Walter L. Goldfrank

Theories of revolution and revolution without theory

ConclusionThe above analysis identified four conditions as necessary and sufficient for revolution in general and the Mexican revolution in particular: a favorable world context, an administrative and coercive crisis of the state, widespread rural rebellion, and dissident elite movement(s). The first three interact to produce a revolutionary situation; the fourth, given the near-automatic existence of alternate contenders, emerges to effect political and social transformation after military superiority is proved. Other conceptions of revolution - with their foci on expectations and deprivations, or dissensus and ideology, or political conflict, or change of “stage” and class struggle - were found wanting theoretically and to varying degrees unhelpful in making sense of the empirical realities of the Mexican case. The historically grounded, world-system informed structural explanation better fits the data. And theoretically, it integrates the two levels of description that analysts of revolution must comprehend: changes in social and political organization, and conscious human action. It preserves the distinction between revolution and other less far-reaching socio-political phenomena. And it suggests, sternly and surely, that in contemporary advanced societies the kind of conjuncture specified above cannot occur. Past revolutions may inspire but cannot serve as models for our own future.

The Limits of Agronomic Determinism: A Critique of Paige's Agrarian Revolution

Social scientists left and right have long engaged in the project of identifying the conditions under which revolutionary, class-conscious social movements emerge. This project aims at prediction, in the hope of either promoting social revolutions or preventing them. Until quite recently both Marxist and liberal social scientists have focussed on “modern” urban social classes as the generators of revolution: the bourgeoisie, the intellectuals, the industrial proletarlat. But paradoxically, though Marx summarily dismissed the peasantry as so many “potatoes in a sack,” and despite the generality of working-class social movements, the major revolutions of our time have been made largely by country people, to the extent that they were made by social movements at all. Thus two major issues take shape in the study of revolutions. One, how and why do peasants—allegedly “premodern” and conservative—defy the laws of social science and becomerevolutionary agents? What is it about rural social conditions that enabled them to dynamite the old order? Two, what is the relationship between revolutionary social movements on the one hand, and revolutionary outcomes on the other? A movement entails the collective action of a class whose ideology may be described as more or less radical; a revolution entails the overhauling of a social structure. In this context, no matter how ideologically “revolutionary” a social movement may be, it is but one of the causal elements that converge to produce social revolution.

Resisting McCarthyism: To Sign or Not to Sign California’s Loyalty Oath

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

The Big Question@@@Rise and Demise: Comparing World-Systems@@@Beyond Eurocentrism: A New View of Modern World History

Employing the approaches of Gramsci and Foucault, Gran proposes a reconceptualisation of world history. He challenges the convention of relying on totalitarian or democratic functions of a particular state to explain relationships of authority and resistance in a number of national contexts.