Theory: First paper assignment (Marx)

Here is the assignment for the first theory paper! I'll distribute paper copies in class today, and have a few pieces of advice as well. Some people may be interested in my grading standards -- I tend to follow the guidelines described in this document by the Bok Center at Harvard, which sets out criteria for A, B, C and "other" papers.

PAPER #1: MARX

Choose ONE of the following questions and compose a brief (4-5 pages) essay in response. Papers will be evaluated on the basis of the style, structure and reasoning brought to the argument.

Proper citation of sources is REQUIRED. The accepted format for citation of sources is the ASA format. The ASA Style Guide is available online at:

http://www.calstatela.edu/library/bi/rsalina/asa.styleguide.html

Papers are due TUESDAY, 14 FEBRUARY in class. Late papers will be refused.

1. A central component of Marx’s critique of capitalism is the category of species being, both as an ideal to which contemporary life can be compared and as a goal for humanity to reach. What is meant by the term? Why are humans not able to achieve species being in a capitalist society? Why does Marx contend that people will be able to achieve it eventually?

2. Marx argues that just as every previous historical arrangement has fallen victim to its own internal contradictions, capitalism will eventually do the same. So far, this appears not to have happened. It is possible that his prediction was correct, but that the “revolutionary moment” has not yet been reached – do you find any evidence for this possibility? It is also possible that Marx may have made some mistakes in his analysis which led him to make an incorrect prediction – do you find any evidence for this possibility?

3. In Marx’s argument, alienation is an inevitable consequence of the existence of private ownership of the means of production. How are these two factors connected to one another? Is alienation at bottom a moral category or a material fact?

4. Friedrich Engels eulogized Marx at his funeral in 1883, claiming “Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history.” Assess Marx’s “law of evolution” and suggest some conclusions as to whether Engels was overstating the case or not.

Please feel free to contact me with any questions.

Sociology of culture: Some definitions and models

The big question, to which we do not necessarily have an answer, is this: What is culture?

There have of course been a lot of different definitions over the years, not all of them consistent with one another. Generally when somebody attempts to define culture, they are also attempting to specify the social role that culture has. Here are just a few of the best-known definitions (see more definitions, and a discussion, at this site):

• Matthew Arnold (1869): “Culture is then properly described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection. It moves by the force, not merely or primarily of the scientific passion for pure knowledge, but also of the moral and social passion for doing good. As in the first view of it, we took for its worthy motto Montesquieu's words: 'To render an intelligent being yet more intelligent!' so, in the second view of it, there is no better motto which it can have than these words of Bishop Wilson: 'To make reason and the will of God prevail!'”
• Edward Tylor (1871): “culture or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society”
• TS Eliot (1948): “Culture may even be described simply as that which makes life worth living.”
• Clifford Geertz(1973): “Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs”
• Raymond Williams(1958): “We use the word culture in these two senses: to mean a whole way of life--the common meanings; to mean the arts and learning--the special processes of discovery and creative effort. Some writers reserve the word for one or other of these senses; I insist on both, and on the significance of their conjunction. The questions I ask about our culture are questions about deep personal meanings. Culture is ordinary, in every society and in every mind.”

These are only a few of the definitions that have been very influential. A comprehensive review of all of the definitions of culture that are in use somewhere would probably be impossible, and might be pointless. A couple of things would seem to proceed from a comparison of these definitions. First, there is an implicit difference between elite and popular culture. Second, there is a lack of agreement as to whether culture is something added to everyday life or an integral part of everyday life. Third, there is an implicit distinction between culture seen as a way of life and culture seen as cultural production or the products of cultural creativity.

It would be difficult to argue that one of these definitions is the “correct” one. Each one of them highlights some aspect of cultural processes, and we will be trying to consider, if not all of them, then as many as we can. One topic of dispute that is centrally important to us: to what degree is culture a product of other social forces, and to what degree is culture an independent influence on social forces? That is to say, is the general direction of influence from culture to society or from society to culture?

An answer to this question is also, in part, an answer to the question of cultural meaning. Some of the general approaches to answering the question of where cultural meaning comes from and whether/why it matters:

• “Reflection” theory, version 1 (Marxist): Cultural production offers a mirror of the social (material) world. “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but their being that determines their consciousness.” What does this mean in practice? Fundamentally, it means that while people are creative, and can produce ideas, they cannot produce just any idea – the range of consciousness is constrained by the material conditions under which people live. So culture, in this view, is at best a source of information about the syptoms of the material arrangements in any historical period.

