Ivan Ermakoff

Ruling Oneself Out: A Theory of Collective Abdications

What induces groups to commit political suicide? This book explores the decisions to surrender power and to legitimate this surrender: collective abdications. Commonsensical explanations impute such actions to coercive pressures, actors’ miscalculations, or their contamination by ideologies at odds with group interests. Ivan Ermakoff argues that these explanations are either incomplete or misleading. Focusing on two paradigmatic cases of voluntary and unconditional surrender of power—the passing of an enabling bill granting Hitler the right to amend the Weimar constitution without parliamentary supervision (March 1933), and the transfer of full executive, legislative, and constitutional powers to Marshal Petain (Vichy, France, July 1940)— Ruling Oneself Out recasts abdication as the outcome of a process of collective alignment. Ermakoff distinguishes several mechanisms of alignment in troubled and uncertain times and assesses their significance through a fine-grained examination of actors’ beliefs, shifts in perceptions, and subjective states. To this end, he draws on the analytical and methodological resources of perspectives that usually stand apart: primary historical research, formal decision theory, the phenomenology of group processes, quantitative analyses, and the hermeneutics of testimonies. In elaborating this dialogue across disciplinary boundaries, Ruling Oneself Out restores the complexity and indeterminate character of pivotal collective decisions and demonstrates that an in-depth historical exploration can lay bare processes of crucial importance for understanding the formation of political preferences, the paradox of self-deception, and the makeup of historical events as highly consequential.

The Structure of Contingency1

Can we identify and theorize contingency as a property of processes and situations? Applied to social and historical events, contingency denotes a mode of causality characterized by its indeterminate character. Conjunctural causation and period effects lack the specificity required to identify a distinctive class of processes. References to chance happenings offer no clue to analyze endogenous disruptions. Focusing on breaks in patterns of social relations and the role played by individual agency, the author distinguishes four types of impact—pyramidal, pivotal, sequential, and epistemic—and investigates how these relate to the possibility of indeterminacy through an Event Structure Analysis of the night of August 4, 1789, in Versailles. This empirical foray underscores the significance of junctures that are indeterminate with respect to their collective outcomes. The article grounds analytically this class of conjunctures with the concept of mutual uncertainty, gauges the phenomenal scope of this contingency in terms of action domains and group types, contrasts it with the notion of chance events, and draws its implications for the study of social and historical change.

Exceptional Cases: Epistemic Contributions and Normative Expectations

Exceptional cases are at odds with the typical: they stand out as bizarre and rare. What then could justify their systematic analysis? Elaborating the analytical distinction between anomalies, exceptions and outliers, this paper outlines three potential epistemic contributions of exceptional cases. First, exceptional cases reveal the limits of standard classification categories. In so doing, they problematize usual classificatory grids. Their input is critical. Second, exceptional cases point to new classes of objects. They acquire paradigmatic status when they exemplify the characteristic features of these new classes with utmost clarity. Third, exceptional cases magnify relational patterns that in more mundane contexts lack visibility. Here their contribution is heuristic. These three contributions become possible when we put at bay normative expectations of what should happen, and specify cases by reference to an analytical space of constitutive dimensions. To underscore the general significance of these observations, I draw on examples borrowed from different quarters of the social sciences: the sociology of organizations, ethnomethodology, comparative historical sociology and the history of science.

Patrimony and Collective Capacity An Analytical Outline

This article investigates the ways in which the appropriation of offices and positions for personal use (“patrimony”) shapes incentive structures and collective capacity. Within the context of an agency relation, patrimonial power characterizes a mode of political dominance and resource management excluding accountability. This micro-analytical definition identifies three sources of variation: (1) the degree of codification, (2) the extent to which allegiance is personal (versus office-based), and (3) the extent to which dependence is asymmetrical. Patrimonial power enhances collective capacity through the creation of nodes of agency. It undermines this capacity by begetting arbitrary power and instability, by undercutting incentives for productive innovations, and by fostering the downward fragmentation of spheres of influence. Actors get out of this structural logic through two conjoint processes: (1) groups vying for office regulate the terms of their competition (intergroup dynamics), and (2) principals develop an incentive to make themselves accountable to fend off their agents’ possible exit (intragroup dynamics).

