks. In the 1990s and 2000s, the insights the intersections of comparative dimension of the section never historical time and managed to go beyond the West so I withdrew comparative space have yet for a while into the Middle Eastern Studies to yield... Time and space Association where I found more resonance with are on our side" my work. What I at the time regarded as the parochialism of ASA and CHS section in particular gradually The ‘comparative’ no longer indicates nation­ waned away in the aftermath of 9/11 as we states, but can also refer to various social groups probably realized how much knowledge and and elements within one society or across experience outside the United States mattered, numerous societies or communities. And as the first in generating the attack on the Twin Towers comparative intersects with the ‘historical,’ the and later the US interventions in Iraq and focus shifts to the analysis of social processes Afghanistan. The debacles of these wars forced rather than anachronic single moments in time, me to bring the Middle East more and more into and to the systematic study social contexts and my sociology courses. What ensued was my social spaces where multiplicity of meanings are ability to develop a more critical sociological generated continually. In my own work, for approach not only to the Middle East or the instance, I no longer focus on the Ottoman United States, but to the world at large. Empire or the Turkish Republic, but rather on the historical transformation of society over two Such a critical approach has also gained more hundred years; not on state documents alone but traction in the field of sociology, as evinced by rather on memoirs to capture the spectrum of analytical frameworks developing around interpretations over time; not on the social post/decoloniality, neoliberalism, and the like. In phenomenon of revolution, but rather on the decade of the 2010s, this critical approach collective violence across time and space. I has led to a sociological refocus on the found that by doing so, I was more able to intersections of (comparative) space and capture the informal experiences of all the (historical) time, literally highlighting once again people, including minorities instead of being the two fundamental parameters of our section. I limited to the formal knowledge that is so often used the term ‘refocus’ because this intersection presented, promoted and reproduced by the state. is very different from our earlier heyday in the 1980s when the unit to study was almost always nation­states; categories of analysis based on the I think we are just beginning to discover what Western historical experience alone were not new analytical insights the intersections of vetted; and social facts were often not historical time and comparative space have yet to contextualized. Now, units of analysis can yield. I am also sure that our studies will chart comprise social actors, groups, objects; origins the future not only of comparative historical of the categories of analysis are carefully analysis, but the field of sociology at large. Time articulated; and all aspects of research are and space are on our side, so let us move forward critically embedded. Hence, time and space play as trailblazers! a very significant role in especially destabilizing

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Conference Report

Orlando Patterson: The Sociology of Slavery in the Longue Durée

ASA 2018 Panel

Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideologies: Orlando Patterson and M. I. Finley among the Dons John Bodel Brown University

In 1978, shortly after arriving in Cambridge to undertake a visiting fellowship at Wolfson College, Orlando Patterson accepted an invitation to tea from Moses Finley, Professor of Ancient History and Master of Darwin College, and thus began a series of conversations about slavery over the following year that would ultimately enrich the work of both men. Patterson was at the time immersed in writing a first draft of Slavery and Social Death. Finley was completing the four lectures he would deliver at the end of the year at the College de France, which were published two years later under the title of the first and most important of them, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology. Patterson has acknowledged the influence of Finley’s work and the benefit of his conversations with Finley in that year Illustration by Tony Rodriguez specifically, first in Slavery and Social Death (xii, 7,) and often thereafter (e.g. Scott 2013: 216­17; Patterson 2017: 265). Finley, as far as I This report is the result of the 2018 ASA Panel can find, had not cited Patterson’s work before of the same title. The panel featured John they met, but he had read and admired Bodel, Fiona Greenland, Renisa Mawani, and Patterson’s survey of scholarship on slavery for Michael Ralph; where George Steinmetz and the Annual Review of Sociology in 1977, and he Orlando Patterson acted as discussants. We would go on (after reading and critiquing a first present here the authors' summary of their draft of Patterson’s manuscript) to praise the contributions (except for Michael Ralph's). The final version of Slavery and Social Death conversation greatly advances our (Patterson 2017: 265) and to recommend it to his understanding of the sociology of slavery. students and colleagues, an endorsement, as

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Patterson has observed, that did much to ensure a during his interactions with Finley. About the favorable reception of the work by classicists first, Patterson himself has been explicit. In the (Scott 2013: 217). The aim instead of this brief long interview he gave to anthropologist David essay is to consider the ways in which the Scott in 2010 and 2011, when asked directly exchange of ideas between Patterson and Finley about the genealogy of the concept of social in 1978 and 1979 contributed to and in a certain death, Patterson mentioned first Moses Finley, sense instantiated a changing of the guard in the who had elaborated an idea of the slave as way that ancient historians incorporate quintessential outsider first expounded by the sociological methods into their thinking about French sociologist of law Henri Lévy­Bruhl slavery in the classical world. (1931), son of the better­known anthropologist Lucien Lévy­Bruhl; then, the work of French To oversimplify, in the early 1980s the interest of anthropologist Claude Meillassoux and his team ancient historians in slavery shifted away from on the Toureg of the Sahel (1975), who spoke of external economic questions and an almost slaves as symbolically dead (cf. Patterson 1982: obsessive focus on the slave as laborer and the 4­5); and finally a theoretical construct of place of slavery in ancient “modes of Roman law (the inspiration of Levy­Bruhl’s production”, to investigation of internal disquisition), which treated slaves as legally sociological and psychological aspects of the dead, and a cultural practice of the Caribs, whose institution such as the workings of slave slaves cut their hair in the fashion of persons in households, manifestations of slave­owning mourning (Scott 2013: 219­220; cf. Patterson ideology in classical culture, and the inner lives 1982: 60). The concoction, in other words, was of Greek and Roman slaves. Finley, in his eclectic, drawing on classical Roman law and teaching as much as in his writing, was some theoretical reflections refined from it, instrumental in turning the lens away from ethnographic comparison, and what might be “class” as a tool of critical analysis toward a called personal experience, or at least familiarity, more contextualized investigation of the internal with life in the Caribbean, and it rested on a dynamics of slavery as an institution, but the solidly triangulated base of legal, linguistic, and lectures he delivered at the College de France behavioral evidence and argument. reveal him still to have been an active combatant in ideological battles that were even then fading into obsolescence, as the Soviet Union began its "...in the early 1980s the interest decade­long descent into the final dissolution of ancient historians in slavery that began with the Polish elections of June shifted away from external 1989. economic questions ... to investigation of internal Since the publication of Slavery and Social sociological and psychological Death, the concepts of natal alienation and social aspects of the institution..." death have become embedded in the theoretical apparatus of virtually all students of ancient Mediterranean society, and Patterson’s ideas not A similarly mixed genealogy underlies one of the only about the social dynamics of slavery but fundamental tenets of Freedom in the Making of about freedom as an expression of relations to Western Culture, that slavery and freedom are power (1991) have become common currency in intimately connected. Patterson had read in the discourse among classicists and ancient graduate school Finley’s seminal essay of 1959, historians across the sub­disciplines. It is “Was Greek civilization based on slave labour?”, therefore worth exploring briefly how both in the final paragraph of which Finley noted a concepts may relate to ideas about the classical correlation between more advanced city states world that Patterson would have encountered and more extreme types of forced labor (Finley

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1959: 164 [1982: 113]; cf. Scott 2013: 217). reverse, as (it could be argued) is the case with Finley reminded readers that “individual Patterson. Finley was equally unsentimental freedom” in this context, meant civic freedom, about tools of historical research and even which in Greek city states belonged only to adult historical questions, which had always to be male citizens, and he seized on Nietzsche’s relevant to contemporary concerns. He had no observation that the Greeks regarded both labor time for arguments and methodologies that had and slavery as “a necessary disgrace, of which outlived their usefulness. one feels ashamed, as a disgrace and a necessity at the same time” to make the point that only the In one of the last essays Finley wrote on the most extreme form of forced labor (chattel topic of slavery, published in 1979, he identifies slavery) provided male citizens with the leisure as a turning point in slavery studies the flood of time they needed to exercise their civic freedom innovative scholarship on American slavery that and to satisfy their ideological prejudices. This followed the publication of Kenneth Stamp’s The seed of an idea, planted in Patterson’s mind in Peculiar Institution in 1956. He recognizes that graduate school, took root in recollections of his what he calls “the terrible reality and urgency of own experience as a colonial boy growing up in contemporary black­white tensions in the United Jamaica at a time when school children on States” make inevitable a suffusion of Empire Day still sang the anthem “Rule ideological bias throughout this scholarship, and Britannia”, with its curiously defiant refrain, he seems to revel in the transparency of the “Britons never, never will be slaves!”, and presuppositions and motivations that are thus eventually blossomed forth in Freedom in the candidly exposed (Finley 1998: 285­90). He Making of Western Culture in the formulation of could also see that investigating the psycho­ a tripartite construct of freedom consisting of social world of the slave, fraught as it must be three aspects—the personal, the sovereignal, and with ideological pitfalls, opened windows into the civic—which Athenians developed at the end understanding the workings of the entire system of the 6th century BCE precisely out of the lived that were impenetrable to the analytical tools of experience of slave women, whose complete the Frankfurt School. In the hierarchy of subjugation poignantly highlighted the methodological approaches, Marxism retains its desirability of an opposing state. Comparison of place at the head of the table (1998: 295), but the the phenomenon with other cultures here center of conversation, and with it Finley’s provided not confirmation of universality but interest, have moved on. At the end of his essay, proof of historical particularity in the precise Finely returns to the idea of the slave as outsider, socio­political circumstances of the later with its concomitant attribution of inferiority—a Athenian empire that created the right alchemy prejudice, he maintains, that was for this trichordal concept of freedom to develop “psychologically necessary to the slaveholder (cf. Scott 2013: 227­28). class”. “That is the area—”, he says in closing, “the psychology and ideology of slavery—which Neither Finley nor Patterson restricted a concern seems to me most urgently in need of continued with social issues to academic discourse; both inquiry, more than the economics of slavery. The engaged actively in the political and social economics belongs to the dead past, the debates of the day, but Finley was never able to psychology to the living present.” (1998: 308). integrate his academic activity with his social advocacy in the way that Patterson has from the With that envoi, one of his last pronouncements beginning harmonized the two, nor (it seems) on the study of slavery and one of his few was he inclined to draw on his life experience to predictions of the path future research might guide his scholarly investigations. One might say follow, Finley effectively passed the mantle of that Finley’s scholarly interests motivated his the comparative study of slavery to Patterson, political and social activism rather than the who even then was completing the landmark

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study that would lay down the first broad tracks London. in the new territory Finley saw as the next frontier. For Finley, the historian’s task, whatever ­­­­1977a. “Slavery”. Annual Review of the period or place, was always to address the Sociology 3: 407­49. living present. Patterson, the sociologist, draws ­­­­1982. Slavery and Social Death. Cambridge, important insights about slavery and freedom in Mass. the contemporary world in part from close attention to the past. It is the interplay between ­­­­1991. Freedom in the Making of Western the two, and the conceptual clarity that can result Culture. New York. from their reasoned comparison, that makes Finley’s work exciting to read even when the ­­­­2017. “Revisiting slavery, property, and debates it engages are no longer relevant, and it social death”. In J. Bodel and W. Scheidel, eds. is what continues to make Orlando Patterson’s On Human Bondage. After Slavery and Social writing, not only on historical sociology but on Death, Malden and Oxford: 265­96. more contemporary and pressing issues, illuminating as well as essential reading for Scott, D. 2013. “The Paradox of Freedom: An classicists and ancient historians today. Interview with Orlando Patterson”. Small Axe 17.1: 96­242. Stampp, K. 1956. The Peculiar Institution. New References York: Vintage Books. Finley, M. I. 1959. “Was Greek Civilization based on Slave Labour?”, Historia 8: 145­64 [= Second Populations and the Finley 1982: 97­115]. Cultural Process of Parasitic Dishonor ­­­­1979 [1998]. “Slavery and the historians”. Fiona Greenland Histoire sociale/Social History 12.24: 247­61 University of Virginia [repr. in B. D. Shaw, ed., Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology by Moses I. Finley, expanded Slavery and Social Death made a number of edition, Princeton 1998, 285­309]. theoretical and methodological achievements, and they can be summarized variously, but the ­­­­1980. Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology. signal contribution is this: Patterson provided us London. with a definition of slavery that is not bound by ­­­­1982. Economy and Society in Ancient economics alone. In his classic statement, Greece, ed. with Introduction by B. D. Shaw and slavery is “the permanent, violent domination of R. P. Saller. New York. natally alienated and generally dishonored persons” (Patterson 1982). For comparative and Lévy­Bruhl, H. 1931. “Esquisse d’une théorie historical sociologists, this definition opened up sociologique de l’esclavage à Rome”. Revue a vast horizon of thought wherein enslavement is Génèrale du Droit, de la Legislation, et de la conceived as socially relational, rather than Jurisprudence 55: 1­17. (only) legally relational, and wherein it achieves domination by psychological as well as physical Meillassoux, C. 1975. L’esclavage en Afrique mechanisms (Patterson & Zhuo 2018; Reed précoloniale. Paris. 2013; Scheidel 2017). One of the most theoretically challenging of these mechanisms is Patterson, O. 1967. The Sociology of Slavery. An parasitic social dishonor. In his afterword in On Analysis of the Origins, Development, and Human Bondage, Patterson explains what he Structure of Negro Slave Society in Jamaica. means by it:

