Dylan Riley

Civic Associations and Authoritarian Regimes in Interwar Europe: Italy and Spain in Comparative Perspective:

What is the relationship between civic associations and authoritarian regimes? While Tocquevillian theories have concentrated mostly on the connection between civic associationism and democracy, this article develops a Gramscian approach, suggesting that a strong associational sphere can facilitate the development of authoritarian parties and hegemonic authoritarian regimes. Two countries are used for comparison, Italy from 1870 to 1926 and Spain from 1876 to 1926. The argument here is that the strength of the associational sphere in north-central Italy provided organizational resources to the fascist movement and then party. In turn, the formation of the party was a key reason why the Italian regime developed as a hegemonic authoritarian regime. The absence of a strong associational sphere in Spain explains why that regime developed as an economic corporate dictatorship, despite many similarities between the two cases.

The Paradox of Positivism

The essays in The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences contribute to a historical and comparative sociology of social science by systematically comparing the rises, falls, and absences of ‘‘methodological positivism’’ across the human sciences. Although all of the essays are of extremely high quality, three contributions develop the argument most fully: George Steinmetz’s introduction and William H. Sewell Jr.’s and Steinmetz’s contributions to the volume. My remarks focus on these three pieces, drawing on the other contributions to illustrate aspects of the argument or to suggest tensions that need exploration.

Beyond strong and weak: rethinking postdictatorship civil societies.

What is the impact of dictatorships on postdictatorial civil societies? Bottom-up theories suggest that totalitarian dictatorships destroy civil society while authoritarian ones allow for its development. Top-down theories of civil society suggest that totalitarianism can create civil societies while authoritarianism is unlikely to. This article argues that both these perspectives suffer from a one-dimensional understanding of civil society that conflates strength and autonomy. Accordingly we distinguish these two dimensions and argue that totalitarian dictatorships tend to create organizationally strong but heteronomous civil societies, while authoritarian ones tend to create relatively autonomous but organizationally weak civil societies. We then test this conceptualization by closely examining the historical connection between dictatorship and civil society development in Italy (a posttotalitarian case) and Spain (a postauthoritarian one). Our article concludes by reflecting on the implications of our argument for democratic theory, civil society theory, and theories of regime variation.

Post-Colonial Journeys: Historical Roots of Immigration and Integration

The effect of Italian colonialism on migration to Italy differed according to the pre-colonial social structure, a factor previously neglected by immigration theories. In Eritrea, precolonial Christianity, sharp class distinctions, and a strong state promoted interaction between colonizers and colonized. Eritrean nationalism emerged against Ethiopia; thus, no sharp break between Eritreans and Italians emerged. Two outgrowths of colonialism, the Eritrean national movement and religious ties, facilitate immigration and integration. In contrast, in Somalia, there was no strong state, few class differences, the dominant religion was Islam, and nationalists opposed Italian rule. Consequently, Somali developed few institutional ties to colonial authorities and few institutions provided resources to immigrants. Thus, Somali immigrants are few and are not well integrated into Italian society.

The New Durkheim: Bourdieu and the State

Bourdieu’s lectures On the State (delivered between 1989 and 1992) are dazzling. Sweeping from tightly focused reflections on French public housing, through deep analyses of the role of medieval jurists in the rise of the French state, to fascinating discussions of the institution of signature and counter signature in early modern England, the lessons will likely be a resource for generations of scholars as they search for fresh analytic approaches to understanding legitimate political authority. Intellectually they can be situated in three ways: as part of a specifically French tradition of public lectures given at the Collège de France, as a particular stage in the development of Bourdieu’s own sociological enterprise and broader engagement with French public life, and as a sustained engagement with Anglo-American historical sociology. As a text On the State invites comparisons to two other courses: Durkheim’s and Foucault’s. Within this set it is a distinctively open and unfinished work full of paths not taken, reflections on the difficulty of dealing with a heterogeneous audience, and an attractively tentative and exploratory stance toward its intellectual problems. On the State can also be situated at a particular moment in Bourdieu’s career. His increasing interest in the state in the early nineties derives from two mutually reinforcing lines of influence: the need to account for the emergence of autonomous fields and the rising influence of neoliberalism in French society in late eighties and early nineties. Fields, autonomous spheres of social life with distinctive properties, had always been central to Bourdieu’s sociology, but he had never adequately explained their origins. By the late eighties he had come to see the state as closely linked to this intellectual problem. There is also an