There's another element to the Marxist version of “reflection” theory. It implies not just that culture occupies a position, but also that it has a purpose. The dominant ideas in any period are the ideas of the people who are dominant, and which justify their dominance. That is to say, most culture has an ideological purpose (in Marxist theory, the definition of ideology is narrower than in everyday usage: as Barthes argues, the phrase “dominant ideology” is redundant).

One possible example: the popularity of crime films and television programs contribute to fear of crime, which is used to encourage the expansion of the size and reach of various types of law enforcement.

• “Reflection” theory, version 2 (functionalist): Humans have a concrete need to understand and interpret the social world in which they live, and this need is met by cultural products. The interaction between culture and society helps to maintain a balance between freedom and constraint, and also offers a set of interacting “inputs” through which people in societies can recognize and adapt to change.

The basic assumption of all functionalist theories is that if anything exists (and especially if it survives) then it must fulfil some important purpose. The challenge for theory is then to discover this purpose.

A possible example: the popular film Brokeback Mountain combines symbols in a way that encourages public discussion, and it is taken both as marking a change in values about sexual orientation and as a way of trying to encourage the change to take place more quickly.

• Culture as an intervention into society (Weberian): Cultural products come together to create an image of the world, which can be a framework for action that changes the social environment. People are motivated by their perceptions and understandings, and some of these come through culture. The prime example for Max Weber was in his study The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, where he used religious ideas to try to answer the question of why people would be attracted to a system that demands so much and offers very little satisfaction. His answer: the technological conditions for the rise of capitalism were around for a long time before capitalism “took off” -- what was necessary was for there to appear a group of people who saw capitalism as offering way of living that was consistent with their values. So culture is what determines whether changes elsewhere will lead to social change or not.

Possible examples may have to do with the bizarre shift of rock n roll music (from “revolutionary” music at the time of its origins to generational and cold-war propaganda), or with the consequences of technology (internet: revolution in communications or convenience for shopping?). The idea here is that cultural predispositions determine whether or not a new force will change a social situation.

The point of drawing these distinctions? One of the primary motivations is a more or less purely intellectual one: to try to figure out where culture fits into a larger social picture. But also a part of the reason has to do with the relationship of individuals to culture: we see it as a source of identity and value, argue over whether elements of it are good or bad, invest energy into determining whether it is “real” or “fake.” These are ways putting all of that effort into a context that can make it understandable.

Some additional resources on Gambetta and organized crime

This document may be useful to some of you, both as an overview of theories of organized crime and as an indication of some of the uses of these theories in law enforcement. It was prepared by researchers for the use of the Law Commission of Canada, and it has a very good bibliography.

For those of you interested in the ways that Diego Gambetta is applying his unique methodological perspective to other questions, you can get a nice taste from his article "Reason and Terror" published in the Boston Review in 2004. Like the book we are reading tries to uncover the rationality of Mafia organizations, this one explores the rationality of terrorism. Interesting, challenging and controversial!

How to write a seminar paper

For anybody who thinks they might have some use for it, Marcia Marlene Hansen has some advice.

Organized crime: Why did the mafia develop when and where it did?

As interesting as this material is, it is also a sign of one of the greatest methodological problems in researching organized crime: much of the available information is secondhand, some of it is contradictory, some of the time projections have to be made from sketchy evidence, and the need for participants to control information and enforce “codes of silence” is not helpful to researchers or to law enforcement (nor, obviously, is it intended to be).

A point we made last week: the market for private protection emerges in a context of lack of trust. So one of the explanations for the rise of the mafia has to be found in reasons for a lack of trust. If we can identify those reasons around the middle of the 19th century in Sicily, there may be ground for drawing parallels to other environments.

One possible thesis – the failure of public administration to establish grounds for trust (“public trust”) creates conditions for the framework of trust to migrate to the private realm (“private trust), in the form of local and kinship networks.

This may explain the need for protection. But it does not explain why the need was answered in the unusual manner in which it was. Gambetta offers other examples (78) of regions where “the absence of a credible central authority” undermined the development of trust, but which either developed different responses or did not develop responses. So if it is easy to explain the demand, how do we explain the supply?