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"The dishonor the slave was compelled to slaves were only ever an extension of the master. experience sprang […] from that raw, human Commemorative monuments were culturally sense of debasement inherent in having no being central in Roman society, which obsessed over except as an expression of another’s being." memory and death rites (D’Ambra & Métraux (Slavery and Social Death 1982: 78; my 2006). If we insist on social death as a definitive emphasis.) condition of slavery, commemorative monuments mark the transition between The essence of this relationship is parasitism. continuums of freedom and enslavement, honor The free person is the parasite, drawing his or and dishonor, and lives lived or aspired to. her social honor from the dishonoring of the enslaved person. In fact, the free person’s We have apparently hit the interpretive wall: standing depends on the availability of that How did parasitic dishonoring, with its dishonored populace. Easily summarized, the “extended self” in the master­slave relationship, concept has been criticized for an apparent accommodate commemorative expressions of paradox: how can “generally dishonored enslaved persons’ individuality? How is social persons” serve as a source of honor? The same death compatible with honor? Patterson’s problem was identified by Hegel, who pointed to response has been to reiterate the institution of a “crisis of honor” experienced by the master slavery as an honorific relationship – an honor­ when he confronted the inconceivability of generating social machine, we might say. This drawing honor from a degraded person who gets us closer to what the dispute about lacks the capacity to confer it in return (Patterson parasitical social dishonor is actually about, 2017: 280­1). namely, two sharply contrasting theories of the social. One vision of the social, the one In building this particular aspect of his argument, suggested by Beard, Harper, and possibly Hegel Patterson relies on evidence from ancient Rome, himself, is that social death and social honor are and this focus explains why much of the ontologically fixed. The other, articulated by criticism of parasitic social dishonoring has Patterson, is that social death and social honor come from classicists. Ancient historians Mary are ontologically processual, or materially Beard and Kyle Harper, in explicit engagement relational to structures of domination and with Patterson’s work, affirm his argument that culture. To reveal the workings of these Roman slaves were outside the system of social structures, Patterson expands the analysis beyond recognition. Being dispossessed of legitimate the master—slave dyad and into the complex honor, and utterly stripped of the resources messiness of the rest of society, the “large group necessary to participate in the “game of honor,” of free persons who were not slave­holders and as Harper phrases it, slaves cannot be a source of who often had to labor for their living” social honor for free persons in that game (Patterson 2017: 280). This group comprises the (Harper 2011: 36). Patterson himself seems to freed and freeborn, rich and poor and in­ suggest something similar, writing in Slavery between, and they, too, played a role in the and Social Death that the slave “usually stood structuring and reinforcement of social status and outside the game of honor” (Patterson 1982: 11). social honoring. As illustration, Patterson Beard goes a step further, arguing that presents the idea of social triangulation. Slavery Patterson’s conception of the enslaved person as solved the problem of honor it created for the socially dead is fundamentally incompatible with master by its concurrent invention of the status the production of honor because social death of freemen. It was, he writes, “the neatest of all means permanent exile from the field of honor social triangulations, and for the West, one of the (Beard 2012). She points to funerary monuments most portentous” (Patterson 1982: 10). This was of manumitted Roman slaves to ask how these so because the master and all non­slaves gained depictions of individuals sustain the idea that at the expense of the slave’s degradation—their

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collective honorific gains came by virtue of this low­born, enslaved and free, constituting a simple negation, giving them a particular social phenomenon I refer to as reciprocal status status, the freeman. It is a characteristic feature leveling, in which the standing of slaves and ex­ of this middle group that it is variegated, slaves is acknowledged but always within the encompassing freeborn and freed, rich and poor, confines of power relations that ensure the and variously honored. That is how power works cooperation of the non­master free with the in a hierarchical society dominated by a small masters’ projects (Reed 2018 on projects). group of elites. Distinctions within this middle group are in flux, not so much open to Empirical Choice and Theoretical contestation as open to interpretation and Historicizing: How to Study Collective experience. By enhancing those “collective Honorific Gains honorific gains” and by re­creating them as free Patterson’s theory of collective honorific gains is men, this social group acquired “a vested interest rooted in the evidence from ancient Rome. in the state of slavery, and a debt of honor to the Epistemologically, he was interested in Roman all­powerful slave­holder class with whom they libertae, or ex­slaves, because they present the felt, as free men, a bond of solidarity” (Patterson first known instance of a group of people taking 1982: 334). public pride in their status as ex­slaves. One But there are a lot of big questions remaining. aspect of this collective pride was the How can collective honorific gains be acceptable deployment of an iconography and nomenclature to the non­master free any more than to the that embraced that social status. Such was the masters if everyone is operating within the same pervasiveness of human enslavement under system of social valuation? And if it is agreed Rome that all dimensions of social life were that the way out of this impasse is to allow affected by it, shaping even those relationships slaves and ex­slaves a modicum of standing, the and identities that did not have any direct better sustenance for the parasites, how can this involvement with slaves and masters. Rome, in happen without threatening the honor of the non­ sum, is the paradigmatic case of a slave society, master free? Finally, what were the mechanisms offering the definitional features of a doulotic by which non­master free and enslaved were system. structurally separated? This is important because the master class was tiny, and needed to ensure their superiority over a much larger population "But there are a lot of big questions of mid­free, free­poor, and enslaved. Marxist remaining. How can collective theory posits the creation of the bourgeoisie and honorific gains be acceptable to the their cultural fetishes (including religion) as a non­master free any more than to weapon of occlusion that blinds all non­masters the masters if everyone is operating to their true predicament – alienation from labor within the same system of social – by drawing their attention to cultural, racial, valuation?" ethnic, and national distinctions. That explanation omits interpretation, or the capacity of individuals to take from cultural creations the Theoretically, Patterson was interested in signals, meanings, and practices that support her persistent patterns of power and domination actions as she navigates the social world. To through time, with Rome featuring as a key answer these questions, I will engage with the originary point for later ideas about slavery. If same empirical material mobilized by Beard and the case’s temporal remoteness seems beyond Harper and show that commemorative reach for comparative and historical sociologists, monuments offer a window onto an elusive Patterson demonstrates its relevance for aspect of a slave society: relations among the

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contemporary theory building. His analytical prominent in studies of collective honor. Such method is to treat each of his sixty­six cases as a texts, of course, also lend themselves to social system (a smaller set of which he labels interpretation (and, via sociological scholarship, slave societies), and to look within each system critical theoretical dissection). But what I’m for formal and informal mechanisms that getting at is a different kind of interpretation: of sustained the necessary arrangements of absolute slaves and ex­slaves and freeborn and masters domination. Social relations are central to these looking at the same funerary images and taking a arrangements. In insisting on this, Patterson range of signs and meanings for their own offers a form of longue durée analysis in which contributions to, and deductions from, collective underlying patterns and structures of slavery are honor. When it comes to Roman ex­slaves’ traced via specific social settings and historical perspectives and experiences, commemorative moments. I stress his methodological novelty, his art offer the closest we get to an unmediated own form of longue durée, because by breaking encounter with collective honorific gains, a with conventions of comparative and historical phenomenon that is itself exquisitely dependent sociology in the late 1970s and early 1980s, on semiotics and performance. Honorific status Patterson effectively anticipated two important is all about who sees you having a certain status developments in long­term historical analysis. and how your claims on status are interpreted These two strains of work are deep history and and accepted by other people. transtemporal history. The conception of antiquity for late modern society in Patterson’s With the empirical necessity of funerary art book deserves closer scrutiny for what it implies established, we need to consider their about how we, as sociologists, choose our cases, affordances for sociological theory: that works of but first it is important to explain the main art present us with diverse visual idioms and objectives with which deep and transtemporal non­linguistic codes, extending beyond Locke’s history are concerned. “compass of human understanding” and into the realm of sensation, perception, and feeling. For There are considerable methodological this reason, what we do with those idioms and challenges in trying to trace the long history of codes has direct implications for our theoretical collective honorific gain as an individual output. In commemorative art, subjects found a experience. As many other scholars have pointed resource for representation, specifically for out, when it comes to the study of slavery we social representation that “allowed ordinary have a historical record dominated by the voices people to participate in the competitive world of of the elite, with enslaved people’s experiences Roman society in which statues in public places buried in the stratigraphy. I don’t think that we honored magistrates and generals” (“D’Ambra can recover “voices” through artifactual and Métraux 2006: x). Although the presumption evidence, but I do think we can get at something underlying earlier work on commemorative art fundamental about collective honor if we look at was that it reinforced identities already the funerary art. There is a way of looking at constituted, more recent work by cultural such material that is an appendage to the sociologists has affirmed that this genre has a texts—as ornament or illustration of a point socially generative capacity, rather than (merely) propounded by the written word. More a reflective one (Wagner­Pacifici & Schwarz methodologically promising, on the other hand, 1991). Whether large­scale paintings of state is a critical semiotic approach that takes the ceremonies or mundane and everyday religious register of visual presentation as a fundamental icons, artworks do not simply hold up a mirror to aspect of social communication. There is a wider society, they galvanize people to think, act, and expressive and interpretive range in this register identify in particular ways (Zubrzycki 2013). In than in juridical texts, masters’ memoirs, or this way, we should understand visual evidence philosophical treatises, all three genres being as fully invested in the ground work of social

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action – constructing processes, we might call Wagner­Pacifici, Robin & Schwarz, Barry. 1991. them. Any semiotic reading will need to contend “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial: with the gritty business of viewership, of Commemorating a Difficult Past,” American everyday audiences looking at, thinking about, Journal of Sociology 97(2): 376­420. or just glancing at a distance the artworks that we tend to study with scrupulous attention. Zubrzycki, Geneviève. 2013. “Aesthetic Revolt and the Transformation of National Identity in Quebec, 1960­1969,” Theory and Society 42(5): 423­475. References Beard, Mary. 2012. Ex­slaves of Rome and From Slave Revolts to Social Death historians’ snobbery. Times Literary Supplement Renisa Mawani Feb. 29, 2012. https://www.the­ University of British Columbia tls.co.uk/articles/public/ex­slaves­of­rome­and­ historians­snobbery/ [Accessed 8/02/2018] Orlando Patterson’s intellectual contributions to the sociology of slavery and to comparative D’Ambra, Eve and Guy Métraux, eds. 2006. The historical sociology have been remarkable. His Art of Citizens, Soldiers and Freedmen in the meticulous archival research, sharp theoretical Roman World. BAR International Series. formulations, and the ease with which he moves Harper, Kyle. 2011. Slavery in the Late Roman between disciplines are equally impressive. World, AD 275­425. Cambridge: Cambridge Despite the breadth and scope of his work, University Press. however, most assessments of Patterson’s contributions center on Slavery and Social Patterson, Orlando. 1982. Slavery and Social Death. In this commentary, I place this book in Death. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University conversation with his earlier work on slavery in Press. Jamaica, a juxtaposition that may invite new questions while offering a greater appreciation Patterson, Orlando. 2017. Revisiting slavery, for the subtleties of Patterson’s arguments (1). property, and social death. In John Bodel and Walter Scheidel (eds.), On Human Bondage: Slavery and Social Death is a wide­ranging After Slavery and Social Death, pp. 265­296. global comparative survey of slavery across Wiley Blackwell. time, space, and continents. Published in 1982, Patterson’s objective was to provide a broad Patterson, Orlando and Xiaolin Zhou. 2018. synthesis and ask a series of questions as to Modern trafficking, slavery, and other forms of what, if anything, was universal about slavery. servitude. Annual Review of Sociology 44: 407­ Drawing from Marx, Weber, Hegel, and from 439. traditions in anthropology and history, Patterson offers a breathtaking examination of slavery in Reed, Isaac. 2013. Power: Relational, 66 slave­owning societies. Slavery and Social Discursive, and Performative Dimensions. Death is groundbreaking for many reasons, Sociological Theory 31(3). including its scope, reach, and argumentation. Reed, Isaac. Power in Modernity. Manuscript in Specifically, Patterson eschews conventional process. Refs. as of 2018. claims that property is the best way to study slavery, and focuses instead on its cultural and Scheidel, Walter. 2017. Violence and the History symbolic dimensions. He defines slavery as “the of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty­ permanent, violent domination of natally First Century. Princeton: Princeton University alienated and generally dishonored persons” (2). Press. Racism, Patterson argues, is what produced

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social death, a condition that “persisted long subjectivity, how can social death be read and after the abolition of individual property rights in dismissed as a “theoretical abstraction”? (8) persons, in the slave culture known as Jim How might social death take on new angles, Crow” (3). depths, and dimensions when situated within a longer arc of Patterson’s scholarship? Since its publication, Slavery and Social Death has inspired lively discussion in sociology and I beyond. Engagements with Patterson’s concept of social death have been folded into debates on Published in 1967, and based on his PhD structure and agency, domination and resistance, dissertation, The Sociology of Slavery, offers an and into discussions of what can be said of black impressive account of slavery in Jamaica, the lives, historically. For critics, social death serves place of Patterson’s birth. Drawing on three as a convenient shorthand, one that glosses the years of archival research, and weaving together myriad power relations through which slavery traditions in sociology, law, and history, was established as a social, political, and legal Patterson produces a stunning tapestry. The form (4). For others, Patterson’s formulations do Sociology of Slavery provides a detailed analysis not account for the rich and willful lives that of the slave plantocracy in Jamaica, the enslaved women and men imagined and carved demographics of enslaved communities, and the out from the most dire and unthinkable social institutions enslaved persons created. circumstances (5). “Jamaica was the plantocratic society par excellence,” Patterson writes (9). Yet, in nearly 300 years of racial and colonial violence, slaves "Since its publication, revolted in ways that were “passive,” “violent,” Slavery and Social Death has individual, and collective (10). By the 19th inspired lively discussion in century, Jamaica had the highest number of sociology and beyond." revolts in any slave­owning jurisdiction in the British Empire. To read Slavery and Social Death alongside The Sociology of Slavery and “Slavery and Slave There are always risks in extracting a single Revolts,” an article Patterson wrote on the first concept from a scholar’s intellectual production. Maroon war in Jamaica, invites a series of Critiques of social death, and there are many, questions. Why did Patterson move empirically become curious when we place them within a and conceptually from resistance and rebellion to longer trajectory of Patterson’s scholarship. social death? How could the slave, in his Much of his early work – including The account, be conceived as insubordinate, defiant, Sociology of Slavery, “Slavery and Slave and socially dead simultaneously? Working Revolts,” and Die the Long Day ­ was aimed at between the coercive power of the plantocracy documenting “the many complex ways in which and the willfulness of those enslaved, Patterson slaves related to each other and defied attempts assigns a legal doubleness to the slave. “Slavery to destroy their humanity through many has been legally defined as ‘the status or strategies of resistance from dissemblance to condition of persons over whom any or all of the outright subversion and rebellion” (6). Given powers attaching to the right of ownership are the biases of official archives, Patterson turned exercised,’” he explains. “What immediately his attention to literature: “In the absence of becomes apparent in any consideration of this historical records, one way to explore the inner legal status is the peculiarly dual nature of the lives of slaves is to exercise one’s literary slave. On the one hand he was the property of imagination” (7). In light of his concerns with another and was regarded as a disposable chattel.

