Social Theory as Politics in Knowledge 9780080459943, 9780762312368, 076231236X

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SOCIAL THEORY AS POLITICS IN KNOWLEDGE

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CURRENT PERSPECTIVES IN SOCIAL THEORY Series Editor: Jennifer M. Lehmann Volume 1:

1980 Edited by Scott G. McNall and Garry N. Howe

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1981 Edited by Scott G. McNall and Garry N. Howe

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1982 Edited by Scott G. McNall

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1984 Edited by Scott G. McNall

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1987 Edited by John Wilson

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1989 Edited by John Wilson

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1990 Edited by John Wilson

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1992 Edited by Ben Agger

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1994 Edited by Ben Agger

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Recent Developments in the Theory of Social Structure, 1994 Edited by J. David Knottnerus and Christopher Prendergast

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1998 Edited by Jennifer M. Lehmann

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CURRENT PERSPECTIVES IN SOCIAL THEORY VOLUME 23

SOCIAL THEORY AS POLITICS IN KNOWLEDGE EDITED BY

JENNIFER M. LEHMANN Departments of Sociology and Women’s Studies, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, USA

2005

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CONTENTS EDITORIAL BOARD

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

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INTRODUCTION

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PART I: BEFORE AND BENEATH OTHER CONFLICTS: FOURTH WORLD SOCIAL THEORY ABOUT THAT BERING STRAIT LAND BRIDGE... A STUDY IN THE FALSITY OF ‘‘SCIENTIFIC TRUTH’’ Ward Churchill

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PART II: A CONTEMPORARY ARGUMENT ‘‘FOR SOCIAL THEORY’’ FOR SOCIAL THEORY: ALVIN GOULDNER’S LAST PROJECT AND BEYOND Robert J. Antonio

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PART III: CONTEMPORARY CONFLICTS OVER SOCIAL POLICY ARGUED IN SOCIAL THEORY THE MAYBERRY MACHIAVELLIANS IN POWER: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION THROUGH A SYNTHESIS OF MACHIAVELLI, GOFFMAN, AND FOUCAULT Paul Paolucci, Micah Holland and Shannon Williams

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GLOBALIZATION OR HYPER-ALIENATION? CRITIQUES OF TRADITIONAL MARXISM AS ARGUMENTS FOR BASIC INCOME Harry F. Dahms

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PART IV: RELIGION, MORALITY, ETHICS? IN MODERNITY, POSTMODERNITY? THE CONCEPTUAL COMMON DENOMINATOR BETWEEN BELLAH, GIDDENS, AND HABERMAS AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE Hanan Reiner

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RECONSTRUCTING ZYGMUNT BAUMAN’S POSTMODERN SOCIOLOGY OF MORALITY Rekha Mirchandani

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BEYOND NEGATIVE RIGHTS: LIVING WITHOUT CERTAINTY, SOCIAL CHANGE AND THE POSSIBILITY OF POSTMODERN ETHICS Ann Neir Woodward

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EDITOR Jennifer M. Lehmann University of Nebraska (Sociology and Women’s Studies)

ASSOCIATE EDITORS Harry F. Dahms University of Tennessee (Sociology)

Timothy Luke Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Political Science)

Lawrence Hazelrigg Florida State University (Sociology)

Raymond Morrow University of Alberta (Sociology)

EDITORIAL BOARD Ben Agger University of Texas-Arlington (Sociology)

Norman K. Denzin University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Sociology)

Robert J. Antonio University of Kansas (Sociology)

Nancy Fraser New School for Social Research (Political Science)

Stanley Aronowitz City University of New York Graduate Center (Sociology)

Martha Gimenez University of Colorado-Boulder (Sociology)

Molefi Kete Asante Temple University (African-American Studies) David Ashley University of Wyoming (Sociology)

Robert Goldman Lewis and Clark College (Sociology and Anthropology)

Ward Churchill University of Colorado (Ethnic Studies)

Mark Gottdiener State University of New York at Buffalo (Sociology)

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EDITORIAL BOARD

Douglas Kellner University of California-Los Angeles (Philosophy)

Steven Seidman State University of New York at Albany (Sociology)

Lauren Langman Loyola University (Sociology)

Frank Taylor Edinboro University of Pennsylvania (Sociology and Anthropology)

John O’Neill York University (Sociology) Moishe Postone University of Chicago (History)

Stephen Turner The University of South Florida (Philosophy)

Lawrence Scaff Wayne State University (Political Science)

Christine Williams University of Texas at Austin (Sociology)

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Robert J. Antonio

Department of Sociology, University of Kansas, USA

Ward Churchill

Department of Ethnic Studies, University of Colorado, USA

Harry F. Dahms

Department of Sociology, University of Tennessee, USA

Micah Holland

Department of Sociology, University of Cincinnati, USA

Rekha Mirchandani

Department of Sociology, Bowling Green State University, USA

Paul Paolucci

Department of Anthropology, Sociology and Social Work, Eastern Kentucky University, USA

Hanan Reiner

School of Behavioral Sciences. The Academic College, Netanya, Israel

Shannon Williams

Department of Anthropology, Sociology, and Social Work, Eastern Kentucky University, USA

Ann Neir Woodward

Department of Sociology, University of Kansas, USA

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INTRODUCTION FROM A MARXIST NATIVE DAUGHTER The title of this volume is a deliberate paraphrase of Louis Althusser’s defense of a specific form of discourse, which he calls philosophy, and which I, like Bob Antonio, call social theory. Like Antonio, I use the term to distinguish this discourse, these discourses, from sociological theory; to insist on its critical potential; to insist on its public significance. I also use the term to insist on its necessarily conflictual character; and to insist on its ubiquity in all discourses, from the most esoteric to the most banal, as well as its articulation by all subjects, from the most ‘‘expert’’ to the most ‘‘vulgar.’’ The title of this introduction is a deliberate paraphrase of Ward Churchill’s book on Indigenism.1 With this title, I enter into the discourse of social theory in this volume. Like Churchill, I am of mixed Indigenous and European ancestry. Like Churchill, my identity is Indigenous. And, like Churchill, I attend to, and participate in, traditional as well as scholarly discourse. That is perhaps the reason for my belief that Churchill’s essay, while submitted well before the controversy aroused by his discourse of dissent, does not appear in the midst of this controversy by mere coincidence. Churchill’s essay speaks about another characteristic of social theory: that part of its conflictual character is inequality, the conflict between dominant and subordinate social theory. And Churchill’s essay, like his dissent, speaks from and for subordinate positions and subordinate peoples. Churchill’s work protests domination, exploitation, expropriation, colonization, enslavement, and genocide – physical and cultural – from the ‘‘exploration’’ and ‘‘discovery’’ of the New World to the ‘‘proclamation’’ and ‘‘establishment’’ of a New World Order. These misnomers and euphemisms lead me to another contested concept in social theory: ‘‘Civilization.’’ As Indigenous people, we know only too well how this word, ‘‘Civilization,’’ and its antithesis, ‘‘Barbarism’’ has been used to justify the destruction and subjugation of what Churchill terms the Fourth World. Before and beneath all other contemporary social conflicts, European Capitalists deployed these concepts to proclaim their superiority and establish their dominance, in the first manifestation of the globalization of Capitalism. xi

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As world citizens, we heard these terms deployed even as the events of September 11, 2001, exploded before our eyes, in live transmissions from Capitalism’s Big Brother. Marx has said that historical events are played out first as tragedy, then repeated as farce. In hindsight, we can see the destruction/creation of the Fourth World as tragedy, as global, enduring, and of inestimable enormity in its consequences. In the present, however, we have been allowed, if not forced, to see the tragedy of and in the terroristic acts of war and their aftermath on ‘‘United States’’ soil. This was the pretext the United States needed to justify waging a hot war against the new Evil Empire, replacing the Soviet Union as the greatest obstacle to the globalization of Capitalism: the Islamic world. Ward Churchill published an essay, ‘‘The Ghosts of 9-1-1: Reflections on History, Justice and Roosting Chickens,’’ in a book entitled on the JUSTICE OF ROOSTING CHICKENS, another paraphrase, of the African American Muslim, assassinated for his own dissenting social theory, El Hajj Malik El Shabbazz (Malcolm X). In this essay, and its precedent, ‘‘Some People Push Back: Reflections on the Justice of Roosting Chickens,’’ Churchill points out that it is impossible to not see the overarching tragedy. The overarching tragedy is the U.S.-driven military globalization of Capitalism, and its current victims, Islamic peoples, notably in the Middle East, and on a genocidal scale in Iraq. And Churchill questions the question, ‘‘Why do they hate us so much?’’ He does not, as is rumored, call Americans Nazis. He compares ‘‘Good Americans’’ to ‘‘Good Germans’’ in their ‘‘anchoring professions of innocence in claims of near-total ignorance concerning the crimes of their corporate state.’’ The corporate purveyors of mediated mass ‘‘knowledge,’’ like the propaganda machines of Nazi Germany, focus on the Barbarism of the human victims of genocide, and turn away from the genocide and its perpetrators, the forces of Civilization. Yes, history repeats itself. The Barbaric, subhuman ancestors of Ward Churchill and me survived the genocide, enslavement, proletarianization, and colonization of Civilization, genocide, proletarianization – if not enslavement – and colonization that quietly continue against us, along with other subordinate ethnicities, and poor people in general, on a global basis, a Cold War. And we witness the same Hot War declared, in the name of Civilization, by the country that overthrew its colonizers to kill, proletarianize and colonize us, in the name of Civilization. We see the same manifest destiny declared, in the name of Civilization, to kill, proletarianize and colonize the new Barbarians in the new, resource-rich Evil Empire, the Middle East, in the name of Civilization. The tragic irony of the ‘‘controversy’’ surrounding Ward Churchill’s subordinate discourse, his dissenting social theory, is another tragic irony of

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Civilization. First, as the critical social theorist Jacques Derrida pointed out, about those who pilloried him, as Churchill is being pilloried today, ‘‘Ils ne p/veulent me lire.’’ They cannot/will not read me. How many who condemn what Churchill says have read what Churchill says? Second, how many of those who would deny Churchill’s Civilized ‘‘freedom of speech,’’ including ‘‘academic freedom’’ would deny that freedom of speech to the profitable misogyny of the pornography industry, or its ethnic counterpart, the scapegoating hate speech of racism? The First Amendment to the Constitution was drafted in the age of the penny press, before corporate mass media rendered it academic, and in the interest of those who would dissent against the colonization of the United States by the United Kingdom, in writing, while colonizing the Indigenous peoples and their oral traditions. Nonetheless, the First Amendment could be, should be, justly applied to protect the right to freely express dissenting social theories, speech by and for subordinate groups, speech opposing dominant social theories, groups, policies, and structures. McCarthyism, a moment of Hot War against free speech, is a great exemplar of the ongoing Cold War against free speech, and the tragic irony of this constituent of Civilization. McCarthyism denied free speech, directly through imprisonment and deprivation of employment, indirectly and infinitely through fear, specifically speech that opposed Capitalism and supported Socialism. And why was it a crime to support Socialism? Why was it worse to support Socialism than to abridge free speech? Because Socialism is, in the dominant discourse of social theory, ‘‘totalitarian’’ – intolerant of free speech, and critical social theory. And this brings me to my dissent, my subordinate position, my critical social theory, and the conflict between my social theory and dominant social theory. This brings me to a dissent, a critique, a conflict even within critical social theory, even within this volume. I use words and concepts, here and elsewhere: Marxism, Feminism, Multiculturalism, Internationalism, as well as words and concepts, positions and structures they oppose: Capitalism, Patriarchy, Racism, Imperialism, to refer to objective positions and structures. I know that this is as unpopular in theory, even or especially in theory thought of as critical, as it is necessary in practice. But that is not the conflict I wish to address here. Rather, I wish to address the fact that these words and concepts, positions and structures, are not only relevant, but necessary. Because the positions and structures that they oppose, whether named or not, are still in existence. For me, there can be no post-Marxism, because there is no post-Capitalism. There can be no post-Feminism, because there is no post-Patriarchy. There can be no post-Multiculturalism, because there

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is no post-Racism. There can be no post-Colonialism, because there is no post-Colonialism – there is only neo-Colonialism. There can be no Globalization, because there is only the Globalization of Capitalism. I am not guilty, as Churchill might wonder, and others have accused Althusserians of, scientism. In fact, Churchill’s words, ‘‘approximations of truth,’’ are almost identical to Althusser’s. In his rational materialist epistemology, models are constructed that more or less adequately approximate social structures. I consider this epistemology a third path, an alternative to the false dichotomy between absolutism and relativism. Further, I do not neglect inequalities and conflicts of power and politics, of ideas and culture, to focus exclusively on inequalities and conflicts of exploitation and economics. Again, echoing Althusser, I understand that there are dominant and subordinate structures and groups in hegemonic politics; dominant and subordinate ideas and groups in a hegemonic culture. Obviously, I do not neglect inequalities and conflicts of gender, ethnicity, or nationality, to focus exclusively on questions of class – although I deny the naturalizing and essentializing, biological, categories of sex and race. At the same time, I cannot theorize the destruction/construction/reproduction of the Fourth World in the exploitation and domination of the New World, or the destruction/construction/reproduction of the Third World in the exploitation and domination from the New World to the New World Order, without theorizing the structure and process of Capitalism. I cannot theorize colonialism, or neo-colonialism, or internal colonialism – within a nation or within a consciousness – without theorizing the structure and process of Capitalism. Individual minds, the Fourth World, the Third World, the Second World, and the First World and the Globalized world are not dominated by Europeans or Europeanism, the West or Westernism, but by Capitalists and Capitalism. I cannot be a cultural reductionist as I cannot be an economic reductionist. Finally, and hopefully obviously, I do not believe that dominance is inevitable or social structures permanent, any more than I believe that equality is inevitable or social changes predictable. Structures in dominance, hegemonic, dialectical, contradictory, unequal structures, necessarily include resistance as well as dominance, and counter-resistance as well as resistance; transformation as well as intransigence and counter-transformation as well as transformation; deconstruction/destruction/de-production and reconstruction/re-struction/ re-production as well as reproduction. Structural social inequalities ineluctably produce social struggles and social struggles ineluctably produce social changes. Social changes may not be predictable, and they cannot eliminate social structures, but they are ineluctable.2

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NOTES 1. Churchill’s book, From A Native Son is evidently a conscious intertextual Indigenous reference to Native Son, by Richard Wright, the conscious African American intertextual reference to American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser, itself a conscious refutation of the European American Horatio Alger mythology of Capitalism. 2. Marx said, ‘‘The changes in the economic system are as predictable as the predictions of natural sciences, but the ways in which [men] respond to them, culturally and politically, is entirely unforeseeable.’’ The Frankfurt School bore witness to, interpreted, and critiqued such predictability and unpredictability when it saw capitalism transformed into socialism in the Soviet Union, yet maintained by fascism and Nazism, as well as by reform and the one-dimensional thought of the cultural industry.

Jennifer Lehmann (Cedar ELK Woman) Editor

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ABOUT THAT BERING STRAIT LAND BRIDGEy A STUDY IN THE FALSITY OF ‘‘SCIENTIFIC TRUTH’’ Ward Churchill The bigger the lie, the more likely it will be believed. – Adolf Hitler

Some ‘‘truths,’’ if not exactly self-evident in their own right, have been made to seem so. We all ‘‘know,’’ for example, that the people now called American Indians originated in Asia and wandered into the Western Hemisphere by way of a land bridge which once joined the eastern reaches of Siberia to the most westerly portion of Alaska. When this migration supposedly occurred has always been a great unknown, although it has seldom been presented as such. During the first half of the twentieth century, it was a matter of anthropological orthodoxy that it could have begun no more than 4,000 years before the present, with the 2,000–3,000-year range being a preferred dating among ‘‘reputable’’ scholars.1 Beginning in the late 1940s, however, it was declared with an equal lack of equivocation that the crossing might have commenced ‘‘as many as’’ 15,000 years ago.2 Then, in the early 1990s, it was reported in USA Today and elsewhere that research in genetics and linguistics had revealed the need for a revision in dating ‘‘the landbridge-traverse’’ to some point at least 30,000 years before present.3 Despite such gross and ongoing disparities with respect to time frame and a range of related problems, many of them equally substantial, the premise Social Theory as Politics in Knowledge Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Volume 23, 3–68 Copyright r 2005 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0278-1204/doi:10.1016/S0278-1204(05)23001-3

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that American Indians originated as a group of ‘‘displaced Asiatics’’ has increasingly been accepted as a ‘‘fact’’ over the past century.4 Through constant reiteration and a systematic glossing over of its more fundamental inconsistencies, the Bering Strait Migration Theory has assumed a status in the popular consciousness comparable to that once occupied by the notion that the universe revolves around the earth. At this point, any student in the upper grades of elementary school is apt to regurgitate a rudimentary version in response to a query as to where Indians ‘‘came from.’’5 Leaving aside a sector of the marginalized, oft-ridiculed, and otherwise stigmatized aggregation of ‘‘academic mavericks’’ who in every generation emerge to challenge scholarly orthodoxy – and thereby exert an inordinately positive influence upon the formation of knowledge in the West6 – the only group presently exhibiting significant resistance to the land bridge migration hypothesis consists of a smattering of Native North Americans who continue to embrace the stories of origin embodied in their own peoples’ traditional understandings of themselves. The last, of course, are invariably and quite condescendingly dismissed as being ‘‘creationists,’’ adherents to the kind of primitive mythic/religious worldview which has long since been displaced by the presumptively superior truth-attaining methods of Western science.7 Irrespective of whether the scientific tradition is in all instances inherently superior to other ways of knowing, a dubious proposition at best, the tailoring of facts to fit theories constitutes neither good science, good pedagogy, nor even good journalism.8 On the contrary, the products of such endeavors are rightly consigned to the realm of sheer intellectual dishonesty and, when disseminated as ‘‘Truth’’ to a mass audience, of propaganda. The latter, as analysts as diverse as Jacques Ellul, Noam Chomsky, and William Graebner have each concluded, is invariably devoted to achieving political rather than scholarly objectives.9 In this sense at least, the mystique of factual supremacy science has now all but universally accorded that the results of scientific inquiry serves mainly as a mask behind which is hidden the hegemonic and often antiscientific functioning of power.10 Few examples of the deformity of science to serve ends other than scientific ends are clearer than that of the Bering Strait Migration Hypothesis. Its conclusions preordained in the very sort of theological considerations the scientific method is ostensibly deployed to refute, the theory has been maintained and continuously refined in the face of countervailing and often overwhelming evidence by America’s steadily evolving anthropological establishment for well over 200 years.11 It is a history replete with forgeries, fabrications and other such hoaxes, the suppression of inconvenient data at

About that Bering Strait Land Bridge

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every turn, and the routinely willful manipulation or misinterpretation of such material as has been admitted to exist.12 It follows that the history of the hypothesis is also littered with the careers, stunted if not broken altogether, of those who, in defiance of the limits placed by orthodoxy upon what they were allowed to conclude, attempted in the manner of Galileo, to find what the facts dictated.13 Conversely, it is filled by the ranks of those who, despite having been eventually shown to have erred by thousands of years and hundreds of percentage points in arriving at the more ‘‘responsible’’ conclusions, continue to be respected and in some cases are much revered figures in their fields.14 Why all of this should be so is, of course, a question begging for an answer. In a society displaying such a profound degree of anti-intellectualism and resulting ignorance that the average citizen would be unable to fix the locations of modern nation-states like Burkino Faso and Myanmar, interpretation of Beringian prehistory would seem an altogether esoteric preoccupation; one lacking in popular appeal (to say the least).15 Why then all the volatility and outright viciousness attending the topic? Why is it incorporated into a public school curriculum unable to impart to its students anything resembling an adequate sense of contemporary geography? How is it that certain ‘‘discoveries’’ in this connection all but inevitably find their way onto the feature pages of media edifices like ‘‘McPaper’’?