One factor: The availability of a labor force. This has to made of people 1) willing and able to practice violence, who are not necessarily available in every environment, 2) trained in the use of violence, which also “derives from a limited number of environments” (78), and 3) willing and able to subordinate the use of violence to the direction of an organization.

Second factor: these violent people must not be “already called for,” that is, they must be out of work. This is where the decline of the feudal system plays a role, since it put a lot of “tough guys” who had previously been in roles such as the military or private enforcement for large landowners out of work. See the long quotation from Leopoldo Franchetti on p. 79 of Gambetta.

Gambetta's argument in short: the destruction of the feudal system had two effects. One of these was the production of a lot of smaller landowners in the place of a few big ones – that is, an expanding class of people demanding protection. Another of these was, because of the instability of political power, a long period of conflict over who had the ability to exercise property rights. There was a large enough client base that providers of protection did not have to be subordinate to one or a few clients: they became autonomous suppliers (80). This explains why the mafia developed most in places that 1) were politically unstable, and 2) experienced the most economic development, creating a large number of transactions to be “protected” (see Gambetta's explanation, 83).

This leads to an interesting finding: although there is a popular perception that the mafia is connected to a culture of poverty and “backwardness” in the southern part of Italy, the evidence suggests something else entirely. The mafia did not develop most in the poorest or most rural areas, but in the most prosperous areas with rapidly developing markets (86-87). This economic approach makes more sense than an approach based on stereotypes about Sicily: why would a protection industry develop if there was nothing to protect?

Gambetta: “mafiosi [...] have regulated the town's wholesale markets by overseeing transactions, setting prices, running auctions, guaranteeing quality, enforcing promises, imposing obligations, apparently even protecting laborers from exploitation and abuse” (87).

It is easy to imagine ways in which the expansion of private ownership of farmland, on the one hand, and the development of urban commercial markets, on the other, created conditions that expanded the market for protection, especially when the state was not in a position to provide law enforcement and protection.

Another dimension here: the rise of the mafia is connected to expanding democratization. Here Gambetta (97-98) is talking about a particular type of democratization: he means that the field of political conflict shifted from one involving a small group of large private landowners who used protection from their employees as an instrument in their conflicts with one another to one involving a much larger assortment of groups from different parts of the rising middle class who used protection from independent operators as an instrument in their conflicts with one another. The key element here is that the providers were relatively autonomous operators.

So let's say that everything Gambetta has told us so far is true, that means we know two things: 1) the mafia is an industry providing private protection, and 2) it operates in a way that is autonomous from its clients. What we do not know about is the characteristics of the organization, or even whether there is an organization. There is considerable disagreement on this point, in particular whether the phenomenon under discussion is “a tight-knit secret sect versus a vague conglomerate of loosely related agents” (102). The evidence is not solid one way or the other, but a middle-range solution is possible, since it is clear that private protection groups exist and there is evidence that at least some of them are in contact with one another and coordinate their activities to a certain degree. Either extreme seems to be a mystification of criminal activity – either they are perceived as being capable of extraordinary coordination, or they are perceived as being completely incompetent. Most likely, people involved in criminal activity have the same capacity to organize themselves as people involved in any other kind of activity. Interests play a role: mafiosi stand to benefit both from the existence of a popular belief that they are well organized and powerful, and also from a popular lack of knowledge about how.

There is evidence of some level of stability and organization (104-105): the relatively consistent of number “firms” in Sicily over a long period of time (suggesting that there is some coordination and a low level of challenges to the system) and the relatively high average age of “bosses” (suggesting the existence of a “career path” and a process of qualification). A possible conclusion from this: incidents in which there are high levels of “gang violence” probably derive from the efforts of somebody outside the cartel of groups trying to alter the balance of power by force, and the efforts of the insiders to prevent outsiders from succeeding (107).

Evidence from the testimony of protected witnesses (110- ) also suggests a relatively consistent system of organization among “firms,” though not all of them hold to it with the same rigidity, and also that there are systems of coordination in most territories. There is some lack of clarity over exactly what is regulated by these local commissions (and how successfully). Unsurprisingly, it seems that the larger the territory in question is, the weaker the regulation.