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But it was impossible to deny that he was also a property with Patterson’s “peculiarly dual nature human being and the law had to be cognisant of of the slave”? What if ambiguity and uncertainty this fact in some way” (11). This dual status of are centered as features of law, ones that shaped the slave directs attention to Anglo law and the the status of personhood and property both processes by which it produces persons and historically and in the present day? Oceans and things (12). slave ships, I suggest in the final section, offer a critical reorientation through which to rethink the In the historiography on slavery, property has slave as person and property. Natal alienation, held a prominent explanatory force and is one of abstraction, and commodification were instituted the arguments that Patterson has challenged. In and defied aboard the slave ship and at sea (19). Slavery and Social Death, he argues that property “certainly has an important place in any II discussion of slavery…but it is no way one of the constituent elements” (13). To view “slavery The Sociology of Slavery begins with a only as the treatment of human beings as dedication to C.L.R. James, one of Patterson’s property,” he contends “fails as a definition since early inspirations. Like many Caribbean writers it does not really specify any distinct category of to follow, James was well aware of the ocean and persons” (14). In Patterson’s account, “there has its significance to the transatlantic slave trade never existed a slaveowning society, ancient or (20). “On the ships the slaves were packed in modern, that did not recognize the slave as a the hold on galleries one above the other,” he person in law” (15). But what he identifies as writes in the opening pages of The Black the “peculiarly dual nature of the slave” points to Jacobins. “Each was given only four or five feet law’s undecidability, its inability to fully in length and two or three feet in height, so that distinguish personhood from property, a point they could neither lie at full height nor sit that requires further consideration. upright.” The insurgencies “at the point of embarkation and on board were incessant, so that Several scholars have criticized Patterson’s the slaves had to be chained, right hand to left rejection of property as an explanation for leg, and attached in rows to long iron bars.” slavery. For David Lewis, the problem is a There was “no place on earth” that “concentrated definitional one. Patterson’s conception of so much misery as the hold of a slave­ship” (21). property, he argues, is “sui generis, and very different from the standard understanding of Since the publication of Slavery and Social property in modern legal theory” (16). Others Death, scholars of transatlantic slavery have have considered property in other registers. drawn critical attention to the middle passage as Cheryl Harris’s “Whiteness as Property” and a time­space in which humans were transformed Dylan Penningroth’s, The Claims of Kinfolk, into things. What is particularly useful in these offer two distinct examples (17). The problems accounts, is that permanent violence and with property as an explanation for slavery may domination, natal alienation, and dishonor – the have less to do with competing definitions and idioms that structure Patterson’s definition of more to do with the fact that definitions of slavery – were produced through practices of property guide these discussions in the first racial and seaborne terror, such as those place. Penningroth, for example, documents described by James. In a well­known passage in law’s limits in determining property. Some “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” Hortense enslaved people “owned property even while Spillers foregrounds the violence of the hold. they themselves were property,” he explains “Those African persons in ‘Middle Passage’ (18). were literally suspended in the ‘oceanic’…removed from the indigenous land What would it mean to begin a discussion of and culture, and not yet ‘American’ either, these

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captive persons, without names that their captors between property and personhood is legally would recognize, were in movement across the produced and dissolved. Law’s power rests in its Atlantic, but they were also nowhere at all” (22). magical ability to turn humans into things, and Captains identified ship owners, slaveholders, things into persons, a point that Patterson and investors in ledgers and account books. acknowledges, and is up to others to develop Africans, by contrast were “reduced to the stark (30). description of ‘negroeman,’ [sic], ‘negroe woman,’ or more frequently, ‘ditto man,’ ‘ditto Notes woman” (23). The most important maritime (1) Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: measurement was not the individual, but the A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard aggregate (24). But even as African captives University Press, 1982); The Sociology of were transformed from humans to cargo, Slavery: An Analysis of the Origins, shipping companies, and slave owners depended Development, and Structure of Negro Slave on the preservation of life, labour, and value. Society in Jamaica (London: Rutherford, Enslaved Africans were carefully inspected for Madison, Teaneck, Farleigh Dickinson physical strength and bodily health (25). University Press, 1967); “Slavery and Slave What Patterson identifies as the “peculiarly dual Revolts: A Socio­Historical Analysis of the First nature of the slave” was initiated aboard the Maroon War Jamaica, 1655­1740,” Social and slave ship and extended to the plantation and Economic Studies, 19(3), 1970: 289­325. beyond. In the absence of slave laws, British (2) Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 13. colonial judges relied on the British common law, commercial and maritime law to oversee the (3) Orlando Patterson, “Revisiting Slavery, transport and sale of African captives. This Property, and Social Death,” in John Bodel and assemblage of sea, ship, and slave was extended Walter Scheidel (eds.), On Human Bondage: to Britain’s American colonies and eventually After Slavery and Social Death (Malden: Wiley, inherited by an independent U.S. (26). Prior to 2017), 281. 1807, when Britain abolished the slave trade in its colonies, all laws governing American (4) Vincent Brown, “Social Death and Political involvement in transatlantic slavery focused on Life in the Study of Slavery,” American “ships, sailors, and investors” (27). The U.S. Historical Review, 114(5), 2009: 1233. Constitution defined a slave as three­fifths of a (5) There are differing perspectives on this. John person, but by the first half of the 19th century, Bodel argues that critiques of Patterson have the U.S. Supreme Court decided a series of cases been “misguided.” See John Bodel, “Death and that formally established the slave as property Social Death in Ancient Rome,” in John Bodel (28). British and American law cast the slave as and Walter Scheidel (eds.), On Human Bondage: person and property, a legal form that continues After Slavery and Social Death (Malden: Wiley, to endure in other ways. 2017), 83; Patterson, “Revisiting Slavery,” 285. The “peculiarly dual nature of the slave” that (6) Patterson, “Revisiting Slavery,” 285. Patterson identified in his early writings on Jamaica may not be peculiar at all. Rather, it is (7) Orlando Patterson, “Preface,” Slavery and an artifice of Anglo law, one that continues to Social Death: A Comparative Study. Second shape contemporary jurisprudence through the Edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, legal personhood of corporations and in the ship forthcoming), 2. as legal person (29). As legal artefacts, the slave, corporation, and ship demonstrate in (8) Brown, “Social Death and Political Life,” different ways, that the analytic opposition 1233.

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(9) Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery, 70. and Self­Making in Nineteenth­Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); (10) Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery, 260. Saidiya Hartman, Lose your Mother: A Journey (11) Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery, 72, my Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: emphasis. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008). (12) Colin Dayan, The Law is a White Dog: How (23) Philip, Zong!, 194. Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons (24) Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); A Middle Passage From Africa to American M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong! (Middleton: Diaspora (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Wesleyan University Press). 2007), 68. (13) Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 17. (25) Sowande M. Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea: (14) Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 21. Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016). (15) Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 22. (26) Paul Finkelman, “Slavery in the United (16) David M. Lewis, “Orlando Patterson, States: Persons or Property?” in Jean Allain Property, and Ancient Slavery: The Definitional (ed.), The Legal Understanding of Slavery: From Problem Revisited,” in John Bodel and Walter the Historical to the Contemporary (2012), 105­ Scheidel (eds.), On Human Bondage: After 134. Slavery and Social Death (Malden: Wiley, 2017), 43. (27) Finkelman, “Slavery in the United States,” 121. (17) Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review, 106(8), 1993: 1710­1791. (28) Finkelman, “Slavery in the United States.” At the same time the U.S. Supreme Court was (18) Dylan C. Penningroth, The Claims of deciding cases on the status of slaves, they were Kinfolk: African American Property and designating ships as legal persons. See Renisa Community in the Nineteenth­Century South Mawani, “Archival Legal History: Towards the (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, Ocean as Archive,” in Markus Dubber and 2003), 46. Christopher Tomlins (eds.), Oxford Handbook on Legal History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, (19) Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human 2018), 291­310. History (New York: Penguin, 2008). (29) Douglas Lind, ‘Pragmatism and (20) Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Anthropomorphism: Reconceiving the Doctrine Betsy Wang (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan of the Personality of the Ship’ U.S.F. Maritime Press, 2010); Derek Walcott, ‘The Sea is History’ Law Journal, (2009­2010) 22(1): 39­121; Renisa in Derek Walcott: Collected Poems, 1948– 1984 Mawani, Across Oceans of Law: The Komagata (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1986). Maru and Jurisdiction in the Time of Empire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), (21) C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins (New especially chapter 2. For a useful discussion of York: Vintage, 1938), 8. slavery, personhood, and property see Stephen (22) Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Best, The Fugitive’s Properties: Law and the Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Poetics of Possession (Chicago: University of Diacritics, 17(2), 1987, 72. See Saidiya Chicago Press, 2004). Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, (30) Dayan, The Law is a White Dog, 10 & 12.

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Patterson was a historian before becoming a Orlando Patterson: The First sociologist, and this leaves strong traces on his Postcolonial Historical Sociologist? work. His essay on the Morant Bay Rebellion George Steinmetz won the prize for the best essay based on University of Michigan archival research awarded by the Jamaica In addition to being a foundational historian and History Teachers Association in 1957. As a theorist of slavery and freedom, Orlando member of the first cohort of students at the new Patterson is one of the first postcolonial University of the West Indies, Patterson was sociologists, standing alongside figures such as channeled from history into sociology, somewhat Abdelmalek Sayad, Albert Memmi, and Frantz against his own wishes at the time. As he writes, Fanon. Patterson’s approach to historical it was a “foregone conclusion” for him that his sociology germinated in conditions completely sociology doctoral thesis at LSE would be a different from those of other American historical study of slavery in Jamaica, even if historical sociologists of his generation. The list of sociology as such didn’t exist at the time. His Patterson’s main influences overlap little with thesis was based on three years of archival work the standard references in American historical in British and Jamaican archives. As Patterson sociology. Starting in the 1960s, Patterson’s notes, there was nothing like this form of articles discuss James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon, historical sociology in British or US sociology at and the philosophy and poetry of the Negritude the time, nothing akin to the subfield that would movement, and his strongest literary influence come to be called Comparative and Historical was Albert Camus. Sociology. Patterson was forced to invent his own approach from scratch. Patterson is the author of three novels, The Children of Sisyphus (1964), An Absence of In his preface to the second edition of the Ruins (1967), and Die the Long Day (1973). His Slavery and Social Death, Patterson alludes to combination of fiction and sociological writing the mismatch between his work and the main is unparalleled. Patterson explains that writing lines of historical sociology in the United States Die the Long Day was necessary preparation for developing in the early 1980s. This book was writing Slavery and Social Death (1982), given published at a moment when American historical the paucity of evidence about the psychological sociology “took a sharp turn toward the study of subjectivity of slaves. Only by first reading the total societies, focusing on the state and novel and then the nonfictional historical collective actors … with the aim of uncovering sociology can we fully understand Patterson’s general causes of society­wide outcomes such as argument in Slavery and Social Death and revolutions,” he recalls, then observing that his Freedom in the Making of Western Culture approach was “completely out of sync with these (1991). Reading the novel and the sociological developments,” especially in its emphasis on the text together avoids common misreadings, such relational and institutional levels of sociocultural as the ideas that Patterson ignores resistance or structures and its orientation toward “the early downplays internal relations among slaves, or (rather than the later) Marx and, even more, that he overlooks intermediate roles between Durkheim, his nephew Marcel Mauss, Weber’s master and slave such as that of the freedmen. historical works, especially on religion,” and the The revolutionary epistemological idea of “classic works of comparative slavery” by Moses connecting fiction and social science was only Finley and others. Patterson was also explicitly promoted by a small number of sociologists such focused on culture. This approach, he writes, was as Michel Leiris, Jean Duvignaud, and Albert “at variance with developments in historical Memmi. Patterson was an acquaintance of sociology which, until recently, virtually George Lamming and other Caribbean writers discarded this foundational construct of the and intellectuals, both in Jamaica and in Britain. discipline.”

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Patterson’s work was shaped by the personal contribution here, Patterson’s analysis of the experience of colonialism and the legacy of emergence of the tripartite construct of freedom slavery. As Patterson writes, “slavery lingered” does not provide “confirmation of universality” in language in Jamaica: “as children we so much as “proof of historical particularity in described the dreaded postholiday return to the precise socio­political circumstances of the school and its whip­happy teachers as ʻour free later Athenian empire that created the right paper burn,ʼ a reference to the manumission alchemy for this trichordal concept of freedom to certificate of freed slaves during slavery.” His develop.” This insistence on particularity is the induction into sociology began at the University hallmark of most historiography, and it was a of the West Indies in Mona outside Kingston, watchword of the entire generation of German when Jamaica was still a British colony. British historical sociologists in the wake of Weber, who postwar sociology, including ethnography, embraced an epistemology that combines community studies, and the sociology of explanation with attentiveness to the singularity immigration and race relations, were invented in (Rickert) and fluid processualism (Dilthey) of the colonies and imported back to the metropole. social life. Patterson’s approach is compatible British historical sociology, by contrast, had a with this broadly historicist tradition, and with metropolitan, Northern, and global­western the critical realist philosophy of social science, focus. Before moving to the US in 1970, which combines understanding or interpretation Patterson was the major exception to this rule. with explanation, and sees the latter as typically involving contingent concatenations of causes. In his 1995 interview Patterson elaborated on his critical epistemology. First, he notes that in Patterson’s work also raises the question as to American sociology there “aren't many notable why the US sociology discipline has largely models for a Black or Mexican American or ignored slavery. As Patterson pointed out in his Puerto Rican trying to come to terms about his or response to the 2018 ASA panel, this refusal to her particular experience,” and that the engage with slavery is especially surprising in a development of these models is hindered by the discipline that seems to be preoccupied with “positivistic effort to create sciences of the injustice, oppression, and inequality. Lest we human experience.” Patterson contrasts this jump to the conclusion that the avoidance of current atmosphere with the “sixties and slavery is a feature of American social science seventies,” which was a “mini golden period of and humanities in general we need only look to minority people really moving toward history, anthropology, or English departments for intellectual life and intellectual reflection.” This counterevidence. There is something specific was an epistemological “golden age,” he about sociology that makes it avoid slavery. suggests, since the “whole school of critical Sociologists tend to perceive slavery, like theory was a form of reflection” on “particular colonialism and empire, as belonging to the past, crises” which “didn't involve so vast a leap from and as therefore lying outside their discipline’s the particular to the incomprehensibly general.” ontological turf. But even if sociology is defined Patterson concludes his 1995 interview with the as the science of the present, we need to “need for a return to a critique of positivism” and recognize that “the present is not the temporal remarks that sociology at the time was “going present, it is what is still sufficiently alive to be through an interesting phase … in the sense that the object of struggles,” as Bourdieu insisted. there is dissatisfaction with the deadening sort of Orlando Patterson teaches us that slavery is alive positivism of earlier years.” in its renewed forms and its lasting effects, and that these effects counterintuitively include Patterson’s foundational Freedom in the Making freedom itself. of Western Culture (1991) strongly exemplifies this anti­positivism. As John Bodel notes in his

