Robert Jackall

The Education of Barrington Moore, Jr.

Barrington Moore, Jr., the distinguished author of a great many books, graduated in 1936 from Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts.1 This essay examines some of the educational roots of his intellectual orien tations and remarkable intellectual productivity. Williams College was chartered by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1793 on an extension of a 1755 bequest of

Re-enchanting the World: Some Reflections on Postmodernism

9,297 from Colonel Ephraim Williams. Williams, the commander of a Massachusetts militia unit, paused at Albany on his way to his death at the Battle of Lake George during the French and Indian War in order to write his last will and testament. Williams

From Predators to Icons: Exposing the Myth of the Business Hero

We live in an epoch marked by great social turmoil, intellectual fer? ment, and concomitant personal bewilderment. Many of the social struc? tures that were in place and most of the beliefs, theodicies, and worldviews that were widely held in 1900, and with them comforting visions of an or? dered world, have collapsed under the rush and burden of events of this most troubling of centuries. Paradoxically, it is the most rationally organ? ized enterprises of our society that continually turn our world upside down. The bureaucratization of every sphere of the economic and social order has eroded the autonomy of local institutions, profoundly altered our class structure, shredded and reknit whole communities, and provided the claim making framework for endless disputes about everything. Science, the child of the Enlightenment and the most important god of the modern epoch, turns out to have a profoundly ambiguous legacy. As Max Weber pointed out, science renders the world more intelligible but less meaningful. Its rationality sweeps aside the cobwebs of old superstitions, and provides our society with knowledge that underpins our entire civilization. But its dis? passionate rationality also disenchants the universe and devalues myth, re

Intellectuals and Fascism: The case of sociology

Michel Agier’s Managing the Undesirables is one of several texts that addresses the complex and proliferating humanitarian infrastructure that is increasingly prevalent in regions of the world besieged by violence and displacement, but his work stands out as particularly important and innovative. Agier addresses some of the central questions facing our world today: belonging, personhood, and the ability of those most cut off from political power to speak for themselves and shape their own lives, and he does so in a way that combines passion and keen observation. In doing so, his work should be of interest to a broad range of sociologists who study social inequality and the structures (even those built from the best of intentions) that perpetuate it. In this volume, Agier explores the concept of humanitarian government, the political apparatus set up during emergency situations that takes responsibility for the life and death of individuals no longer protected adequately by a state. For as Agier shows, a refugee camp is far more than a place of shelters and emergency food aid. They are places in which someone decides who gets plastic sheeting and who does not, who receives food rations and for how long, what social programs should be put into place and who should be in charge of them, and what barriers need to be constructed (barbed wired, armed guards, cinderblock walls) to ostensibly protect those inside but also to protect the local population from incursions of these displaced ‘‘undesirables.’’ Further, these ‘‘camps’’ are hardly temporary shelters; many have existed for decades, taking on the appearance of towns and cities with entrepreneurs setting up small businesses and political elites emerging from the post-flight chaos. And yet, the camp is a hybrid social form, taking the shape of something entirely new from what existed before in the lives of its inhabitants, and as Agier convincingly argues, it exists in a state of exception, outside the bounds of the political and social life that humanitarian law and human rights ostensibly guarantee. Agier uses his ethnologist’s eye for culture to analyze observations he made during fieldwork in refugee camps in Kenya, Zambia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea between 2000-2007, accessing the camps through Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF; in English, Doctors Without Borders). His affiliation with MSF gave him a level of flexibility and independence (particularly from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees) that allowed him sufficient time in the camps to not only observe humanitarian government at work but also the response of the refugees under its purview. He combines his observations with detailed histories of different migrations, explaining the historical and geographic paths that led different groups of refugees to the camps that he studied. Agier demonstrates the discursive power that humanitarian organizations have over defining and categorizing the displaced individuals in the camps; defining a person’s status as a refugee leads to acceptance into the camp and the security that brings, but the denial of such status leads to rejection and often deportation back to life-threatening circumstances. Once determined as a refugee, a person’s suffering and vulnerability come to define their place in the camp and the world, with moral hierarchies created around different definitions of vulnerability with different access to resources provided by the humanitarian organization. This process, Agier argues, de-socializes refugees; they lose their individual personhood and either become ahistorical, pitiable masses that the charitable-at-heart seek to keep alive, or potential threats to order and the safety of the non-displaced that must be managed or

Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers

Fascism is a defining phenomenon of the twentieth century. The term comes from the Fascisti, an Italian political organization founded in 1919 which, under Mussolini, came to dominate that country. But the Fascisti drew their name from the ancient Roman custom of minor officers called lictors who bore the fasces, bundles of wood that symbolized submission to lawful authority; lictors cleared the way for magistrates in the public forum. Fascism came to mean a certain kind of political authoritarianism, specifi? cally that which coordinates the state, industry, finance, labor, and commerce under strong nationalistic policies. Many fascist regimes also had powerful leaders at their head, figures who were so lionized that their very persons came to symbolize their nations. Virtually all the fascist states relied as well on brutal suppression of opposition, accompanied by mass propaganda and censorship. Fascism differed in important ways, from communism, its his? torical sibling, although totalitarianism in whatever guise seems to have shaped everyday experiences similarly, if one compares accounts of, say, life in Hitlers Germany and Stalins Soviet Union. Communism communalized productive property, placing a premium on manipulation of bureaucratic party organizations to achieve economic rewards; fascism lent the fulcrum of state power to private property enabling prominent individuals loyal to party leaders and their goals to leverage their resources into fabulous wealth. Communism typically portrayed the past as an unmitigated record of ex? ploitation of the laboring classes, looking forward to a bright future free of former oppression in which the previously exploited inverted the social order and became ascendent. Fascism projected an equally bright future, but one that typically restored aspects of a glorious past, a mythic world of great men, robust moral virtue, old-time values, and communal harmony. Both communism and fascism held great appeal for many engag? intellectuals. Put very briefly, communism offered a this-worldly, modernist salvation, complete with the self-righteousness born of identification with the under