EDUCATION AS CULTURAL IMPERIALISM There is no argument among serious researchers that a mongoloid stock first colonized the New World from Asia. Nor is there controversy about the fact that these continental pioneers used the Bering Land Bridge that then connected the Asian Far East with Alaska. – Gerald F. Shields, et al. American Journal of Genetics (1992)

As is the case with so many things not otherwise apparent, the motive(s) most likely reside within the structure of the society itself. The United States is, after all, first and foremost a colonial ‘‘settler state’’; that is, a country of a type in which the colonizing state has been constructed in its entirety upon the territory of the colonized.16 Maintaining the colonized in a condition of acute and perpetual domination is of the most crucial importance to any such internal colonial order because, unlike the arrangements evident in more classical imperial systems, the colonizing population has no territory of its own into which it can withdraw, should its subjects free themselves

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from subordination.17 As the matter has been posed by Cherokee activist Jimmie Durham, The state called ‘‘France’’ is connected to something like a country, also called ‘‘France.’’ The state called ‘‘America’’ is connected to an independent settler colony. At the end of its ‘‘empire’’, Great Britain must return to that island in Europe y. [A]t the end of America’s empire it should follow that there is a country that is America. Would my country become free of the US? If so, where is America? If not, do I really not come from any place? Is the country of my people really only a story in the Great American Story?18

For obvious reasons, then, it is absolutely essential in the view of any settler elite – the Euroamerican intelligentsia, for instance – to contrive an affirmative response to the latter question. Not only the relatively high degrees of privilege and prestige they are accorded, but perhaps their very survival is seen as being entirely dependent upon their ability to preserve and perfect the internal colonial system, rendering it even more efficient and impervious to attack. From this vantage point, the salient issue is by what means this might best be accomplished. Here, an insight offered by the Tunisian anticolonial theorist Albert Memmi seems particularly instructive. In order for the colonizer to be a complete master, it is not enough to be so in actual fact, but he must also believe in its legitimacy. In order for that legitimacy to be complete, it is not enough for the colonized to be a slave, he must accept his role.19

The most effective route to this end, Memmi observed, is usually for the colonizer to assert direct control over the history of the colonized, falsifying it in such a way as to cast the degraded status in which they presently find themselves as a natural and inevitable result of ‘‘deficiencies’’ embodied in their own past.20 To some extent, the content of what is said is less important than the psychologically/intellectually disempowering manner in which it is conveyed and the fact that it is invariably at odds with whatever the colonized believed they knew, not only of themselves but of the world itself. The process is always unidirectional, never reciprocal – the colonizer purports to explain the colonized to themselves, never the other way around – and always, no matter its inconsistencies and other defects, presented as the revelation of a superior truth.21 There can be no deeper or more meaningful disruption of a people’s sense of themselves than an intervention designed to preempt and eventually supplant their own understanding(s) of their origins. Thus, the otherwise inexplicably high priority placed by the American anthropological establishment and its counterparts upon refinement and defense of the Bering Strait migration theory in the face of much contrary evidence and, most pointedly, in contradiction to explanations of who they are/where they came

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from posited within the oral historical traditions of American Indians themselves.22 All told, the phenomenon represents a veritable textbook illustration of what Martin Carnoy and John Tomlinson, among others, have described as the deployment of science, education, and the media for purposes of ‘‘cultural imperialism.’’23 Insofar as this is so, it is worth examining the Bering Strait theory in some detail, from the point of its inception during the seventeenth century to its iteration at the dawn of the twenty-first, interrogating the basis upon which the notion has been sustained at each step along the way. While it is quite unlikely that any of us will arrive at anything approximating real truth through such an undertaking, there is nonetheless an obvious value in confronting and discarding the more deliberate forms of untruth. In this manner, it should be possible to see things clearly, or at least more clearly than we have before, and to draw from this appreciation a more viable set of conclusions than we have previously possessed.

ORIGINS OF A SCIENTIFIC MYTH Nothing could be more central to American reality than the relationships between Americans and American Indians, but those relationships are of course the most invisible and the most lied about. The lies are not simply a denial; they constitute a whole new world. —Jimmie Durham ‘‘The Ground Has Been Covered’’ (1988)

It all began in 1492, with Columbus’s discovery of an entire hemisphere previously unknown to Christendom. While the new geography was in itself difficult enough to explain in biblical terms, a more significant issue was raised by the fact that, on its face, the Americas’ vast human population could not be accounted for by way of descent from Adam and Eve, the original pair of humans supposedly created by the Christian God in the Garden of Eden. The need of the Church to preserve its interpretive authority set in motion a protracted process of tracing the lineage of New World peoples to Old World origins in a manner consistent with scriptural requirements.24 While there were a number of attempts to simply define American Indians as a nonhuman form of wildlife, and in some cases even ‘‘the spawn of Satan,’’25 by the end of the sixteenth century the majority of theologians had gravitated to the notion that Indians were the progeny of one or more of the 10 lost tribes of Israel noted in the Bible.26 Exactly how these ‘‘Wandering

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Jews’’ had managed to get from one hemisphere to the other was left rather ambiguous until 1650, when Israel ben Mannasseh, a rabbinical scholar, published a book entitled The Hope of Israel. Therein, it was argued that transit had been made ‘‘over an ancient land bridge now covered by the ‘Strait of Anian’ – a vague term in use then, long before the Bering Strait had become known and named, for the narrow body of water separating the extreme of Asia from that of North America.’’27 In effect, [Mannasseh’s] theory on this fundamental point was the same as the one most widely held today, except that the latter places the migration across the strait much earlier than he did. Mannasseh, of course, considered the migration to have occurred somewhat after the Assyrian conquest of the northern Kingdom of Israel and the dispersion of its Ten Tribes [in 721 B.C.]; but, on the other hand, he does not think that the migrants consisted exclusively of their descendants, and in this respect his theory touches once again upon the modern one. For he maintains that most of the migrants were pure Tartars [with] the Jewish tribes in their midst.28

Mannasseh’s themes were widely embraced over the next century, with a Savannah-based English trader named James Adair, eventually, in 1775, publishing an elaborate system of linguistic ‘‘proofs’’ that indigenous American languages derived from what he called ‘‘Israelite origins.’’29 By 1829, a self-proclaimed prophet named Joseph Smith had consummated the ‘‘Ancient Hebrew’’ school of interpretation by offering up what he claimed was the translation of a hieroglyphic text written by an angel named ‘‘Moroni’’ on a set of gold plates. Supposedly, only Smith could read the hieroglyphs, and then only through a pair of miraculous stones, also provided by Moroni. To preclude others demanding to see the plates themselves, Smith announced that the angel had conveniently whisked them away to heaven.30 In any event, Smith’s Book of Mormon ‘‘details how America was first settled by a tribe of Israelites called Jaredites, who came direct from the confusion of the Tower of Babel as described in the Book of Genesis. These Jaredites were supposed to have come via boats, landing on the Gulf Coast of Mexico and founding a number of centers such as Monte Alban and La Venta, but after a series of calamities, they were destroyed in the Second Century B.C.’’31 Smith then describes how a second Israelite migration to America, again accomplished by boat, was led by a man named Lehi. Lehi and his followers, the argument goes, came directly from Jerusalem about 600 B.C., and after their arrival quickly split into two groups, the Nephites and Lamanites. The Nephites are said to have built the great pre-Columbian sites of Central America and the Andes y and to have died out about 324 A.D. The Lamanites are said to have become a

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nomadic agricultural people who continued in a ‘‘degenerate condition’’ and who became the ancestors of the familiar North American Indian tribes.32

While the Smith text has long since been proven fraudulent – most recently in 1977, when it was demonstrated that much of the material about American Indian origins was composed of pages extracted from the manuscript of an unpublished novel stolen from Congregationalist Minister Solomon Spaulding in 181633 – its Truths continue to be embraced as an article of faith by the 3.8 million members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormons), and to form the conceptual foundation of the New World Archaeological Institute at the church-sponsored Brigham Young University.34 Meanwhile, by the beginning of the nineteenth century another school of thought had arisen from Mannasseh’s postulation, and this one is purportedly more scientific than scriptural in orientation. Abandoning references to the supposed Judaic origins of America’s aboriginal population, those of this inclination increasingly gravitated toward the portion of their predecessor’s thesis which described the earliest migratory influx as having been composed primarily of ‘‘Mongoloid stock’’ and to have entered the hemisphere via a land bridge.35 Exemplifying this thinking was Thomas Jefferson, who deployed a rudimentary Bering Strait hypothesis in his Notes on the State of Virginia, first published in 1781. The late discoveries of Captain Cook, coasting from Kamchatka to California, have proved that, if the two continents of Asia and America be separated at all, it is only by the narrowest streight [sic]. So that y inhabitants may have passed into America: and the resemblance between the Indians of America and the Eastern inhabitants of Asia, would induce us to conjecture that the former are descendants of the latter.36

Unlike the theologians from whom he took his cue, Jefferson adopted the notion of a relatively recent migration of Indians into the New World for expressly secular rather than religious reasons. In essence, his motive was to foster a misimpression that Indians were really no more genuinely indigenous than those invading their territories, and thus imbued with no greater aboriginal rights than were he and the class of Euroderivative usurpers he represented. Thus disencumbered from constraint, in their own minds at least, he and his peers were morally freed to take what they wanted, whenever they wanted.37 A major difficulty confronting the hypothesis was, of course, that there was not so much as a shred of evidence to support it. This defect was rather conveniently corrected in 1836, when a naturalist named Constantine Samuel Rafinesque published The American Nations, a book in which he explained

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how he had spent more than a decade deciphering ‘‘an ancient hieroglyphic document, painted and engraved on wooden tablets y by early Lenape (Delaware) Indians.’’38 Rafinesque called the document Walam Olum, which he said meant ‘‘painted record’’ in Lenape, the Delaware language. The hieroglyphs allegedly documented how North America was settled by Lenape who had come from Asia across the frozen Bering Strait, conquered a moundbuilding people who had already settled in the Midwest, and then diversified into the various tribes of Algonquian-speaking peoples. As for a time frame, a long list of chiefs included in the text allowed Rafinesque to ‘‘compute the generations’’ back to a migration that began 3,600 years ago.39

Although there were strong indications from the outset that this tract too was a fraud – like Smith’s golden plates, Rafinesque’s wooden tablets were immediately proclaimed to have been ‘‘lost’’ – its authenticity was readily affirmed by America’s burgeoning scientific community.40 For a full century, ‘‘the Walam Olum assumed increasing importance in the literature about American Indian origins’’ and was regularly endorsed as a crucial piece of evidence supporting the Bering Strait hypothesis (this was true even of scholars like linguist Daniel G. Brinton, who performed a fresh translation of Rafinesque’s notebooks in 1855 and privately admitted that they smacked of fabrication).41 The capstone was placed upon this trend during the early 1930s when millionaire pharmacologist cum amateur paleontologist Eli Lilly funded a team of eminent archaeologists, ethnologists, linguists and historians to substantiate the Walam Olum.42 The project took twenty years and resulted in an ‘‘exhaustive report,’’ published in 1954, concluding that the ‘‘Delaware’’ fable was at least as authentic and historically valuable as the Homeric epics which had led German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann to discover the lost city of Troy at the turn of the century.43 As recently as 1987, historian C.A. Weslager, a reputed specialist on the Lenni Lenape, went on record asserting the tract’s integrity, and reeled off a list of distinguished colleagues who agreed with him.44 It would be another decade before a graduate student named David Oestreicher finally exposed the Walam Olum as an elaborate but rather crudely constructed hoax. ‘‘Before long,’’ Oestreicher recounted in the October 1996 issue of Natural History, ‘‘I found the text was filled with preposterous grammatical constructions and fractured words. Later, when I examined Rafinesque’s manuscript y I found it replete with crossed-out Lenape words that had been replaced with others that better matched his English ‘translation.’ In other words, Rafinesque had been translating from

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English to Lenape, rather than the other way around: his manuscript was the rough draft of a forgery.’’45 Rafinesque also left a paper trail showing that he had obtained Delaware words for his hoax mainly from the work of two Moravian missionaries: David Zeisberger’s Grammar of the Language of the Lenni-Lenapi (1827) and John Heckewelder’s list of Lenape names published in 1834 y Equally telling were typographical and historical errors copied uncritically from source books, and non-Delaware vocabulary (including Ojibwa, Osage, Shawnee, and even Aztec and Chinese words), which peppered his text y. The hieroglyphs of the Walam Olum are [also] hybrids concocted from ancient Egyptian writing, ancient Chinese Ku-Wen script, Ojibwa Midewin pictographs, and even some Maya symbols.46

As Oestreicher himself points out, it was not especially difficult to trace the contours of Rafinesque’s fraud by examining the author’s original manuscript and other papers, ‘‘which had been languishing in the archives of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.’’47 That virtually none of the senior scholars in relevant fields appear to have bothered to do the same before citing the Walam Olum as corroborating their own theories, speaks quite eloquently to the quality and integrity of the theories themselves.48 In effect, a ‘‘factual’’ cornerstone upon which the presumed validity of the Bering Strait hypothesis in its scientific guise has until quite recently been anchored has proven no less invented than that underpinning the version put forth in The Book of Mormon.49 At the very least, Rafinesque’s ‘‘Red Record’’ of American Indian migration out of Asia – still quite popular among the ‘‘New Age’’ set50 – must be ranked along with such travesties as Piltdown Man and the early books of Carlos Castaneda as one of the greatest scams in the history of anthropology.51 Yet, its significance is in many ways eclipsed by the magnitude and techniques of falsification, which have emerged as the normative standard of interpretation within the anthropological establishment more generally.

THE ENFORCEMENT OF ORTHODOXY Objectivity is not an unobtainable emptying of the mind but a willingness to abandon a set of preferences when the world seems to work in a contrary way y. Good theories invite a challenge but do not bias the outcome y. We say, in our mythology, that old theories die when new observations derail them. But too often, indeed I would say usually, theories act as straightjackets to channel observations toward their support and to forestall data that might refute them. —Stephen Jay Gould Bully for the Brontosaurus (1992)

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Although Rafinesque’s timetable never made the least scientific sense – like those advanced by Mannasseh and Smith, it was constructed entirely from interpretation of biblical history52 – it was quickly adopted by the anthropological establishment and vigorously defended for over a century.53 As lately as the 1940s, the canonical Truth insisted upon by anthropology’s leading ‘‘experts’’ – men like Ales Hrdlicka, curator of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum from 1909 to 1941 – was that humans had not arrived in the Americas more than 3,000 years ago. In 1928, Hrdlicka even ‘‘had the boldness to decree at a meeting of the New York Academy y that there could not have been a Paleo-Indian [emphasis added].’’54 [Hrdlicka’s] authoritarian and negative stance on matters of early man – that is, an American population earlier than historic Indian – was so rigorous and ably defended that for decades American scholars gave no serious thought to the possibility that the occupancy of the Americas was anything but recent – no deeper than 2,000 to 3,000 years in time.55

Anyone suggesting that people might have been here for some longer period was branded a crackpot or scholarly heretic, their evidence automatically dismissed as fabricated or at least too ‘‘controversial’’ to be taken seriously. This rule was initially applied even to figures such as J.D. Figgins, Director of the Denver Museum of Natural History, Harvard University’s Alfred Vincent Kidder, and Frank H.H. Roberts, Jr., all of whose adherence to the approved limit was swayed by the 1926 finding, near Folsom, New Mexico, of projectile points embedded in the bones of Bison antiquus (an animal which had been extinct for some 10,000 years).56 Similarly, in 1931, when University of Minnesota anthropologist Albert E. Jencks recovered the first human skeletal remains among deposits from the last ice age, Hrdlicka quickly attacked his conclusion that the bones were at least 10,000 years old, claiming that Jencks had merely discovered the much more recent burial of a modern Sioux Indian.57 ‘‘Minnesota Man,’’ as Jencks dubbed his find (although it consisted of the bones of an adolescent female), was eventually and definitively dated at more than 11,000 years, but it would be another three decades before the technology to accomplish this became available.58 In 1932, another batch of projectile points was found near Clovis, Texas, beneath a layer of earth containing Folsom points (indicating that they were older still). More importantly, several of them were wedged between the ribs of the skeletons of woolly mammoths, camels, and the small, three-toed horse which had once flourished in North America, but which had been extinct for 12 millennia.59 As such discoveries proliferated, pressure mounted

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among anthropologists themselves for an adjustment of orthodoxy to incorporate them, thereby rendering mainstream interpretations more defensible in the face of criticism. Their backs against the proverbial wall, Hrdlicka and his followers fought a vicious holding action, vociferously ‘‘denying everything to maintain [their] position that man could be anything, anything at all, but not ancient in America.’’60 Although the weight of evidence was clearly and increasingly against them, the old guard prevailed for another 15 years before a new Truth displaced theirs in the establishment’s representations to the general public. Even then, the change was grudging and came primarily as the result of a geological rather than anthropological discovery. This took the form of a realization that the land bridge over which humans were supposed to have first crossed into the Americas could have existed only during an ice age, when sufficient water had been absorbed into the earth’s glacial mass to lower sea levels enough to expose the Beringian ocean floor.61 Since the last ice age ended 10,000 years ago, it followed that people had to have been here by that point if the Bering Strait migration hypothesis was to hold up at all. Pushing the point of entry back a bit further still would allow the theory to encompass Folsom, Clovis and related finds.62 Hence, in 1948, University of California anthropologist Alfred Louis Kroeber, who had replaced Hrdlicka as the acknowledged ‘‘dean of the profession’’ upon the latter’s retirement in 1941, used his new status to ‘‘resolve’’ the issue, once and for all.63 Drawing a new line in the dirt, Kroeber announced that, henceforth, the ‘‘maximal period’’ of human occupancy in the Americas would be set at 12,000 years, a duration subsequently extended to 15,000. As he put it in his definitive Anthropology, It may be said that in the opinion of most Americanists, ethnologists as well as archaeologists, the first human immigrants arrived in the Western Hemisphere in late Pleistocene times. The meagerly known Clovis, Folsom and similar cultures y. represent this early level of culture y. If anything earlier than Clovis and Folsom existed in America, it has not been found.64

Conspicuously absent from this sweeping statement was any reference to the magnitude of the inaccuracy which had marked mainstream anthropological dating over the preceding fifty years (a factor of 400–500%). It was, moreover, false before it was uttered, avoiding mention, among many other things, of the pair of so-called ‘‘San Diego Skulls’’ discovered by Malcolm J. Rogers, Curator of the San Diego Museum of Man, during the late 1920s.65 Well before Kroeber entered his pronouncement, George F. Carter, previously Curator of Anthropology at the San Diego Museum and

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later a senior geologist with the Texas A&M University, had taken up the question of the skulls’ antiquity, concluding that they were at least 40,000 years old.66 While Kroeber himself opted for the most part to simply ignore such findings, the response of his ‘‘new school’’ establishment was to subject Carter to the most extreme sorts of ridicule, labeling his evidence ‘‘Cartifacts’’ and seeking to drive him from the ranks of professional anthropologists altogether.67 While the validity of his estimates were finally confirmed during the early 1970s when Scripps Institute geochemist Jeffrey Bada used amino acid racemization testing to date the first of the San Diego Skulls (La Jolla) at 44,000 years, and the second (Del Mar) at 48,000,68 Carter’s reputation has never really been redeemed. Those of his detractors, on the other hand, despite the fact that they were dead wrong at best and conscious liars at worst, for the most part remain sterling. Evidence of the deep antiquity of human occupancy in the Americas, meanwhile, continued to emerge at a steady rate. From 1951 to 1955, for instance, a series of excavations by geologist Thomas E. Lee on the Sheguiandah Reserve, on Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron, yielded materials dated at 30,000 years by the University of Arizona’s Ernst Antevs.69 Then, in 1956, Philip Orr, a respected paleontologist with the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, collected bone fragments from a site on southern California’s Santa Rosa Island, which were tentatively dated at about 30,000 years.70 Although Orr’s reports on his Santa Rosa finds were treated much like Carter’s on the San Diego Skulls, he was eventually more than borne out: in 1977, Ranier Berger, a UCLA geophysicist, established conclusively through radiocarbon dating that remains taken from the same locality were at least 40,000 years old.71 Orr’s discoveries were followed in 1957 by the radiocarbon dating of materials recovered by Frank Hibbens nearly 20 years before in the Sandia Mountains, near Albuquerque, which indicated ‘‘an age of at least 20,000 years, with the reasonable probability that the true age exceeds 30,000 years.’’72 In 1958, an animal bone imbedded with a Clovis point near Lewisville, Texas, was radiocarbon dated by scientists at the Humble Oil Company Laboratory to 37,000 years; a subsequent test at UCLA dated it to 38,000 years.73 Then, in 1961, there was the finding of a human-inscribed bison bone in a 43,000-year-old peat stratum near American Falls, Idaho.74 Two years later, geologist A. McS. Stalker discovered remains near Taber, Alberta, which turned out to be at least 35,000 years old.75 A year after that, tools fashioned from animal bones were extracted from a site near Dawson City, Yukon, and radiocarbon dated at 38,000 years.76

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Subsequent discoveries have included the Monte Verde site in Chile (over 30,000 years),77 the Tlapacaya site near Mexico City (22,000–24,000 years),78 the Old Crow or Bluefish Cave sites in the Yukon (30,000 years),79 the radiocarbon dating of skulls found much earlier near Los Angeles (23,600 years) and Otavalo, Ecuador (over 30,000 years),80 a similar dating of a skull found more recently by paleontologist Morton Childers in California’s Yuha Valley (22,000 years),81 the Pikimachay Cave site near Ayacucho, Peru (20,000 years),82 the Muaco Site near Falcon, Venezuela (over 16,000 years),83 the Yukon’s Tanana Uplands (29,000 years),84 Pedra Feruda, Brazil (32,000 years),85 and the so-called ‘‘Black Box Skull’’ (52,000 years).86 Nor has the latter been the only very old find. In 1975, another acid racemization test performed by Kenneth Bada – this one of the remains unearthed in 1972 by Stanford University archaeologist Bert Garrow, near Sunnyvale, California – yielded a dating of 70,000 years.87 Similarly, materials extracted in 1975 by paleontologist Jorge Espanoza from a site near El Bosque, Nicaragua, have been dated at 70,000 years,88 while stone tools discovered in San Diego’s Mission Valley a couple of years later by Brian Reeves, a University of Calgary archaeologist, were situated in a geological stratum more than 100,000 years old.89 Materials removed by a U.S. Geological Survey team from the Hueyatlaco and El Horno sites near Puebla, Mexico, during the same period yielded fission tract dates even older than that.90 By the mid-1960s, the late Louis Leakey – renowned as the discoverer of Australopithecines, the oldest known protohuman remains (9 million years), as well as those of Homo hablis, the second oldest (3 million years)91 – had become convinced by the mounting evidence that even older sites, perhaps the oldest of all those occupied by fully modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens), might be found in North America.92 At the time of his death in 1972, Leakey had arranged for excavations near southern California’s Calico Hills with the stated expectation that materials dating back 100,000 years or more would be discovered there.93 Although nothing of such extreme antiquity has yet emerged from the Calico site, materials reasonably dated at 60,000 years have been turned up.94 All of this notwithstanding, the anthropological status quo has for more than half a century continued to defend Kroeber’s magical 15,000 year cutoff line as if it were writ in stone. ‘‘After 40 years of searching,’’ University of Texas geologist cum University of Arizona paleontologist C. Vance Haynes, Jr., straightfacedly declared in a representative 1969 essay, ‘‘little positive evidence for earlier occupation of the New World has been