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Notes 2014. (1) Although Fanon was trained as a psychiatrist, (8) Patterson, “Preface, 2018,” xi. he taught the first cohort of Tunisian sociology students at Tunis in 1960, and his writing in the (9) Ibid., xi. second half of the 1960s was increasingly (10) Ibid., vii. sociological. George Steinmetz, “Sociology and Colonialism in the British and French Empires, (11) George Steinmetz, “A Child of the Empire: 1945­1965,” Journal of Modern History 89:3 British Sociology and Colonialism, 1940s­ (2017), 601­648. 1960s,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 49:4 (2013), 353­378 (2) See especially David Scott, “The Paradox of Freedom: An Interview with Orlando Patterson,” (12) Williams, “Orlando Patterson Interview.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 17:40 (2013), 96­242; Richard Williams, (13) Patterson, Freedom in the Making of “Orlando Patterson Interview,” Sociological Western Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1991). Forum 10:4 (1995), 653­671; Donette Francis, “Cosmopolitan Patriots: West Indian (14) John Bodel, “Ancient Slavery and Modern Intellectuals Between Home and Metropole” Ideologies: Orlando Patterson and M. I. Finley (Ph.D. thesis, New York University, 2001). among the Dons” (my emphasis). (3) Orlando Patterson, “Baldwin as Stylist and (15) Frederick C. Beiser, The German Historicist Moralist: Critical Assessment of the Essays of Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, James Baldwin,” New Left Review No. 26 2011). (Summer 1964), 31­38; “Twilight of a Dark (16) Pierre Bourdieu, “The Sociologist’s Craft,” Myth: Assessment of the Social Philosophy and in Pierre Bourdieu and Roger Chartier, The Poetry of Negritude,” The Times Literary Sociologist and the Historian (Cambridge: Polity Supplement (Special Commonwealth Edition), Press, 2015), 16. No. 3316 (Sept. 16, 1965), 805­806; “Frantz Fanon. My Hope and Hero,” New World 2:3­4 (1966), 93­95. American Sociology's Denial of (4) See Albert Memmi, La statue de sel: roman Slavery (Paris: Corrêa, 1953); Agar (Paris: Corrêa, Orlando Patterson 1955); Portrait du colonisé, précédé du Portrait Harvard University du colonisateur (Paris: Corrêa, 1957); on Memmi as writer and sociologist, see Jeanyves I. Introduction Guérin, ed., Albert Memmi, écrivain et Consider the following six observations: sociologue: actes du colloque de Paris X­ Nanterre, 15 et 16 mai 1988 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1. Slavery is one of the most foundational 1990). institutions in the history of the West (1). (5) Scott, “The Paradox of Freedom,” 118. 2. Of all western societies, the United States has been most profoundly influenced by slavery, (6) “Preface, 2018,” in Patterson, Slavery and economically, socially, politically and culturally, Social Death, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Harvard its centrality recently re­emphasized by Jill University Press, 2018), viii. Laporte (2) in her widely praised history of the (7) Interview by the author with Orlando nation. Patterson, Cambridge, Mass., November 21,

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3. One of, if not the most important social Race, let me hasten to add, has little to do with problem in the US today is the persistence of this strange disciplinary aversion. American racial inequality and chronic racism, exacerbated sociologists of all ethnicities share this strange in recent years with an openly racist president disciplinary blindness to slavery. riding the backlash against the nation’s first black president. The remainder of this note briefly expands on these preliminary observations. 4. It is generally agreed that this problem originated in the nation’s long history of slavery II. The Historical Significance of Slavery and the succeeding neo­slavery of Jim Crow. For It is becoming increasingly evident to historians this reason, academic work on slavery is that slavery was one of the foundational flourishing in history, economics and all but one institutions of western civilization. Not only did of the other social sciences (3). the institution play a critical role in the Greco­ 5. Sociology is the academic discipline that is Roman origin of the West, but at all the most involved with the problem of race and subsequent high points of its development. Long inequality. And yet, paradoxically, sociology is resisted by classical historians, a turning­point the discipline least concerned with the subject of came in the 1960s with the work of the great slavery, a neglect that verges on contempt. classical scholar and historical sociologist Sir Works on slavery rarely, if ever, appear in the Moses Finley (8). It is now the established view pages of its leading journals. Graduate students that the answer to the title of his famous essay, steer clear of the subject. Other than myself, a “Was Greek Civilization Based on Slave Labor?” Jamaican, I know of only four professional is a resounding “yes!” Not only was slavery sociologists who currently work either directly essential to all aspects of the Athenian economy, or indirectly on American slavery (including the but important too for the rise of freedom as neo­slavery period) and its consequences or the central value and the attendant emergence of role of slavery in the development of capitalism: democracy. Martin Ruef (4), Chris Muller and Deirdre Slavery rose to even greater importance in all Bloome (5), and John Clegg (6), an Englishman, periods of Roman history, from the era of the which means that only three current American Twelve Tables right down to the collapse of the born sociologists have found the subject of Western empire in the late fifth century, and American slavery worthy of study. The Berkeley remained important in Byzantium down to its sociologist Loic Wacquant certainly takes the demise in 1453. Slavery permeated all aspects of subject of American slavery seriously, but he too Rome except its military—its economy, is a foreigner, from France. So does George bureaucracy, educational system, popular and Steinmetz although his focus is on colonial and elite culture, and religion (9). post­colonial studies. It is noteworthy that the great sociologist, W.E.B. Du Bois’ foundational It was within the context of Roman slave society role in the discipline was, until very recently, that emerged the institution that was later to shamefully neglected, along with his dominate and fashion Western civilization, monumental work of historical sociology, Black Christianity, which was not only critically Reconstruction in America, 1860­1880 published dependent on slaves and freedmen in its in 1935, one of the most important studies in the formation, but was profoundly influenced in its historical sociology of slavery and its afterlife. theology by the metaphor of slavery, Pauline This neglect has, at last, begun to change thanks Christological soteriology being largely an in good part to the work of Aldon Morris and a introjection of the experience of manumission younger generation of scholars (7). from the social death of slavery, Jesus’ crucifixion being symbolically reinterpreted as

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the redemption fee (from Latin redemptio: to post­juridical system of slavery known as Jim purchase out of slavery) paid for Cristian rebirth Crow which Du Bois long ago showed to be into spiritual freedom. slavery by another name. This system formally came to an end only with the dismantlement of Early medieval Europe is no longer a dark age, Jim Crow laws in 1965. The permeation of its history lit up by remarkable methodological slavery in American history, society and culture advances in the new science of the human past was therefore deep, broad, foundational and (10). Wherever that light shines we find the lasting. American historical sociology is also brutal face of slavery: Carolinian Europe, completely in the dark about these fundamental Norman England, 11th century Ireland, and the developments. rise of the late medieval city states. The slave trade was a major economic source for several of Why then the resounding silence of sociology, the great renaissance states, especially Genoa compounded by its deliberate academic and Venice , the latter running large slave banishment of the few who have dared to study plantations producing sugar in the Mediterranean the institution of slavery and its persisting islands which were the models for the slave lineaments? systems that later emerged in the New World. Even where, as in Renaissance Florence, slavery III. The silence of the sociological clan was of only domestic significance it nonetheless First, it is important to note that this neglect and loomed large in the consciousness and thought of censorship of the subject is true only of elite Florentines, as I have recently argued (11). American sociologists. In Europe the study of The rise of the modern West, based on the slavery has long been taken very seriously. One Atlantic system, was largely made possible by of my mentors, C.L.R James, the great the enslavement and sustained holocaust of 12 Caribbean Marxist counterpart and contemporary million Africans. Early capitalism depended of DuBois, holds a revered place among British heavily on the profits of the slave trade and New and French sociologists, his classic work, The world sugar plantation slavery; later industrial Black Jacobins (1938) on the Haitian slave capitalism, right down to the latter half of the revolt and its imbrication with the French 19th century was integrally involved with slave Revolution, being still widely cited and taught. produced cotton (12). It is remarkable that grand This is especially true, though not confined to, historical sociology, though largely preoccupied Marxist and neo­Marxian sociologists in view of with the rise of modern Europe, almost the importance Marx attributed to slavery and completely missed the mark in regard to the the slave mode of production in his own centrality of slavery in its development, in sharp historical sociology. It is reflected in the works contrast with European historical sociologists. of historical sociologists such as Keith Hopkins (my former colleague in sociology at the London Slavery in the U.S. it is increasingly established, School of Economics, later professor of ancient was critical not only for the development of its history at Cambridge University), Perry economy. The institution was also a vital factor Anderson and Robin Blackburn. My own works in the rise of American democracy. It shaped the on slavery have received far greater attention in character of freedom as central value in America, Europe than in America, starting with my first defined blacks as the permanent internal book, The Sociology of Slavery in Jamaica. It is outsiders, an inferior race whose blackness striking that, when it was first published in 1967, defined whiteness as a unifying cultural force although written by a then relatively unknown (13). What ended in 1865 was individual, legally young scholar just out of graduate school, the based slavery. After the radical interlude of work was widely reviewed in both the academic Reconstruction, it was followed by the collective and mass circulation British press, including a

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favorable one by the eminent British historian, and fashions in sociology. Up to the 1960s Eric Hobsbawm, in the Manchester Guardian. slavery was, indeed, considered an essential Very few American sociologists read, or even factor in explaining racism and the plight of know of the existence of The Sociology of black Americans. DuBois was in no doubt that Slavery. So it is hardly surprising, though the African­American “home was destroyed by galling, that several American scholars have slavery” (15). His work was still influential and criticized me for not doing what I was among the black sociologists such as E. Franklin Frazier first post­colonial scholars of any discipline to and Kenneth Clark as well as white scholars took do: write a detailed, archival­ based study of the the subject seriously in their work, as did Gunnar lived experience of slaves: their social and Myrdal in his influential magnum opus, An cultural lives, psychological reactions, hopes, American Dilemma. This all came to a fears, and widespread resistance. screeching academic halt with the now notorious leaked pamphlet by Daniel Patrick Moynihan So why have American sociologists, in spite of who did no more than summarize what was then their deep engagement with the problem of common knowledge: that slavery had a racism and racial inequality disdained the study devastating impact on blacks both externally in of slavery? One reason is disciplinary its generation of racism, Jim Crow and parochialism: plain ignorance of developments segregation, and internally in its effects on black in ancient, modern and economic history, marital and familial relations. Nor was his including that of America, and of the remarkable language, which we now cringe at, any different new methodological breakthroughs that are from that used by sociologist, black and white, at revolutionizing our knowledge of the past. the time. This was the heyday of functionalism and terms such as “deviance,” “dysfunction,” “pathology” were commonly invoked by both white and black sociologists and policy "So why have American advocates on both the right and the left when sociologists, in spite of their describing problems of the lower classes of all deep engagement with the ethnicities. However, the document came at the problem of racism ... disdained wrong time and was written by the wrong person the study of slavery?" (only a year earlier the black sociologist Kenneth Clark, whose work played a critical role in the Closely related is what George Steinmetz has Supreme Court’s outlawing of school recently called the “pervasive presentism of segregation, had used exactly similar terms in his American sociology,” reflected in the temporal book Dark Ghetto). The intellectual tide, and regional parochialism of the papers however, had suddenly turned sharply away from published in the discipline’s leading journals, the Parsonian functionalism, and from historical and vast majority of which “usually do not indicate cultural explanations of social life. To complicate any era, period, or time frame, and are written in matters, Oscar Lewis’ culture of poverty theory, the sociological present tense,” which “conveys first published in 1959, which had initially an image of the social world as being governed gained currency, was by the mid­sixties being by unchanging universal laws and logics of denounced , along with Moynihan, as academic necessity ... the message is that the present is the attempts to blame the victim. (It is worth noting same as the past, or that the past is simply not that Lewis was a Marxist anthropologist who interesting” (14) died while working in revolutionary Cuba, in violation of American laws). Thus culture An important further reason is that slavery became suspect among sociologists and the became entangled with changing ideological fads subject was largely dropped from sociological work on race and poverty from the mid­sixties to

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its revival, on strictly enforced academic norms historiography, as one skeptic has noted, was to that excludes it as an explanatory factor in the write the role of the slavemaster and the sexual study of race. horrors of slavery, the double burden of female slaves as overworked laborers and rape victims, Alas, the study of slavery became smeared clean out of the accounts of Southern slavery. through a kind of intellectual guilt by association Nonetheless, it fitted squarely with the sharp among sociologists, especially in light of structural, anti­cultural turn in the sociology of Moynihan’s rather heavy­handed attribution of black life and poverty. Every sociologist of race black familial “pathology” to the direct effects of now assumed that there was no need to consider slavery without sufficient consideration of the slavery in the study of race and poverty; to the nuances of continuity and the importance of contrary, any such consideration immediately interacting structural forces. This banishment of raised suspicion and the risk of being flattened slavery from the explanatory tool­kit of with the trigger ready charge: blaming the sociologists was reinforced by parallel victim. One sociologist, Frank Furstenberg Jr., developments among historians studying slavery after peeking into the new historiography, during this period. Partly motivated by the confidently informed the sociological uproar over the Moynihan report, historians went community that slavery had nothing to do with on a massive revision of the, until then, common the high rate of single parenting among the black view that slavery had devastating consequences poor. It was all about the present urban for black life. Very soon a new romanticized experience. It took a professional historian, orthodoxy emerged that emphasized the Steve Ruggles, to demolish this presentist wondrous ways in which black slaves, in spite of misstatement (17). Happily, two excellent young two and a half centuries of enslavement, the last sociologists, Deirdre Bloome and Chris Muller, 50 of which saw the brutal separation of couples have finally awakened the discipline to the from each other and of parents from their centrality of history for any understanding of the children, and the inhuman breeding of black black family (18). bodies to meet the demands of the internal slave trade from the Old South to the new cotton belt It is very likely that this view of the irrelevance (a subject on which Du Bois wrote forcefully), of slavery carried over to the generation of nonetheless created harmonious communities scholars who ushered in the new wave of what on the slave plantation sustained by nuclear, god­ John Goldthorpe has called “grand historical fearing families that rivaled modern suburban sociology” that emerged in the mid­to late families in their stability and loving unity. The seventies and early eighties, led by the scholars black historian John Blassingame’s text, The such as Theda Skocpol, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Slave Community, (1972) became a best seller. Peter B. Evans, Fred Bloc, Margaret Somers and Among white historians, Herbert Gutman’s work others, under the inspiration of Barrington on the Black Family in Slavery and Freedom Moore’s seminal book, The Social Origins of (1976) became the locus classicus for those Dictatorship and Democracy. Their manifesto, seeking support for the view that slavery left the Vision and Method in Historical Sociology, black family unscathed. Indeed Gutman left a edited by Skocpol, was published in 1984, two portrait of black slave women as models of years after Slavery and Social Death, seventeen Victorian primness. Fogel and Engerman’s Time years after The Sociology of Slavery, and I was on the Cross (1974) although pathbreaking in its immediately left in no doubt about the fate of cliometric methodology and macroeconomic slavery, not to mention my own works, in this reinterpretation of the capitalistic nature of then hot new school of American historical Southern slavery, also reinforced the view that sociology. On the rare occasion when the subject slavery was non­destructive of the social lives of was mentioned, as in Wallenstein’s first volume the slaves. The unintended effect of this new on The Modern World System, it was from