I'll leave aside the question of rituals and rules in mafia “firms,” except to note that the style of presentation Gambetta uses seems to be derived from the fact that not very much is known about these things, but there does seem to be enough information available to suggest that rules are enforced unevenly, and that many of them, except the ones related to control of information, are symbolic in nature.

At our next meeting, more about mafia symbolism.

Theory: Putting Marx in context

You have already read the introduction to Marx in the textbook, which is pretty good on biographical details and in identifying the most important theoretical concepts from Marx. What I want to do is to offer a bit of background on where Marx is coming from intellectually, and why people continue to regard his ideas as important.

Probably the most important piece of the context of Marx's thinking comes from the Enlightenment agenda of perfecting the world. A lot of 19th century intellectual life can be discussed in terms of the responses to two political revolutions:

• the American Revolution, which was partly about responses in a colony to issues of imperial control, but was also largely justified by elaborating an ambitious project to create a representative democracy, one which would not rely on declarations of the divine right of a monarch to rule over everybody else. In developing this project, the people who led the American Revolution were strongly influenced philosophers like John Locke, who offered new (for the time) theories addressing the question of on what basis a government can be called legitimate, and what compels people to trade in their personal sovereignty for the benefits and constraints of living under a political authority, and by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who postulated a “social contract” detailing what individuals and governments can expect from one another in this exchange.
• The French Revolution, which was also antimonarchical, but in addition to this brought in the category of “the people” as a political and historical actor, and could also probably be regarded as the first major political project to create a “nation” (as defined in terms of identity and language—French was not the dominant language in all of France at the time of the French Revolution). The major figures of the revolution often spoke in terms of projects of recreating the world in a revolutionary image, based on principles of “Reason.”

Each of these revolutions was subject to a lot of different directions, and a lot of stops and starts. There was also a large number of failed revolutionary projects in this period. But one category of thinking that became widely diffused was the idea of revolution, the sense that a combination of activity, participation and reason could be brought together to fundamentally change the world. Marx participated in these ideas.

One of the frustrations of the 19th century was that even with these political revolutions, it was not clear that the promise of democracy was going to be fulfilled. At the same time that the number of democratic states was increasing, industrialization meant that huge numbers of rural poor people moved to cities to take factory jobs, where they were often underpaid, concentrated in urban slums where the living conditions were squalid and unhealthy, and kept out of public life and politics. The widespread use of child labor, and also of slavery in some countries, made the new democratic dream appear more like a nightmare for many people. Marx was one of the people who began to interpret this situation to mean that there was a need for another revolution – societies had begun to get rid of their kings and queens, now it was time for them to get rid of their business owners, who he saw as responsible for the new form of misery.

So what is it that makes Marx so sure that the business owners are the problem? To answer that question, we have to make a quick detour into the philosophy of history…

First, tothe question of whether there is a purpose to history. Immanuel Kant wanted to find a rational basis for morality. It came to be formulated in terms of Kant’s categorical imperative. Here are two formulations of the "categorical imperative":

1. "Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it would become a universal law."
2. "Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end."

Philosophically, this represents an effort to build a basis of morality that relies exclusively on reason – morality is being conceived as deriving from the need for logical consistency (rather than deriving from a source of authority). Sociologically, it presents people wanting to act in a moral way with a problem – it is deriving a principle by postulating the existence of a perfect, ideal state in which actual people do not actually live.

GWF Hegel tried to resolve this problem by introducing an element of historical contingency. He argued that by way of resolving contradictions, human history is on a (predetermined) path of moving, in every period, a bit closer to truth, to the Absolute. What this represents is an understanding of historical development that is modelled on the processes of reason and science. So we may not be able to realize Kant’s categorical imperative just yet, but when history reaches its goal, Hegel says, we will be.

Marx was heavily influenced by these ideas – the world must be better, and people should be able to count on the logic of history to move it in that direction. But there are two important differences between Kant and Hegel on the one hand and Marx on the other: they thought that they had discovered something on the level of ideas, and that understanding and perhaps changing ideas would be sufficient to bring about the change that the world needed. One of the places where this motivation is apparent is in his "Theses on Feuerbach" from 1845 (these were written in response to the ideas of Ludwig Feuerbach, who in his book The essence of Christianity, sought to find a material basis for religious values).