The Third Reich as Rogue Regime: Adam Tooze’s Wages of Destruction

What was the connection between the structure of the German economy in the 1930s and German aggression in World War ii? Adam Tooze’s Wages of Destruction forcefully poses this issue, but fails to adequately resolve it. Instead, on this decisive question, his analysis oscillates uneasily between two equally unconvincing models: rational-choice theory and cultural determinism. This surprising explanatory failure derives from an inadequate theorisation of German imperialism as the expression of the combined and uneven development of the German economy and society in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.

The Historical Logic of Logics of History: Language and Labor in William H. Sewell Jr.

How does the logic of language combine with the logic of labor to explain historical change? This article suggests that William H. Sewell Jr.’s work can be divided into three periods, each characterized by a different answer to this question. In the work of the early cultural turn, labor and language codetermine historical change; in that of the high cultural turn, the logic of language becomes dominant; and in that of the postcultural turn, labor returns to a more central position. The article argues that these shifts result from tensions in Sewell’s account of historical change and suggests a comparison with Jürgen Habermas’s account of work and interaction.

Changes in Censuses from Imperialist to Welfare States

1. Introduction 2. The Interactive Effects of States and Societies on Censuses 3. The Rise of the Racial Census in the United States 4. Italy and the Regions 5. Interventionist Censuses Develop in the Twentieth Century 6. The Post World War II United States: The Census and Identity Mobilization 7. The Insulation of the Italian Census 8. Conclusions

Back to Weber

Richard Biernacki’s book has been controversial since before its publication. As has already been widely discussed on the blogs, Jeff Elman, the dean of Social Sciences at the University of California, San Diego sent Biernacki a letter in June of 2009 ordering him not to publish his manuscript or present findings from it at professional conferences. The letter also threatened Biernacki with censure, salary reduction, or dismissal if he continued. The controversy has continued after publication. Andrew Perrin on the blog ‘‘Scatterplot’’ rejected Biernacki’s argument as pompous, muddled, overstated, and mean spirited. On its face, these reactions seem compelling evidence in favor of Biernacki’s central thesis that quantitative cultural sociologists are engaged primarily in a religious exercise: ritual. A clear, if implicit, implication of this analysis is that critics of the method should be treated as heretical outsiders to be banished from the community; and this seems to have been Biernacki’s experience to some extent. In any case, the superheated polemics surrounding Reinventing in Social Inquiry have not been conducive to a cool analytic assessment of its central theses— such will be the focus of these remarks. Biernacki’s central thesis is that ‘‘coding procedures in contemporary sociology’’ are not methods for empirically documenting meaning or changes in meaning, but rather are analogous to ‘‘the rites by which religious believers relabel portions of the universe in a sacred arena for deep play’’ (p. 3). In the face of this situation, he calls for a return to ‘‘humanist interpretation’’ that ‘‘better fulfills the consecrated standards social ‘scientists’ ostensibly ascribe [namely the natural sciences]’’ (pp. 2–3). To substantiate his thesis, Biernacki carefully examines the relationship between the primary sources and coding results of three exemplary texts in the sociology of culture. These are Peter Bearman and Katherine Stovel’s article ‘‘Becoming a Nazi’’ which appeared in the journal Poetics in 2000, John Evans’ book Playing God?, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2002, and Wendy Griswold’s ‘‘The Fabrication of Meaning: Literary Interpretation in the United States, Great Britain, and the West Indies,’’ published in the American Journal of Sociology in 1987.

Routes or Rivals? Social Citizenship, Capitalism, and War in the Twentieth Century

fought for, and the conflicts are messy. Perhaps better than anyone, Mann looks everything in its face. His volume, The Dark Side of Democracy, which like his book on Fascisms is an offshoot from Volume Three and Four, sees the impulse of popular democracy in the genocidal killings that have marked modern times. Max Weber famously said, ‘‘I want to see how much I can take.’’ Michael Mann gives the answer: a hell of a lot.