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40,000 theoretical feet above the slow­motion the Jamaican working classes the favored male genocidal horrors and grounded sociological synonyms for fucking with a woman is to “beat” terrain in which I worked—one mode of labor and to “lash” her. In the ghettos of America production, along with East European serfdom “running train” (gang­raping) on young girls is and Western wage labor, in the magnificent the height of masculinity. In Jamaica over 80 emergence of the modern world system. My own percent of children are being brought up by intellectual trajectory was completely at variance impoverished women. In America it is over 70 with this “grand” new vision. Slavery and Social percent and rising. Bourgeois historians and Death was, of course, a very comparative work. sociologists cannot bear to face such horrors of But there all similarity ended, substantively, self­injury. Instead we are presented with the methodologically and theoretically, as George romantic ennobling of the slave condition in Steinmetz points out in his contribution to this which slavery is reinterpreted as a mere volume. “predicament” nobly negotiated by the slave. I kid you not (20). Sociologists observe the The fundamental issue at stake here is the homicidal, sexual and familial tragedies in the misguided failure of sociologists, both those who ghettos of Kingston, Montego Bay, Maryland work on present problems and historically and Chicago, and proclaim that it is only oriented ones, to recognize one of the most tragic structural and external. It is indeed structural. complexities of oppression. This is the fact that Monstrously so. But history matters, as does oppression works both externally and internally, culture, the mouth of history’s flow, which a commonplace among European Marxist and interactively bears down on the oppressed, both non­Marxist scholars such as Paul Willis (19). If externally and internally, like a disgorging a person is brutally abused as a child, the injuries amazon. linger not only in the scars on her flesh and the persisting presence of her abusers, but in the psychological wounds that often result in her own self­inflicted cuttings and suicidal urges. Notes What is true of individuals holds equally for (1) See Thomas Piketty, (2014) Capital in the groups. If a people is brutally oppressed for Twenty­First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard several centuries, it is inevitable that their hurt, University Press), 158­163; Orlando Patterson, their rage and degradation are partly turned on (1991) Freedom n the Making of Western Culture themselves, in the tendency of those with some (New York: Basic Books). little power to turn upon those even more vulnerable. The abuse of children by their (2) Jill Lepore (2018) These Truths: A History of parents which I observed every day in my the United States (New York: W.W. Norton & fieldwork among the slum­dwellers of Kingston, Co). and experienced myself from my sadistic teachers at elementary school in rural, colonial (3) These are too numerous to mention, but see Jamaica, are direct reflections of a system in Sven Beckert (2015), Empire of Cotton: A which for centuries the lash was the primary Global History (Vintage); Walter Johnson, motivation to work. The daily degradation that (2017) River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and men experience, under slavery, in the post­ Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge,MA; emancipation canefields, as yard­boys and fast­ Harvard University Press); Edward Baptist food workers in the post­colonial and post­ (2016), The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery industrial economies, inevitably corrodes to a and the Making of American Capitalism (New perverse masculinity in which men assuage their York: Basic Books); Seth Rockman (2009) socio­economic impotence through the physical Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery and Survival and sexual abuse of women and children. Among in Early Baltimore (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins)

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J.Inikori, S. Engerman, eds. (1992) The Atlantic Oxford Handbook of Freedom, D. Schmidtz and Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies and C. Pavel, eds. (New York: Oxford University Peoples in Africa, The Americas and Europe Press). (Duke University Press). (12) Eric Williams (1944/1994) Capitalism and (4) Martin Ruef (2014), Between Slavery and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Capitalism: The Legacy of Emancipation in the Carolina Press); Kenneth Morgan, Slavery, American South (Princeton: Princeton University Atlantic Trade and the British Economy, 1660­ Press). 1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press); Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson & James (5) Deirdre Bloome1 & Christopher Muller Robinson, (2005) “The Rise of Europe: Atlantic (2015) “Tenancy and African American Marriage Trade, Institutional Change and Economic in the Postbellum South,” Demography (2015) Growth,” The American Economic Review, 52: 1409–1430. 95(3): 5436­579. See also endnote 3 above. (6) John J. Clegg, “Credit Market Discipline and (13) Edmund Morgan (2003) American Slavery, Capitalist Slavery in Antebellum South American Freedom (New York: W.W. Norton). Carolina,” Social Science History, Volume 42, Issue 2 Summer 2018, pp. 343­376. (14) George Steinmetz, “Arguments for a Comparative and Historical Sociology Section of (7) Aldon Morris, The Scholar Denied: W.E.B. the ASA,” Trajectories: Newsletter of the ASA DuBois and the Birth of Modern Sociology Comparative and Historical Sociology Section, (Berkeley: University of California Press). A Vol. 29, No.3, Spring 2018. conference celebrating the foundational role of DuBois in sociology, inspired by Morris’ book, (15) W.E.B DuBois (1899/1967) The was recently held at Harvard, organized by Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (New York: graduate students in sociology: Scholarship Schocken Books): p.196. Above the Veil: A Sesquicentennial Symposium Honoring W.E.B DuBois, October 25­27, 2018. (16) Frank F. Furstenberg Jr., Theodore See also Christopher Muller. 2015. ”Politics and Hershberg, John Modell (1975) “The Origins of Science in the Work of W. E. B. Du Bois,” the Female­headed Black Family: The Impact of European Journal of Sociology 56: 407­412. the Urban Experience,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 6(2): 211­233. (8) M.I. Finley (1999) The Ancient Economy (Berkeley: University of California Press). (17) Steve Ruggles, “The Origins of the African­ American Family Structure,” American (9) Walter Scheidel, ed. (2012) The Cambridge Sociological Review 59(1):136­151. Companion to the Roman Economy (New York: Cambridge University Press); K.R. Bradley (18) Deirdre Bloome & Christopher Muller, (1987) Slaves and Masters in the Roman Empire (2015) “Tenancy and African American Marriage (New York: Oxford University Press). in the Postbellum South,” Demography (2015) 52:1409–1430. (10) Michael McCormick (2002) Origins of the European Economy: Communications and (19) Paul Willis (1981) Learning to Labor: How Commerce, AD 300­900 (New York: Cambridge Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs University Press). (New York: Columbia University Press). (11) Orlando Patterson (2018) “Freedom, (20) See Vincent Brown, “Social Death and Slavery, and Identity in Renaissance Florence: Political Life in the Study of Slavery,” American The Faces of Leon Battista Alberti,” in The Historical Review 114 (2009): 1231–1249.

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Conference Report

Between Declension and Nostalgia Bringing a Comparative Historical Gaze to the Logics and Lived Experiences of the American Rust Belt

Photo Credit: Jschnalzer (Wikimedia Commons, CC) Introduction Amanda McMillan Lequieu The day after the 2016 election, sociologists University of Wisconsin-Madison faced an “acute existential crisis,” according to then­ASA president Michele Lamont. Somehow, Josh Pacewicz Brown University a group of people committed to tracing and defining the social problems of inequality, This article summarizes the ASA 2018 panel of human capital, and economic transformation the same title, which featured the two authors underestimated the systemic frustration, as well as Shannon Elibath Bell (Virginia Tech) dislocation, and consequential political foment of and Colin Jerolmack (New York University). working­class America. Lamont (2016) suggested that the results of the presidential election might “be interpreted as an expression of the white working class’s parallel move to

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assert its worth as a group that perceives itself as Appalachian coalfield residents quiescent in the playing by the rules while others “cut in line”” face of increasing environmental and public (citing Hochschild 2016), and evidence of a health threats posed by mountaintop removal growing “recognition gap” between liberal, mining and other coal industry practices. Colin coastal elites and the once­middle­class residents Jerolmack (New York University) offered a of marginalized America. contemporary case of community acceptance of natural resource extraction in the case of Any existential crisis was not for lack of existing fracking in northern Pennsylvania. Amanda scholarly research on the repercussions of the McMillan Lequieu (University of Wisconsin) ‘rusting’ of America’s industrial corridors in the analyzed the long­term consequences of the late 20th century. Indeed, sociologists have long evaporation of the steel commodity chain from analyzed the sudden decline of career both extractive and manufacturing communities employment for blue­collar workers in the in the upper Midwest. And Josh Pacewicz industrial sector (e.g. High 2003; Dudley 1994) (Brown University) traced the process of and the consequential rise of “precarious work” political reorganization required by in the late 20th and early 21st centuries (e.g. manufacturing decline in two small cities in Kalleberg 2009; Paret 2016), and a new Iowa. Individually, and then in an extended generation of ethnographies offer windows into period of moderated discussion, these studies the personal devastation wrought by explored the synergies and differences between unemployment, outmigration, and cultural recognition gaps among former workers, marginalization in the wake of community­scale property owners, and community members in transformations of employment (e.g. Hochschild cases across rural and urban contexts and 2016; Broughton 2015). Rather, it was the extractive or manufacturing industries. persistence, prevalence, and political implications of emotions linked with economic From these four distinct studies emerged two loss, disenfranchisement, racial anxieties, and/or themes of particular interest to sociologists of cultural alienation in certain segments of comparative historical sociology. First, we working­class America that gave sociologists discuss the ways in which economic processes pause. shape non­economic, social relations. After all, people and their places often outlive economic An invited session at ASA 2018 aimed to address development or disaster. Second, we contend that these puzzles of contemporary industrial and thinking historically about the relationship post­industrial America. The Special Session, between place and economy helps us understand entitled “Between Declension and Nostalgia: how long­term residents of both past and current The Logics and Lived Experiences of Politics, industrial communities conceptualize blame and Culture, and Economics in the American Rust responsibility. In the remainder of this essay, we Belt,” moderated by Michael M. Bell (University expand these two theoretical frameworks for of Wisconsin­Madison) brought into understanding contemporary political economies conversation four contemporary cases of post­ and political praxes of the American Rust Belt, industrial and re­industrializing extractive and and then draw from our individual studies to manufacturing communities. These papers illustrate our contributions. probed the complexities of individual and corporate experiences of how past and current The Place of Historical Capitalism economic relationships shape political engagement, cultural expectations, and First, the processes of capitalism not only take narratives of blame. Shannon Elizabeth Bell place; they make place. A central tenant of (Virginia Tech) argued how certain historical comparative historical analysis is that social events and processes have kept many Central objects are shaped by their genesis, as Steinmetz

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(2017) argued. Each case study in this Special those commodities are created or altered, those Session exemplified how past expressions of lines of connection to other parts of the world economic power continue to shape contemporary shape place and its social worlds. However, that social life. meaningful bundle of identities, social connections, and memories that make up place Place is space filled with the social stuff of does not disappear when economic connections life—a geographical location imbued with transform. Put otherwise, place—that economic histories, social relationships, and constellation “of material things that occupy a cultural landmarks. Place is constituted not only particular segment of space and have sets of by what is internal to it, but by its distinct lines meanings attached to them” by social actors of connection to other parts of the world (Cresswell 2008, p.135)—and its power (Massey 1995; Castells 1989). How much more structures often outlive the economic moment so in natural resource extraction and that granted the genesis of both. manufacturing industries. In much of the American industrial corridor, places were or are The four case studies central to this special connected to other places because of what they session highlighted two types of historical offer economically. The process of expressions of capitalism in the American commodification of land, labor, and the raw and extraction and manufacture. First, in the cases of manufactured materials creates markets, midwestern manufacture and extraction, since infrastructures, and identity discourses that span the social worlds of community life were imagined boundaries of rural and urban, past and originally organized around the life of a single present. industry, the death of that anchor industry threw the logics of quotidian life into question. Second, Herein lies an irony central to capitalism: for the Central Appalachian and Mid­Atlantic cases communities established primarily as sites of highlighted how patterns and perceptions of land labor, the stability of social life relied on the tenure informed how residents rationalized continued mobility of commodities. Natural contemporary environmentally and economically resources extraction is place­based, for instance, risky industries. while the commodification of that resource requires mobility. Minerals and metals are fixed in place in the earth, rendering their extraction and economic valuation reliant on the material and symbolic processes of commodification. “Herein lies an irony central to Mining requires the commodification, and thus, capitalism: for communities portability of resources located only in one established primarily as sites specific place. At the same time, the extraction, of labor, the stability of social transportation, and processing of those life relied on the continued commodities require the stabilization of labor, mobility of commodities.” markets, and nature across extractive and manufacturing nodes of commodity chains. These components of industry “configure differently in site­ and time­specific forms, [and] interact with economics and politics as locally In McMillan Lequieu’s research along the now­ and temporally specific activities of society” defunct iron and steel commodity chain in the (Bunker & Ciccantell 2005, p. 7). Thus, the American Midwest, the formation of identities of politics of selling commodities requires both self and group—while certainly inflected by place and portability, both motion and moorings race, gender, age—were first and foremost (McMillan Lequieu 2017). When the routes of situated within a deeply capitalistic context. In