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found.’’95 In 1976, the late Robert Heizer, at the time a rather exalted figure in the anthropology department on the University of California’s Berkeley campus, offered an even more penetrating observation; the dates being reported by Bada, Berger and others, Heizer informed the readership of the New York Times, were ‘‘too old’’ to be considered credible, no matter how they were arrived at.96 As lately as 1992, an exhibit depicting Mesoamerican culture at the Colorado Museum of Natural History began with a placard describing how people first entered the hemisphere across a Bering Strait land bridge a mere 15,000 years hence.97 Four years later, a junior professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado, his face adorned with a knowing smirk, enlightened his audience with the ‘‘fact’’ that despite ‘‘certain wild claims to the contrary y there was simply nobody here more than twelve or fifteen thousand years ago.’’98 No qualifications at all were attached to these public assertions, or any of a few hundred others that might be cited (each of them saying more or less precisely the same thing). For those who fail to hew the institutionally prescribed line, moreover, the price can be as steep today as that paid by George Carter during the 1950s. Probably the most prominent example is that of ‘‘Scotty’’ MacNeish, former President of the Society for American Archaeology, Director of the R.S. Peabody Foundation for Archaeology and winner of the A.V. Kidder Award for Archaeology in 1971. While MacNeish obviously prospered so long as he adhered to limits of Kroeberian interpretation, his publication of a 1976 article arguing the case for human occupancy in the Americas of 40 millennia or more resulted in a marked and immediate diminishment of his reputation.99 Over the next 20 years, his work at the Pendejo Cave – in far southeastern New Mexico, just outside El Paso, Texas – exacerbated the situation considerably, especially after samples of human hair he recovered there in 1992 were dated by acid racemization at just under 40,000 years.100 As a consequence, MacNeish has been banished to a kind of anthropological hinterland reserved for ‘‘eccentrics’’ like Carter and even, to some extent, Louis Leakey himself.101 And, if such punishment has been so routinely meted out to these relative luminaries, it is predictable that less wellestablished individuals have often fared far worse. A perfect illustration is that of Jeffrey Goodman, a young freelance archaeologist who, while digging a site near Flagstaff, Arizona, during the late 1970s, unearthed a human-inscribed stone from a 100,000-year-old geological stratum. Although he followed all the proper procedures both during the dig and after, obtaining independent confirmation from leading experts at each step along the way, Goodman’s insistence upon the authenticity and importance of his

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find quickly resulted in his being made a laughingstock and excommunicated from the profession altogether.102

A FEW PROBLEMS OF CHRONOLOGY Evidence from a number of archaeological sites distributed in the western part of the hemisphere from the Yukon into South America now indicates a minimum possible date of 40,000 years for the earliest entry of man into the North American continent. —Ruth Gruhn ‘‘Excavations at El Bosque’’ (1977)

Actually, aside from arrogance, obstinacy, and a lingering Jeffersonian desire to make American Indians appear as recently arrived as possible, there are some very strong reasons for the anthropological status quo having been so adamant in its resistance to datings earlier than 15,000 years in the Americas. Not the least of these has been the contention, still prevalent and until quite recently a matter of Scientific Truth, that truly modern humans did not appear until about 40,000 years ago, in Europe.103 Since it would obviously have taken many millennia for this new species to have spread across Asia to the far reaches of Siberia, the migratory ‘‘stock’’ with which it is presumed the New World was initially populated would not have been available for such purposes until some point usually estimated at rather less than 20,000 years ago.104 Then there is the geological history of the ‘‘land bridge’’ itself. Although there have been four glacial periods of sufficient magnitude to bring the whole of Beringia above water during the past quarter-million years, only the most recent, which lasted from roughly 35,000 to about 10,000 years ago, fits the above-mentioned schedule.105 Even this time frame must be constricted, however, since the range of conditions permitting human transit across the bridge and then southward into the interior of North America existed, if they existed at all, for only about 5,000 years on either side of the point of maximum glaciation. In other words, the necessary ‘‘open corridor’’ from Siberia to Texas can be presumed to have existed only during the 10 millennia from 25,000 to 15,000 years before present.106 Moreover, since humans were not supposed to be in a position to undertake the trek until the requisite interval had all but expired, the window of opportunity available for the Bering Strait traverse is reduced to almost nothing. Hence, the rigid Kroeberian insistence that the ‘‘original American’’ walked into Alaska 15,000 years ago, neither more nor less.107 To

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concede that she/he arrived even a few thousand years earlier might be geologically plausible, but it would serve to undermine one of the more carefully crafted ‘‘scientific’’ underpinnings of white supremacist ideology: the idea that since Europeans were the first to evolve into fully human form, and have thus had longer to develop their physiologically human attributes, they are ‘‘naturally’’ superior to all other human groups.108 Quite apart from skeletal remains and other materials which have been dated to an antiquity deeper than 15 millennia, even those which fall within the approved limit often present insurmountable problems in terms of chronology. How, for example, did people who first entered Alaska at the approved point manage to establish themselves at the many Clovis sites situated as far south as New Mexico at more or less the same time?109 Or the 15,000-year-old Meadowcroft rock shelter in Pennsylvania?110 Or, for that matter, the 14,500-year-old Wilson Butte site in Idaho?111 More problematic still, how could they possibly have reached the 14,400-year-old Taima– Taima site in Venezuela, or the 14,200-year-old Alice Boer site in Brazil?112 Even sites which fall well within the approved limit can cause severe chronological problems. Consider, for instance, Fells Cave near Tierra del Fuego, at the very tip of South America, which was inhabited about 8,500 years ago. Why would it take people more than 20,000 years to migrate from Europe to eastern Siberia, and then only another 6,500 to cover the nearly equivalent distance separating Fells Cave from the Bering Strait? As the noted Mexican anthropologist Jose´ L. Lorenzo has remarked, it seems rather implausible to suggest that some sense of ‘‘manifest destiny [caused the Fells Cave occupants] to set track records for the course from the Bering steppes to Patagonia.’’113 Yet, until quite recently, this is the best pretense of an explanation orthodoxy has had to offer. A different but somewhat related difficulty will be found with the more than 8,000-year-old Koster site in Illinois. Although it is obviously recent enough to fit the Kroeberian time frame, it displays every indication – even plastered walls in the dwellings – of representing a sizable and long-settled agrarian civilization.114 How did the descendants of a group of the exceedingly primitive hunter–gatherers who supposedly inaugurated human occupancy in the Americas by crossing the Beringian land bridge manage to achieve such an advanced state in so short a period when it is generally estimated that it took the sedentary cultures of Mesopotamia more than 30 millennia to accomplish the same feat?115 On this score, too, the status quo has remained all but silent. Comparable problems abound. Why, for example, do so many sites along the southern Atlantic seacoast – the 10,000-year-old Little Salt Spring, near

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Sarasota, Florida, comes to mind – substantially predate those in New England and eastern Canada?116 Why, as a rule, do coastal sites tend to be older than those in the continental interior? 117 And why, since the Bering Strait hypothesis so clearly necessitates a dispersal pattern from the far north of the hemisphere southward, do more southerly sites tend to be older than those in the north? 118 To such questions, orthodoxy poses no answers. Even in Beringia, the chronological situation is the same. The oldest recorded site of human occupancy in eastern Siberia is located at Lake Baikal, nearly 2,500 miles from the Strait. It has been reliably dated at a little under 20,000 years.119 On the American side, the most proximate site will be found in the Old Crow/Bluefish Cave complex, in the western Yukon. By conservative estimates, the area was occupied at least 24,800 years ago.120 Moreover, whereas the Lake Baikal site is completely isolated, and thus anomalous, several other sites in the same region as the Bluefish Caves are confirmed as being of comparable antiquity.121 In the absence of an H.G. Wells-type time machine, it is a bit difficult to conceive how anyone, ‘‘Paleoindian’’ or otherwise, is supposed to have arrived in the Yukon several thousand years before leaving their supposed point of departure in Siberia. It follows that the rules normally governing the interpretation of physical data – i.e., ‘‘the scientific method’’ of basing conclusions only upon demonstrable facts – require that the figurative footprints posited by the Bering Strait migration theorists be turned around. On the face of it, the available evidence indicates that if somebody walked across an ice age Beringian land bridge, it was indigenous Americans moving into Asia rather than vice versa.

PALEOENVIRONMENTAL CONSIDERATIONS Scholars and popular science writers, in discussing the Bering Strait doctrine, usually do not discuss the real life difficulties which this idea presents. They reach a point where they must sound intelligent to their peers and readers and promptly spin out a tale of stalwart hunters trekking across frozen tundra or frolicking in suddenly warm Arctic meadows, and continue with their narrative. Looking at a map of the world, the proximity of Asia and Alaska seems too obvious to reject, but rarely do scholars look at the map closely enough to see the absurdity of their claim. —Vine Deloria, Jr. Red Earth, White Lies (1995)

The implausibility of the Bering Strait hypothesis has by no means been confined to matters of dating and chronology. Take, for example, the gap

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supposedly separating the two huge glacial masses of North America during the period running from 15 to 25 millennia ago. In the classic Beringian migration theory, it was through this ‘‘ice-free corridor,’’ which reputedly followed more or less the same course as the present day McKenzie River, that those who initially crossed the land bridge dispersed southward into the U.S. portion of the continent.122 Alternatively, they would have had to traverse a 2,500 mile expanse of open ice, all of it as much as 2 miles thick, in order to reach their destination (clearly an impossible feat, not only for a group of ‘‘stone age hunter–gatherers’’ but anyone else lacking modern survival rations and Goretex equipment).123 A major problem with the ‘‘McKenzie Corridor’’ hypothesis, moreover, is the likelihood that no such passageway to the south ever existed. If it did, it almost certainly opened up at the very end of the last ice age, a point in time far too late to account for most of even the most recent sites mentioned in the preceding section.124 Perhaps worst of all – from a conventional viewpoint, at least – is a 1967 finding by Reid Bryson, a well-respected specialist in Arctic climatology, that even if an ice-free corridor did exist during the necessary interval, the air temperature therein would have been about 201 colder than that prevailing across the surface of the glacial plateau.125 In other words, conditions along the bottom of any ice-free passage would have been much harsher than those atop the ice itself. Nor does assuming the opposite is true, that an ice-free passage not only existed but that it was as relatively lush and game-laden as its proponents imply it, really resolve the issue. As Vine Deloria, Jr., has pointed out, in order even to reach Beringia proper from the most proximate region they are known to have occupied during the relevant period, wandering Siberians would have had to scale not one, but ‘‘two formidable mountain ranges, the Khrebet Gydan and the Chukotskye Nagor’ye.’’126 Having surmounted this pair of obstacles, and then a thousand or so miles of slogging across barren salt marshes while following their most likely route across the land bridge,127 these hardy souls would have found themselves confronted by yet another series of ordeals, before they ever arrived at the fabled McKenzie Corridor. Reaching y present-day Alaska, the people [would] encounter a forbidding set of mountains both above and below the Arctic Circle. The Baird, Schawat, Endicott, and Shublic chains [would] face them from the north, the Kaiyuh and Kukokwim Mountains are to the south, and on reaching the Canadian border they [would] meet the Richardson Mountains and the continental divide of the northernmost chain of the Rocky Mountain group. To the south are also the Ogilvie Mountains and the massive McKenzie mountain chain with the smaller Franklin Mountains yet to the east.128

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The question is not so much whether all this could have been done – although that in itself seems dubious – but why anyone would have bothered. The standard answer is that the ‘‘paleoliths’’ endured such hardships in order to eventually feed upon the ‘‘megafauna’’ with which the more temperate regions of ice age North America were quite richly endowed. Precisely how, lacking satellite photography, a bunch of stone agers living on the Asian steppes were supposed to have known that an abundance of large game animals were flourishing just a dozen mountain ranges, one swampy land bridge, one deep freeze of an ice-free corridor and 5,000 miles away, would seem at first glance to be something of a mystery. The anthropological establishment, however, is ready with a pat explanation: The megafauna were already using the Beringian land bridge to migrate from North America into Asia.129 Here, we have drifted from the realm of the merely absurd into that of the truly sublime, presented as we are with the spectacle of hunters who were by most accounts subsisting rather comfortably on the prey available in their home territories – their larder would have included all manner of animals from mammoths to bison, as well as a vast array of fowl – suddenly deciding to give it all up and go trudging off across thousands of miles of the most daunting terrain on the planet to search for a few new species.130 Meanwhile, their ostensible quarry plods by, going in exactly the opposite direction.131 Under even minimal scrutiny, the scenario seems more appropriate to a Three Stooges movie than serious scientific discourse, but it nonetheless continues to pass for such inconventional anthropological circles. Human beings can be dolts, of course, and it is thus (barely) conceivable that a few might actually have played the role assigned to them in this bizarre script. But what of the animals? Deloria smilingly depicts herds of horses and camels which would have had gone ‘‘stampeding up Skagway Pass [and] racing across the frozen tundra,’’ en route to Siberia. Why? Did they suddenly change their diet from grass to tree bark and shrubs because they were possessed by some ‘‘mystical vision’’ of the Asian steppes?132 In his most satirical way, Deloria indulges in a fanciful recreation of how it must have worked. Bison bison and Mrs. Bison are peacefully grazing in central Asia without a care in the world when they look up and see horses and camels strolling by – the camels perhaps on their way to Egypt. Quick as a wink, Bison bison turns to Mrs. Bison and happily exclaims: ‘‘Honey, do you realize there is an ecological niche for grazing animals now open in Kansas and Nebraska?’’ The whole herd is terribly excited at the prospect in spite of the fact that the monsters Bison taylori and Bison latifrons already graze most of the American plains y. Word goes around central Asia and pretty soon the entire Bison bison species decides to cross the Bering Strait.133

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Perhaps predictably, the anthropological establishment has remained unfazed by the sheer outlandishness of its orthodoxy. On the contrary, several of its more prominent members have harnessed themselves to the task of proving the ‘‘hunting as motive’’ aspect of the land bridge migration theory correct. The means to this end has been for anthropological heavy hitters like Carl Sauer, Robert Ardrey, Paul Martin, Vance Haynes and Jared Diamond to argue that since the series of megafaunal extinctions occurring in the Americas toward the end of the ice age coincide with the supposed initial influx of humans, a process of wanton ‘‘overkill’’ by the newly arrived hunters accounts for the abrupt disappearance of the truly large mammals.134 As Ardrey puts it, [E]very fossil record points to the probability that within a thousand years after our arrival in America across the land bridge we [completely] exterminated the mammoths y. The new hunters, who would father the American Indian, left an unmistakable record: within a few thousand years they and their descendants, armed only with throwing spears and Asian sophistication, exterminated all the large game in both North and South America.135

Thus, we are expected to believe that a handful of paleoliths wielding a meager assortment of rocks and sticks set about systematically exterminating not only a hemisphere’s worth of mammoths, mastodons and the gigantic Bison taylori, but even the larger baluchitherium (a type of rhino standing 18 feet tall at the shoulder, this was the largest land mammal ever, 4 feet taller than the Imperial mammoth).136 The obvious question of how so few could have killed so many so rapidly and with such primitive technology has been peremptorily addressed by Paul Martin’s assertion, on the basis of the most paltry evidence, that the hunters routinely drove entire herds of megafauna over cliffs in order to butcher a single animal.137 Both he and Haynes have also assigned a truly fantastic birthrate to the original hunting party. According to y Dr. Vance Haynes of the University of Arizona, a single tribe of mammoth hunters could in just 500 years increase to a population of 12,500 y. Dr. Paul Martin, also of the University of Arizona, working from a computer simulation, says that from a tribe of 104 individuals in just 345 years a population of 500,000 could be reached y. The rapid population explosion from several different migrant groups is also used to account for the multiplicity of Indian languages and cultures and racial variation.138

Not only does the notion of a paleolithic ‘‘population explosion’’ on such a scale flatly contradict Kroeber’s estimate that there could not have been more than a million people in all of North America at the time of the Columbian landfall,139 a Truth which was quite uniformly asserted until the

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mid-1980s,140 the entire ‘‘hunting hypothesis’’ accentuates the problem of chronology. Now, instead of simply having to have arrived in South America at almost the same moment they were supposedly first crossing the Bering Strait, Paleoindians would have had to have somehow effected a virtually simultaneous slaughter of the continent’s megafauna in its entirety. Additionally, and without belaboring such preposterous images as that of giant ground sloths being herded over the edge of the nearest precipice, it should be observed that the Ardrey/Martin/Haynes/Diamond proposition is beset by the facts that many of the extinctions at issue seem to have occurred well before they are willing to admit humans arrived in the Americas,141 that the animals appear to have died in the wrong locations,142 and that many species of megafauna – Bison bison, for instance – have obviously survived quite well right up until the modern era.143

RECENT REVISIONS I prefer archaeological dates, when available, but the archaeology of America is more like a battlefield than a research topic. Given the circumstances, I suppose it is reasonable to be cautious. Only if I were forced to bet, I would prefer older dates. —Luca Cavalli-Sforza unpublished presentation (1992)

There have, of course, always been those who pointed out the implausibility of such scenarios. As early as 1940, George Gaylord Simpson published an important but little-heeded essay in which he challenged the whole concept of interhemispheric mammal migration,144 and at this point even Vance Haynes has followed the lead set in George Carter’s 1968 essay ‘‘Uhle’s Mastodon,’’ rejecting the possibility that ‘‘overkill’’ by humans could in itself have caused the abrupt die-out of so many large mammals.145 Others have set out to address the defects inherent to the idea of diffusion through the hypothetical ice-free corridor. Interestingly, they have approached the issue in a manner which would serve to correct at least some of the chronological problems mentioned earlier. If the initial population moved southward through a mid-continental corridor, one would expect that the oldest sites would occur closest to the southern ice margin, there would be a perceptible temporal gradient from north to south, and that movement into peripheral areas such as y the Pacific Coast would show a secondary temporal gradient with decreasing age from west to east. In fact, the available evidence reflects no such gradient.146

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Knute R. Fladmark, an anthropologist at Simon Frasier University, has proposed an alternative dispersal theory which has people crossing the Bering Strait and then moving southward along both the western and eastern seaboards, before turning inland at some point below the glaciers.147 This would certainly retire the ‘‘corridor controversy,’’ and explain certain otherwise inexplicable datings along the Atlantic Coast (Little Salt Springs and Meadowcroft, for instance, as well as the 10,600-year-old Debert site in Nova Scotia).148 What it does not explain is why any of the supposed early migrants might have elected to make a more than 3,000 mile traverse of the entire North American Arctic before turning southward. Alan Bryan and Ruth Gruhn have developed a more limited, and in some ways more defensible, version of the concept. In their model, people migrated along the southernmost edge of the land bridge and then moved southward along the Pacific coastline before turning east.149 This formulation, which offers a more reasonable sequence than the notion of a transcontinental Arctic migration, nonetheless shares with Fladmark’s the avoidance of dependency on the existence of an ice-free corridor.150 This, in turn, allows proponents to roll back their timeline to the point at which the Bering land bridge might first have become traversible – 30,000–35,000 years before present – a change which provides not only the appearance of an explanation to many of the otherwise inexplicably early site dates in eastern North America and points south, but encompasses most of what Carter and his colleagues turned up in the so-called ‘‘Texas Street’’ area of southern California.151 Contentions that people were in the Americas so long ago are coming to be considered increasingly less heretical by the status quo, given a recently emergent consensus, derived mainly from finds in the Mideast and southern Africa, that Homo sapiens sapiens have been around for at least 70 rather than a mere 40 millennia.152 In sum, it would seem that we are on the verge of yet another canonical revision of Truth, one in which the Kroeberian limit will be supplanted in very much the same fashion as was Hrdlicka’s by Kroeber’s, and for essentially the same reasons.153

ON THE MATTER OF MTDNA Clearly, the maintenance of the ‘‘status quo’’ is a powerful force to be reckoned with. However, the World – and what we don’t know about it – would be less than it is today if we did not allow ourselves to challenge traditional foundations, knowledge and assessments. The current resistance to ideas of change in many scientific fields y parallels the

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difficulty faced by turn-of-the-century American avocational and professional anthropologists in [asserting] that American Indians had an autochthonous origin in the Americas. —Alvah M. Hicks ‘‘Rethinking Homo Sapiens in the Americas’’ (1994)

