John Torpey

“Making Whole What Has Been Smashed”: Reflections on Reparations*

In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Walter Benjamin describes a Paul Klee painting in which an angel is contemplating the wreckage of the past as it piles up at his feet. “The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed,” but a storm blowing from Paradise drives him backward into the future. “This storm,” Benjamin writes laconically, “is what we call progress.”1 Benjamin’s aphorism echoes his pronouncement earlier in the “Theses” that there is no artifact of culture that is not at the same time a product of barbarism. For all his acknowledgment of the cruelty that underlay great human cultural achievements, Benjamin is nonetheless prepared to accept that this is, or at least is intrinsic in, “progress”; however worthy of remembrance these sacrifices surely are, human advance is not conceivable without a certain amount of suffering. Freud had already suggested as much in his reflections on the discomfort that human beings experience in civilized society.2 Like Benjamin, he wanted to minimize the suffering while celebrating the achievements made possible by the sacrifices. Our own age is considerably less sanguine about the extent to which sacrifice and suffering should be tolerated, regardless of the cause it might serve. Hegelian views—and certainly Marxist ones—of the teleological character of history-asprogress are decidedly outre; the body counts associated with various utopian projects have grown too large during the course of the twentieth century for anyone still to speak glibly about “striding over corpses” on the way to the good society.3 We have been chastened by the monumental man-made catastrophes of the last hundred years. Even more, many have come to believe that there are few “acci-

Legal integration of Islam : a transatlantic comparison

The status of Islam in Western societies remains deeply contentious. Countering strident claims on both the right and left, Legal Integration of Islam offers an empirically informed analysis of how four liberal democracies--France, Germany, Canada, and the United States--have responded to the challenge of integrating Islam and Muslim populations. Demonstrating the centrality of the legal system to this process, Christian Joppke and John Torpey reject the widely held notion that Europe is incapable of accommodating Islam and argue that institutional barriers to Muslim integration are no greater on one side of the Atlantic than the other. While Muslims have achieved a substantial degree of equality working through the courts, political dynamics increasingly push back against these gains, particularly in Europe. From a classical liberal viewpoint, religion can either be driven out of public space, as in France, or included without sectarian preference, as in Germany. But both policies come at a price--religious liberty in France and full equality in Germany. Often seen as the flagship of multiculturalism, Canada has found itself responding to nativist and liberal pressures as Muslims become more assertive. And although there have been outbursts of anti-Islamic sentiment in the United States, the legal and political recognition of Islam is well established and largely uncontested. Legal Integration of Islam brings to light the successes and the shortcomings of integrating Islam through law without denying the challenges that this religion presents for liberal societies.

Coming to terms with the communist past: East Germany in comparative perspective

As so often after the collapse of authoritarian regimes, the post‐communist societies of eastern Europe confront the problem of dealing with alleged regime‐sponsored criminality by their predecessor rulers. This article examines the various approaches taken toward this problem in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, and (east) Germany, with special emphasis on the anomalies presented by the latter case. It is argued that the different approaches taken in these countries can be explained by a combination of two main factors: the ‘weight of the past’ (the level of development of civil society before 1989) and the ‘politics of the present’.

Revolutions and freedom of movement: An analysis of passport controls in the French, Russian, and Chinese Revolutions

In her landmark study States and social revolutions, Theda Skocpol argues that the most consistent and remarkable outcome of the revolutionary upheavals in France, Russia, and China was the administrative centralization of these states and the enhancement of their capacity to reach into society to achieve their aims.1 Yet Skocpols comparative analysis of the social and political transformations in these countries led her to conclude that the extension of bureaucratic domination was

Religion and the Occupy Wall Street movement

The Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011 and its corollaries, Occupy Sandy and Occupy Debt, have been largely understood as secular movements. In spite of this, religious actors not only participated, but in some cases played an integral role within the movement, lending material support, organizing expertise, and public statements of support. We rely on interviews with faith leaders (N = 13) in New York and Oakland, and engage in an analysis of print and online media to explore the role of religious actors and groups in Occupy Wall Street. Religious participants were often long-time veterans of progressive political struggles and drew inspiration from their faith traditions. Nonetheless, religious commitments were secondary to political objectives shared by themselves and their secular counterparts. Religious leaders believed they offered symbolic authority to the movement and highlighted this in their engagement in the hope of giving it greater moral weight. Current discussions on postsecularism and public religions are considered.