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both rural and urban cases (northern Wisconsin conflicts (Pacewicz 2016). He argued that people and southeast Chicago), pre­industrial established reliable and relatively moderate landscapes were marked more by forests and political party identification by using daily life as marshlands, respectively, than by houses and a guide; indeed, older residents still describe roads. Thus, late 19th and early 20th century their neighborhoods, former jobs, or even ways companies played the role of employer, of spending leisure time as inherently community planner, and government. From Republican or Democratic. Pacewicz’s study constructing company houses, to investing in illuminates how the Rust Belt’s economic transportation infrastructure, to providing health transformation promoted the street­level care, pensions, and pseudo­unions, iron and steel disintegration of traditional party politics. With companies materially and symbolically key community leaders inactive in party politics, constructed laborer communities as sites the two parties became disembedded from centered around the continued success of the community governance. The two parties, and firm. Interviews suggested that the legacy of particularly the GOP, fell into the hand of historical relationships continues to shape the activists fixated on wedge issues. In the 1980s, narratives of past and present in Wisconsin and corporate mergers thinned the ranks of Chicago. Because iron and steel companies traditional elites and focused remaining leaders’ offered social structures as well as attention on nonpartisan efforts to woo outside infrastructures, contemporary interviewees investment. From the ground up, politics became —many of whose parents or grandparents had divorced from economic and civic institutions migrated to these rural or urban site as iron and and embedded instead within a public sphere that steelworkers—admire the beneficence of alternatively promotes political apathy and industrial companies to this day. “The mines amplifies reactionary voices. were so good with the people,” as one rural interviewee said (McMillan Lequieu 2017). Shannon Elizabeth Bell called for greater Thus, iron and steel companies making place attention to the historical and ideological roots of meant that company closure wasn’t just about local support for environmentally destructive the loss of good jobs and subsequent economic industries. In her recent book, Fighting King depression—although those problems also Coal: The Challenges to Micromobilization in loomed large in interviews. The closure of an Central Appalachia (MIT Press, 2016), Bell anchor company signified a fundamental shift in explores the question of why, in the face of the way both work and home were experienced widespread environmental and public health in these communities. harms and a more than five­fold decline in coal­ mining jobs, so few coalfield residents join Similarly, Pacewicz demonstrated how mid­20th environmental justice organizations seeking to Century urban production economies once hold the coal industry accountable and bring structured both community relations and about a “just transition” in Central Appalachia. residents’ understandings of civic and political Part of the answer, she argues, lies in participation. In the two cities in Iowa central to understanding the influence of certain historical his study, large, locally­owned industries enabled events and processes that have shaped people’s a class of business and labor leaders who were lives and constrained their willingness to speak simultaneously engaged in civic groups, local out against the coal industry. The widespread politics, and grassroots organizations for both outmigration that began in the 1950s and political parties. This arrangement, which continues to today is permanently disrupting Pacewicz characterizes as politics embedded in valuable social networks in Central Appalachia community governance, led locals to see (Bell 2009; Bell 2016). This ongoing process of community engagement and party politics as depopulation is due to technological advances in synonymous with overdetermined labor­business coal production over the past 60 years, wherein

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coal mines today requires only a fraction of workers once needed for operation. For instance, West Virginia, the top coal­producing state in Appalachia, was able to produce the same “Since depopulation causes amount of coal in the 2000s as it did in the late major upheavals in social 1940s, but with one­sixth of the workers (Bell networks, community and York 2010). Absentee landownership in relationships and connections Central Appalachia has further exacerbated the that remain in place are demographic effects of these job losses, allow absolutely precious to remaining little opportunity for other industries to develop residents.” in the region. In the late 1800s, eager capitalists from outside Appalachia descended upon the mountains, grabbing up millions of acres of land and mineral rights at very low prices or stealing the land through legal traps (Gaventa 1978). As Finally, Jerolmack’s case of local support for Haynes (1997) relates, most local residents had shale gas extraction (fracking) in in a rural, been subsistence farmers up until that point and mixed­income Pennsylvania community did not know that the minerals beneath their land similarly illustrates why communities may were so valuable. In the early 1980s, between 80 champion environmentally and economically and 90 percent of the land in the highest coal­ risky industries. He offers the puzzle of the producing counties was owned by absentee ‘please­in­my­backyard’ (PIMBY) phenomenon landowners (Appalachian Land Ownership Task hinted at throughout the previous three Force, 1983). Such uneven land tenure meant studies—nonmobilization of residents when new, that huge swaths of Appalachia remained extractive industries express interest in accessing unavailable for development outside of resource their land. The PIMBY stance contrasts with not­ extraction. Thus, as one of the many in­my­backyard (NIMBY) activism pursued by consequences of the mono­economy that was more privileged communities against new created from this concentration of land, each unwanted land uses, which consequentially shifts wave of mine layoffs in the wake of the those land uses to more economically introduction of more efficient mining technology disadvantaged regions. Through ethnography and meant that large portions of the working­age interviews, Jerolmack found that residents population were forced to migrate outside of the invited gas extraction exploration and region to find employment. Since 1950, West development on their land even as personal Virginia alone has seen a net out­migration of economic gains were minimal and water nearly 40 percent of its population (Bell and contamination was likely. Why would mixed­ York 2010). Bell (2016) argues that these income Pennsylvanians, then, be not only depopulation processes have powerfully acquiescent to the transformation of place by influenced individuals’ willingness to speak capital, with all its hazards, but actively defend out—or not speak out—against the coal industry. landowners’ freedom to lease their land to Since depopulation causes major upheavals in fracking companies? In a forthcoming article in social networks, community relationships and the American Journal of Sociology, Jerolmack connections that remain in place are absolutely and his co­author Edward T. Walker (2018) precious to remaining residents. Threatening suggest that residents’ support of new industry those relationships by, for instance, joining an derives from a common devotion to self­reliance, environmental group and thus offending one’s belief that land ought to be productive, and coal­truck­driving neighbor, can be difficult and commitment to private property rights. risky social maneuver.

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These four cases offer insight into how the worth,” to expand Boltanski & Thevenot's politics of place are residual, stored up in (1999) classic line of thought. Landscape­scale landscapes and local power structures. The two economic change, through the establishment of post­industrial cases (McMillan Lequieu and new gas extraction projects, like in Jerolmack’s Pacewicz) highlight the simultaneous persistence Pennsylvanian case, or through the collapse of a and renegotiation of the social worlds which regional commodity chain in the late 20th were originally organized around the life of a century, as in McMillan Lequieu’s cases, require single industry, while the two studies in residents to redefine what is valuable about their contemporary extractive communities (Bell and place and its people. Discourses of blame allows Jerolmack) reveal the intertwined relationship narrators to admit the realities and significance between land tenure and relationships of power of the economic change while yet holding fast to between companies and individuals. Certainly, non­economic, moral or ideological statements the processes of capitalism, both historical and of worth. Third, narratives of identity and worth contemporary, are highly contingent and case­ often utilize contrasts with other groups. For based, characterized by diverse manifestations of instance, when speaking to white working­class power, conjunctures of causes, and constant voters, Trump “aimed to appeal to this group by renegotiation. Yet across cases, there emerges a validating their worth as workers…by removing patterned process of capitalism creating place blame for their downward mobility.” Instead, through the commodification of land, labor, and Trump shifted blame for economic crises onto the material stuff of economies. both broad processes and hyper­local experiences: most typically, globalization and Blame, Quiescence, and Recreating Narrative labor competition with “illegal immigrants” Orders of Worth (Lamont 2018, pp.422–423). Thinking historically about the relationship Community members in each of the four studies between place and economy helps us understand of this special session engaged discourses of how long­term residents of both post­ and blame—both othering blame and withholding current industrial communities assign and it—to reclaim identities and re­define their withhold blame. By blame, we mean a common, places. In McMillan Lequieu’s former iron and narrative trope of placing responsibility for steelworking communities, laborers, their perceived ills in society. Based on our generative families, and community leaders placed little discussion in this Special Session, we contend blame on the companies that once took care of that both the presence and absence of blame their communities. Even though corporations contributes to three similar patterns of narrative made—and unmade—their industrial control. First, responsibility language seems a communities for capital, blame was directed not consistent strategy for groups which feel at industrial companies, but at processes of misunderstood to create space and recast identity capitalism, writ large, and local governments. narratives. Extractive and manufacturing Interviewees consistently highlighted the role of industries generate both immense risk and amoral, invisible economic forces that enabled undefined economic potential. When personal the mobility of capital away from their home and collective identities are entangled in this region. Wayne, in Wisconsin, said, “Well, free tension inherent to industrial boom and bust, trade is not fair trade. What are you going to do? narratives of blame or acceptance may offer All the big players moved.” And in Chicago, people an opportunity to reclaim their personal Jose declared, in an oral history, “We get this story in ways that make sense to them. Second, steel that we get in here from Japan and other blame is a form of collective justification, as it countries, cheaper.’ So that’s what killed us.” At offers a shared language through which groups the same time, many interviewees also blamed create new definitions of value and “orders of state and municipal governments for persistent

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disinvestment in their communities. observations. But, by his time of his fieldwork, Disenchantment with local (not national) community relations were increasingly defined governments centered on very specific issues, by a community­politics opposition: community such as persistent industrial zoning, the lack of institutions were in the hands of leaders oriented brownfield cleanup or mine entryway protection, towards a cosmopolitan economic development and the disintegration of transportation strategy. Their most vocal opponents were infrastructures. In Wisconsin, Jack complained political activists, who championed hot button that his county “didn’t get help when they pulled political issues, various sorts of nativism, the rail out…We sure as hell haven’t had any and—at the time of his fieldwork—particularly help from the state.” And Tom, a nonprofit Christian conservative positions like celebration organizer, was frustrated that the city of Chicago of traditional marriage and hostility towards the kept the southeast side zoned industrial even gay rights movement. Thus, an implicit fifty years after the last steel mill shut down: understanding of these community patterns “For the longest time, the City Department of resonated with an incipient populism, with many Planning and Development [ignored us]. Just residents espousing various reactionary positions because it’s on a map downtown somewhere that and consequentially blaming an out of touch elite it’s industrial, they thought that’s all we are. for their troubles. He argued that Rust Belt’s We’ve always been the poor stepchild down political shifts are due partially to a vacuum of here, you might say, and the dumping ground.” community organization and public recognition, Both forms of blame emphasized the perceived a delayed, and continuing, consequence of the invisibility and marginalization of the case study region’s economic transformation. communities in the multi­decade wake of company closure. Bell (2016) explicates the puzzling pattern of quiescence, rather than blame, in her case. She argues that not only do structural factors affect Central Appalachians’ support for the coal industry, but there are long­lasting cultural “Just because it’s on a map consequences emanating from the persistence of downtown somewhere that it’s negative stereotypes about Appalachian people. industrial, they thought that’s In innumerable pop culture all we are. We’ve always been representations—from films to television shows the poor stepchild down here, to children’s books to comic strips, Appalachia you might say, and the has, for more than 100 years, been portrayed dumping ground.” (incorrectly) as a monolithically white, isolated frontier “filled with uneducated, backward, and violent ‘hillbillies’…whose impoverishment is a result of their deficient culture” (Bell 2016, p.15). Herbert Reid and Betsy Taylor (2010), Pacewicz likewise demonstrated how among others, have argued that popular community level transformations altered the depictions of Appalachia as “premodern” or collective structures that residents of his “savage” have led to the normalization of violent communities used to understand economic practices like mountaintop removal mining in the dislocation. Traditionally, residents in his Iowan region. Furthermore, as sociologist Rebecca cases understood politics in terms of labor and Scott (2010) argues, these stereotypes have also business conflicts. Pacewicz (2016) found that left many Appalachians in a position of feeling this conflict view remained the dominant the need to prove their worth as American political frame for many, at least during the 2008 citizens; and essentially, the only thing that they and 2012 election cycles when he carried out have been told by the rest of the nation that’s of

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value in their mountains is their coal. Thus, comparisons across time and space, rural and supporting the coal industry is viewed by many urban contexts, and theoretical and as being essential for earning the respect of their methodological frameworks. Bell and Jerolmack fellow Americans. looked at patterns of contemporary quiescence and nonmobilization in contemporary, rural Finally, Jerolmack’s contemporary case of extractive locations, while Pacewicz centered on fracking in northern Pennsylvania sheds light on urban post­manufacturing communities, and how residents’ firm commitment to a Lockian McMillan Lequieu considered view of property rights and devotion to self­ deindustrialization across both rural and urban reliance has been translated into a cynicism nodes of a commodity chain. All four scholars toward ‘outsiders.’ Not only does a community­ engaged some ethnography and interview­based scale lack of confidence in the federal research; Pacewicz used network analysis and government preclude endorsing environmental McMillan Lequieu leaned more heavily into regulation, but a common perception of comparative historical research. Yet all four antifracking activists as “liberal” outsiders studies shed light on the complexities of brought in to trouble local autonomy actually individual and collective experiences of political increases community solidarity in support of engagement, cultural marginalization, and the fracking. This case illustrates why communities emotions of economic gain and loss. may blame outsiders in order to actively champion risky industries. By grappling with how economic processes shape non­economic, social relations and thus, Tracing narratives of blame and quiescence in how long­term residents of both past and current these working­class communities grants insight industrial communities need to reconceptualize into how people themselves recognize or create blame and responsibility, sociologists can trace recognition gaps between themselves and others. both the case­specific and processual Indeed, narratives of blame do productive work mechanisms of recognition gaps, cultural for people who perceive themselves as marginalization, and contemporary political marginalized and othered themselves. Blame or economies in the American Rust Belt. active support offers members a “discursive” narrative which they can control in the face of notable economic and social change. And these narratives, we argue, tend to be largely non­ References economic, centering on the moorings of stable, Appalachian Land Ownership Task Force, 1983. place­based life rather than the motions of Who Owns Appalachia? Landownership and its commodities (McMillan Lequieu 2017). Impacts. University Press of Kentucky. Conclusion Bell, Shannon Elizabeth. “‘There Ain’t No Bond To understand emotions of marginalization, in Town Like there Used to Be’: The Destruction mobilization, or lack of recognition in the of Social Capital in the West Virginia American Rust Belt, we argue for a deeply Coalfields.” Sociological Forum. 24(3): 631­ historical analysis of how actors and processes 657. shape specific communities in the image of Bell, Shannon Elizabeth. 2016. Fighting King capitalism and, consequentially, how and why Coal: The Challenges to Micromobilization in people in those communities engage non­ Central Appalachia. The MIT Press. economic logics of value to make sense of their contested landscapes. In addition to these Bell, Shannon Elizabeth and Richard York. theoretical observations, this Special Session “Community Economic Identity: The Coal highlighted what can be gained from cross­case Industry and Ideology Construction in West

