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Fall 2005 Newsletter of the ASA Comparative and Historical Sociology Section Volume 17, No

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Fall 2005 Newsletter of the ASA Comparative and Historical Sociology Section Volume 17, No ________________________________________________________________________ __ Comparative & Historical Sociology Fall 2005 Newsletter of the ASA Comparative and Historical Sociology section Volume 17, No. 1 ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________ From the Chair: State of the CHS Union SECTION OFFICERS 2005-2006 Richard Lachmann SUNY-Albany Chair Richard Lachmann Columns of this sort are the academic equivalents of State SUNY-Albany of the Union speeches, opportunities to say that all is well and to take credit for the good times. Chair-Elect William Roy I can’t (and won’t) take credit for the healthy state of com- University of California-Los Angeles parative historical sociology but I do want to encourage all of us to recognize the richness of our theoretical discus- sions and the breadth and depth of our empirical work. The Past Chair Jeff Goodwin mid-twentieth century revolution in historiography—the New York University discovery and creative interpretation of previously ignored sources, many created by historical actors whose agency had been slighted and misunderstood—has been succeeded Secretary-Treasurer by the recent flowering of comparative historical work by Genevieve Zubrzycki sociologists. University of Michigan We can see the ambition and reach of our colleagues’ work Council Members in the research presented at our section’s panels in Phila- Miguel A. Centeno, Princeton (2007) delphia and in the plans for sessions next year (see the call Rebecca Jean Emigh, UCLA (2006) for papers elsewhere in this newsletter). The Author Meets Marion Fourade-Gourinchas, Berkeley (2008) Critics panel on Julia Adams, Lis Clemens, and Ann Or- Fatma Muge Gocek, U Michigan (2006) Mara Loveman, UW-Madison (2008) loff’s Remaking Modernity: Politics, History, and Sociol- James Mahoney, Northwestern (2007) ogy was emblematic of how our field’s progress got ex- pressed at the Annual Meeting. While that book (and the panel discussion) explicitly place recent scholarship in the Newsletter Editor context of the past half-century of historical sociology, the Monica Prasad papers presented on other panels (like the contributions to Northwestern University Remaking Modernity) demonstrate clear advances in our capacity to identify the ways in which multiple causal Webmaster forces combine to produce contingent chains of historical Dylan John Riley change. Most impressive are the sophisticated ways the au- University of California, Berkeley thors explain human motive. Adams et al. describe three waves of historical sociology: a first wave of classical so- ciology (which was brought low by simplistic Comparative & Historical Sociology Vol. 17, No.1 Fall 2005 modernization theory), a second wave of increas- policy experts’ at Washington think tanks. At the ingly sophisticated structural analysis, and now a same time, the rigor of the analyses was exhilarat- third wave that returns our attention to the agency ing. of actors. Much of the third wave’s creativity springs from efforts to recreate the mentalities and milieus of long-dead actors who often left no documentary evidence of their desires and concerns, or who may have engaged in practices or left re- We can take pride that collec- cords intended to mislead others or which were at tively our section colleagues times self-deluding. are in the forefront of turning Efforts to derive agency from structural positions or sociology from its fixation with through the logic of rational choice allow for impor- tant if limited advances. The cultural turn that is the United States of the pre- analyzed and exemplified in Remaking Modernity sent moment. (There are times draws on the best of twentieth century historiogra- phy along with an array of insights drawn from when I think the ASA motto more recent studies in organizational analysis, gen- could be ‘100 Years of What der studies and other disciplines. What emerges are multi-dimensional images of humans in the process Happened in America Last of identifying their interests and desires while also Week’.) establishing and sustaining the social relations nec- essary to their achievement. Our ultimate goal, as it has been since Marx, is to show the causal and tem- poral interactions of those two aspects of social be- ing: identity and interest, conception and social re- lation. Perhaps it is quixotic to hope that our colleagues’ I heard fine examples of sophisticated understand- insights can be injected into political debates, never ings of motives and their attempted realization in mind policy. However, as academics we have a the papers presented at the session on Political Vio- large collective