Modes of repair: Reparations and citizenship at the dawn of the new millennium

The late twentieth-century spread of interest in the notion of “reparations” cannot be understood apart from the semantic meanings of the word itself. The term is one of the “re-words” that Charles Maier has identified as the object of rising interest among various groups in recent years.6 The first thing that must be said is that the word came to be transformed, sometime after World War II, from its earlier connotation of “war reparations” into something much broader. Before the Second World War, the use of “war” as a modifier here would have been nearly redundant; in that era, it went without saying that “reparations” were an outgrowth of war. The paradigmatic case of reparations, perhaps, was that mandated by the Versailles Treaty that ended World War I and imposed heavy obligations on the Germans to compensate the Allies for their wartime losses. In cases such as this, the term was synonymous with “indemnities”; again, the use of “war” to modify the main term would have been largely superfluous. It went without saying – in English at least – that “reparations” was an exaction imposed by the winners of a war on the losers, who were said to have been responsible for the damage caused by the conflict.7

Huizinga on America

The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, perhaps best known for his writings on the Middle Ages and on play in human life, also wrote rather extensively on the United States. He both followed and, in certain respects, sharply criticized Alexis de Tocqueville’s views on America, while ultimately echoing many of Max Weber’s views of the United States and more generally of the rationalization of modern life. Given that Huizinga is known primarily for his writings about culture, it is intriguing that his perspective on America was heavily skewed toward an emphasis on the economic aspects of American life. Huizinga’s writings on America offer an intriguing Dutch perspective that has been widely missed in social scientific discussions of the United States and on the notion of American exceptionalism.

American and French Revolutions: Impact on the Social Sciences

This article surveys the significance of the American and French Revolutions in the modern social sciences. It argues that the French Revolution has historically had a greater impact, except among those political sociologists preoccupied with the question of ‘American exceptionalism.’ Yet this has changed since the collapse of Soviet Communism, and certain features of the American Revolution and the American experience have come to the fore.

Enlightenment: Impact on the Social Sciences

This article examines the relationship between the Enlightenment and the modern social sciences. It details the different national traditions of ‘Enlightenment’ and how these have affected the trajectory of the social sciences. It explores both the ways in which the social sciences have sought to carry out an ‘Enlightenment project’ and the doubts that have been raised about that project along the way.

Identifying Citizens: ID Cards as Surveillance

This book has a catchy title and nice cover art, adding to the reader’s anticipation that it will be an absorbing—and entertaining— read. The price is reasonable, making it potentially attractive as a text. And the book is, in fact, generally quite well written. America’s romance with technology is complicated, contradictory, and confusing, and it certainly deserves more scholarly attention. However, much has already been written on this subject, not enough of which finds its way into the pages of this book. The introduction suggests that its author, fiction writer and English professor Glen Scott Allen, imagines an audience largely unfamiliar with social and cultural studies of science and technology, and tends to leave the impression that he is unfamiliar with much of this work himself. Allen concentrates on what he sees as Americans’ suspicion of the purely scientific, as opposed to the technological, a suspicion that he correctly surmises may have roots in social class distinctions. He reports that in researching this book, he ‘‘began to wonder to what extent . . . American culture [has] shaped American scientific practice’’ (p. 5), as though this were an entirely original question. In Chapter One, he marvels that in 1848 the American Association for the Advancement of Science adopted promotion of the ‘‘purer’’ sciences as its goal (p. 17), and in general implies surprise at his discovery of the social, political, and class-based character of science (although it is not exactly clear how the AAAS vision is an argument that Americans distrust science, instead of an argument that at least some of us approve of it). He discusses the ‘‘selling’’ of American science in Chapter Three without any apparent reference either to the work of sociologist Dorothy Nelkin or to that of media historian Marcel Lafollette, two scholars especially well-known for their careful documentation of how media representations of science and technology have historically served this purpose. Then, in Chapter Four, Allen presents American Pragmatism without reference to John Dewey, who makes only a cameo appearance a few pages later. Surely Dewey’s contribution to Pragmatism would have been an excellent pillar on which to build any argument about American perspectives on practical knowledge. Finally, as a postscript about two pages from the end of the entire work, Allen confesses that two issues ‘‘not specifically addressed in this book are race and gender’’ (p. 260). Struggling to express my reaction to this latter statement in particularly appropriate scholarly language, the phrase that seems to sum it up best is : ‘‘Well, duh!’’ While some of Allen’s insights into American culture are intriguing—for example, our preference for the practical and our obsession with efficiency certainly ring true—they are not ideally persuasive as presented because of the book’s tendency to ignore too many important issues and scholars. Allen may have read more broadly in the sociology and history of science – as well as in media studies and philosophy—than this presentation of his subject matter implies; if so, he ought to have reflected this reading in what he has written here. A dose of empiricism may be helpful in this context. While it seems to be true (on the basis of most relevant opinion polls) that today’s Americans prefer science that has economic or social benefits (for example, science that creates jobs, health, and wealth), it is also true that Americans continue to like and trust science as well as technology (even while some segments are doubtful about specific points, such as evolution and climate change). If, as Allen apparently takes as his premise, suspicion of all things purely scientific is a peculiarly American cultural