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Virginia.” Rural Sociology. 75(1):111­143. Inequality. American Sociological Review, 83(3), pp.419­444. Boltanski, L. & Thevenot, L., 1999. The Sociology of Critical Capacity. European Lamont, M., 2016. Trump’s Triumph and Social Journal of Social Theory, 2(3), pp. 359­377. science adrift… What is to be done? ASAnet. Available at: http://www.asanet.org/trumps­ Broughton, C., 2015. Boom, Bust, Exodus. New triumph­and­social­science­adrift­what­be­done York, N.Y: Oxford University Press. [Accessed November 16, 2016]. Bunker, S. & Ciccantell, P.S., 2005. Matter, Massey, D., 1995. Places and Their Pasts. Space, Time, and Globalization: An Introduction. History Workshop Journal, 39, pp.182­192. In Globalization and the Race for Resources. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. McMillan Lequieu, A., 2017. “We made the choice to stick it out ” : Negotiating a stable Cardoso, F.H. & Faletto, E., 1979. Dependency home in the rural, American Rust Belt. Journal and Development in Latin America, Berkeley, of Rural Studies, 53, pp.202­213. Available at: CA: University of California Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2017.04.005. Castells, M., 1989. The Informational City: Pacewicz, J., 2016. Partisans and Partners: the Economic Restructuring and Urban Politics of the Post­Keynesian Society, Chicago, Development, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Il.: University of Chicago Press. Cresswell, T., 2008. Place: Encountering Paret, M., 2016. Towards a Precarity Agenda. geography as philosophy. Geography, 93(3), Global Labour Journal, 7(2), pp.111­122. pp.132­139. Reid, Herbert and Betsy Taylor. 2010. Dudley, K.M., 1994. End of the Line: Lost Jobs, Recovering the Commons: Democracy, Place, New Lives in Postindustrial America, Chicago: and Global Justice. University of Illinois Press. University of Chicago Press. Scott, Rebecca R. 2010. Removing Mountains: Gaventa, John. 1980. Power and Powerlessness: Extracting Nature and Identity in the Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Appalachian Coalfields. University of Minnesota Valley. University of Illinois Press. Press. Haynes, Ada. Poverty in Central Appalachia: Steinmetz, G., 2017. Field Theory and Underdevelopment and Exploitation. Routledge. Interdisciplinary: Relations between History and High, S., 2003. Industrial Sunset: The Making of Sociology in Germany and France during the North America’s Rust Belt, 1969­1984, Toronto, Twentieth Century. Comparative Studies in Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press. Society and History, 59(2), pp.477­514. Hochschild, A.R., 2016. Strangers in their own Steinmetz, G., 1992. Reflections on the Role of land: Anger and Mourning on the American Social Narratives in Working­Class Formation: Right, New York, N.Y: The New Press. Narrative Theory in the Social Sciences. Social Science History, 16(3), pp.489­516. Kalleberg, A.L., 2009. Precarious Work, Insecure Workers: Employment Relations in Transition. American Sociological Review, 74, pp.1­22. Lamont, M., 2018. Addressing Recognition Gaps: Destigmatization and the Reduction of

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Essay Durkheim, Darwin, and Ranke: Disciplining the Scientific Self by Herman Paul, Leiden University

Introduction is, “an account of the alleged historical development of an enterprise the identity of There was a time, or so the story goes, when which is defined by the concerns of the current research ethics did not yet exist. It came into practitioners of a particular scientific field” being only after World War II, in response to the (Collini 1988: 388). Its presentism is most gruesome practice of Nazi doctors subjecting visible in its close identification of research prisoners in concentration camps to dangerous ethics and codes of conduct. This identification medical experiments. Initially, research ethics may seem reasonable in a time when ethics is took the form of a ten­point declaration named frequently associated with codes and protocols. after the city where Karl Brandt and 22 other It conceals, however, that the history of research Nazi doctors were sentenced by a military ethics is much richer than the history of its tribunal for their involvement in human codification, and that it stretches further back in experimentation. This Nuremberg Code (1947), time than textbooks want us to believe. in turn, became the basis for subsequent codes of ethics, such as the Declaration of Helsinki This paper draws attention to one particular (1964) and the International Ethical Guidelines strand of this longer, richer history. Zooming in for Biomedical Research Involving Human on the “scientific self,” that is, the historically Subjects (1993). The emergence of research contingent sets of habits, dispositions, virtues, or ethics as we currently know it can thus be dated competencies that scientists consider important quite precisely: in the immediate aftermath of for the pursuit of scientific research, the paper World War II, in the context of the Nuremberg argues that the scientific self is an embodied Trials. articulation of what scientists at a given time and place regard as good, responsible research. With This story, told with minor variations in examples from across the scientific spectrum countless textbooks in research ethics, is a (sociology, biology, history), the paper shows, typical example of a “disciplinary history,” that

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more specifically, that the scientific self offers us Francesco Guiccardini to methodological a glimpse of research ethics in non­codified form criticism. His attempt to show that Guiccardini – a form of ethics that is less stable, more and other highly respected Renaissance contested, and therefore at least as interesting as historians had been guilty of “forgery of truth” the Nuremberg Code or the Declaration of and “modification of facts” served a Helsinki to the extent that it translates abstract revolutionary cause. It demonstrated the need for ethical demands into concrete human character a new type of historian, more “critical” and traits (1). “trustworthy” than his predecessors. If it took a while before Ranke was generally accepted as an Three Classics embodiment of this new type of historian, this To recognize the key importance of the scientific was because alternative conceptions of the self, it suffices to revisit nineteenth­century scientific self, defended by Heinrich Leo and classics such as Émile Durkheim’s Les règles de Friedrich Christoph Schlosser, among others, did la méthode sociologique (The Rules of not immediately disappear. Indeed, within Sociological Method, 1895), Charles Darwin’s German historical scholarship, Ranke’s favorite On the Origins of Species (1859), and Leopold virtues – “criticism,” “precision,” and Ranke’s Zur Kritik neuerer Geschichtschreiber “penetration” – never ceased to be criticized. (Critique of Modern Historians, 1824). What Partly because of political and religious fault these manifesto­like texts had in common is that lines, the virtues of a good historian remained a they sought to change science (or at least, a subject on which historians could fiercely particular province of science) by changing the disagree (Paul 2017b). scientist. The “scientific revolution” they This, of course, was also Durkheim’s experience. advocated was, first and foremost, a revolution The “objectivity” that the French sociologist within the self. famously advocated in Les règles de la méthode Take the opening pages of Darwin’s Origins, sociologique was intended as a remedy to where the author explained at length how “naivety,” “speculation,” “dogmatism,” and “the cautiously he had tried to avoid vices of “haste” promptings of common sense.” Given and “preconceived opinion.” The self­image Durkheim’s interest in Francis Bacon, this list of Darwin rhetorically constructed was one vices could easily be interpreted as a nineteenth­ revolving around “dispassionate judgment” and century update of Bacon’s idola mentis (“idols of “flexibility of mind.” In Victorian England, this the mind”). In fact, however, “objectivity” was could be read as an attempt to assure skeptical the programmatic name that Durkheim claimed readers that Darwin’s research adhered to for a way of doing sociology that sharply traditional scientific method. But as Thomas distinguished itself from how Herbert Spencer, Huxley clearly saw, open­mindedness and Auguste Comte, and Gabriel Tarde practiced independence of judgment could also be sociology. Durkheim’s catalog of virtues and interpreted as markers of a new scientific vices had a polemical intent: it favored a type of persona. For Huxley, indeed, it was precisely his scientist who privileged data collection over independence of thought that made Darwin “the theoretical speculation and factual knowledge incorporated ideal of a man of science” – a man over grand theory (Gane 1988). who served science instead of society, made no Language of Virtue and Vice attempts to please traditional authorities, and relied on his own findings instead of on the Apparently, then, the scientific self was central opinions of others (White 2003). to the scientific revolutions that Ranke, Darwin, and Durkheim sought to unleash. New methods Ranke, too, advocated a new scientific persona or approaches required new types of scientists. in subjecting early modern historians like

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Even if the virtues or dispositions characteristic attention to the important role of the scientific of those new personae were not always new – self, to contested standards of scholarship, and to “objectivity” was a nineteenth­century virtue, disciplinary sub­communities identifying with but “criticism” and “impartiality” had histories different scientific personae. that stretched back to at least the seventeenth century – their specific constellations (what was Disciplining the Self the “highest” virtue that a scientist had to The ethical dimensions of all this become most embody?) and connotations (what exactly did clearly visible if we look not just at scientific “critical” mean?) served the purpose of creating discourse, but also at how standards of virtue and new scientific personae. vice are translated into practice – into lecturing, This not only happened at mountain peak level, supervising, and mentoring, for instance. in the foundational texts of scientific disciplines. Educational practices were important for at least (The publication of Ranke’s 1824 book, at least, two reasons. One reason is that Ranke and has traditionally been interpreted as the “birth” Durkheim sought to socialize students into a of modern historiography.) Language of virtue scientific ethos consistent with their conceptions and vice permeated scientific discourse at all of the scientific self. Ranke trained young levels. We find it in book reviews, in which historians in his “historical exercises” scientists judged each other’s work against (historische Übungen) – an informal seminar standards of virtue. We find it in letters of where students discussed primary sources and recommendation, where candidates for academic presented draft papers – while Durkheim positions were presented as models of virtue (or, mentored younger colleagues through his Année occasionally, as unable to resist temptations of sociologique. Although Darwin’s case is slightly vice). Most notably, we find it in controversies in different, Huxley (“Darwin’s bulldog”) believed which scientists failed to reach agreement over scientific education to require identification what, in a particular context, counted as virtue or figures and therefore presented Darwin as vice (Paul 2017a). embodying “the ideal according to which [students] must shape their lives” (Huxley 1885: Interestingly, emerging attempts to rewrite the 535). history of nineteenth­century science through the prism of virtues and vices reveal different A second reason why education mattered is that patterns of consensus and conflict than those Ranke, Darwin, and Durkheim agreed on the offered in standard narratives of natural viciousness of the human mind. Just as “professionalization.” On one hand, nineteenth­ Darwin elaborated on “the chief cause of our century scientists nearly universally believed that natural unwillingness” to accept new ideas, research made demands on dispositions known Durkheim lamented the mind’s “natural as virtues. On the other hand, they found it disposition to fail to recognize” various kinds of particularly difficult to agree on what were the bias. All authors therefore insisted on the need most important virtues, partly because many of for “rigorous discipline,” with all the these virtues, “objectivity” included, had not Foucauldian connotations of that phrase: “Only only epistemic connotations, but religious and sustained and special practice can prevent such political layers of meaning, too (Paul 2017b). shortcomings” (Durkheim 1895). So, even for historians without specific interest It is in educational practices like Ranke’s in how the history of science intersects with the historical exercises that such disciplining of history of research ethics, virtues and vices in selves becomes most visible. It is here that nineteenth­century scientific discourse are a students were being molded into scientists, promising subject of inquiry. They draw learned to develop scientific habits, and were taught how to suppress their “prescientific

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selves” for the sake of objectivity. Historians of Acknowledgments science have good reason to examine the following questions: How did this work? To A longer version of this paper, entitled “The what extent were virtues actually taught? What Scientific Self: Reclaiming Its Place in the happened to students who failed to conform to History of Research Ethics,” will appear in those standards of virtue? We have been Science and Engineering Ethics. Funding was pursuing these questions through a project provided by the Netherlands Organization for entitled “The Scholarly Self” at Leiden Scientific Research (NWO). University. Note Conclusion (1) Following nineteenth­century usage, this To what extent does the concern for scientific paper uses “science” in the broadest possible selves and their defining qualities belong to the sense, also encompassing the social sciences and history of research ethics? If we follow recent humanities. historians of medical ethics and expand research References ethics to include all “moral economies of science” (e.g., Baker 2013), it becomes possible Baker, Robert. 2013. Before Bioethics: A History to imagine a history of research ethics prior to of American Medical Ethics from the Colonial the Nuremberg Code. More importantly, it Period to the Bioethics Revolution. Oxford: becomes possible to acknowledge the existence Oxford University Press. of other ethically relevant genres than that of codes of conduct. The result, most likely, will be Collini, Stefan. 1988. “’Discipline History’ and a history of research ethics that is more ‘Intellectual History’: Reflections on the complicated, and arguably more interesting, than Historiography of the Social Sciences in Britain the standard narrative told in research ethical and France.” Revue de Synthèse 109: 387­399. textbooks. However, it will take time for the Gane, Mike. 1988. On Durkheim’s Rules of contours of this history to become visible: much Sociological Method. London: Routledge. research still needs to be done on research ethics prior to World War II. Huxley, Thomas H. 1885. “The Darwin Memorial.” The Popular Science Monthly 27: Focusing on the nineteenth century, this paper 532­536. seeks to make a modest contribution to such an expanded history of research ethics by arguing Paul, Herman. 2017a. ´Virtue Language in that scientists reflecting on the virtues of the Nineteenth­Century Orientalism: A Case Study scientific self were engaged in research ethics in Historical Epistemology.” Modern Intellectual avant la lettre. In defining good science, in History 14: 689­715. specifying what this demanded of the scientific self, and in translating these demands into _____. 2017b. ´The Virtues of a Good Historian educational programs, they were as seriously in Early Imperial Germany: Georg Waitz’s engaged in implementing ethical standards as Contested Example.” Modern Intellectual their twentieth­century successors were in History, advanced access at drafting, revising, and implementing codes of doi.org/10.1017/S1479244317000142. conduct. White, Paul. 2003. Thomas Huxley: Making the “Man of Science.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Mini-Conference

A Critical History of the Mini-Conference by Simeon J. Newman, University of Michigan