audience in our students, and in the lence and Terrorism organized by our outgoing long-run (the sort of time period that is the subject chair, Jeff Goodwin. The presenters were engaged matter of our discipline) truth has consequences. In in public sociology of the highest order, excavating any case the vision of historical sociology offers its the sources of political violence. After hearing own rewards. We can take pride that collectively Elizabeth Wood and Michael Biggs, I came away our section colleagues are in the forefront of turning with a fuller and more precise understanding of the sociology from its fixation with the United States of motives behind and consequences of rape in warfare the present moment. (There are times when I think and protest through self-immolation than I could the ASA motto could be ‘100 Years of What Hap- find in any other place. Georgi Derluguian placed pened in America Last Week’.) I thank all of you, the revolution in Chechnya in a world historic con- my intellectual colleagues, for the insights you offer text that made sense of the revolutionaries’ motives, and invite you to share your current work by con- strategies and goals. Finally, Michael Schwartz, by tributing to future issues of this newsletter, in ses- distinguishing between terrorism and guerrilla war sions at next year’s meetings, and in all the other in terms of goals, tactics and actors, brought more venues available to us. illumination to the war in Iraq than any other analy- sis I have encountered. In some ways the session was depressing, for its grim subject matter but also because the ways in which sociologists think about these matters has so little influence on the puerile discussions of terrorism that appear even in the most serious news outlets and in papers by ‘foreign Page 2 Comparative & Historical Sociology Vol. 17, No.1 Fall 2005 Symposium: Disciplines and Inter- disciplinarity Interdisciplinarity is the newest academic search as unscientific, or pooh-poohing someone’s trend, but is it worth the effort? Bruce Car- statistical methods as backward or old-fashioned); ruthers argues that the study of the economy substantive one-upmanship (“... but we’ve known must be interdisciplinary, while George all this since so-and-so’s 1964 article – what is Steinmetz finds the division of history from soci- really new here?”); rhetorical refutations and finger- ology “disastrous.” pointing (“So-and-so is completely wrong about X. If she is wrong about this, how can we trust any- thing she says about Y or Z?”); jokes (“How many Frontier Arbitrage economists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? – None. They leave it up to the market forces.”); and Bruce G. Carruthers of course, jargon (examples are too numerous to Northwestern University mention but clearly use of Latin is a sine qua non for a special type of academic habitus, ceteris pari- Boundaries are useful not only for what they hold bus). Much effort goes into the inscription and pro- together, but also for what they keep apart. Con- tection of such boundaries, and indeed practically sider that a disciplinary boundary helps to unite a the only things missing are a formal dress code, dis- group of academics as sociologists, for example, tinctive uniforms, or a secret handshake. Can sump- and it also distinguishes them from political scien- tuary rules for sociologists be far off? tists, anthropologists, or economists. Such a consid- erable amount of professional energy is devoted to Boundaries bolster academic identities and profes- boundary maintenance that one cannot help but sional solidarity, settle jurisdictional disputes, and think of Mary Douglas’s discussion of purity and help police the disciplinary division of labor. But danger. Various anti-pollution strategies get de- they also create unusual opportunities for the ad- ployed in pursuit of disciplinary rectitude: academic venturous, as the etymology of the word entrepre- definitions (“sociology is the study of blah, blah, neur suggests. Life on the disciplinary frontier of- blah”); credentialing (a professional sociologist is fers the possibility of breaching barriers and trans- someone with a PhD in sociology); informal net- gressing boundaries, what we might call “construc- works (who are your grad-school pals?); profes- tive misbehavior.” Intellectual entrepreneurs can sional social activity (which conferences does one wander into foreign territory, bringing back tales of attend); ritualized method (for historians, immer- wondrous sights and strange baubles. They can, in sion in the archives; for economists, first use of a short, perform a kind of arbitrage: taking ideas or Nash equilibrium, Granger causality, or a Lagrange facts from where they are commonplace and bring- multiplier); ritual or totemic citation (signaling alle- ing them to where they are scarce, rare, or new.
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