Thesis 2:
The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the this-worldliness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.

Thesis 7:
Feuerbach, consequently, does not see that the “religious sentiment” is itself a social product, and that the abstract individual which he analyses belongs to a particular form of society.

Thesis 8:
All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.

Thesis 11:
The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.

To change it? For what purpose? Here enters the question of what human beings are and what they need. For all his insistence on material explanation, Marx was influenced by Romantic thinking. What he offered was the concept of species being: his response to the question of what is essentially human. We will talk about this when we read Marx’s “economic and philosophic manuscripts,” but this is a problem for reading Marx – “species being” is a central concept to understanding his entire critique of modernity, but he never defines it.

Some points on "species being":
1. what distinguishes humans from other animals is that they use work in order to create their own lived environment.
2. they do this through sensuous contact with the material world.
3. by doing this they enter into relationships with one another.
4. by entering into relationships with one another, they make history and create a social order.

The closest thing in a reading of early Marx to a definition of species being comes from someone else: a footnote by R.C. Tucker in The Marx-Engels Reader:

summarizing Feuerbach on “species being”: “Man is not only conscious of himself as an individual; he is also conscious of himself as a member of the human species, and so he apprehends a ‘human essence’ which is the same in himself and in other men.”
in R.C. Tucker (ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader (2d. ed.). New York: WW Norton and Co., pp. 34-35 fn 9.

The critique of modernity is built around this insight: capitalism creates conditions which separate (alienate) people from species being, and this has consequences throughout the whole social order. History says that this problem has to be overcome. We will discuss the problem in detail, and Marx's ideas about how it can be overcome, in the following sessions.

Sociology 107: Room change

We got a bigger room for the bigger class! Starting Tuesday, our meetings will be in JC 001.

Seminar paper schedule for Sociology of Culture

These are the dates and topics that members of the seminar chose. As you can see, there are some topics for which people have not chosen to present: volunteers are welcome, especially for 6 April and 13 April. We have no papers scheduled for the last week of the semester -- let's keep it that way, and we can think of a nice way to celebrate our final meeting. Presenters: remember to have your paper by e-mail to me for distribution by noon on the day before the seminar.

26 January: Fundamental problems in sociology of culture
Reading: Griswold, Cultures and societies

• The “reflection” model of cultural meaning
• Changes in popular culture (Gross)
• Technological changes in communication (Tentor)

2 February: Popular culture and cultural division
Reading: Thornton, Club cultures

• “Mass culture” and “subculture” (Domash)
• “Authenticity” of cultural products (Lo Conte)
• Performed and recorded music (Sunkin)

9 February: Subculture and the maintenance of boundaries
Reading: Thornton, Club cultures

• The “mainstream” (Cedor)
• “Sharon and Tracy” (Patarkatsishvili)
• “Selling out” (Weiss)

16 February: Popular culture, identity and technology
Reading: Manuel, Cassette culture

• “New” and “old” media technologies (Cutroni)
• Centralization and decentralization of music industries (Sylvester)
• “Piracy” (Rabinovici)

23 February: Regional and local culture
Reading: Manuel, Cassette culture

• The ghazal and rasiya forms (Balila)
  
• Cassette production and diversity of music production (Block)
• Popular music and sectarian conflict

16 March: Cultures in contact and conflict
Reading: Paredes, Folklore and culture

• “México de adentro” and “México de afuera” (Harrison)
• Cultural contact in a border region (Hickey)
• Sources of misunderstanding (Cunningham)
  

23 March: The transformation of cultural form
Reading: Paredes, Folklore and culture

• Origin and development of folk cultural forms
• José Mosqueda, cultural hero (Link)
• Masculine identity and machismo (Berghegger)

30 March: High culture, popular culture, and cultural creativity
Film: The miners’ opera

• Poverty, economic and cultural creativity (Washington)
• Participating in the film and play (Dodge)
• Comparative cultural strategies (Ng)

6 April: Culture, politics and the avoidance of politics
Reading: Eliasoph, Avoiding politics

• “Close to home” and “for the children”
• The “volunteers” and “politics”
• The “buffaloes” and public life

13 April: Culture, engagement and disengagement
Reading: Eliasoph, Avoiding politics

• The production of “cynical solidarity”
• Maintaining and crossing boundaries around the “public sphere”
• The “cycle of political evaporation”