Emotions, Cognition, and Collective Alignment: A Response to Collins

Emotions acquire considerable phenomenological salience in times of challenge and high confrontation (Burstin et al. 2015, pp. 139–49). It is not difficult to understandwhy. These are timeswhen interactions no longer become subsumed to predictable patterns. The practical relevance of institutional mediations crumbles. Evaluative responses, be they negative or positive, become less filtered or regulated by conventional practices. Actors who used to rely on routine scripts lose the sense of confidence that these provided, while actors eager to get rid of them feel elated and emboldened. Acknowledging the salience of emotions in conflict situations, however, hardly tells us what emotions do in such conjunctures—in other words, their etiological status. Are they causes? Are they effects? Randall Collins’s interaction ritual theory addresses both questions by systematizing the foundational claims of what could be called an emotional energetics (my term) as the basis of social dynamics (Collins 1981, p. 1009; 2004, p. 42). Emotional states become amplified in settings characterized by high physical density, clearly bounded relations, and mutual focus (Collins 1993, p. 206; 2004, p. 48). Interaction rituals that enhance emotional energy exert a force of attraction of their own (Collins 1993, p. 205). This emotional energy is a function of the “situational ingredients” that condition amplification. The emotional output thus produced activates or reactivates solidary commitments and feelings ofmorality (Collins 1981, p. 1001; 2001, p. 28; 2004, p. 108). It lasts when it gets vested in formal rituals and symbols (Collins 1993, p. 212; 2004, p. 107). From this theoretical perspective, the night ofAugust 4, 1789, inVersailles is a prima facie paradigmatic case. Durkheim (1995, p. 211) mentioned the event to illustrate his argument about group endeavors transcending individual and corporate egoisms. High physical density, boundaries to outsiders, and a shared focus were definitional features of the interactional setting at this event. Protagonists were impressed by the effervescence that took hold of the Assembly (Kessel 1969, p. 48). Acts of high public spiritedness fed and crowned the effervescence. Thus, the situational ingredients, the dynamic, and the outcome fit the interaction ritual theory’s main claims. The case has all the trappings of a done deal. On closer examination, as we magnify the focus and, even more importantly, investigate the event from a sequential perspective, the diagnosis ap-

Preferences and Situations: Points of Intersection Between Historical and Rational Choice Institutionalism. Edited by Ira Katznelson and Barry R. Weingast. New York: Russell Sage, 2005. Pp. 345.

329 in local branches of national organizations from his calculations so as to capture the propensity of people to form and participate in initiatives and aggregate common interests without direction from above. Cleary and Stokes, by contrast, use self-reported membership in organizations of all kinds, including trade unions and national parties, as the basis for their assertions, and their results are therefore not directly comparable to those of Putnam. In a telling aside (p. 137), the authors note that “the only kind of association that Mar del Plata residents participated in more than people from other regions was sports clubs,” a type of association that in fact figured significantly in Putnam’s data set. While these points of convergence (and divergence) with Putnam are intriguing and call for further examination, they also raise doubts about the appropriateness of Mexico and Argentina as the basis for generalizations about democratic performance and culture. For while Italy had certainly been marked by over two decades of fascist rule, it was, by the late 1970s, a relatively stable, consolidated democracy of over 30 years’ standing. By contrast, Mexico was just emerging from authoritarian rule in 2001–02, when Cleary and Stokes carried out their surveys. Indeed, the authors themselves admit that in 14 of Mexico’s 31 states (including one of their cases, Puebla), “it is hard to say whether the state PRI [Institutional Revolutionary Party] is committed to democratic procedures” (p. 26). While Argentina had been democratic for 18 years in 2001, the surveys were conducted there during and immediately after the worst economic crisis in the country’s recent history, in an atmosphere of widespread disgust with all politicians. Despite these shortcomings, this volume represents a significant contribution to the comparative politics and political sociology literature thanks to its attempt to test the civic culture paradigm using sophisticated quantitative methods within a Latin American context. Its has also generated suggestive hypotheses concerning the relationship among economic development, the decline of clientelism, and the growth of institutional trust that deserve further exploration.

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Whenever we speak of patrimonialism, the reference is to the rule of the pater. Weber theorizes this connection from a genetic perspective. The prototype of patrimonial governance is the household. The patrimonial ruler manages his realm as he would manage his household according to rules of traditional wisdom. This genetic and naturalist model makes patriarchy a constitutive dimension of patrimonial practices. In this conception, patrimony implies the dominion of fathers. Patrimonial officials are bound to be male.3 At least this is what we think. And we are all the more inclined to think so if we assume that the rule of the fathers is a fact of nature grounded in a biological necessity. Etymology comforts this bias: the reference to gender, being inscribed in the term, lends credence to a substantialist interpretation.

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In a book written more than four hundred years ago ( Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, 1548), La Boetie conveyed his astonishment about people “acquiescing to their own servitude.” Ruling Oneself Out restates the problem: why do groups legitimize the prospect of their political incapacity and, by way of consequence, the possibility of their servitude? I address this question by considering two parliamentary decisions of crucial historical significance: the parliamentary surrenders of constitutional authority in Germany (March 1933) and in France (July 1940). These events have paradigmatic value because they are clear-cut cases of collective abdications and because they lend themselves to explanations that seem as obvious as they are commonsensical. People abdicate because they face coercive pressures. They abdicate because they misjudge the consequences of their action. Or they abdicate because their ideology predisposes them to do so.

Patrimonial rise and decline. The strange case of the familial state

French history in which a new conservatism has been invented, much of it traceable to recent American extrapolations wrought on the Cold War inspired views of Fran?ois Furet and his followers once active at the University of Chicago. Thus the best strategy is to ignore the eccentricities of Gordons argument and to concentrate on the elements worth pondering. Those who remain captivated by the power and mystique of the social should know that they have rich and rewarding historical company.