It is always an imperative for the scholarly establishment, whenever it sanctions some important alteration of orthodoxy, to foster the impression that all correctives necessary to repair whatever inaccuracies or misperceptions have accrued from its approved system of ‘‘knowledge formation’’ are selfevidently contained within the system itself. Hence, promulgation of any new Truth must invariably await such time as it can be presented not as an antithesis of the falsity intrinsic to the establishment’s previous explanatory paradigm, but as a conclusion or set of conclusions flowing logically from the preceding Truth. In this manner, both the prevailing mode of intellectual propriety and the core mythologies it is designed to protect are reaffirmed rather than nullified, transformed or even disrupted.154 Since 1950, it has become increasingly fashionable – by this point even necessary – to lard such packaging with a veneer of rhetoric about ‘‘technological advances,’’ which have allegedly confirmed certain foundational Truths while ‘‘perfecting our understanding’’ of them (i.e., allowing modifications of interpretive orthodoxy without disrupting its hegemonic function).155 After Kroeber’s 1948 revision, for instance, the then recently developed methods of radiocarbon and uranium-fission dating were deployed in a thoroughly misleading fashion to create the illusion that his new time line had been ‘‘scientifically validated’’ in ways which both Hrdlicka’s and that of the dissidents militating for greater antiquity had not.156 In the present context, it appears that the same purpose is served by genetics research, especially that pertaining to the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) genome ‘‘marking’’ each human group. Although there are a number of such markers through which heredity can be traced, mtDNA is subject to by far the slowest rate of mutation and thus retains a relatively constant ‘‘signature’’ while being handed down, generation after generation, for thousands of years. It follows, theoretically at least, that studying the mtDNA characteristics among extant groups will allow researchers to determine with considerable precision exactly who is related to whom around the planet. Then, by charting the extent of mutation in other genomes, which change at known rates, it can be ascertained with a similar degree of precision when each group branched off the others, a process that should ultimately provide (A) a much clearer insight into the locus of human

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origins and (B) far better understandings of how, when, in which sequence and by what routes humanity dispersed around the world.157 The topic of the 1993 USA Today feature article mentioned in the opening section of this essay concerned the claim advanced by a team of researchers headed by Emory University geneticist Douglas C. Wallace that, by following these DNA ‘‘footprints,’’ it had been able to establish ‘‘conclusively’’ that America’s indigenous population originated in Asia.158 Although readily acknowledging the great proliferation of genetic distinctions among today’s ‘‘Amerind’’ peoples, Wallace and his colleagues argue simply that it would take as long as 40,000 years for such differentiations to evolve from a single source.159 Hence, their ‘‘considered estimate’’ of when Paleoindians must have first migrated to Alaska from Siberia coincides rather neatly with those advanced by Bryan and Gruhn as well as a number of linguistics researchers.160 The Wallace team’s findings have been typically advanced as a sort of ‘‘revolutionary breakthrough’’ in the ‘‘independent scientific corroboration’’ of anthropological theory. In an unguarded moment, however, he himself has stated that their research orientation followed from ‘‘traditional anthropological analysis,’’ which, in their view, had already ‘‘confirmed that American Indians came from Asia y across the Bering land bridge when it was exposed during an episode of glaciation.’’161 To all appearances, then, Wallace and his collaborators engaged not in the kind of ‘‘detached, neutral and objective inquiry’’ upon which the tradition of science is ostensibly predicated, but merely in the task of casting an aura of ‘‘hard’’ scientific proof around a Truth they had embraced a priori. Even a cursory examination of their research record serves to bear out such suspicions. From the outset, according to their published material, they had expected to encounter evidence indicating a diffusion of genetic traits from southeast Asia northward, across Beringia and into America.162 Problems arose, however, when it turned out that the evidence revealed precisely the opposite: four distinct mutations, which are very rare in southern Asia, somewhat more common in northern and central Asia, and occurring at ‘‘surprisingly higher frequencies’’ among American Indians.163 In other words, while there was a huge mass of a particular, very old mtDNA characteristic among ‘‘Amerinds,’’ it was almost entirely absent other than in a few small pockets of Asians. To avert the obvious conclusion that the source of such genetic traits would be where they are most prevalent, a matter indicating diffusion from America to Asia rather than vice versa, the Wallace team elected to interpret its data backwards, hurriedly cobbling together a whole new genetic theory

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which they initially called ‘‘The Founder Effect.’’164 In this altogether bizarre concoction, assembled on no discernible evidentiary basis whatsoever, those Asians who first came to America did so in such small groups and, unlike the relatives they left behind, stayed so completely isolated until so recently that they experienced a ‘‘genetic bottleneck’’, which preserved their peculiar mtDNA characteristics in ways which proved impossible in Asia itself.165 A more blatant display of facts tortured into conformity with theory is difficult to imagine. Unmentioned in the USA Today article, either by Wallace or by author Tim Friend, is the fact that virtually every other researcher who has examined the issue arrived at a diametrically opposing conclusion. A team headed by University of Utah geneticist Ryk Ward, for example, studied a single tribal population in the Pacific Northwest, the Nuu-Chal-Nulths, and arrived at some rather less theoretically strained positions in a 1991 study published by the National Academy of Science.166 Ward’s analysis shows that: 1) minimum estimates indicate that the sequence divergence (unshared lineages) in [a single] Amerindian tribe is over 60% of the mitochondrial sequence diversity observed in major Old world groups such as Japanese or sub-Saharan Africans; 2) the magnitude of the sequence difference between this tribe’s lineage clusters suggest that their origin must predate [the supposed] Pleistocene colonization of the Americas; and 3) ‘‘since a single Amerindian can maintain such intensive molecular diversity, it is unnecessary to presume that substantial genetic bottlenecks occurred during the formation of contemporary groups or, in particular ‘Dramatic Founding Effect’ resulted in the peopling of the Americas.’’167

Ward and his associates have also pointed out that ‘‘preliminary analysis of sequence data for the same mitochondrial segment from other Amerindian tribal groups indicates that a majority of tribes are as diverse as the NuuChal-Nulths and that only a small subset of the lineages found in one tribe are shared with others.’’168 In substance, there is substantial evidence that ‘‘Amerinds’’ have long since attained ‘‘mutational drift equilibrium’’ or ‘‘steady-state genetic distribution,’’ a condition militating strongly against the Wallace team’s conclusions since it has yet to be achieved in Eurasia.169 For what should by now be obvious reasons, there has been no enthusiastic rush by the status quo to pronounce the results of studies like Ward’s as ‘‘conclusive,’’ no matter how solid the science entailed in reaching them. Nor have the media shown the least interest in promoting them. Instead, while fanfare concerning mtDNA research dropped off almost entirely, and the topic is entirely omitted from recent compendiums like Frederick Hadleigh West’s 1996 American Beginnings,170 the usual unwritten understanding appears to have taken hold among mainstream anthropologists.

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Whenever the matter is raised in public settings, they resort to a simple reversal of reality, baldly announcing that ‘‘the genetic evidence tends to support standard migration theory,’’ and let it go at that.

THAT MAN FROM KENNEWICK It’s amazing how many people, dismissing or ignoring Indian [origin stories] as mere superstition, still cling to much wilder explanations of their own devising. —Jeffrey Goodman American Genesis (1981)

A different but plainly related issue has also (re)appeared quite recently. This concerns the July 1996 discovery of a human cranium by local residents while wading in shallow water along the Columbia River near Kennewick, Washington. Believing the skull to be of recent origin, the pair turned it over to the police, who passed it along to the coroner, who, after determining it was far from fresh, enlisted the assistance of paleontologist James Chatters in exhuming the rest of the remains, which turned out to have a chunk of an ancient Cascade projectile point embedded in the hip bone.171 Chatters filed a routine application to examine the remains further, while a coalition of the area’s indigenous peoples including the Umatillas, the Yakimas, the Colvilles, the Wanapums and the Nez Perce, filed to have them reburied under provision of the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA).172 Things got sticky almost immediately, when federal authorities announced they were legally obliged to honor the latter petition.173 Still, the matter would likely have commanded little more than passing public interest had not Chatters, after conferring with Catherine J. MacMillan, an emeritus paleontologist at Central Washington University, promptly pronounced the skull to be that of a ‘‘protocaucasoid male’’ who had been prowling the region as long ago as 9,000 years.174 ‘‘I have got a white guy with a stone point in him,’’ Chatters informed New York Times reporter Timothy Egan.175 Egan himself then explained that the find ‘‘adds credence to theories that some early inhabitants of North America came from European stock,’’ a formulation understood by many readers in the ultra-Jeffersonian sense of implying that Euroamericans were as indigenous to America, and thus as imbued with aboriginal rights, as American Indians themselves.176

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By that point, although the remains had been found only a short distance downstream from the notorious Hanford nuclear complex – a facility known to have discharged some forty billion gallons of highly irradiated water into the environment since 1945,177 – and were therefore almost certainly contaminated, they had been radiocarbon-dated at about 8,500 years (subsequent tests would yield dates up to 9,300 years).178 With that, Dennis J. Stanford, chair of the Smithsonian’s Department of Anthropology and Paleontology, suspended his usually exaggerated air of skepticism about controversial datings long enough to weigh in alongside his third-tier Washington colleagues, proclaiming the ‘‘Kennewick Man’’ to be both ‘‘very old’’ and ‘‘caucasoid.’’179 Stanford then joined Vance Haynes and six other prominent anthropologists in filing a suit to prevent the NAGPRAmandated reburial.180 A second petition was also filed by a self-proclaimed ‘‘Aryan’’ organization calling itself the Asatru Folk Assembly, the members of which profess adherence to ancient Norse Odinist beliefs, who sought to claim the remains as one of their own forebears. According to Asatru head Stephen McNallen, ‘‘a Caucasian such as Kennewick Man cannot possibly be considered a ‘native’ American within the meaning of NAGPRA, unless of course the courts are prepared to concede that Caucasians are the native people, here as well as in Europe.’’181 The combined involvement of neonazis and of established heavyweights generated even more media attention, culminating in an October 1998 segment of the CBS ‘‘news magazine’’ 60 Minutes, one of the most widely viewed television programs in the world.182 It also led a federal magistrate to order the remains to be transferred to the Burke Museum at the University of Washington, where they were subjected to precisely the sort of tests to which the Yakimas and other native claimants objected, and which NAGPRA had supposedly intended to prevent.183 Even as the ruling was pending, moreover, Washington State’s reactionary Republican Representative Richard ‘‘Doc’’ Hastings introduced a measure to revise the Act itself in such a way as to bar native people from ever again mounting such ‘‘interference in the workings of science.’’184 Rather predictably, all things considered, extensive laboratory analysis merely confirmed what the Indians had been saying all along: that there was nothing in the least ‘‘caucasoid’’ about the Kennewick Man. His closest physiological linkage has proven to be with several other small north Asian groups to whom, as was mentioned above, the indigenous population was already known to be related.185 Equally predictably, the response of the anthropological establishment has been that such results point to the need

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for still more testing, including ‘‘destructive analysis of skeletal materials.’’186 In retrospect, it seems dubious that Stanford, Haynes or several other major players in the Kennewick Man case ever actually believed the remains might add up to what Chatters and MacMillan were claiming. Rather, given the openness and degree of the hostility exhibited by the anthropological community to the idea expressed in NAGPRA – that indigenous people might possess at least some prerogative to protect their gravesites against being pillaged by anthropologists and other looters – the likelihood is that they viewed it merely as a convenient ruse through which to undermine the Act’s effectiveness.187 Unfortunately, as is usually the case when native rights are litigated in U.S. courts, their subterfuge appears to have worked all too well.188

LOST TRIBES (AGAIN), AND SUNKEN CONTINENTS [The very first Americans] were Aryans. They could hardly have been anything else. They were white and they were warriors and they sailed the sea with confidence. They were, therefore, masterful men. They were in search of new and better homes, and when they found what satisfied them, they remained there. Now, these are all Aryan traits, and they have been through the ages. —H.W. Magoun Introduction to Denison’s Linguistics (1913)

Although they may not have known it, those who embraced postulations of the Kennewick Man’s ‘‘European origins’’ were not really buying into anything new and different. In actuality, such ideas have a long and ignoble history, once again tracing their roots back to the forgeries of Constantine Samuel Rafinesque. Sharing an attribute in common with other nineteenth century Eurosupremacists, Rafinesque adamantly refused to believe that nonwhites could have created such things as Mesoamerican architecture and the great mound complexes of the Ohio and Mississippi River Valleys.189 Hence, while providing his ‘‘proof’’ that the contemporary native population originated in Siberia, he also speculated that the hemisphere had previously been inhabited by a much superior ‘‘white race’’ which had entered America from the west and established great civilizations before being overwhelmed and exterminated by waves of invading Asiatic savages.190 Rafinesque himself did not exactly claim that these mysterious whites came from Europe, as such. Rather, referencing Plato’s account of the lost continent of Atlantis, he contended the ‘‘real’’ first Americans were almost

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certainly Atlantians who’d been forced to flee when their homeland sank beneath the sea some 11,600 years ago.191 Although this aspect of Rafinesque’s fraud was not especially well-received at the time, mainly because it exhibited far too great a conflict with the constraints of biblical chronology, others sought to take his basic idea and rework it into a more theologically acceptable form. Apart from the earlier-discussed literature concerning the Lost Tribes of Israel, the nineteenth century witnessed a small avalanche of literature purporting to demonstrate that it was the ancient Phoenicians,192 Egyptians,193 Greeks,194 Celts, and/or others who had been here before the Indians. While many of these notions have continued to attract proponents through the present moment – a variation of the ‘‘Celtic founding’’ concept was championed by Harvard professor Barry Fell until well into the 1980s, for example195 – the decline of clerical influence over the past century has paved the way for a revival of Rafinesque’s original Atlantis thesis. At present, there is a rather copious literature on the topic, albeit much of it in a form which would have boggled Rafinesque himself (much less Plato).196 One of the more startling recent innovations has been the substitution of the Pacific for the Atlantic Ocean, and the Atlantians for the residents of a completely different sunken continent, called Lemmuria or ‘‘Mu.’’197 According to its ‘‘discoverer,’’ a self-styled adventurer calling himself ‘‘Colonel’’ James Churchward, Mu, which Churchward claimed was ‘‘the birthplace of all humanity,’’ consisted of a huge landmass extending from Easter Island westward to the Carolinas, and from the Cook Islands northward to Hawaii. The continent had achieved a population of 64 million and established the initial human colonies in both Asia and America before it sank, Churchward noted in the 1931 announcement of his ‘‘find.’’198 His proof? Following a rather familiar pattern, he based these assertions on a number of clay tablets only he had access to. Churchward said he discovered these [materials] when, on a trip to monasteries in India and Tibet, he persuaded a priestly friend to show him some secret tablets which had lain untouched in vaults since time immemorial; these turned out to be the ‘‘genuine records of Mu.’’ The tablets were inscribed in a dead language Churchward believed to be the original tongue of mankind, and it required two years study before he could translate these ‘‘Sacred Inspired Writings.’’199

There are also those who hold the idea that both the continents, Atlantis and Mu, not only existed but contributed mutually to the initial peopling of the Americas.200 At their most extreme, proponents of such ideas depart the planet altogether, accounting for American Indians, or at least a lot of their older architectural and engineering achievements, by way of migrations

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from extraterrestrial locales. A salient example will be found in Erich Von Da¨nekin’s immensely popular Chariots of the Gods.201 This record can also be run in reverse, as with NASA space engineer Sepp Blumrich, who theorized about visitors from elsewhere in the cosmos in his 1973 The Spaceships of Ezekiel, before ending up, in 1977, as a staunch advocate of the idea that the American Indians came from Lemmuria.202 Returning to somewhat less exotic spaces, we find that the many quandaries presented by the conventional Beringian migration theory have given rise to a resurgence in not entirely dissimilar ideas among more ‘‘respectable’’ scholars over the past 40 years. Probably the first serious proposal came in 1963 from the late E.F. Greenman, a well-respected professor at the University of Michigan and curator of its anthropological museum, who argued that people first entered North America from Europe, arriving by canoe.203 Greenman (who had a detailed knowledge of both Paleo-Indian artifacts and the artifacts of Europe) was startled by the many similarities he discovered between PaleoIndian and European artifacts. This led him to postulate the theory that during Europe’s Upper Paleolithic cultural period (35,000 to 12,000 years ago) men from France and Spain traveled to North America by crossing the Atlantic in ‘‘Beothuk,’’ unique deepwater skin canoes y. He proposed Newfoundland as the point of entry, with subsequent migrations to the southwestern United States, including portions of Mexico.204

Greenman’s version of the Atlantis theory has since been supplanted by that of Robson Bonnichsen, Director of the Center for Study of First Americans at Oregon State University and lead plaintiff in the Kennewick Man suit, who is more inclined to believe that the transatlantic voyage was made in skin boats.205 Others, such as Emilio Estrada and Betty J. Meggers, have advanced academic variants of Churchward’s Mu fantasy, arguing that there was transpacific influx from Polynesia, southern Asia, or even Japan or Korea, into Ecuador and Peru.206 The migrants, they suggest, could have made the trip by balsa wood raft, thus reversing the proposition made famous by Thor Heyerdahl’s 1947 ‘‘Kon-Tiki Expedition’’ that American Indians became Polynesians after using such craft to move outward from South America into the Pacific (Heyerdahl, of course, was also convinced that the Indians were themselves transplanted Egyptians who had earlier traversed the Atlantic on reed boats and set out to prove it on the first of his ‘‘Ra Expeditions’’ in 1969).207 Perhaps the only established anthropologist to have yet faced the evidence squarely has been the late Werner Mu¨ller. After a decades-long and exhaustive study, not only of site datings but of the dispersal patterns of material culture, he concluded that the available data unequivocally fails to

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support theories that the Americas were first populated by migrations from either Siberia or Europe (much less Polynesia, where the human habitation of most islands began less than two millennia hence).208 On the contrary, since the older attributes of material culture in North America are also evident in the more proximate regions of both Europe and Asia – and are conspicuously absent from the thousands of miles of the Eurasian landmass separating these locales – Mu¨ller observed that, on their face, the facts indicate an outward, probably overland, migration from America into both Siberia and Scandinavia at some point around 40,000–50,000 years ago.209 Needless to say, the silence with which the anthropological establishment has elected to greet Mu¨ller’s well-supported and carefully-reasoned ‘‘defection’’ has been resounding. Meanwhile, chatter about the nature and supposed significance of the Kennewick Man remains unabated. In this juxtaposition of responses resides something undeniably resembling a confession on the part of the status quo. Ultimately, there could be no more eloquent summation of the virulence with which the racial or cultural biases and irrationality that have always plagued Americanist anthropology continue to afflict it as the twentieth century draws to a close.

THE VIEW FROM NATIVE NORTH AMERICA From our oral histories, we know that our people have been here from the beginning of time. We do not believe our people migrated here from another continent, as the scientists do. Some scientists say that if [we do not accept their work], we, as Indians, will be destroying evidence of our history. We already know our history. It is passed on to us by our elders and through our religious practices. —Armand Minthorn 60 Minutes (1998)

There was never a reason for anthropology as a discipline, had it taken as its objective the attainment of approximation of truth rather than that of providing unending if illusory reinforcement of the Truth inhering in white supremacist belief, to have found itself at its present sorry pass. Anthropology has always had an alternative readily available to it, immediately accessible and bound up neatly in a ‘‘database’’ which, unlike the anthropological canon itself, has all along exhibited the cardinal virtues of internal integrity and consistency. This, of course, resides in the complex of traditional remembrances – the real ones, not fabrications like the Walam Olum – of the peoples indigenous to the Western Hemisphere.

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It was, after all, the blinders imposed by the Scientific Truth that people ‘‘couldn’t possibly’’ have been here so long ago that caused anthropologists, almost without exception and well into the mid-twentieth century, to dismiss as mere ‘‘myths and legends’’ the many vibrant accounts shared by native wisdomkeepers of their ancestors’ interactions with giant beavers, stiff-legged bears, hairy elephants and other such Pleistocene wildlife.210 Only when the accumulation of evidence from other disciplines forced a belated concession that Indians must indeed have been here did the ‘‘legends’’ begin slowly to be seen as the more nearly literal recountings of fact.211 Never, however, has it been admitted that the Indians’ customary manner of receiving and retaining information might equal, or be in some ways superior to, that embraced by the legions of anthropologists and kindred ‘‘experts’’ who had for so long and so haughtily denigrated the accuracies contained in this aspect of native ‘‘folklore’’ as ‘‘primitive superstition.’’212 The attitudinal and methodological conceits of anthropological scientism thus remained substantially unaltered, an unfortunate circumstance, the consequences of which remain glaringly evident in treatment accorded traditional knowledge. The Hopi ‘‘Four Worlds’’ chronicle, for instance, continues to be ridiculed – as it was by Ales Hrdlicka during the 1920s – for no other reason than that its depiction of the Hopis having lived through ages of fire, water, and ice before the beginning of the present era would, if interpreted literally, mean they have resided in North America for an ‘‘impossibly’’ long period.213 True, the anthropological timeframe adopted after 1948 might accommodate the Hopis’ World of Ice, construed as corresponding to the glacial period ending about 10,000 years ago, but water? The Hopis would have to have been here during the extensive flooding that ended some 25,000 years hence.214 Until the beginning of the 1990s, the very idea was pronounced to be as preposterous as the notion of ‘‘paleoindians’’ had been by Hrdlickians half a century earlier. With the current revision of the anthropological time frame to 30,000 years, the Hopis’ World of Water has also been encompassed within the parameters of Scientific Truth. But fire? That would mean they were here during a period of great lava flows which is usually estimated to have ended some 100,000 years ago.215 A reasonable observer might expect that with two of the three previous ‘‘worlds’’ posited in the Hopi narrative having already been borne out – and countervailing ‘‘understandings of science’’ having thus proven dead wrong – humility alone should compel even the most hidebound anthropologist to treat the Hopis’ account of experiencing a World of Fire with a bit more respect than has prevailed up till now.