20 April: Culture, social change and the “underground”
Reading: Szemere, Up from the underground

• What factors made rock music “political” (Garrett)
• Hungarian musicians and “antipolitics” (Ventola)
• Attali: “Not the image of things, but the transcending of the everyday, the herald of the future”

27 April: The “underground” surfaces
Reading: Szemere, Up from the underground

• The “pop machinery” in post-Communist Hungary
• Memorializing the “countercultural past”
• Gender and culture as “rebellion”

Technical update for theory course

Sociology 107 now has 29 people in it, and no more people will be added. This is over the enrollment cap, and it is also more than our room can hold, so I am asking for a new classroom. Watch for notices here on the question of our new home.

Classical theory: Introductory notes

Periodically I will be posting short summaries of some of the main points covered in class on a given day. These notes may or may not bear any resemblance to what is actually said or done in class. I will not be posting general lecture notes on a regular basis, as these are telegraphic notes to myself which would probably be of very limited use to anybody else. --EDG

A lot of people approach the prospect of a theory course with some reservations! Old, boring, technical, difficult, not based on facts … if by the end of the term some of you come to see how exciting theory is, I will feel like I have achieved my purpose.

A baseline definition: theory has two purposes (see textbook, p. 3): 1) to explain and predict phenomena, and 2) to produce hypotheses that can be tested. Maybe that does not sound very exciting by itself! But the interesting stuff in any text is sometimes not apparent at first glance. What I think is interesting here is what is hiding behind a proposition when we are talking about societies. It means:

• Social facts can be treated like other facts, and it is possible and worthwhile to develop explanations for them.
• However different societies or parts of societies may be from one another, they can be compared, across space and time. They are not mysterious.
• Even if it is not possible to know what will happen in the future, people who know enough about the past and present can try to recognize patterns and suggest predictions.
• Maybe most of all, facts do not speak for themselves, but have meaning only in a context: where they appear and how they are organized. Different suggestions about what the context is (Goffman called this “the definition of the situation”) will give different weights and different values to different facts.

What a lot of this amounts to is a claim that social facts can be treated the way physical science approaches physical facts, or biological science approaches biological facts. Now, a lot of people find this claim objectionable – after all, people are not the same as cells, rocks or vectors. Besides this, there are objections about claiming to achieve a level of certainty that cannot possibly be achieved, and also objections that the level of knowledge that natural or physical scientists have cannot be reproduced by “the science of society” because such things as experiments would also be impossible or so grossly unethical that it would be hard to conceive of such a thing.

Well, fair enough. Let’s say that “social science,” as we like to call it, might be a flattering image but cannot and probably should not be achieved as a fact. There are some contours of science that are simply not available to us. But maybe we need to conceive of science in a different way – not the pursuit of certainty and mastery, but the pursuit of understanding. The term that is used in German is broader than the one used in English: Wissenschaft might be broken down as “making knowledge,” and in usage it refers to the organized pursuit of understanding. This could be the kind of science we are after – somewhere in between precise measurement or manipulation on the one hand, and guesswork or the blind application of ideological principles on the other.

What this might do is allow us a way of approaching the “big questions” so that we can suggest answers.

• (one big question: why were so many people in the 19th century wrong in thinking that as modernity advanced, religion would disappear?)
• (another big question: how will societies around the world change when oil becomes a scarce and expensive commodity?)
• (another question: how will the distribution of political power in the US change as the racial and ethnic composition of the population changes?)

The material we will be reading this term comes from a specific place and period: Europe from the middle of the 19th to the early 20th century. This is conventionally thought of as "classical " theory’s “moment”: an age of revolution(s). Let's try to put this into context.

The first original theoretical idea any human came up with was probably: “that’s the way it is.” It was the principal explanation for most social facts during most of human history. Since “the way it is” seemed to last so long and be so unlikely to change (and since the alternative was often complete breakdown or disorder!), asking why “it” was the way it was seemed beside the point. For those who insisted on questioning, there were always religious principles (theoretical proposition: the system of power in which humans are subject to other humans is a logical extension of the system of power in which all humans are subject to divine forces) to rely upon.

