David Zaret

Petitions and the "Invention" of Public Opinion in the English Revolution

Current accounts of the capitalist and Protestant origins of the democratic public sphere are inconsistent and speculative. This empirical account explains the transition in political communication from norms of secrecy to appeals to public opinion. Popular communicative change in the English Revolution anticipated, in practice, the democratic theory of the public sphere when printing transformed a traditional instrument of communication-the petition. Petitions had medieval origins and traditions that upheld norms of secrecy and privilege in political communication. Economic and technical properties of printing-namely, heightened commercialism and the capacity to reproduce texts-demolished these norms by changing the scope and content of communication by petition. This practical innovation appears in all factions in the revolution. But among radical groups, the political use of printed petitions led to novel theories and to democratic speculation on constitutional provisions that would ensure the authority of public opinion in politics. This analysis contradicts key assumptions on communicative change that fuel pessimistic assessments of the modern public sphere in post-modernism and critical theory.

RELIGION AND THE RISE OF LIBERAL-DEMOCRATIC IDEOLOGY IN 17TH-CENTURY ENGLAND*

In classical and contemporary sociology, key elements of liberal-democratic ideology are seen as secular extensions of Protestant ideas. This case study provides a different analysis that emphasizes the problem of religious conflict and radicalism in early liberal-democratic ideology. Proponents of the new ideology rejected key tenets of their Puritan heritage, adopting deistic beliefs that legitimated pluralism and tolerance and opposed the older Puritan ideal of godly politics. Building on recent work in the sociology of culture, the paper outlines an analytic strategy for explaining change in ideological systems. Ideological change emerges out of the interaction of contextual pressures and intellectual precedents, as a collective response by ideological innovators to problems of authority. The analysis in this study shows how historical events can form an episodic context which structures this problem of authority.

From Weber to Parsons and Schutz: The Eclipse of History in Modern Social Theory'

Sociologists have generally dissociated theoretical synthesis from historical research, but the triumph of general theory over historicism is a hollow one. Efforts to formulate general theories of society devoid of historical limitation have created serious problems for theoretical work. This article examines two important examples of this tendency: Parsons and Schutzs use of Weberian sociology to derive general theories of social action. A historically grounded procedure for generating concepts was central to Webers work. It united explanatory and interpretative analysis within a reflexive framework that responded to the intellectual and political interests of the theorist. Early writings of Parsons and Schutz surmount, in different ways, Webers strictures on the limits of general theory by eliminating the historical component of Webers thought. This development reversed Webers theoretical achievement, decomposing his synthesis into hostile theories based on key fragments of his analysis.

Fear, Myth and History: The Ranters and the Historians.

Preface Note List of abbreviations 1. The historians and the Ranters 2. Who were the Ranters? 3. Examining the Ranter core 4. The Ranter sensation 5. Explaining the Ranter myth 6. Explaining the historians Appendix Index.

Book ReviewsThe Abolition of Feudalism: Peasants, Lords, and Legislators in the French Revolution. By John Markoff. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997. Pp. xviii+689.

This book is a distinguished product of its author’s long experience in subjecting that most contentious historical event—the French Revolution—to quantitative analysis. Markoff’s goal is to explain the collapse of the seigneurial regime in terms of the ways in which peasants and legislators “confronted one another, posed problems for one another, and implicitly negotiated with one another” (p. 5). The quantitative analysis uses two sets of data. One is the cahiers de doléances, petitions that recorded grievances and demands as part of the process for convocation of the Estates-General of 1789. The content analysis of these grievances and demands uses the general cahiers endorsed by assemblies of the nobility and Third Estate and a national sample (n 5 748) of cahiers from rural parishes (roughly 2% of the parish cahiers). The second data set has a longitudinal dimension that captures forms and rhythms of rural collective action up to 1793 (when the Convention passed legislation that ended seigneurial rights). From secondary historical sources, Markoff constructs a database of 4,700 “events” (20 or more persons who seize or damage resources of another party or defend themselves against the same). Markoff’s account of the peasant-bourgeois alliance against French feudalism opposes two dominant approaches to the study of the French Revolution. He rejects revisionist historical accounts that minimize the importance of long-term structural change and see elite manipulation as a principal factor behind popular participation in revolutionary politics. Yet his account is equally opposed to structural explanations that gloss over the importance of “process” (see below) in revolutionary politics. Throughout the book Markoff assesses and qualifies prior claims by social historians and sociologists on the political goals and tactics of different social groups. For example, evidence from the cahiers contradicts Alfred Cobban’s claim that indemnification proposals (compensation for eliminated seigneurial rights) were a maneuver by nobles intent on preserving the seigneurial regime. Twenty-seven percent of parish assemblies supported compensation for at least one seigneurial right. That support varied widely for different seigneurial rights, Markoff argues, is evidence of a rational political calculus that led villagers to frame a viable political strategy. In analyzing rural political events, Markoff finds support for much but not all of Charles Tilly’s portrait of traditional patterns of popular collective action: it was, as Tilly argues, predominantly “local” but it was not “patronized,” that is, “neither made on behalf of nor rarely with the support of some powerful patron external to the community” (p. 263).

85.00 (cloth);

The idea of a heavenly contract, uniting God and humanity in a bargain of salvation, emerged as the keystone of Puritan theology in early modern England. Yet this concept, with its connotations of exchange and reciprocity, runs counter to other tenets of Calvinism, such as predestination, that were also central to Puritan thought. With bold analytic intelligence, David Zaret explores this puzzling conflict between covenant theology and pure Calvinism. In the process he demonstrates that popular beliefs and activities had tremendous influence on Puritan religion.