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Instead, it is subjected to exactly the same sort of snickering and out-ofhand dismissals once bestowed upon the prospect of Indians having been here long enough to glimpse a live mastodon. The Hopis are by no means the only people whose emic recollections are discounted in this fashion. The oral histories of the Klamaths, Nisquallys, Wishrams, and a number of others in the Pacific Northwest contain detailed accounts of volcanic activity in the region, including such phenomena as the formation of Crater Lake and the last eruption of Mount Hood.216 Without exception, such information has been laughingly snubbed by anthropologists, mainly because to have witnessed the events in question, people would have inhabited the area ‘‘far too long ago.’’ Indians have sometimes responded by suggesting that the problem suffered by their detractors is twofold: not only has the duration of their own occupancy been underestimated, but – as has been increasingly confirmed by recent geological studies – the antiquity of the volcanic events at issue have in some cases been grossly overestimated.217 Nor do indigenous explanations of geological phenomena necessarily have to involve deep time to be scoffed at. The Lakota account of the creation of Devil’s Tower, for example, in which the lofty volcanic plug suddenly rose up from the ground only a few thousand years ago, is spurned in favor of the ‘‘known geological history’’ in which the whole formation was quite slowly exposed by erosion during a period spanning millions of years.218 Similar treatment is accorded to the Lakota recounting of a tremendous earthquake, which even more recently created the South Dakota Badlands.219 Needless to say, the same people’s account of their origin, in which they emerged from a cave in the Black Hills at the dawn of time, is granted no credence whatsoever by an anthropological establishment which insists they first arrived in the region from Minnesota somewhere around 1780.220 No matter whether it is the Cherokee recounting of their emergence from water or that of the Colvilles about theirs in an interaction with the animals of present-day Washington State,221 whether it is Tohono O’odam descriptions of the Etoi, a mysterious dinosaur-like creature supposedly extinct for millions of years before the first protohuman evolved into being,222 or ancient petroglyphic depictions of the African ibex along the walls of Arizona’s Havasupai Canyon, an entire hemisphere removed from the only region in which ibex are supposed ever to have roamed,223 traditional knowledge is invariably disparaged or ignored until it has been ‘‘substantiated by science.’’ Scientific findings, on the other hand, are never subject to corroboration by way of their consistency with the understandings of indigenous people.

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Thus, the anthropological mainstream has systematically and persistently denied itself the slightest possibility of coming to grips with the actualities of its ostensible subject matter, or of making useful collateral contributions to related fields like geology and paleobiology. Worse still, in wielding its presumptively unparalleled expertise in discerning the meaning of all things native, it has effectively monopolized the interpretation or translation of traditional knowledge to non-natives, thereby preempting the native voice itself in the arena of popular discourse. This, in turn, has effectively precluded indigenous understandings and insights from exerting their rightful influence within the process by which human knowledge is shaped in its totality.224 It is undoubtedly true, as Umatilla spokesperson Armand Minthorn observes in the epigraph heading this section of the present essay, that American Indians continue to know their own histories. It is equally true, nonetheless, that – largely as a result of the past century’s anthropological obstructions and obfuscations – very few others are truly aware of them. True as well is the fact that, after centuries of increasingly intensive educational mainstreaming, many or even most Indians no longer possess such information.225 Assuming that the knowledge embodied in native traditions holds any validity at all, the situation is categorically unacceptable.

TOWARD A NEW SYNTHESIS OF UNDERSTANDING Given a theoretical vacuum left by the shaking of traditional archaeological ideas and conventions, we must seek new ideas, concepts, and their theoretical integration with reference to how the world works, why man behaves the way he does at different times and places, and how we may understand recognized patterns of changes and diversity in organized human behavior. Only to such theories may the scientific method be properly addressed. Thus, today’s challenge is in theory building, and thus far little progress has been made, although many persons have seen the challenge and accepted it. —Lewis R. Binford Faunal Remains from Klasies River Mouth (1984)

To paraphrase an old adage about love, our understanding of anything else is quite dependent upon our having first attained an accurate understanding of ourselves. This is meant not in the narrow sense of personal self-awareness, but collectively, as societies and as a species. Lewis Binford, Vine Deloria and others have observed, quite correctly, that we are a very long way from possessing such knowledge.226 Indeed, beset as we are by a scientian anthropological establishment professing answers to questions it has

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never asked, our situation is much worse than that obtaining under conditions of the most abject ignorance.227 The self-satisfied complacency bound up in catechismic regurgitations of Truth is, after all, always less stimulating of constructive inquiry than admissions that the answers to fundamental questions remain unrevealed. The key to deciphering the puzzle before us is thus to wring a confession from the status quo which can be summed up in the three words it has always been most loath to utter, ‘‘We don’t know.’’ Should this prove impossible – as seems likely – the task becomes that of delegitimating and supplanting established institutions altogether,228 forging in their stead inquisitive enterprises through which more appropriate standards of humility and intellectual honesty can be manifested. The idea is related to but in many ways broader than the conceptions of ‘‘liberatory pedagogy’’ propounded by Paulo Freire, Ivan Illich, and others over the past 30 years.229 The bedrock principle upon which these endeavors must be anchored, if they are to avoid an eventual replication of the profoundly biased and denial-ridden posture of their predecessors, is a presumption that all traditions of knowing are of equal value, none inherently more valid than another.230 From this standpoint, the aspirant function of scholarship – indeed, of intellectuality itself – may be seen as residing in the correlation of culturally specific interpretations of reality and reconciliation of whatever contradictions apparently divide them. Ultimately, the object is to effect a synthesis in which the understandings attained (or attainable) within each tradition are supported and affirmed by those advanced in all others.231 Not only is such an approach counterhegemonic in the sense that it challenges the conventions of orthodoxy on their face, it is explicitly antiimperialist in the sense earlier implied by Durham, Carnoy and Memmi.232 Perhaps self-evidently, its virtues therefore include a far greater potential in terms of apprehending and conveying approximations of truth than does the present system in which narrow e´lites promulgate and defend as Scientific Truth whatever mythologies happen to best reinforce the existing relations of power at any given moment.233 In anthropological or archaeological terms, simply admitting the time frame(s) posited in native origin stories and oral histories would go far toward addressing Roger Owen’s 1984 lament that ‘‘no general y formulations attempt to weave the phenomena presented as evidence of pre-Clovis contention into the generally acknowledged fabric of world prehistory.’’234 This would in turn shed an entirely new light on such questions as how a range of ‘‘significant innovations [including] graphic representations, true blade technology, personal ornamentation, complex weapon and propulsion

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systems, long distance procurement of durable raw materials, subsistence systems based on strategically organized use of the landscape over the course of the year, rapid and continual technological change through time, and cultural systems that vary greatly from region to region’’ – all of which had supposedly ‘‘never been seen before on earth’’ – might have made their ‘‘sudden’’ appearance as a concomitant of the Cro-Magnon invasion of Europe some 40,000 years ago.235 That such things had been ‘‘seen before on earth,’’ and that they had evolved over a long period rather than ‘‘emerging quite suddenly [and] inexplicably,’’ becomes immediately apparent the moment ‘‘pre-Clovis contentions’’ are admitted to the record. While the ancestral forms of the European projectile points have not been found on the Eurasian plains as prehistorians believed would be the case, ancestral forms for the American projectile points [dating from the same time] have been found. The Clovis point from Lewisville, Texas, which has been dated to over 38,000 years, shows that these projectile points were first invented in the Americas. The projectile points from geographically diverse sites such as Meadowcroft, Pennsylvania; McGee’s Point, Nevada; and Tlapacoya, Mexico, support the validity of the Lewisville point. In fact, by the end of the Pleistocene epoch, there were a number of different point types and cultural traditions extant in the Americas, demonstrating that a great range of technological diversity had already been developed.236

The types of points involved clearly indicate the development of ‘‘complex weapons systems’’ such as spear-throwers and bows and arrows. With regard to graphic representations, there is a pictorially carved llama bone recovered from a site dated at more than 30,000 years at Tequixquiac, near Mexico City, and an engraved mastodon bone of similar antiquity also found in Mexico and directly comparable to the art of European CroMagnons.237 The same can be said of three massive stone carvings near Malakoff, Texas, and finds at a number of other sites.238 The remainder of the list of ‘‘late Pleistocene innovations,’’ from personal ornamentation to cultural variation by region, was also plainly evident in the Americas at points as early as, and often much earlier than in Europe. The idea that modern humans in this hemisphere might predate those in most other parts of the world would also explain why agriculture seems to have been invented here. Although it is seldom remembered, and even less frequently remarked upon, the oldest recorded sample of corn pollen – dated at approximately 80,000 years – was recovered in 1954 by Harvard botanist Elsa Barghoorn from a drill sample taken at a depth of 200 feet below Mexico City.239 Grinding technologies, associated with preparation of vegetal foodstuffs like corn, have been found in sites dated at well over

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20,000 years on California’s Scripps campus, the Alice Boer site, and elsewhere.240 By comparison, the Old World’s Mesopotamian ‘‘Cradle of Civilization’’ in the Euphrates Valley – dating from about 9,000 years – is quite recent.241 The same holds true for the domestication of animals. While this ‘‘great leap toward civilization’’ supposedly occurred in Mesopotamia with the domesticating of dogs, pigs, sheep, goats, and finally cattle over a span running from 9,000 to 7,000 years hence,242 evidence from the Old Crow region indicates that American Indians were keeping dogs many millennia earlier. As paleontologist Brenda Beebe remarked at the time of the find, ‘‘Our most surprising discovery is the jaws of several domesticated dogs, some of which appear to be 30,000 years old. This is almost 20,000 years older than any other known domesticated animals anywhere in the world.’’243 Even the invention of pottery, another aspect of civilization long thought to have occurred in Mesopotamia somewhere between 8000 and 9000 years ago – a premise more lately superseded by the discovery of 13,000-year-old pots in the Fukuki Cave and Senfukuji rock shelter, both on the island of Kyushu, Japan – may well have occurred in Peru much earlier, the concept then carried into the Old World by migrating Indians.244 Be that as it may, it is true, as Alan Bryan observed in 1978, that ‘‘diffusion from America to Japan would be just as possible as diffusion in the opposite direction.’’245 Indeed, such a direction of diffusion might explain why the Ainus, an ancient ‘‘genetic isolate’’ in northern Japan, show a far greater degree of cranial similarity to the equally isolated Yauyos Indians of Peru than they do to any of their contemporary ‘‘Mongoloid’’ neighbors.246 All told, as dissidents like Janice Austin, Alvah Hicks, and Jeffrey Goodman have argued with increasing vigor over the past three decades, and as indigenous traditionalists have asserted all along, there is more evidence to indicate that American Indians comprise a separate and distinct ‘‘race’’ in our own right than anything else. It appears from [Austin’s] statistical analysis that the traditional anthropological classification of American Indians as a branch of the Asian Mongolians is all wrong. The traditional interpretation was highly subjective, based on the lumping together of physically diverse American Indian groups; it is supported by little metric data and no chronology. Based on the new datings and the new statistical data, the Paleo-Indians should be classified as [a distinct genetic ‘‘stock’’] who evolved into various American Indian peoples, giving the modern-day American Indians their own racial grouping as separate from the Mongoloids or Caucasoids. On the other hand, European Cro-Magnons should be classified as a branch of y Paleo-Indians who evolved into what we now describe as modern Caucasoids. Similarly, based on the many analogies noted

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WARD CHURCHILL between ancient Mongolian skulls and some ancient American Indian skulls, the first Asians should also be classified as a branch of y Paleo-Indians who became Asiatic Mongolians.247

Accepting the growing weight of evidence that Native Americans didn’t necessarily ‘‘come from somewhere else’’ would address a few other matters as well. As things stand, any suggestion that modern humans might have evolved in the Americas is considered impossible because of an ostensible absence in this hemisphere of primate species from which humans might have sprung. This presumption, however, is itself highly problematic, given that the exact nature of humanity’s simian ancestors remains unknown.248 Even if it were otherwise, the evolutionary progression culminating in Homo sapiens is anything but clear, a matter readily evidenced by the century-long insistence of orthodox paleobiologists that Neanderthals were part of the chain.249 There is now a near consensus among students of evolutionary biology that the origins of our own species, Homo sapiens, is somehow intimately linked with the first intercontinental ancient hominid, Homo erectus. However, neither the transformation of erectus to sapiens nor the transformation of ancient (archaic) populations of Homo sapiens to their anatomically modern succeeders (H s sapiens) are matters of agreement in this scientific fraternity y. In fact, there is no consensus.250

Louis Leakey, for once, believed that evolutionists were following the wrong line, and that Homo erectus represented an ‘‘evolutionary dead end’’ of the same sort as Neanderthal.251 He also felt strongly that Homo sapiens might well have originated independently in the Americas, and, as has been noted, died with the expectation that modern human remains would eventually be discovered in this hemisphere dating back 100,000 years or more.252 Nor does he stand alone in his ‘‘eccentricity.’’ In adopting the view of a possible ‘‘American Genesis’’ for humanity, Leakey joined a distinctively able minority of scholars including Scotty McNeish, Paul Mellars, Lewis Binford, Bruce MacFadden, Eric Delson, A.L. Rosenberger, Christopher B. Singer, Nelson Eldridge, and Ian Tattersal, among others, each of whom has lately moved in more or less the same direction.253 The work of the last six is particularly interesting insofar as they have been steadily chipping away at the alleged ‘‘primate barrier’’ preventing autochthonous emergence of Homo sapiens in the Western Hemisphere. As MacFadden has put it, there is ‘‘good reason to lament the fragmentary record that must be used to decipher the evolution of y New World primates. It can truly be said that the paleontological record of New World platyrrhines [prehumans] is indeed the weakest of the lot. There are several records for this, but these mostly stem from the fact that, with the push to find human ancestors, emphasis has been outside y America.’’254

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Ongoing assessments of Platyrrhini (ancient New World) primates have depicted them as unmistakable members of the order ‘‘Haplorhini,’’ a monophyletic taxon encompassing both New and Old World anthropoids. The source for the Ecocene (55–32 million years ago) presence of both New and Old World primates must be an earlier common ancestral form. Perhaps the North American and European Adapidae, the earliest of the known pre-primates, is the progenitor of today’s higher primate groups [including humans].255

The question hinges, according to Alvah Hicks, upon ‘‘what constitutes acceptable evolutionary terms for investigating the earliest archaeological remains of mid-Pleistocene man in the Americas. The present effort is to distinguish compatible analogies that might instigate a change in paradigm and allow us to reconsider the antiquity of the modern human anatomy and to bring in New World considerations y. Could the Western Hemisphere have spawned its own distinct hominid form, the indigenous Native American?’’256 To put it another way, can American Indians be better accounted for by the contortions of migration theory – whether across a Bering Strait land bridge or otherwise – or by some scheme of ‘‘multiregional evolution’’?257 And, if the latter is conceded as a possibility, is it not at least equally plausible that Homo sapiens might have as easily made their first appearance here as anywhere? The answers to such queries remain exceedingly obscure. While an American genesis may eventually be documented beyond all doubt, it is at least equally possible that the whole notion of human monogenesis will be proven wrong, and that some form of polygenesis occurred.258 Such could be the implication of the recent finds of 90,000-year-old sites near the mouth of the Klasies River in southern Africa when taken in combination with the evidence accruing from America.259 Alternately, it may be shown that there was monogenesis in some area of the earth other than the Western Hemisphere, but at a point much more remote in time than has heretofore been admitted by the scientian establishment. Whatever the truth turns out to be, it can be apprehended only if we face the questions squarely, without the a priori assumption that we possess ‘‘answers.’’ The story of humanity thus remains to be written, not only in the manner of its inception but in the history of its subsequent unfolding. To write it accurately, we must at last agree to toss the lingering lies of a Beringian migration and the European origin of modern man upon the historical slag heap where all such racist propaganda properly belongs. Only by the most thoroughgoing demystification of such scientian precepts and their alleged primacy can we hope to move forward, redeeming the validity embodied both in other traditions and within the tradition of science itself, thus attaining

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more genuine and complete understandings of who we are. The task is daunting, to say the least, and yet we owe it to ourselves to undertake it. More, we owe it to those who come after us, our future generations, that we hand down the legacy of our struggle to reclaim our minds. In the end, there can be nothing of greater substance or significance that we might bequeath.

NOTES 1. Kenneth MacGowen and Joseph A. Hester, Jr., Early Man in the New World (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, [2nd ed.] 1962) pp. 124–8, 134. 2. A good overview of the thinking during this phase is provided in David M. Hopkins, ed., The Bering Land Bridge (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1967). 3. Tim Friend, ‘‘Genetic detectives trace the origin of first Americans,’’ USA Today, Sept. 22, 1993. 4. For a state of the art rendering, see Frederick Hadleigh West, ed., American Beginnings: The Prehistory and Paleontology of Beringia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 5. I know of no studies conducted on this question among the age group mentioned. I have, however, polled first-year university students enrolled in my own survey course, ‘‘Topical Issues in Native North American Life,’’ each semester over the past seven years. Of the nearly 2,100 queried to date, all but nine responded in the manner described. Of these, the vast majority indicated they’d been taught the Bering Strait explanation of American Indian origins before they completed junior high school, and most much earlier. 6. See, e.g., Norwood Russell Hanson, Patterns of Discovery (London: Cambridge University Press, 1958); Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967); Lewis S. Feuer, Einstein and the Generations of Science (New York: Basic Books, 1974) pp. 239–321. 7. Vine Deloria, Jr., explores this juxtaposition quite well in a chapter entitled ‘‘Science and the Oral Tradition’’, in his Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact (New York: Scribner’s, 1995) pp. 37–60. Also see his ‘‘Ethnoscience and Indian Realities’’ in Barbara Deloria, Kristen Foehner and Sam Scinta, eds., Spirit & Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr., Reader (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 1999) pp. 63–71. 8. See, e.g., Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York: Science Editions, 1961 reprint of 1934 original); Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (New York: Harper Torchbooks, [2nd ed.] 1968). 9. Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965); Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon, 1988); William Graebner, The Engineering of Consent: Democracy and Authority in Twentieth Century America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987). 10. Stanley Aronowitz, Science as Power: Discourse and Ideology in Modern Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988) esp. pp. 3–34. For the concept of hegemony as intended here, see Walter L. Adamson, Hegemony and

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Revolution: A Study of Antonio Gramsci’s Political and Cultural Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980) pp. 170–179. Of additional interest, see J.G. Merquoir, The Veil and the Mask: Essays on Culture and Ideology (London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1979). 11. Anyone wishing to press the claim that the formation of knowledge in the United States is ultimately determined by scientific rather than theological imperatives should examine the ongoing struggle between the Christian version of creationism on the one hand and advocates of Darwinian theories of evolution on the other. Plainly, science prevails only when it is offered in a form compatible with the precepts of Christian understanding. For background, see Edward J. Larson, Trial and Error: The American Controversy Over Creation and Evolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (New York: Basic Books, 1997). 12. There are, to be sure, a number of other vectors of science exhibiting the same sort of history. Consider for example the rigging of the results pointing to an intelligence-correlated hierarchy of race reported by Samuel Morton, founder of the ‘‘discipline’’ of craniometry, in his seminal 1839 book, Crania Americana; Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981) pp. 51–60. Although many of the flaws in Morton’s manipulative methods were revealed by the 1850s, his conclusions conformed to the biases of America’s Euroamerican scientific community and were therefore accepted as valid, laying the foundation for the even more insidious ‘‘disciplines’’ of phrenology and eugenics; Stefan Ku¨hl, The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism and German National Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). Such ideas were supposedly discredited by nazi ‘‘excesses’’ during the 1930s, but have lately proven themselves alive and well in such widely-acclaimed pseudoscientific tracts as Richard J. Herrnstein’s and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994). For analysis of such trends, see Troy Duster, Backdoor to Eugenics (New York: Routledge, 1990). 13. Such a fate has been by no means restricted to those taking issue with the Bering Strait hypothesis, of course. Consider the case of Immanuel Velikovsky, who, beginning in 1950, published a series of books in which he reinterpreted recent planetary history in a manner decisively at odds with prevailing orthodoxy. Subjected to severe ridicule by virtually the entire scientific community, he was essentially driven from ‘‘respectable’’ intellectual life altogether. By the late 1970s, however, it had become apparent that Velikovsky had been far more right than wrong. A number of his erstwhile critics – without apology, attribution or concession of their own previous errors – simply appropriated his ideas, reworking them to fit within the overall interpretive paradigm he had rejected; Vine Deloria, Jr., God Is Red: A Native View of Religion (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, [2nd ed.] 1994) pp. 123–34. One suspects Galileo would have felt right at home in Velikovsky’s company; see Georgio De Santillana, The Crime of Galileo (New York: Heinemann, 1958). 14. Once again, the principle obviously applies to fields beyond the boundaries of paleontology, or anthropology more generally. Consider the example of Sir Isaac Newton, whose primary intellectual virtue, as it is put in a recent text on the history of science, resides in having gotten his physics ‘‘completely wrong’’; Brian L. Silver, The Ascent of Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) pp. 3–10.

