John A. Hall

Book ReviewsRevolutionary Demands: A Content Analysis of theCahiers de Doleancesof 1789.By Gilbert Shapiro and John Markoff. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998. Pp. xxxi+684.

If the origins of this book go back to the mid-1950s when Gilbert Shapiro first began to teach on Tocqueville’s interpretation of the revolution, it owes most to collaboration between the authors at the University of Pittsburgh over the last quarter of a century. This is a long time, but scarcely a second can have been wasted. For this is an awesome and pathbreaking achievement of which sociology as a whole should be proud: every angle of a key historical data source has been teased out and made available to systematic use, and in a way that for once really does immeasurably improve upon prior work of historians. All that a short review can do is to hint at some of the richness of very dense analyses: to that end, it makes sense to spell out the observation correctly made by Charles Tilly in his foreword, namely that there are in fact three different books within this large volume. The first specifies the nature of content analysis in a high-powered and authoritative manner. The core of the argument made rests on a use of Chomskian linguistics to defend the need for human coders of data—as against those who imagine that content analysis could hereafter be done in absolutely aseptic manner by powerful computers. The extraordinary creativity of human language use means that mere raw data is, at least as yet, almost useless: what matters rather is the counting of statements endowed with meaning, a process which can only be achieved by human coders. Shapiro and Markoff have long experience with coders, and this leads to a mass of interesting insights. They found that non–social scientists coded their data most easily; the entry of data thus depends on generalists whose work can then be used by specialists. Further, they note that they are not really sure how such coders do their work, but they present and apply a series of ingenious tests to show how very reliable is the data so created. The whole of this methodological section is both exciting and convincing, and it deserves the widest readership: it makes a powerful case for the realiability and usefulness of a particular method and offers a model as to how a historical source can be turned into usable data for social science. The second contribution is much more specific, and it concerns the nature of the cahiers de doleances (the lists of grievances) drawn up in 1789 for the consideration of the first Estates General to be called for 175 years. The cahiers were drawn up by members of the three great estates, a process which involved some 40,000 bodies, mostly rural. The authors are especially good at explaining, in the light of a large secondary literature, the nature of the evidence that the cahiers provide: they provide compelling arguments and tests that show that they are broadly rep-

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Jack Goody is one of the most eminent postwar British social scientists, the social anthropologist who gave his subject an historical turn— thereby providing sociologists with key monographs on literacy, on military technology and state development, and on the assault by the Catholic Church on extended kinship links. The present sustained meditation will certainly gain readers on account of its antiorientalism—although it should be stressed immediately that Goody is an old-fashioned empiricist, keen to tell us both about other societies and ourselves, and so decidedly averse to the view that we cannot understand “the other.” Much is to be learnt from Goody’s negative critique of Max Weber, about whom he writes with great insight and knowledge, and of such academic colleagues as Ernest Gellner and Alan MacFarlane—with some of his venom being left for this reviewer. More important, the book contains the fullest account available of Goody’s own view of social development, and it will become a standard work on that account alone. Attention is initially given to the Weberian notion that occidental development depended upon the possession of some unique sort of rationality. Goody will have none of this: he argues persuasively that logical thought was present in all the great oriental civilizations and further insists that systematic bookkeeping was equally widespread—there being nothing special, in his view, about double-entry bookkeeping per se. Equally powerful chapters then demonstrate that there were no psychic barriers to commercial activity in oriental civilizations: Goody makes this point particularly forcefully with reference to Gujarat, but he adds some attention to both China and Japan. A final pair of truly brilliant chapters consider the notion that a more nuclear family, home to “individualism,” might have aided development in the West, with extended kinship networks elsewhere being seen as some sort of obstacle to development. Goody notes, to begin with, that family size did not vary vastly across civilizations, except during moments of demographic explosion, and he insists that economic development has always—in the past and present of the West as much as in that of the East—been aided by extended kinship links. Goody goes beyond these particular arguments to suggest that occidental and oriental civilizations share a common Mesopotamian social portfolio, whose base in literacy can be observed by the examination of Africa, on which he is an expert, where it was lacking. For most of the historical record, oriental civilizations have led or surpassed the achievements of the West, and Goody believes that they may be set to do so again. Far too much has been made of early modern achievements—even granted the impact of the printing press, about which he writes with great in-