John Markoff

The Ubiquitous Rise of Economists

Professional economists have for a long time had significant roles as advisers to policy makers. In recent years they have gone well beyond this in many countries and have come to occupy the highest positions in government. While their technical knowledge is an important reason for their influx into governments, their acquisition of the highest positions of authority, we contend, is to an important degree a ceremonial display. The symbolic aspect of the appointment of high-level economist-politicians is as significant as any specific stock of knowledge they bring to political life and is a part of an emerging transnational political culture in which economists occupy a sacerdotal role.

Civilization and Barbarism: Cattle Frontiers in Latin America

INTRODUCTION In looking at yesterdays frontiers (or at todays industrialized world), social analysts tend to see violence as a straightforward and uncomplicated phenomenon: when openly used, it is a direct way of settling disputes; when it is not used but available, it is a necessary—and, at least in the short run, sufficient—condition of domination. As a background condition violence is readily forgotten. Such is the case even in the study of the various affronts to authority that are lumped under the rubric of‘collective behavior.’ One speaks of violent ‘episodes’ arising from the ‘breakdown’ of various routine social mechanisms. By the same token, all the interesting problems in political theory seem to lie in the area of how to control people in every other conceivable manner: through the establishment of a normative consensus, through ideologies, through the creation of common interests, or through bargains and deals. Sufficient consideration is not usually given to the varied and subtle effects of these ways in which the capacity for violence is structured in social life. But consequences follow for any society from the presence or absence of full-time military specialists, from the forms of their organization, from the regional distribution of control of organized violence, from the advantages and disadvantages associated with the use of force, and from the norms associated with such use.

The Linkage of Data Describing Overlapping Geographical Units

A mass or energy filter or spectrometer having a known electrode configuration such as quadrupole cylindrical, monopole cylindrical or hyperboloidal wherein the electrodes are energised by a periodic or quasi-periodic time varying electrical potential the waveform of which is significantly different from a sinusoid and incorporates a zeroth harmonic term in its Fourier series. It is preferred that the waveform should be either rectangular in character or trapezoidal in character and that means should be provided for varying the duty cycle of the waveform.

Economists in the Americas

Probably no region’s economists have had greater public visibility or greater impact on regional and national public policy than Latin America’s and no region has been more directly affected by the spread of US economics. Economists in the Americas joins a small but important comparative literature on economics as a profession and is the first comparative treatment of professional economists in the United States and Latin America.

THE SOCIAL GEOGRAPHY OF RURAL REVOLT AT THE BEGINNING OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

The rural uprisings that were critical in the collapse of the Old Regime in 1789 have been intensively studied; the comparative analysis of rural revolt is currently a lively topic in American social science. This paper examines hypotheses on the social contexts likely to foster insurrection through the use of a variety of quantitative indicators. The principal tool is logistic regression. Several predictors of rural upheaval suggest some of the revolt-generating processes and structures: economic integration into the market; the political penetration of local institutions by the central state bureaucracy; conflict over land use; and the strength of local communal organization. Many other explanations are not confirmed: literacy does not generate revolt nor does variation in the level of hardship have the consequences expected in much of the literature. Beyond the specific findings, the rural turbulence of 1789 shows itself to be an amalgam of quite diverse conflicts. In the spring and summer of 1789 the peasants of France rose. Their mobilization took many forms and was directed against many targets. A central goal of the revolutionary legislature in that turbulent summer was the demobilization of the countryside, a goal that proved elusive for years to come. But already in the spring, the as yet scattered acts of peasant selfassertion testified to the potential storms, and formed a significant part of the context within which the elections of deputies to the Estates-General took place. The continuing rural turbulence, both demonstrating and aggravating the incapacity of the existing political order, made a major contribution to the sense of crisis that led the representatives of the Third Estate to abandon the concept of the EstatesGeneral to which they had been duly elected, and in an act of revolutionary self-assertion, led them to declare themselves the nucleus of a National Assembly. The wave of rural mobilization that starts in the middle of July, together with the turbulence of the towns, forms the backdrop to the National Assemblys ringing