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15. Remarks upon the ubiquitousness anti-intellectuality of the average American are by now a commonplace. For those to whom the notion might be fresh, however, see, e.g., Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963). 16. For analysis, see, e.g., Ronald Weitzer Transforming Settler States: Communal Conflict and Internal Security in Northern Ireland and Zimbabwe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 17. The concept of internal colonialism was perhaps first articulated by Antonio Gramsci in an essay, ‘‘The Southern Question,’’ included in his The Modern Prince and Other Writings (New York: International, 1957) pp. 28–51. It was developed more fully by Michael Hector in his Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–1966 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). One of the earliest efforts to frame the situation of American Indians in these terms was made by the late Robert K. Thomas in his ‘‘Colonialism: Classic and Internal,’’ New University Thought, Vol. 4, No. 4, 1966–1967. 18. Jimmie Durham, ‘‘Cowboys and y,’’ in his Certain Lack of Coherence: Writings on Art and Cultural Politics (London: KALA Press, 1993) p.175. 19. Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965) p. 89. 20. Ibid., p. 105. 21. See Remi Clignet, ‘‘Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t: The Dilemmas of Colonizer-Colonized Relations,’’ Comparative Education Review, Vol. 15, No. 3, 1971. 22. This is not meant to imply that the same principle does not apply more or less across the board in anthropology and related disciplines. It does. For discussion, see Thomas Biolsi and Larry J. Zimmerman, eds., Indians and Anthropologists: Vine Deloria, Jr., and the Critique of Anthropology (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997). Also see the works cited in note 224. 23. Martin Carnoy, Education as Cultural Imperialism (New York: David McKay, 1974); John Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). Of related interest, see T.J. Jackson Lears, ‘‘The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities,’’ American Historical Review, No. 90, 1985. 24. See, e.g., Ronald Sanders, Lost Tribes and Promised Lands: The Origins of American Racism (New York: HarperPerennial, [2nd ed.] 1992) pp. 178–188. 25. For an excellent recounting of Spanish debates on the humanity of ‘‘los Indios,’’ see Lewis Hanke, All Mankind Is One: A Study in the Disputation Between Bartolome´ de Las Casas and Juan Gine´s de Sepu´lveda on the Intellectual and Religious Capacity of American Indians (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974). The ‘‘Satan’s spawn’’ thesis was advanced most forcefully by Puritans such as Cotton Mather in his famous 1702 proclamation, quoted in Jeffrey Goodman, American Genesis: The American Indian and the Origins of Modern Man (New York: Summit, 1981) p. 25. 26. The first recorded articulation of the idea is attributed to Father Acosta, a Spanish priest; George F. Carter, Earlier Than You Think: A Personal View of Man in America (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1980) p. 7. For further background, see Lee H. Huddleston, Origins of the American Indians, European Concepts, 1492–1729 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969).

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27. Sanders, Lost Tribes, p. 369. The idea took hold rather quickly from there. By 1683, Quaker leader William Penn, for example, went on record to assert that he was ‘‘ready to believe [Indians] to be of the Jewish race – I mean of the stock of the ten tribes’’; quoted in Goodman, American Genesis, p. 25. The Puritan leader Cotton Mather also professed such beliefs in his 1702 book, Magnali Christiani Americana. 28. Sanders, Lost Tribes, (New York: HarperPerennial, [2nd ed.] 1992) pp. 369– 70. 29. James Adair, The History of the American Indians (London: E. and C. Dilly, 1775). Variations on this theme later came to include supposed linguistic correlations with ancient Greek and Phoenician, Latin, Norse and Gaelic, among others; see, e.g., Researches on America, Being an Attempt To Settle Some Points Relative to the Aboriginies of America &c. (Baltimore: Jos. Robinson, 1817). 30. A good account will be found in the early chapters of Thomas F. O’Dea’s The Mormons (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950). One interesting idea is that Smith was to some extent ‘‘inspired’’ in conjuring up his own fable by Elias Boudinot’s A Star in the West; or, A Humble Attempt To Discover the Long Lost Ten Tribes of Israel, Preparatory to the Return to their Beloved City (Trenton, NJ: Fenton, Hutchinson & Dunham, 1816). This is certainly the case with Epaphras Jones’ On the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, and the Aboriginies of America, &c. &c. (New Albany, IN: Collins & Green, 1831). 31. Goodman, American Genesis, p. 27. Also see Milton R. Hunter and Thomas Stuart Ferguson, Ancient America and the Book of Mormon (Oakland, CA: Kolob Books, 1950). Among the more noteworthy non-Mormon proponents of the Jaredite concept was Edward King, Viscount of Kingsborough, who squandered his entire fortune publishing a lavish series of books claiming to include all necessary proof that Mexican antiquities had been created by the Lost Tribes; Edward King Kingsborough, Antiquities of Mexico, 9 vols. (London: Havell and Colnaghi, 1831–1848). 32. Goodman, American Genesis, p. 28. The material in question will be found in The Book of Mormon, Nephi 1:2; Mosiah 1:4. 33. As it turns out Smith didn’t even bother to recopy the material before inserting it into his own manuscript. Howard Davis, an independent researcher, discovered the pages, verified as having been written in Spaulding’s own hand, in the Mormon Church’s Salt Lake City archives; ‘‘Mormon Mystery,’’ Time, July 11, 1977, p. 69. 34. Goodman, American Genesis, p. 28. 35. Overall, see Margaret T. Hogden, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964). 36. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982 edited reprint of 1781 original) p. 101. 37. See Bernard W. Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian Philanthropy and the American Indian (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973). Also see Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981) esp. pp. 108– 115. 38. David M. Oestreicher, ‘‘Unraveling the Walam Olum,’’ Natural History, Oct. 1996, p. 14. Rafinesque’s material was originally published as The American Nations; or, Outlines of Their General History, Ancient and Modern (Philadelphia: C.S. Rafinesque, 1836).

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39. Oestreicher, ‘‘Unraveling the Walam Olum,’’ p. 14. 40. Ibid., pp. 14–15. One early doubter was ethnologist Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, who challenged the document’s authenticity from the beginning. Schoolcraft’s objections – all of them entirely valid – were simply overridden by his peers, the great majority of whom seem to have viewed Rafinesque’s material as being far too convenient to disregard, refute, or even seriously question. 41. Ibid., p. 15. Brinton’s material was published as The Lenape´ and Their Legends, With the Complete Text and Symbols of the Walam Olum, a New Translation, and an Inquiry Into Its Authenticity (New York: AMS Press, 1884 reprint of 1855 original). Also see Ephraim George Squier, ‘‘Historical and Mythological Traditions of the Algonquins, with a Translation of the Walam Olum, or Bark Record of the Lenni-Lenape,’’ American Review, Feb. 1849. 42. On Lilly’s anthropological predilections, see generally, James H. Madison, Eli Lilly: A Life, 1885–1977 (Indianapolis: Indian Historical Society, 1989). More specifically, see Lilly’s own ‘‘Tentative Speculations on the Chronology of the Walam Olum and the Migration Route of the Lenapi,’’ Proceedings of the Indiana Academy of Science, No. 54, 1944. 43. The report, published under the imprimatur of the Indian Historical Society, was titled Walam Olum or Red Score: The Migration Legend of the Lenni Lenapi or Delaware Indians – A New Translation, Interpreted by Linguistic, Historical, Archaeological, Ethnological, and Physical Anthropological Studies (Chicago: Lakeside Press, 1954). To assess its impact on contemporaneous scientific attitudes, see, e.g., William B. Newcomb, ‘‘The Walam Olum of the Delaware Indians in Perspective,’’ Texas Journal of Science, Vol. 7, No. 1, 1955 (reprinted in Bulletin of the Archaeological Society of New Jersey, No. 30, 1974); August C. Mahr, ‘‘Walam Olum I, 17: A Proof of Rafinesque’s Integrity,’’ American Anthropologist, No. 59, 1957. 44. Oestreicher, ‘‘Unraveling the Walam Olum,’’ p. 16. For samples of Weslager’s academic work, see his The Delaware Indians: A History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1972); The Delawares: A Critical Bibliography (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1978); The Delaware Westward Migration, With the Texts of Two Manuscripts, 1821–1822, Responding to General Lewis Cass’ Inquiries About Lenape Culture and Language (Wallingford, PA: Middle Atlantic Press, 1978). 45. ‘‘The word Talegiwil, for example, was translated a ‘Talega head or emperor.’ But wil can only signify an anatomical head in Lenape, and is never used for a leader, as it is in English’’; Oestreicher, ‘‘Unraveling the Walam Olum,’’ p. 16. 46. ‘‘Rafinesque incorporated y Asian words to strengthen his ‘proof’ of Amerindians’ Asian origins. In the Walam Olum the proto-Indians are described by the Chinese (and non-Delaware) word Jin, meaning ‘man.’ Other Delaware words are contorted to resemble Hindi, Hebrew, and Greek’’; ‘‘Unraveling the Walam Olum,’’ pp. 16, 18. 47. Ibid., pp. 17–18. 48. To be fair about it, there has been a vocal contemporary minority – the historian William A. Hunter, for example, as well as archaeologists like John Witthoft and James B. Griffin – who, like Schoolcraft before them, entered strong exceptions to the scholarly consensus that the Walam Olum was authentic; ibid., p. 16.

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49. Tellingly, Rafinesque proved himself to be quite aware of Joseph Smith’s comparable and slightly earlier hoax, authoring an 1835 polemic entitled ‘‘The American Nations and Tribes Are Not Jews’’ by which he sought to refute the Mormon founder’s thesis. See generally, Charles Boewe, ‘‘A Note on Rafinesque, the Walam Olum, the Book of Mormon, and the Mayan Glyphs,’’ Numen, Vol. 32, No. 1, 1985. 50. The Walam Olum was ‘‘reinterpreted’’ yet again during the 1980s, this time by David McCutchen, an erstwhile student at the California Institute of the Arts, and is available as The Red Record: The Oldest Native American History (Garden City, NY: Avery, 1989). Needless to say, McCutchen’s ‘‘scholarship’’ does not include mention of skeptics like Schoolcraft, Hunter, Witthoff, and Griffin, nor fluent Delaware speakers like Lucy Parks Blalock, who have asserted all along that the language deployed by Rafinesque was not authentically their own. 51. See the essay ‘‘Carlos Castaneda: The Greatest Hoax Since Piltdown Man,’’ in my Fantasies of the Master Race: Literature, Cinema and the Colonization of American Indians (San Francisco: City Lights, [2nd ed.] 1998) pp. 27–66. Also see Frank Spenser, Piltdown: A Scientific Forgery (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Richard de Mille, Castaneda’s Journey: The Power and the Allegory (Santa Barbara, CA: Capra Press, 1976). 52. By the early nineteenth century, biblical scholars claimed to be able to fix the approximate time of the creation as being approximately 2,500 years B.C. Their method was to take the average human lifespan and apply it in combination with the number of generations recounted in the Bible from the Garden of Eden to the birth of Christ. Rafinesque took the same approach, computing his time frame from ‘‘a long list of chiefs included in [his] text.’’ The list itself was a partial and rather inaccurate compilation he had plagiarized from John Heckewelder; Oestreicher, ‘‘Unraveling the Walam Olum,’’ p. 16. 53. See Gordon R. Willey and Jeremy A. Sabloff, A History of American Archaeology (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman & Co., 1974). 54. Goodman, American Genesis, pp. 43, 47. Overall, the Smithsonian Institution can be considered emblematic of the ‘‘anthropological establishment’’ in the sense the term is intended in this essay; for explication, see Curtis M. Hinley, Jr., Savages and Scientists: The Smithsonian Institution and the Development of American Anthropology (Washington, D.C. Smithsonian Institution, 1981). I also tend to subsume archaeology and paleontology under the more general rubric of anthropology. I do so for many of the reasons outlined by Lewis R. Binford in his essay ‘‘Archaeology as Anthropology,’’ American Antiquity, No. 28, 1962. 55. Jesse D. Jennings, Prehistory of North America (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974) p. 39. 56. The materials were discovered, not by professionals engaged in field research, but by a cowboy named George McJunkin. Nonetheless, they eventually precipitated a shift in the dating of human occupancy in America to ‘‘an earlier period than was previously supposed’’ by anyone other than American Indians and others imbued with a healthy skepticism of Scientific Truths; Edwin Wilmsen, ‘‘An Outline of Early Man Studies,’’ American Antiquity, quoted in C.W. Ceram, First American (New York: Mentor Books, 1972) p. 306.

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57. Jencks’ dating is advanced in his Pleistocene Man in Minnesota: A Fossil Homo Sapiens (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1936). Hrdlicka’s response was published in various places, including his essay ‘‘Early Man in America: What Have the Bones to Say?’’ in G.G. MacCurdy, ed., Early Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1937) pp. 93–94. It should be noted that established anthropologists overwhelmingly sided with Hrdlicka in trying to discredit Jencks’ discovery, if not the discoverer himself; see, as examples, Ernst Antevs, ‘‘The Age of ‘Minnesota Man’,’’ Carnegie Institution Year Book, No. 36, 1937; G.F. Kay and M.M. Leighton, ‘‘Geological Notes on the Occurrence of ‘Minnesota Man’,’’ Journal of Geology, No. 46, 1937. 58. Goodman, American Genesis, p. 44. 59. On the importance of the finds of both Folsom and Clovis, see Ceram, First American, p. 292. 60. Wilmsen, quoted in Ceram, First American, p. 306. 61. For a good summary of these findings, see D.A. McManus and J.S. Creager, ‘‘Sea-Level Data for Parts of the Bering–Chukchi Shelves of Beringia from 19,000 to 10,000 14C yr. BP,’’ Quaterny Research, No. 21, 1984. 62. E.F. Greenman, ‘‘The Upper Paleolithic and the New World,’’ Current Anthropology, Vol. 4, 1963. 63. Kroeber is probably best remembered for the ‘‘humanitarianism’’ he exhibited in taking Ishi, reputedly the last Yahi Indian, and converting him into a veritable museum exhibit. For the standard apologist account, see Theodora Kroeber, Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961). A more accurate assessment is provided in Christopher Shae’s ‘‘The Return of Ishi’s Brain: After an Unsettling Discovery, Anthropologists Reconsider a Legendary Relationship,’’ Lingua Franca, Vol. 10, No. 1, 2000. 64. Alfred L. Kroeber, Anthropology (New York: Harcourt Brace, [2nd ed.] 1948) p. 777. 65. Goodman, American Genesis, p. 82. 66. For contemporaneous materials, see George F. Carter, ‘‘Evidence for Pleistocene Man at La Jolla, California,’’ Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 2, No. 7, 1949; ‘‘Evidence for Pleistocene Man in Southern California,’’ Geographical Review, Vol. XL, No. 1, 1950; ‘‘Man in America: A Criticism of Scientific Thought,’’ Scientific Monthly, Col. XXIII, No. 5, 1951. These findings are synthesized and expanded in Carter’s Pleistocene Man at San Diego (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957) and contextualized in his memoir, Earlier Than You Think. 67. For a representative contemporaneous dismissal of his material, see H. Marie Wormington, Ancient Man in North America (Denver: Colorado Museum of Natural History, 1957) p. 223. 68. Jeffrey L. Bada, Patricia Masters Helfman, R.A. Schroeder, and George F. Carter, ‘‘New Evidence for the Antiquity of Man in North America Deduced from Aspartic Acid Racemization,’’ Science, No. 184, 1974; Jeffrey L. Bada and Patricia Masters Helfman, ‘‘Amino Acid Racemization Dating of Fossil Bones,’’ World Archaeology, Vol. 7, No. 2, 1975. 69. Lee’s conclusions are summarized in his ‘‘The Antiquity of the Sheguiandah Site,’’ Canadian Field Naturalist, No. 71, 1957; ‘‘The Question of Indian Origins,’’ Science of Man, No. 1, 1961.

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70. Philip C. Orr, Prehistory of Santa Rosa Island, California (Santa Barbara, CA: Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, 1968) p. 111. 71. Radiocarbon dating techniques can measure the age of organic material up to 40,000 years. The Santa Rosa material ran off the end of the scale, meaning it was even older; ‘‘Early Man Confirmed in America 40,000 Years Ago,’’ Science News, March 26, 1977. Also see Ranier Berger, ‘‘Advances and Results in Radiocarbon Dating: Early Man in America,’’ World Archaeology, Vol. 7, No. 2, 1975. 72. Frederick Johnson and Frank C. Hibben, ‘‘Radiocarbon Dates from the Sandia Cave, Correction,’’ Science, No. 125, 1957, pp. 234–235; Hugo Cross, ‘‘Age of the Sandia Culture,’’ Science, No. 126, 1957. The Sandia materials, upon which Hibben had been reporting since 1937, constituted another batch of evidence Kroeber simply declared nonexistent in his 1948 pronouncement. See, e.g., Frank Hibben, ‘‘Association of Man with Pleistocene Mammals in the Sandia Mountains, New Mexico,’’ American Antiquity, Vol. 11, 1937; ‘‘Evidences of Early Occupation in the Sandia Cave, etc.,’’ Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, No. 99, 1941. 73. Wormington, Ancient Man, p. 58. 74. Jose´ L. Lorenzo, ‘‘Early Man Research in the American Hemisphere,’’ in Alan L. Bryan, ed., Early Man in America from a Circum–Pacific Perspective (Edmonton: University of Alberta, 1978), p. 4. 75. A. McS. Stalker, ‘‘Geology and Age of the Early Man Site at Taber, Alberta,’’ American Antiquity, Vol. 32, No. 4, 1969. 76. Richard S. MacNeish, ‘‘Early Man in the New World,’’ American Scientist, May–June 1976, p. 320. 77. Tom D. Dillehay, Monte Verde: A Late Pleistocene Settlement in Chile (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989); also see N. Guidon and G. Delibrias, ‘‘Carbon-14 Dates Point to Man in the Americas 32,000 Years Ago,’’ Nature, No. 321, 1986; and Tom Dillehay, ‘‘A Late Ice-Age Settlement in Southern Chile,’’ Scientific American, No. 251, 1984. 78. Lorena Miriambell, ‘‘Tlapacoya: A Late Pleistocene Site in Central Mexico,’’ in Bryan, Early Man in America, pp. 221–230. 79. William N. Irving and C.R. Harrington, ‘‘Upper Pleistocene RadiocarbonDated Artifacts from the Northern Yukon,’’ Science, Jan. 26, 1973; Robson Bonnichsen, ‘‘Critical Arguments for Pleistocene Artifacts from the Old Crow Basin, Yukon,’’ in Bryan, Early Man in America, pp. 102–117; Richard E. Morlan, ‘‘Early Man in Northern Yukon Territory: Perspective as of 1977,’’ in Bryan, Early Man in America, pp. 78–95; Jacques Cinq–Mars, ‘‘Bluefish Cave 1: A Late Pleistocene Eastern Beringian Cave Deposit in the Northern Yukon,’’ Canadian Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 3, 1979; William N. Irving, ‘‘New Dates from Old Bones: Twisted Fractures in Mammoth Bones and Some Flaked Bone Tools Suggest that Humans Occupied the Yukon More than 40,000 Years Ago,’’ Natural History, Feb. 1987; Dennis Stanford, ‘‘The Ginsberg Experiment: Archaeology Can Be Bone-breaking Work,’’ Natural History, Sept. 1987. 80. Berger, ‘‘Advances and Results in Radiocarbon Dating,’’ p. 180; David M. Davies, ‘‘Some Observations on the Otavalo Skeleton from Imbabara Province, Ecuador,’’ in Bryan, Early Man in America, p. 273. 81. W.M. Childers, ‘‘Preliminary Report on the Yuha Burial, California,’’ Anthropological Journal of Canada, Vol. 12, No. 1, 1974; S.L. Rogers, ‘‘An Early

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Human Fossil from the Yuha Desert of California – Physical Characteristics,’’ San Diego Museum Papers (San Diego: San Diego Museum of Man, 1977). 82. Richard S. MacNeish, ‘‘Early Man in the Andes,’’ Scientific American, Apr. 1971. 83. Lorenzo, ‘‘Early Man Research,’’ p. 5. 84. ‘‘Golden Discovery: Oldest Bering Man?’’ Science News, May 12, 1979. 85. N. Guidon and G. Delibias, ‘‘Pedra Feruda: Carbon 14 Dates Point to Man in the Americas 32,000 Years Ago,’’ Nature, No. 321, 1986; Neide Guidon, ‘‘Cliff Notes: Rock Artists May Have Left Mark in Brazil More Than 30,000 Years Ago,’’ Natural History, Aug. 1987; David J. Meltzer, J.M. Adovisio and Thomas D. Dillehay, ‘‘On a Pleistocene Human Occupation at Pedra Feruda, Brazil,’’ Antiquity, No. 68, 1994. 86. Sonia Cole, Leakey’s Luck (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975) p. 359. 87. Jeffrey L. Bada and Patricia Masters Hilfman, ‘‘Amino Acid Racemization Dating of Fossil Bones,’’ World Archaeology, Vol. 7, No. 2, 1975. 88. William D. Page, ‘‘The Geology of the El Bosque Archaeological Site, Nicaragua’’ and Ruth Gruhn, ‘‘A Note on Excavations at El Bosque, Nicaragua in 1975,’’ both in Bryan, Early Man in America, pp. 231–260, 261–262. 89. Bryan O. Reeves, ‘‘Early Man at Mission Valley, California,’’ unpublished paper presented at the Annual Meeting for the Society for American Archaeology, Tucson, AZ, 1978; ‘‘Stone Tools Estimated at 100,000 Years Old,’’ Arizona Republic, Apr. 3, 1977. 90. Barney J. Szabo, Harold E. Malde, and Cynthia Irwin-Williams, ‘‘Dilemma Posed by Uranium Series Dates on Archaeologically Significant Bones from Valsequillo, Puebla, Mexico,’’ Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Vol. 6, No. 4, July 1969; Goodman, American Genesis, pp. 140–145. 91. On the significance of Leakey’s African discoveries, see Cole, Leakey’s Luck; LeGros W.E. Clark, The First Evidence for Human Evolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969). 92. Leakey was persuaded not just by the work of others, but by his own experience. In 1967, he and Ranier Berger had combined to date a skull found by amateur archaeologist Howard Wilson near Laguna Beach, California, at 17,000 years (far too old for Kroeber’s limit to apply); Berger, ‘‘Advances in Radiocarbon Dating.’’ A year later, he dated materials recovered from an apparent fire circle unearthed by San Bernardino Museum paleontologist Ruth deEtte Simpson from a sight near the Calico Hills (outside Barstow, California) at 50,000 years; Goodman, American Genesis, p. 133. 93. Louis S.B. Leakey, Ruth deEtte Simpson, Ranier Berger, John Witthoff and others, ‘‘Man in America: The Calico Mountains Excavations,’’ Britannica Yearbook of Science and the Future (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1970); Pleistocene Man at Calico (San Bernardino, CA: San Bernardino Museum Association, 1972). 94. C. Vance Haynes, Jr., ‘‘The Calico Site: Artifacts or Geofacts?’’ Science, July 27, 1973. Although Haynes represented his peers in claiming that the Calico artifacts were simply ‘‘natural phenomena’’ created by geological forces, leading European experts had already examined the objects and concluded they were crafted by humans. One of those rendering this opinion was Franc- ois Bordes, author of The Old