One of the reasons this began to break down was because of changes in intellectual life. Science began to develop to the point that things that seemed to be mysterious began to appear to have rational explanations. Philosophy developed to the point that it challenged the authority of religion as a source of truth, and became capable of proposing alternatives.

But talking about changes in intellectual life explains only so much. It is not always possible to account for ideas solely in terms of other ideas. At some point that comes to look less like sociological explanation and more like fantasy. These intellectual developments – changes in the ideas that people had available to them – did not happen in a vacuum but happened because there were changes in the way people lived.

The period is often called the age of revolutions: political; industrial; communication and travel; secular; urban.

What can we say about these revolutions? They produced tremendous hope (everything can be changed and made right) and they also produced tremendous fear (everything that we know is slipping away). In many cases, they meant that the world was fundamentally transformed over the course of the lifetime of an ordinary individual. Marx described this in the sentence: “all that is solid melts into air.”

This is one possible definition of what makes modern society different from traditional society: traditional society, for all its limitations, offered people certainty and security; modern society produced uncertainty and permanent anxiety. That would be a fairly pessimistic definition. It would imply that people experiencing this are looking for answers to the question of what happened to them, what are the new rules, and what it all means.

It would also be possible to offer another definition: traditional society, in all its seeming permanence, imposed limitations on people and seemed stagnant. Modern society seemed to offer the hope that through knowledge and reason, everything could be understood, human arrangements could be made rational and beneficial, problems could be solved.

One of the fundamental insights to come out of the rise of reason as the deciding factor in knowledge is that what people thought for many years was inevitable, the result of divine will or nature, was really the result of the kinds of arrangements that developed between people – and that these arrangements can and do change. That is to say, people began to realize that there seemed to exist something independent and powerful called society. They hoped that this could be understood using the same principles that science was beginning to use to understand everything else. The first person to use the word sociology was a philosopher, Auguste Comte, who proposed that if the rules according to which arrangements worked could be understood, then it would be possible to understand how they change and it would also be possible to understand how to intervene in order to change them for the better. But sociology was not the first term he used: the first time out, he called this new science he proposed social physics. The term was rejected, probably for good reason. But it remains useful because it implies that there is some kind of motion in question. Comte argued that social physics had two subfields: social statics (why social arrangements tend to be stable and to successfully reproduce themselves) and social dynamics (why social arrangements change or die out and new ones develop). Nearly nobody reads or cites Comte anymore or uses these terms, but let me suggest that they can be useful to keep in mind as a source of questions when you look at the works of the theorists we are reading: what are their answers to the question of social statics and to the question of social dynamics?

Another general question that might be posed is this: if people and societies change, is there anything that can be thought of as permanent? Odd as it may sound, religion has always offered some sort of answer to this question. It postulated that the moral and spiritual life of humans predates and outlives the material constraints under which they live every day. There are probably two ways to try to answer this question without relying on religion. The biological answer would involve looking backward and talking about origins and materials: what humans are made of, what they desire, what impulses and instincts they have. This leads to considering humans as individuals who live outside of history. At least one version of the sociological answer would involve looking forward and talking about what humans can hope for in the future based on what we know so far.

A point about the transformation from traditional to modern society: although this move is usually thought of in terms of progress, it did not benefit everybody or delight everybody. One of the central questions of sociological theory is what are the problems of modern life? Often the answer is posed in terms of a postulate about human nature – humans need something that modern life is not providing. Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber offered very different answers to this question, which we will be exploring in detail over the semester.

Organized crime: Introductory notes

Periodically I will be posting short summaries of some of the main points covered in class on a given day. These notes may or may not bear any resemblance to what is actually said or done in class. I will not be posting general lecture notes on a regular basis, as these are telegraphic notes to myself which would probably be of very limited use to anybody else. --EDG

It is difficult to examine organized crime in an empirical and analytic manner, because the approach is in some ways constructed in advance by two very popular discourses: the discourse of moral panic and the discourse of exoticism. One thing this tells us is that organized crime has an important presence in both politics and culture. These discourses do not necessarily help much with understanding, however, since both of them come “already equipped” with a way of understanding the problem.