Only with considerable hindsight can certain history of higher education as it relates to U.S. series of events be seen as crises—or, for that capitalism. Drawing from his voluminous matter, as successes. The same can be said for research on the topic and from work currently in the ASA Comparative­Historical Sociology progress, he recounted how the U.S. university Section’s 2018 miniconference, “The Crisis of system was initially modeled on the railroad History and the History of Crisis,” held at the industry, giving it its terminology and University of Pennsylvania on 10 August 2018, organizational form (university “majors” were the day before the ASA Annual Meeting began. modeled on the “major” railroad lines connecting Kim Voss (2016­2017 Section Chair) and George key destinations) and setting it off on a dismal Steinmetz (2017­2018 Section Chair) beckoned quest to organize intellectual life in a way that is sociologists and fellow travelers to engage the consistent with capitalist industry. The problem, theme of crisis in their widely­circulated call for of course, was that there is no good way of doing abstracts. Two plenary sessions, comprised of that. So this initiative metamorphosed into a seven prominent speakers, spoke on the themes political campaign to convert higher education of crises in higher education and crises in society whole cloth into a business. The campaign had at large, respectively. Some of the authors of the periods of greater and lesser success according to papers in the breakaway sessions—who hailed the presence or absence of acute crises in the from several countries—also addressed the enveloping political economy and as modified by conference theme. And some of the 90 attendees “faculty rebellions.” By around 1990, Barrow who registered, and probably some of the many argues, they won: there is no longer any way for others who stopped in, also talked about it. One faculty to fight against this initiative from within historical sociologist thought the theme was “too university institutions with any prospect other abstract”; others were excited about it. Although than defeat followed by defeat. it is still too early to settle that question decisively, we can, nevertheless, recap the event. The solution, Barrow argued, is “mass direct action in which faculty directly seize control of The opening plenary featured three speakers all what Marx called the means of intellectual of whom discussed crises in U.S. higher production” in order to replace the “corporate education. Clyde W. Barrow (Political Science, university” with the “syndicalist university.” In University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley) support of the viability of this approach he presented a sweeping, theoretically­driven argued that use of extra­institutional channels

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has been immensely successful at producing “crisis” as an enduring structure. Educational changes thought to be out of reach at his own opportunity was not more equal before institution. The intellectual justification for the government policy threw its weight behind syndicalist university comes from the labor private colleges nor before publics were theory of value and the observation that students privatized. Since there was no golden age, it pay to go to university because of the faculty cannot have entered into crisis; insofar as (not because they want to finance bloated thinking in terms of crisis assumes a golden age, administrations). Nevertheless, the landmark it therefore obscures the real problems. Voss Supreme Court decision, Trustees of Dartmouth described her work on how crises are constructed College v. Woodward (1819), placed control in in the media, and left attendees with the question the hands of the board of trustees, barring faculty of whether there are ways to conceptualize crisis power. This is the main legal impediment to that do not assume the status quo ante was establishing what Barrow described as his third­ preferable. way Proudhonian alternative to both capitalism and communism according to which the Of the 94 paper abstracts submitted, 40 were university would be a worker enterprise. accepted and divided into eight panels spanning the themes of Constructing Crisis (for which Rather than speak directly to that proposal or its Julia Adams served as discussant), Cities and alternatives, the other panelists opened up new Households in Crisis (Zaire Dinzey­Flores), vistas. Michael Bérubé (English, Pennsylvania Crisis and Contentious Organizing (Eric State University) engaged the problem of the Schoon), Southern Solutions (Melissa Wilde), shifting boundary between academic freedom Economic Change and Crisis (Anthony Chen), and professors’ extramural expression, drawing The State and/in Crisis (Richard Lachmann), from his deep experience working for academic Crises of Democracy (James Mahoney), and workers’ rights and his years serving on the Crises and Mobilization (Charles Kurzman). American Association of University Professors’ Since papers broke new ground on fundamental Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. questions about geopolitics and hegemony, He challenged the view that faculty’s extramural democracy and nationalism, urbanization and speech can threaten academic freedom by contention, among many other topics, discussion arguing that academic freedom is ultimately could not be contained to the break­out sessions. based on the freedom of extramural speech. He concluded that we are not facing a bona fide During the conference’s second plenary, four crisis of academic freedom, but rather a national speakers ranged nearly as widely as the papers in crisis precipitated by the ascendency of a addressing the topic of “The Age of Crisis.” “fascist” and white nationalism, but also warned George Steinmetz (Sociology, University of that the extramural­speech foundations for Michigan) made the case that crisis has been academic freedom are perilously shifting beneath central to the discipline of sociology since its our feet. inception, returning to a theme he raised in his essay on the topic earlier in the year in which he Kim Voss (Sociology, UC Berkeley) drew from observes that “most of the European disciplinary her current research and her front­row­seat founders of sociology construed their new experience as the Associate Dean of the science in terms of crisis” (http://chs.asa­ Graduate Division to call the very idea of crisis comparative­historical.org/the­crisis­of­history/). of higher education into question insofar as This, he argued, is desirable. students are concerned. She observed that due to “Crisis”—etymologically a cognate of low graduation rates, U.S. higher education is “critique”—resists enlistment to undesirable reinforcing inequality rather than undermining it. projects of value­free social science. Following However, she noted, this is not so much an acute Koselleck, Steinmetz observed, crises also imply

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contingency and indeterminacy. Focusing on point of the problem of power. In his wide­ them can therefore help prevent us from ranging discussion covering some of the topics undertaking an ill­advised search for law­like of his book­in­progress, he pivoted on the regularities. Schmittian­Agambian notion of the “state of exception.” By cashing this out as “the Elisabeth S. Clemens (Sociology, University of representation of violence as correct action,” his Chicago) discussed crisis via an engagement remarks helped in the urgent task of synthetic with the political theorist of crisis, Edmund theorization that can encompass, without Burke. Also picking up on the theme of reducing to, the current crisis of the U.S. indeterminacy, she conceived of crises as times political establishment. At a time when the U.S. when our theories no longer guide us, and asked is so clearly not exceptional vis­à­vis broader how we ought to comport ourselves as social historical patterns—at least insofar as states of thinkers and researchers during such times. The exception are even comparable—and when U.S. very nature of crisis is that we cannot predict the politics tack into terrain that historical future importance of our research: with the sociologists are best equipped to grapple with, resolution of crisis, the topic of our research may this foray was most welcome. cease to be important to many people or may seem urgent to nearly everyone. She suggested One hopes that historical sociologists will that there is a considerable amount of luck at continue such ambitious synthetic endeavors at play during such times, insofar as research future conferences and in other venues such as careers are concerned, but also that intensive the Critical Historical Sociology Blog. One study of crises when they are underway may implicit theme threading through much of the provide one with the best compass we can hope conference was the problematic political for and may also help us sharpen our theories. commitments of those often considered the best interlocutors for theorizing crisis. While Robin Wagner­Pacifici (Sociology, New School historical sociologists and social theorists are not for Social Research) delivered an avowedly usually attracted to conservative thought, it contemporary U.S.­centric talk, exploring seems that confronted with the task of theorizing phenomenologically a series of four binaries crisis, such perspectives were most compelling. that, she argued, are unfortunately increasingly If this is true, why that might be the case, what meaningless in the age of Trump. She drew its alternatives might be, and how they compare metaphors from physics—referencing the would seem to be worthwhile topics for further “political black hole” in which, she opined, the debate. The Marxist tradition, many of whose U.S. currently finds itself—and probed for thinkers have engaged the theme of crisis structural­linguistic moorings. Ultimately, she extensively, is an obvious elephant in the room. found the search a disappointment. While it may or may not have been intentional, in opting for a It is hoped that, with hindsight, both the conceptualization of crisis that did not embrace conference organizers—Barış Büyükokutan, contingency (an analytic point of departure at Luis Flores, Simeon J. Newman, Tasleem odds with the dominant interpretation of the Padamsee, Eric Schoon, George Steinmetz, Kim conference theme) and in ultimately concluding Voss, and Melissa Wilde—and attendees will that “the right metaphor is eluding me,” she consider the conference a success. It would not suggested that anti­deterministic analytic have been possible without the material support approaches may be the only viable ones for of several sponsors: the sociology departments of theorizing crisis. the University of California, Berkeley, University of Pennsylvania, Ohio State Isaac Reed (Sociology, University of Virginia) University, and University of Michigan, and the engaged the theme of crisis from the vantage ASA CHS Section.

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Mentorship Event

A Successful Mentorship Event 2018 ASA Annual Meeting

Jennifer Triplett providing an opportunity for faculty and students University of Michigan to meet and network freely. Attendees then divided into seventeen small groups organized Johnnie Lotesta by substantive interests for more pointed Brown University conversation with assigned faculty mentors. This Ricarda Hammer year’s attendees represented the great vibrancy Brown University and intellectual diversity of both sections, covering topics such as nationalism and Sara Tomczuk violence, culture and memory, social University of Washington movements, political economy, and welfare states. Huddled around cocktail rounds and At the ASA Annual Meeting this past August, the nestled into plush armchairs, participants Comparative and Historical Sociology section discussed the intersections of their research (CHS) partnered again with the Global and programs, the ins­and­outs of publication, tips Transnational Sociology section (GTS) to put on and tricks for fieldwork, and the experiences that a mentorship event for graduate students and have shaped their careers. As Cata Vallejo postdocs. This year’s event was held at Aqimero, Pedraza, a participating graduate student from a restaurant housed in the lobby of the Ritz­ the University of Virginia recounted, Carlton, just steps from Philadelphia’s historic City Hall. There were nearly ninety participants, “I was paired with a wonderful faculty that not including 23 professors, 10 postdocs, and 55 only cares about the same theoretical questions graduate students. Both sections offered but who also does research on Latin America. He financial support, and GTS generously provided provided guidance on how to keep a dialogue extra funds to sponsor registration fees for a with experts in the region and those who number of graduate students and non­tenured provided help with fieldwork.” faculty. Kristin Foringer, a graduate student participant The two­hour event began with open­ended from the University of Michigan, expressed mingling over drinks and hors d'oeuvres, appreciation for the opportunity to meet new

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colleagues and gratitude for the faculty members trite to say things like, ‘The future of the who volunteered their time. In her own words, discipline is bright.’ But in this case it's true, and it all comes down to sustained engagement with "This mentoring event was really useful to me as cutting­edge theory and comparative methods a first­time ASA attendee in particular since it that reach beyond conventional spaces and time provided a great "face­to­name" opportunity to periods.” meet several scholars in my subfield along with graduate students at different schools doing Since its inception in 2013, the mentorship event similar research to me. I am also very grateful to has become a CHS­GTS tradition as both the scholars who were generous with their time sections seek to recruit and support young and really wanted to spend an hour or two in scholars. The event originated at the initiative of conversation with graduate students looking to then­GTS Chair Julia Adams, who recruited follow similar trajectories as them both research­ Chris Muller and Nick Wilson to organize the and career­wise.” event in partnership with CHS. This first event involved a sit­down luncheon generously Fiona Greenland, Assistant Professor of sponsored by Yale Sociology. Event organizers Sociology at the University of Virginia, experimented with multiple formats in remarked on the variety of topics that her small subsequent years, and the event evolved into a group of faculty and students discussed, as well happy hour format with both structured as the hope she has for continued collaboration conversation and informal mingling. Thanks to of this variety among students and professors. As the organizing efforts of Damon Mayrl, Chris she explains, Muller, Nick Wilson and Richard Lachmann, “The mentoring event did a great job of bringing mentorship events were held at each of the 2013, together PhD students and faculty members, all 2014, 2015 and 2016 Annual Meetings. at various career stages and linked by shared The success of the mentorship event over the interests in comparative and historical sociology. years and its significance to section members are In our group we tackled questions about the job made evident in the statements of participating market, sustainable writing habits, big data faculty and students. As CHS Treasurer and archival work, and how the field has changed in former mentorship event organizer Damon Mayrl the last 10 years. It was a vibrant mix of the states, pragmatic and existential, with a collective sense of investment in each other's work. I know it's “I think this is a great event for building contacts

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and solidarity within the section, and for passing incoming GTS Chair, “The mentorship event on professional knowledge and tricks of the trade was remarkable for a number of reasons, not to a new generation of historical sociologists. It least of which was to find colleagues earlier in was very helpful for me as a graduate student their career who shared so many interests. If and very enjoyable to participate in as a mentor knowledge networks matter, CHS/GTS this past year. It's been particularly gratifying to mentoring is a winner!” see how many section members have actively inquired about serving as mentors over the All bias aside, we share Michael’s enthusiasm years.” and look forward to future mentorship events to come. CHS Chair Fatma Müge Göçek remarked similarly about this year’s event, “This was a most productive event not only for graduate students and junior professors to The authors wish to thank Kristin network and receive academic guidance, but for Foringer, Fiona Greenland, Michael like­minded senior professors to get to [know] Kennedy, Cata Vallejo Pedraza and Fatma each other as well. I thank CHS for organizing it Müge Göçek for their feedback and their and hope it gets repeated in the future.” willingness to provide statements for this We are pleased to announce that Council voted article. We also wish to thank Damon to dedicate a new line to support mentorship Mayrl and Nick Wilson for sharing their events in future years. As student participants in institutional knowledge. Finally, we extend the event ourselves, we wish to thank the faculty our gratitude once again to the CHS and who volunteered their time and registration fees, GTS Chairs and Councils for their the section Chairs and Council members who generous and enthusiastic support. helped with recruitment and offered financial support, and, of course, our fellow graduate students who shared their interest and enthusiasm. In the words of Michael Kennedy,

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News

Comparative-Historical Sociology Section Announcements

how the methodological approach can unsettle many of our preconceived notions of modern culture, including religious divides around race, gender, and fertility. Give Methods a Chance is a podcast devoted to research methods in practice, created by Kyle Green (Utica College) and Sarah Lageson (Rutgers University­Newark). The podcast features conversations with top scholars on a multitude of approaches to answer important questions and share stories about their experiences studying the social world. If you are interested in participating in the series, contact Kyle Green and Sarah Lageson at [email protected]. Melissa Wilde featured in Give Methods a Chance Podcast Click here to check out the conversation with Recent Publication Section member Melissa Wilde (University of Buck, Andrew and Jeffrey K. Hass. (2018) Pennsylvania), featured in the podcast series “Coalitional Configurations: A Structural Give Methods a Chance. Analysis of Democratization in the Former Focusing on comparative­historical methods, Soviet Union.” Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Melissa Wilde reflects on the questions of Post­Soviet Democratization, 26(1): 25­54. generalizability, the author's responsibility for how and who uses the published research, and

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