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Stone Age (New York: World University Library, 1968) and widely considered the world’s leading authority of Pleistocene technology; Cole, Leakey’s Luck, p. 355. George Carter – who once challenged a group of skeptical colleagues to find just one naturally produced ‘‘Cartifact’’ from the millions of stones littering an ancient seashore (they failed) – also rebuts Haynes’ contention with relative ease; Earlier Than You Think, pp. 41, 213–217. 95. C. Vance Haynes, Jr., ‘‘The Earliest Americans,’’ Science, Vol. 166, No. 7, 1969 p. 711. As concerns advanced technological dating of materials recovered from a number of sites, Haynes simply dismissed it in favor of his ‘‘hunches’’; see his ‘‘Carbon-14 Dates and Early Man in the New World,’’ in Paul S. Martin and H.E. Wright, eds., Pleistocene Extinctions: The Search for a Cause (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967) pp. 267–268. It should be noted that Haynes has been joined in making such assertions by his colleague and sometime collaborator, Paul S. Martin, head of the Center for Paleoenvironmental Studies at the University of Arizona; Paul S. Martin, ‘‘Clovisia the Beautiful! If Humans Lived in the New World More Than 12,000 Years Ago, There’d Be No Secret About It,’’ Natural History, Oct. 1987. 96. Quoted in Boyce Rensberger, ‘‘Coast Dig Focuses on Man’s Move to the New World,’’ New York Times, Aug. 16, 1976. 97. The ‘‘Aztec World’’ exhibit was mounted as a collaborative effort by Davı´ d Carrasco, then Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado/Boulder, and Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, Director of the Museo del Templo Mayor in Mexico City and a direct lineal descendant of the last Aztec ruler, at the Colorado Museum of Natural History, from September through November 1992; see Davı´ d Carrasco and Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, Moctezuma’s Mexico: Visions of the Aztec World (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1992). 98. Douglas B. Bamforth, symposium on the ‘‘Peopling of America,’’ Jan. 1996. 99. Richard S. MacNeish, ‘‘Early Man in the New World,’’ American Scientist, Vol. 64, May–June 1976. 100. Richard S. MacNeish, The 1992 Excavations of Pendejo Caves near Oro Grande, New Mexico (Andover, NH: Andover Foundation for Archaeological Research, 1992). 101. While it is true that – with the exception of a handful of the more rabidly reactionary types like Vance Haynes (see note 95, above) – few anthropologists have openly attacked Leakey’s work at Calico Hills, it is equally true that it has by and large met with a thundering silence. 102. The 400  600 stone was found during the summer of 1979 in a stratum previously dated by Thor Karlstrom, a senior geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey and retained for this purpose by Goodman’s team (which included Alan Bryan, a specialist on early humans with the University of Alberta, and his wife, Ruth Gruhn, an archaeologist at the same institution). Corroborate radiocarbon dating of certain organic materials was performed by the Smithsonian Institution. That a set of peculiarly geometrical markings on the ‘‘Flagstaff Stone’’ were produced by humans was independently confirmed after detailed examinations by University of Arizona geologist Arend Meijer and Arizona State University petrographer John Ferry (neither of whom was informed of the artifact’s suspected antiquity). The authenticity of other materials recovered from the immediate area – mostly the telltale flakes of rock

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left behind when stone tools are manufactured, but also including a rudimentary blade – was confirmed by the noted French authority Franc- ois Bordes (see note 94), as well as George Carter and Scotty MacNeish. Nonetheless, University of Arizona paleontologist Paul Martin, a close collaborator of the inimitable Vance Haynes (see notes 94, 95), represented the establishment position quite ably by dismissing the entire lot as having been produced by ‘‘natural, geological phenomena.’’ Thereafter, lacking an institutional affiliation, he was unable to secure funding with which to continue his research; Goodman, American Genesis, pp. 201–216. 103. Turning to a very popular and representative text, John Pfieffer’s The Emergence of Man (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), one finds this dating at p. 197. Indeed, on the book’s overleaf, there appears a human ‘‘family tree’’ of exactly the sort deployed by tracts devoted to illustrating theories of racial hierarchy during the nineteenth century. Pfieffer’s is topped by a plainly caucasoid-looking individual, adorned in a loincloth and carrying a spear. The figure is captioned, ‘‘Modern Man: appears 40,000 years ago.’’ Although Pfieffer concedes that this new species originated elsewhere, probably the Middle East, and at a somewhat earlier point (up to 50,000 years), the virtual entirety of the 50 pages of text (pp. 196–245) he devotes to discussing the emergence of Homo sapiens sapiens focuses on Europe, especially the Les Eyzies region of France. 104. For datings of the earliest known human occupancy in the relevant area, see Fumiko Ikawa-Smith, ‘‘The Early Prehistory of America as Seen from Northeast Asia,’’ in Jonathan E. Ericson, R.E. Taylor and Ranier Berger, eds., The Peopling of the New World (Los Altos, CA: Ballena Press, 1982). 105. The three earlier periods are thought to have lasted from 90,000 to 50,000 years ago, from 120,000 to 75,000 years ago, and from 165,000 to 140,000 years ago; P. Evans, ‘‘Towards a Pleistocene Time-Scale,’’ in The Panerozoic Time-Scale: A Supplement, Pt. 2 (London: Geological Society of London, 1971). 106. Carter, Earlier Than You Think, p. 247. Also see Stephen C. Porter, ‘‘Landscapes of the Last Ice Age in North America,’’ in Ronald C. Carlisle, ed., Americans Before Columbus: Ice-Age Origins (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Dept. of Anthropology, 1988) pp. 1–24; H.E. Wright, Jr., ‘‘Environmental Conditions for Paleoindian Immigration,’’ in Tom D. Dillehay and David J. Meltzer, eds., The First Americans: Search and Research (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 1991) pp. 113–135; John Hoffecker, ‘‘The Colonization of Beringia and the Peopling of the New World,’’ Science, No. 257, 1993. 107. Proof that the geological conditions so vital to the migration theory in its classical formulation had ended 15,000 years ago was probably the only reason Kroeber accepted the earlier-mentioned 3,000 year revision of the 12,000 year ‘‘maximum’’ he had initially insisted upon; see David M. Hopkins, ‘‘Aspects of the Paleogeology of Beringia during the Late Pleistocene,’’ in D.M. Hopkins, J. V. Matthews, Jr., C.E. Schweger and S.B. Young, eds., The Paleoecology of Beringia (New York: Academic Press, 1982) pp. 3–28. Also see the text accompanying note 64 in the present essay. 108. For a rather refined articulation of exactly this sort of crudely racist concept, see Carlton S. Coon, The Origin of Races (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962). In his memoirs, George Carter recounts a debate between Jeffrey Bada and Ranier Protsch in which Protsch’s main point was ‘‘that fully modern man (Homo sapiens sapiens)

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was no more than 40,000 years old anywhere in the world and expectably much younger in America. Therefore, he concluded, Bada’s 50,000-year dates for highly developed man (racially marked, even) in America could not possibly be correct’’; Earlier Than You Think, p. 59. 109. There are, of course, concrete examples by which minimum dispersal times can be estimated. The Athabascan (Dene) people are one of those relative handful who do seem to have actually migrated into the Beringian area of North America from Siberia approximately 15,000 years before present. A portion of them, now known as the Navajo (Dine´), broke off and moved southward, eventually settling in the northern portion of Arizona and New Mexico about a thousand years ago. In other words, the migration required some 14,000 years to complete; see generally, Harold E. Driver, Indians of the Americas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975). 110. James M. Adivasio, ‘‘Excavations at Meadowcroft Rock Shelter, 1973–1975: A Progress Report,’’ Pennsylvania Archaeologist, No. 45, 1975; ‘‘Meadowcroft Rockshelter, 1977: An Overview,’’ American Antiquity, No. 43, 1978; ‘‘Meadowcroft Rock Shelter,’’ in Bryan, Early Man in America, pp. 140–180, esp. p. 156. 111. Goodman, American Genesis, pp. 243–244. 112. On Taima–Taima, see Lorenzo, ‘‘Early Man Research,’’ p. 5. On Alice Boer, see W.J. von Puttamer, ‘‘Man in the Amazon: Stone Age Present Meets Stone Age Past,’’ National Geographic, Vol. 155, No. 1, Jan. 1979. It should be noted that more recently discovered sites in Brazil may date to 50,000 years; Richard Wolkomir, ‘‘New Finds Could Rewrite the Start of American History,’’ Smithsonian, No. 21, Mar. 1991. 113. Lorenzo, ‘‘Early Man Research,’’ p. 4. 114. Felicia A. Holton, ‘‘One of the Most Important Archaeological Digs in America,’’ New York Times, July 15, 1973. 115. Pfeiffer, Emergence of Man, p. 242. 116. ‘‘Florida Burial Site: Brains to Boomerangs,’’ Science News, Aug. 6, 1977. 117. See, e.g., the display included in Goodman, American Genesis, pp. 94–95. 118. Ibid. Also see Alan L. Bryan, ‘‘Early Man in America and the Chronology of Western Canada and Alaska,’’ Current Anthropology, Oct. 1969. 119. Ikawa-Smith, ‘‘Early Prehistory,’’ p. 23. Also see Constance Holden, ‘‘Tooling Around: Dates Show Early Siberian Settlement,’’ Science, No. 275, Feb. 28, 1997. 120. Robert H. Ackerman, ‘‘Bluefish Caves,’’ in West, American Beginnings, pp. 511–513, esp. p. 513. 121. These include both Dawson City and the Tanana Uplands; Goodman, American Genesis, pp. 94–95. Such problems with the orthodox migration chronology were noted almost as fast as the Kroeberian revision was effected; see, e.g., J.B. Birdsell, ‘‘The Problem of the Early Peopling of the Americas as Viewed from Asia,’’ in W.S. Laughlin and S.L. Washburn, eds., Physical Anthropology of the American Indian (New York: Viking Fund, 1951) pp. 1–68. 122. For a succinct elaboration of this thesis, made in the process of challenging it, see Froelich Rainey, ‘‘The Significance of Present Archaeological Discoveries in Inland Alaska,’’ in Marian W. Smith, ed., Asia and North America: Transpacific Contacts (Millwood, NY: Krause Reprints, 1974 ed. of 1953 Society for American

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Archaeology original) p. 46. For more recently compiled data on the supposed ‘‘McKenzie Ice Corridor’’ itself, see P.T. Bobrowsky and N.W. Ritter, ‘‘Geological Evidence for an Ice-Free Corridor in Northeastern British Columbia, Canada,’’ Current Research in the Pleistocene, No. 7, 1990. 123. Goodman, American Genesis, p. 63. 124. For a more comprehensive survey, see Roy L. Carson, ‘‘Clovis from the Perspective of the Ice-Free Corridor,’’ in Robson Bonnichsen and Karen L. Turnmire, eds., Clovis: Origins and Adaptations (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1991) pp. 81–90. 125. Reid Bryson, Radiocarbon Isochrones of the Laurentian Tide Sheet (Madison: University of Wisconsin Technical Report No. 35, 1967) p. 8. Bryson was an expert on Arctic weather and, at the time, chair of the Department of Meteorology at the University of Wisconsin. 126. Deloria, Red Earth, White Lies, p. 88. 127. On the topography, climate and vegetation of the land bridge, see Paul A. Colinvaux, ‘‘Reconstructing the Environment,’’ in West, American Beginnings, pp. 13–19. Also see C.E. Schweger, et al., ‘‘The Paleoecology of Beringia – A Synthesis,’’ in Hopkins, Matthews, Schweger and Young, Paleoecology of Beringia, pp. 425–444. 128. Deloria, Red Earth, White Lies, p. 88. 129. H. Muller-Beck, ‘‘Migrations of Hunters on the Land Bridge in the Upper Pleistocene,’’ in Hopkins, Bering Land Bridge, pp. 373–408. The notion is so overlysubscribed as to have formed an absolute consensus of opinion. Robert Ardrey, for example, presents it in passing, as a ‘‘fact’’ unworthy of further comment, in his The Hunting Hypothesis: A Personal Conclusion Concerning the Evolutionary Nature of Man (New York: Antheneum, 1976) p. 9. The same can be said of such ‘‘Indian sympathizers’’ as Peter Farb; see his liberal epic, Man’s Rise to Civilization as Shown by the Indians of North America from Primeval Times to the Coming of the Industrial State (New York: Avon, 1968) p. 240. 130. The migrants are supposed to have included the horse, the camel, the moose, a couple of bears and the beaver; Bjo¨rn Kurte´n and Elaine Anderson, Pleistocene Mammals of North America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). 131. An alternate theory has the hunters following ‘‘herds’’ of bison and other large mammals across the land bridge, but this is an even more strained ‘‘explanation.’’ Why, it must be asked, would hunters track a few buffalo all the way from Lake Baikal to Kansas when there were presumably millions of the beasts grazing on the nearby Siberian steppes? These issues are implicitly raised in R. Dale Guthrie’s ‘‘Mammals of the Mammoth Steppe as Paleoenvironmental Indicator,’’ in Hopkins, Matthews, Schweger and Young, Paleoecology of Beringia, pp. 307–326. 132. Deloria, Red Earth, White Lies, p. 100. 133. Ibid., pp. 100–101. 134. Paul S. Martin, ‘‘Pleistocene Overkill,’’ Natural History, No. 76, Dec. 1967. In its most nuanced and definitive form, the concept is articulated in the collection of essays edited by Paul S. Martin and H.E. Wright, Jr., and published under the title Pleistocene Extinctions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967). Variations on the theme will be found in Paul S. Martin and Richard G. Klein, eds., Quaternary Extinctions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). Later extrapolations include Jared Diamond’s ‘‘The American Blitzkrieg: A Mammoth Undertaking’’, Discover,

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June 1987, and Bernard W. Powell’s ‘‘Talking About Earth: Did Early North Americans Mount a Mammoth Blitzkrieg?’’ Earth Science, Vol. 40, No. 4, 1987. Also see the essays collected in Larry Agenbroad’s Megafauna and Man: Discovery of America’s Heartland (Flagstaff: Northern Arizona University Press, 1990). 135. Ardrey, Hunting Hypothesis, pp. 9–10. Very similar articulations will be found in Paul S. Martin’s ‘‘The Discovery of America,’’ Science, No. 179, 1973; ‘‘Slaughter of Mastodons Caused Their Extinction,’’ Geo, June 1984. 136. For one of the earlier expositions of this thesis, see C. Vance Haynes, Jr., ‘‘Elephant-hunting in North America,’’ Scientific American, Vol. 214, No. 6, 1966. On the baluchitherium, see L. Taylor Hansen, The Ancient Atlantic (Amherst, WI: Amherst Press, 1969) p. 257. 137. Paul S. Martin, ‘‘Pleistocene Overkill,’’ in Martin and Wright, Pleistocene Extinctions, pp. 75–120; ‘‘Prehistoric Overkill: The Global Model,’’ in Martin and Klein, Quaternary Extinctions, pp. 354–403; ‘‘Who or What Destroyed Our Mammoths,’’ in Agenbroad, Megafauna and Man, pp. 109–117. Also see Paul S. Martin and H.E. Wright, Jr., ‘‘Pleistocene Extinctions: The Search for a Cause,’’ Proceedings of the Seventh Congress of the International Association for Quaternary Research (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967); Bernard W. Powell, ‘‘Were These America’s First Ecologists?’’ Journal of the West, No. 26, 1987; Rick Gore, ‘‘Extinctions,’’ National Geographic, June 1989; Bruce Bower, ‘‘Extinctions on Ice,’’ Science News, October 31, 1987. 138. Goodman, American Genesis, p. 52; citing Haynes, ‘‘Elephant Hunting’’; Paul S. Martin, ‘‘The Discovery of America,’’ Science, No. 179, March 9, 1973. Also see Paul S. Martin and J.E. Mosimann, ‘‘Simulating Overkill by Paleoindians,’’ American Scientist, Vol. 63, No. 3, May–June 1975. 139. Alfred L. Kroeber, ‘‘Native American Population,’’ American Anthropologist, N.S., XXXVI, 1934. Cultural and Natural Areas of Native North America (Berkeley: University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology, 1939) pp. 148–149. More current estimates typically fall within the 2 (Ubelaker) to 4 million (Denevan) range, still far too low to conform to the paleolithic demography advanced by Haynes and Martin; Douglas H. Ubelaker, ‘‘North American Indian Population Size,’’ in John H. Verano and Douglas H. Ubelaker, eds., Disease and Demography in the Americas (Washington, D.C. Smithsonian Institution, 1992) pp. 169–176; ‘‘Native American Populations in 1492: Recent Research and a Revised Hemispheric Estimate,’’ in William Denevan, ed., The Native Population of the Americas in 1492 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992) pp. 18–19. Indeed, the Haynes/Martin hypothesis cannot be squared even with such high-end estimates as the 18.5 million advanced by Henry F. Dobyns in his groundbreaking Their Number Become Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983). 140. Actually, there is a current effort to reassert Kroeberian orthodoxy on this score; David Henige, Numbers From Nowhere: The American Indian Precontact Population Debate (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998). 141. Deloria, Red Earth, White Lies, pp. 115–116; David J. Meltzer and Jim I. Mead, ‘‘Dating Late Pleistocene Extinctions: Theoretical Issues, Analytical Bias, and Substantive Results,’’ in Jim I. Mead and David J. Meltzer, eds., Environments and Extinctions: Man in Late Glacial North America (Orono, ME: Center for the Study of

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Early Man, 1985) pp. 145–173. More broadly, see the essays included in William Glen, ed., The Mass Extinction Debates: How Science Works in a Crisis (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984); Stephen K. Donovan, ed., Mass Extinctions: Processes and Evidence (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). 142. Vast mammoth boneyards are situated on islands of the northern coasts of Siberia and Alaska, for example, hundreds of miles from any requisite cliffs. These remains, moreover, show no indication at all of having been butchered by humans; N.K. Vereschchagin, ‘‘Primitive Hunters and Pleistocene Extinction in the Soviet Union,’’ in Martin and Wright, Pleistocene Extinctions, p. 388; Stephen Taber, ‘‘Perennially Frozen Ground in Alaska: Its Origins and History,’’ Geological Society of America Bulletin, No. 54, 1943, p. 1490; Deloria, Red Earth, White Lies, pp. 131– 141. 143. It is conservatively estimated that there were as many as 75 million ‘‘buffalo’’ (Bison bison) in North America at the dawn of the nineteenth century; Ernest Thompson Seton, Lives of Game Animals (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1927 reprint of 1909 original) pp. 654–656. Also see William T. Hornaday, Extermination of the American Bison, with a Sketch of Its Discovery and Life History (Washington, D.C.: U.S. National Museum, 1889) pp. 367–369; Henry Poland, ‘‘Buffalo, or American Bison,’’ in Fur-bearing Animals in Nature and Commerce (London: Gurney & Jackson, 1892) pp. 290–299; Roger A. Caras, ‘‘A Symbol for All: The Mighty Bison,’’ in North American Mammals: Fur-bearing Animals of the United States and Canada (New York: Meredith Press, 1967) pp. 461–467; David A. Dary, The Buffalo Book: The Full Saga of an American Animal (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1974) pp. 22–29. A summary of recent attempts to revise such estimates downward to as few as 8 million will be found in Sheperd Krech III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999) pp. 136–138. 144. George Gaylord Simpson, ‘‘Mammals and Land Bridges,’’ Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences, Vol. 30, No. 4, 1940. 145. George F. Carter, ‘‘Uhle’s Mastodon,’’ Anthropological Journal of Canada, Vol. 16, No. 2, 1968. Haynes recently appeared in an interview on the Arts and Entertainment (A & E) television network in which he at last publicly conceded that, while the hunting practices of Paleoindians might have contributed to their demise, such things could not have precipitated extinction. His thinking now seems to have inclined toward the sort of natural catastrophism long advanced as an explanation by Vine Deloria and others; Deloria, Red Earth, White Lies, pp. 133–137; Frank C. Hibben, ‘‘Evidence of Early Man in Alaska,’’ American Antiquity, No. 8, 1943, esp. p. 256. More broadly, see Richard A. Kerr, ‘‘Periodic Impacts and Extinctions Reported,’’ Science, No. 223, 1984; Walter Alverez, ‘‘Impact Theory of Extinctions and the Invertebrate Fossil Record,’’ Science, No. 223, 1984; David M. Raup, ‘‘Biological Extinction in Earth History,’’ Science, N. 231, 1986; Richard A. Kerr, ‘‘Cores Document Ancient Catastrophe,’’ Science, No. 275, 1997. For a good overview, see Fred Warhofsky, Doomsday: The Science of Catastrophism (New York: Readers Digest Press, 1977). 146. K.R. Fladmark, ‘‘Routes: Alternative Migration Corridors for Early Man in North America,’’ American Antiquity, Vol. 44, No. 1, Jan. 1979, p. 60. 147. Ibid. Also see K.R. Fladmark, ‘‘The Feasibility of the Northwest Coast as a Migration Route for Early Man,’’ in Bryan, Early Man in America.