In this course we will not ignore the political and cultural elements present in the discourses that were just mentioned: they are important factors in the social life of organized crime. But the emphasis will be more on some other aspects of organized crime that may be equally important:

• Organized crime as a business
• Organized crime as a daily activity
• Organized crime as an element in the lives of neighborhoods and local communities
• Organized crime as a consequence of and competitor with governments
• Organized crime as an international phenomenon

What we want to find out is how criminal organizations operate, who participates in them and why, what the people who participate in them do, how they interact with other institutions, and what this all means.

Corruption is a phenomenon that is sometimes related to organized crime and sometimes not related. One of the questions worth addressing is the degree to which the activities of legal and illegal organizations resemble one another, and ways in which the two worlds intersect.

A distinction worth making at the beginning: when we talk about groups engaged in illegal activity, it is useful to label these as criminal organizations. These are profit-making enterprises similar to nearly any other business, seeking to make money by selling a product. What distinguishes them from other businesses is that the product that they sell is illegal.

This has consequences for the way that business is conducted. Any lawyer will tell you that the basic element of any contract is trust, but that if trust is violated, the institutions of law are available to enforce the provisions of the contract. This applies only to legal businesses: illegal businesses do not have access to institutions of the law to enforce their contracts. So in order to assure that their business can be conducted and agreements maintained, they seek out private protection. The institutions that provide provide private protection are referred to generally as mafias (this is derived from the popular name for a variety of groups operating in or originating from Sicily, but there are obviously other organizations of the same type). Of course, there are many situations in which businesses whose activity is not illegal may also want or be compelled to use private protection. Both illegal businesses and mafias are forms of organized crime, but they play different roles in the organized crime system.

This is of course not to say that mafias are simply private versions of institutions like police and courts. They are not subject to the same sort of regulation and control, and very often compete both with legal institutions and with other illegal organizations for control of the protection market. But to the degree that mafias do provide (however imperfectly and sometimes violently) a service that provides some benefit, this may go some way toward explaining both why some people participate in their activities voluntarily, and also why such organizations are to some level tolerated both by legal institutions and by communities. That is not to say that the consequences of organized crime are in any way positive for the communities in which such organizations operate, of course.

This approach will be developed in some detail by Diego Gambetta in his study of the Sicilian mafia. While not arguing that the mafia is in any way a legal or legitimate organization, he argues that it operates according to rules and by a rational logic. Read Part I of Gambetta for Friday's class, and we will discuss his arguments further then.

Students wanting to add Sociology 107

A note to any students wanting to add Sociology 107:

According to the registrar's office, the course is full. Judging from the number of people who have communicated with me, there are at least ten people wanting to add this course. Obviously not all of them can be admitted. Nobody will be admitted before beginning of the term. On the first day, it will be possible to see whether spaces have opened up. Seats in excess of the enrollment cap will go only to Sociology majors. The priorities for admission into the course are:

1. 4th year Sociology majors (there should not be any of these)
2. 3rd year Sociology majors
3. 2nd year Sociology majors
4. 3rd and 4th year Sociology minors
5. 2nd year Sociology minors
6. 1st year students, non-majors and non-minors

Please note: students who are registered but do not attend the first session will be dropped. Students who want to add can only get a place on the list if they attend the first session. As the course is offered every semester, those students who are not admitted will have another opportunity in the fall.

Syllabus for Sociology 231, Sociology of Culture

The syllabus for Sociology 231 (crosslisted as Communication 230) is now ready, and can be downloaded here. This file is made available through the RapidShare file hosting service, which is a free service. However, they do have a commercial element: the interface will ask whether you want a free or a "premium" dowload. You want a free one, of course.

Syllabus for Sociology 264, Organized Crime and Corruption

The syllabus for Sociology 264 is now ready, and can be downloaded here. The same advice applies as for students in theory: the file is made available through the RapidShare file hosting service, which is a free service. However, they do have a commercial element: the interface will ask whether you want a free or a "premium" dowload. You want a free one, of course.

Syllabus for Sociology 107, Classical Sociological Theory

The syllabus for Sociology 107 is now ready, and the document can be downloaded here. The file is made available through the RapidShare file hosting service, which is a free service. However, they do have a commercial element: the interface will ask whether you want a free or a "premium" dowload. You want a free one, of course.

A question on grading

Weiqi Gao asks whether this exam answer ought to get full credit.

I say the answer is accurate, but probably never appeared on an exam.