Literacy and Revolt: Some Empirical Notes on 1789 in France

It has been widely argued that the growth of mass literacy is critical for the development of modern forms of contentious politics. Recent Scholarship, however, has challenged this view. This study explores the relationship between levels of literacy in rural France toward the end of 18th century and the extent and nature of peasant mobilization at the beginning of the French Revolution. It is found that literacy did not promote rural disturbances as such but that the forms and targets of peasant actions in the more literate areas difered from those in the less literate. The less literate districts were notable for mobilization against rumored but nonexistent invasions, whereas the most literate districts nurtured attacks on the central social institutions of the Old Regime.

A Moving Target: Democracy

Achieving consensus on a definition of “democracy” has proven elusive. Institutions that have been taken to be essential to democracy have changed radically since the word “democrat” began to be widely used toward the end of the eighteenth century. Democratic ideas and democratic practice engender conflict that transforms institutions rather than just reproduces them. Its transformative character rests on a half-dozen key attributes of democracy: it is an actor’s concept, as well as an analyst’s; it can arouse strong feelings; it combines not always compatible ideas; it empowers dissent; it involves a dynamic mixture of inclusion and exclusion; and the democratic histories of national states have been intertwined with global domination. Two processes combine to generate much social dynamism. First, democracy’s stirring inclusionary claims have been contradicted by a complex structure of exclusions, including distinctions in rights of full participation among citizens, distinctions in rights between citizens and non-citizens, and distinctions in resources among legally equal citizens. And second, democratic practice has been fertile soil for the development of social movements. Taken together, democracy is an invitation for movements to try to shift the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, and in so doing to expand or constrict democracy itself.

Peasants Protest: The Claims of Lord, Church, and State in the Cahiers de doléances of 1789

For all the attention the rural insurrection of 1789 has received, there is still a great deal to learn. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie has suggested that the revolts provide us with a window into a great transformation of the French countryside. He is struck by the contrast with the great seventeenth-century movements of violent resistance to the fiscal pressures of the growing state. After a long interval in which the defeated peasantry raised no major challenge, the distinctive target of the rural upheavals of the early revolution had switched from the claims of the state to those of the lord. Understanding this shift, Le Roy Ladurie suggests, should illuminate the rural history of France in modern times. Why do peasants rise against one target rather than another? To date there is little scholarly consensus on the forms and significance of the rural insurrection.

Some Effects of Literacy in Eighteenth-Century France

Some Effects of Literacy in Eighteenth-Century France Two decades ago a team of sociologists conducted a study of the attitudinal consequences of literacy in what was then East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. They found, through a carefully designed sample survey of factory workers and rural cultivators, that the outlook of the literate differed in a number of particulars from their nonliterate compatriots. The literate, for example, were more likely to identify themselves as Pakistanis, a finding clearly in accord with the common view of literacy acting to extend ones horizons beyond a restricted local world. What is more striking, however, is the degree to which their data showed that in most concrete life situations literacy was not a particularly powerful shaper of attitudes. When asked to characterize their willingness to move to West Pakistan in search of higher income, there was a marked difference between the willing factory workers and the unwilling cultivators. The literate respondents, however, differed little from the unlettered.1 A still more striking feature of the data was the frequency with which literacy did indeed appear consequential-but only within a particular social setting. The literate, for example, expressed greater admiration for philanthropic bosses than they did for ascetic preachers-but only among factory workers; among the cultivators, literacy produced no effect on this item at all. In short, what these researchers documented for East Pakistan was that, although literacy appeared to be a matter of some significance, a good deal of that significance depended on the specific

Economists in the Americas: convergence, divergence and connection

Probably no region’s economists have had greater public visibility or greater impact on regional and national public policy than Latin America’s and no region has been more directly affected by the spread of US economics. Economists in the Americas joins a small but important comparative literature on economics as a profession and is the first comparative treatment of professional economists in the United States and Latin America.