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148. On Little Salt Springs, see note 116. On Meadowcroft, see note 110. On the Debert Site, see E.F. Greenman, ‘‘The Upper Paleolithic and the New World,’’ Current Anthropology, Feb. 1963, pp. 44, 81. 149. Alan L. Bryan, ‘‘An Overview of Paleo-American Prehistory from a CircumPacific Perspective,’’ in Bryan, Early Man in America, pp. 306–327; Ruth Gruhn, ‘‘Linguistic Evidence in Support of the Coastal Route of Earliest Entry into the New World,’’ Man, No. 23, 1988; ‘‘The Pacific Coast Route of Initial Entry: An Overview,’’ in Robson Bonnichsen and D. Gentry Steele, eds., Method and Theory for Investigating the Peopling of the Americas (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1994) pp. 249–256. For a succinct overview, see Anonymous, ‘‘Coastal-Entry Model Gains Support as Ice-Free Corridor Theory Fades: The Coastal Route Theory is ‘In’,’’ Mammoth Trumpet, Vol. 13, No. 3, 1998. 150. As is indicated in the essays cited above – notes 146, 147 – Fladmark does not seem in the least opposed to this alteration. 151. For succinct synopses of these finds, several of which have been mentioned in this essay, see ‘‘Texas Street Artifacts,’’ New World Antiquity, Vol. 2, Nos. 9–12, 1955; Bryan, ‘‘An Overview of Paleo-American Prehistory,’’ esp. pp. 309–313. It should be noted that Carter himself rather wholeheartedly subscribed to the Bryan– Gruhn revision in his ‘‘American Paleolithic’’ and, especially, Earlier Than You Think, pp. 244–248. 152. On the Mideast, see, e.g., ‘‘Modern Man: Mid-East Origins?’’ Science News, March 3, 1979. On southern Africa, see Richard G. Klein, ‘‘The Stone Age Prehistory of Southern Africa,’’ Annual Review of Anthropology, No. 12, 1983; Lewis R. Binford, Faunal Remains at the Klasies River Mouth (New York: Academic Press, 1984). Overall, see Paul A. Mellars, ed., The Emergence of Modern Humans: An Archaeological Perspective (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). 153. Indications that this is true will be found in a spate of recent literature. See as examples, David S. Whitley and Ronald I. Dohrn, ‘‘New Perspectives on the Clovis versus Pre-Clovis Controversy,’’ American Antiquity, Vol. 58, No. 4, 1993; David J. Meltzer, ‘‘The Discovery of Deep Time: A History of Views on the Peopling of the Americas,’’ in Bonnichsen and Gentry, Method and Theory, pp. 7–26; Stuart J. Fiedel, ‘‘Older Than We Thought: Implications of Corrected Dates for Paleoindians,’’ American Antiquity, Vol. 64, No. 1, 1999; Special Issue, ‘‘Charting the Way Into the Americas’’ Mammoth Trumpet, Vol. 14, No. 1, 1999. 154. This construction is handled quite adequately in the chapter entitled ‘‘Science and Technology as Hegemony’’ in Aronowitz, Science as Power, pp. 3–34. Relatedly, see Noam Chomsky’s seminal essay, ‘‘Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship,’’ in his American Power and the New Mandarins (New York: Pantheon, 1967) pp. 23–158. 155. There is a rather vast literature on this topic. To trace the trend as it evolved, see Tim Onosko, Wasn’t the Future Wonderful? A View of Trends and Technology from the 1930s (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1979); Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982); Jacques Ellul, The Technological Bluff (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1990). 156. The tests were used as a means of conclusively confirming any site dating falling within the approved 15,000-year limit. Tests yielding older dates, on the other

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hand, were, and often still are, offered as proving the incompetence of those who discovered the materials tested, most often by way of ‘‘site contamination.’’ See, e.g., C. Vance Haynes, Jr.,’’Carbon-14 Dates and Early Man’’; ‘‘Paleoindian Charcoal from Meadowcroft Rockshelter: Is Contamination a Problem?’’ American Antiquity, Vol. 45, No. 3, 1980. 157. See for general information Rebecca L. Cahn, M. Stoneking and A.C. Wilson, ‘‘Mitochondrial DNA and Human Evolution,’’ Nature, No. 325, 1987; D. Andrew Merriweather, ‘‘The Structure of Human Mitochondrial DNA Variation,’’ Journal of Molecular Evolution, No. 33, 1991; Tabitha M. Powledge and Mark Rose, ‘‘The Great DNA Hunt,’’ Archaeology, Vol. 49, No. 3, 1996; Emoke J.E. Szathmary, ‘‘Modeling Ancient Populations Relationships from Modern Population Genetics,’’ in Bonnichsen and Gentry, Method and Theory, pp. 117–130. 158. Friend, ‘‘Genetic detectives.’’ The research team had already published an academic report on its findings; Douglas C. Wallace and Antonio Torrini, ‘‘American Indian Prehistory as Written in the Mitochondrial DNA: A Review,’’ Human Biology, June 1992, p. 759. 159. The indigenous population is anthropologically/linguistically subdivided into three major groups dubbed ‘‘Amerind,’’ ‘‘Na-Dene,’’ and ‘‘Eskimo-Aleut.’’ Of these, ‘‘Amerind’’ is by far the largest, most geographically expansive, and considered to be the oldest. ‘‘Na-Dene,’’ which aggregates for the most part in northwestern Canada is thought to be much more recently arrived, while ‘‘Eskimo-Aleut’’ remain circumpolar; Jennings, Prehistory of North America, p. 32. 160. It is now rather commonly estimated that the rich diversity of ‘‘Amerind’’ languages evident in historical times would have taken approximately 40,000 years to evolve from a ‘‘root tongue’’; see Joseph H. Greenberg, Language in the Americas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988); Ives Goddard and Lyle Campbell, ‘‘The History and Classification of American Indian Languages: What Are the Implications for the Peopling of the Americas?’’ in Bonnichsen and Gentry, Method and Theory, pp. 189–207; Johanna Nichols, ‘‘Linguistic Diversity and the First Settlement in the New World,’’ Language, No. 66, 1990. A very good, albeit somewhat outdated, correlation of data will be found in Joseph H. Greenberg, Christy G. Turner II, and Stephen L. Zegura, ‘‘The Settlement of the Americas: A Comparison of the Linguistic, Dental and Genetic Evidence,’’ Current Anthropology, No. 27, 1986. 161. Quoted in Friend, ‘‘Genetic detectives.’’ 162. D.C. Wallace, S.D. Ferris, M.C. Rattazi, and L.L. Cavalli-Sforza, ‘‘Radiation of Human Mitochondrial DNA Types Analyzed by Restriction Endonuclease Cleavage Patterns,’’ Journal of Molecular Evolution, No. 19, 1983. 163. Theodore G. Schurr, Scott W. Ballenger, Yik-Tuen Gan, Judith A. Hodge, D. Andrew Merriweather, Dale N. Lawrence, William C. Knowler, Kenneth M. Weiss, and Douglas C. Wallace, ‘‘Amerindian Mitochondrial DNAs Have Rare Asian Mutations at High Frequencies, Suggesting They Derived from Four Primary Maternal Lineages,’’ American Journal of Human Genetics, No. 46, 1990. 164. Douglas C. Wallace, Katherine Garrison and William C. Knowler, ‘‘Dramatic Founder Effect in Amerindian Mitochondrial DNAs,’’ American Journal of Physical Anthropology, No. 68, 1985. Also see D. Andrew Merriweather, Francisco Rothhammer and Robert E. Ferrill, ‘‘Diffusion of the Four Founding Lineage

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Halotypes in Native Americans Suggests a Single Wave of Migration for the New World,’’ American Journal of Physical Anthropology, No. 98, 1995. 165. Antonio Torrini, Theodore G. Schurr, Margaret F. Cabell, Michael D. Brown, James V. Neel, Merethe Larsen, David G. Smith, Carlos M. Vullo, and Douglas C. Wallace, ‘‘Asian Affinities and Continental Radiation of the Four Founding Native American Mitochondrial DNAs,’’ American Journal of Human Genetics, Sept. 1993; Antonio Torrini, Rem I. Sukerik, Theodore G. Schurr, Yelena B. Starikovska, Margaret F. Cabell, Michael H. Crawford, Anthony G. Comizzie, and Douglas C. Wallace, ‘‘Mitochondrial DNA Variation of Aboriginal Siberians Reveals Distinct Genetic Affinities to American Indians,’’ American Journal of Human Genetics, Sept. 1993. For the popularized replay, see John F. Hoffecker, W. Roger Powers and Ted Goebel, ‘‘The Colonization of Beringia and the Peopling of the New World,’’ Science, No. 259, 1993. 166. Ryk H. Ward, Barbara L. Dew-Jager, and Svante Pa¨a¨bo, ‘‘Extensive Mitochondrial Diversity Within a Single Amerindian Tribe,’’ Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, No. 88, 1991. Also see Marta Mirazon Lahr, ‘‘Patterns of Modern Human Diversification: Implications for Amerindian Origins,’’ Yearbook of Physical Anthropology, No. 38, pp. 163–198. 167. Alvah M. Hicks, ‘‘Rethinking Homo Sapiens in the Americas: A Working Hypothesis,’’ unpublished paper, 1994, p. 14; quoting Ward, Dew-Jager and Pa¨a¨bo, ‘‘Extensive Mitochondrial Diversity,’’ p. 8720. A similar conclusion was reached by geneticist Moses S. Schanfield; see his ‘‘Immunoglobulin Allotypes (GM and KM) Indicate Multiple Founding Populations of Native Americans: Evidence of At Least Four Migrations to the New World,’’ Human Biology, Vol. 64, No. 3, 1992. 168. Ward, Dew-Jager and Pa¨a¨bo, ‘‘Extensive Mitochondrial Diversity,’’ p. 8723. The conclusion corresponds closely to that drawn by Gerald F. Shields, Kristen Hecker, Mikhail I. Voevoda and Judy K. Reed in ‘‘Absence of Asian-specific Region V Mitochondrial Marker in Native Beringians,’’ American Journal of Human Genetics, No. 50, 1992. 169. Ranjit Chakrabority and Kenneth M. Weiss, ‘‘Genetic Variation in the Mitochondrial DNA Genome in American Indians is a Multi-Drift Equilibrium,’’ American Journal of Physical Anthropology, No. 86, 1991; D. Andrew Merriweather, ‘‘The Structure of Human Mitochondrial DNA Variation,’’ Journal of Molecular Evolution, No. 33, 1991, p. 552; Tom Dillehay, ‘‘Disease Ecology and Initial Human Migration,’’ in Dillehay and Meltzer, First Americans, pp. 231–264. 170. The conclusions in this ‘‘definitive’’ compilation of current Beringian research are divided into two parts at the end of the volume, under the headings ‘‘Linguistic Evidence’’ (pp. 525–536) and ‘‘Archaeological Evidence’’ (pp. 537–560). At no point in the entire 576 page book is genetics evidence so much as mentioned. 171. The story has been recounted in a multiplicity of publications. See, e.g., Douglas Preston, ‘‘The Lost Man,’’ New Yorker, June 16, 1997. 172. For background on NAGPRA (y 3(c)(1), 25 U.S.C. 3002(c)(1)), see Roger C. Echohawk and Walter Echohawk, Battlefields and Burial Grounds: The Indian Struggle to Protect Ancestral Grave Sites in the United States (Minneapolis: Lerner, 1994). 173. The Columbia River, as a navigable waterway, falls under the jurisdiction of the Army Corps of Engineers, which is thus responsible for enforcing not only

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NAGPRA but the 1979 Archeological Resources Protection Act (ARPA; y 4, 16 U.S.C. 470cc); Andrew Slayman, ‘‘A Battle Over Bones,’’ Archaeology, Vol. 50, No. 1, 1997. 174. The role played by MacMillan is covered in Slayman’s ‘‘A Battle Over Bones.’’ Also see Francis P. McManamon, ‘‘The Initial Scientific Examination, Description and Analysis of the Kennewick Man Human Remains’’ (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept. of Interior, National Park Service, Archaeology and Ethnography Pgm., 1999). 175. Timothy Egan, ‘‘Tribe stops study of bones that challenges history,’’ New York Times, Sept. 30, 1996. For a profile of Chatters, see Mike Lee, ‘‘No turning back on Kennewick Man,’’ Tri-City Herald, Dec. 28, 1999. 176. See, e.g., Roberta L. Hall, ‘‘Who WERE the First Americans?’’ Mammoth Trumpet, Vol. 11, No. 3, 1996; Keefe Borden, ‘‘Skull redefines American ancestry,’’ New York Times, May 21, 1998; Toby Murcott, ‘‘What Was a Caucasian Doing in the US 9,000 Years Ago?’’ BBC News Service, Feb. 2, 1999. Sharon Begley and Andrew Murr, ‘‘The First Americans,’’ Newsweek, May 13, 1999. A good, albeit conservative, overview will be found in Mike Lee’s ‘‘New World habitation tricky issue,’’ Tri-City Herald, Dec. 26, 1999. 177. Elouise Schumacher, ‘‘440 Billion Gallons: Hanford wastes could fill 900 King Domes,’’ Seattle Times, Apr. 13, 1991. 178. The initial dating was provided in Aug. 1996 from a metacarpal bone by R. Irving Taylor of the University of California/Riverside; Slayer, ‘‘Battle Over Bones.’’ Subsequent datings were performed at the University of Arizona and by Beta Analytical, Inc., of Miami, Florida. The latter arrived at the date of approximately 9,200 years before present; McManamon, ‘‘Initial Scientific Examination,’’ pp. 7–8. Subsequent tests ordered by the court simply (re)confirmed Beta’s 9,200 year dating; Mike Lee, ‘‘Lab test support age of Kennewick Man,’’ Tri-City Herald, Jan. 13, 2000. All tests were performed using AMS (mass spectometry) techniques; for technical details, see M.J. Aitkin, Science-based Dating in Archaeology (London: Longman, 1990). 179. Stanford was featured prominently in the 60 Minutes television segment broadcast in Oct. 1998. 180. The suit was filed by Robson Bonnichsen, Director of the Center for Study of First Americans at Oregon State University, and is formally cited as Bonnichsen, et al. v. U.S. District of Oregon, Civ. No. 96–1481 JE (1997). Aside from Bonnichsen, Stanford and Haynes, those listed as plaintiffs in the suit were Douglas Owsley of the Smithsonian, Richard Janyz of the University of Tennessee, D. Gentry Steele of Texas A & M, George Gill of the University of Wyoming, and C. Loring Brace, Curator of Biological Anthropology at the University of Michigan’s Museum of Anthropology; Slayer, ‘‘Battle Over Bones.’’ Also see Andrew Slayer, ‘‘Reburial Dispute,’’ Archaeology Online News, October 10, 1996; Dave Schafer and John Stang, ‘‘Anthropologist fight to study Kennewick bones,’’ Tri-City Herald, October 18,1996. 181. Statement during January 1997 radio interview; tape on file. The Asatru Assembly did not officially withdraw from the fray until January 2000; Mike Lee, ‘‘Asatru give up Kennewick Man battle,’’ Tri-City Herald, January 14, 2000. 182. Mike Lee, ‘‘Kennewick Man poised for ‘60 Minutes’ role,’’ Tri-City Herald, October 28, 1998; K. Kris Hirst, ‘‘Kennewick Man – or how I learned to hate 60 Minutes,’’ AboutArchaeology.com, November 1, 1998.

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183. Stanford expressed considerable displeasure that the remains were not ordered to be transferred to the Smithsonian itself; John Stang, ‘‘Judge orders Kennewick Man moved to Seattle,’’ Tri-City Herald, Sept. 3, 1998. 184. Mike Lee, ‘‘Doc pushes bill to study old bones,’’ Tri-City Herald, November 14, 1997. 185. Mike Lee, ‘‘Report on Kennewick Man suggests Asian origin,’’ Tri-City Herald, October 15, 1999. 186. Mark Rose, ‘‘Kennewick IV: The Saga Continues,’’ Archaeology, Vol. 52, No. 5, 1999; Mike Lee and Chris Mulik, ‘‘Tribes disturbed by more tests on old bones,’’ Tri-City Herald, Jan. 14, 2000; McManamon, ‘‘Initial Scientific Examination,’’ pp. 6–7. The analysis McManamon claims is still ‘‘necessary’’ includes DNA testing. This begs the fact that such testing was undertaken in 1996 by Frederika Kaestle a graduate student supervised by biological anthropologist David Glenn Smith of the University of California/Davis; Slayer, ‘‘Battle Over Bones.’’ For a sample of Kaestle’s work, see her ‘‘Molecular Analysis of Native American DNA from Western Nevada,’’ Nevada Historical Society Quarterly, Vol. 40, No. 1, 1997. Overall, see Mike Lee’s ‘‘Politics of the Past: Scientists, tribes still at odds over Kennewick Man bones,’’ Tri-City Herald, December 26, 1999. 187. See Arizona State University paleontologist G.A. Clark’s ‘‘NAGPRA and the Demon-Haunted World,’’ a guest editorial prepared for the December 1996 issue of Archaeology (Vol. 49, No. 4), wherein it is asserted that ‘‘NAGPRA is an unmitigated disaster for archaeologists, bioarchaeologists, and other physical anthropologists concerned with the study of human remains.’’ Other exemplary quotations are salted throughout several of the pieces cited herein, especially Slayer’s ‘‘Battle Over Bones.’’ It should also be noted that a whole new organization called ‘‘Friends of America’s Past’’ (FAP) is devoted to opposing NAGPRA through suits such as Bonnichsen; see the article by FAP founder Cleone Hawkinson entitled ‘‘Behind the Scenes: What’s the Kennewick Man Case Really About?’’ Originally published in Ohio Archaeology Magazine in 1998, the piece is now available on the internet at www.friendsofpast.org. 188. For the best overall analysis currently available, see David Hurst Thomas, Skull Wars: Kennewick Man, Archaeology and the Battle for Native American Identity (New York: Basic Books, 2000). 189. This was the basis for Joseph Smith’s formulation of a two-stage Nephite/ Lamanite migration of Israelites, with the former being more ‘‘advanced’’ than the latter; see note 32 and accompanying text. A wonderful overview of such thinking will be found in William Stanton’s The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes Towards Race in America, 1815–1859 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960). 190. This too was – and to an uncomfortable extent remains – a prominent theme in American letters; see, as examples, John McIntosh, The Origin of the North American Indians (New York: Nafis & Cornish, 1843); John D. Baldwin, Ancient America (New York: Harper & Bros., 1872); John T. Short, The Americans of Antiquity (New York: Harper & Bros., 1880); Josiah Priest, American Antiquities (Albany, NY: Hoffman & White, 1883); Bernard Shipp, The Indian and Antiquities of America (Philadelphia: Sherman & Co., 1897). 191. Oestreicher, ‘‘Unraveling the Walam Olum,’’ p. 19.

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192. See, as examples, George Jones, An Original History of Aboriginal America (New York: Harper & Bros., 1843); John B. Newman, Origin of the Red Man (New York: John C. Wells, 1852). 193. For surprisingly good surveys of the literature by a pair of the foremost twentieth century advocates of ‘‘American Egyptology,’’ see A. Hyatt Verrill, Old Civilizations in the New World (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1924); A Hyatt Verrill and Ruth Verrill, America’s Ancient Civilizations (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953). ‘‘American Egyptology’’ is debunked quite nicely, right along with the ‘‘Phoenicians were here’’ school of thought and others, in Martin Gardiner’s littleremembered gem, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (New York: Dover, 1957). 194. See, e.g., Alexander Bradford’s American Antiquities and Researches into the Origins and History of the Red Race (New York: Drayon & Saxton, 1840) and Samuel G. Drake’s The Book of the Indians; or, the Biography and History of North America from Its First Discovery to the Year 1841 (Boston: Benjamin B. Mussey, 1841). Jennings C. Wise continued the tradition into the mid-twentieth century with his The Red Man in the New World Drama (Washington, D.C.: W.F. Roberts, 1931) and America: The Background to Columbus (Charlottesville, VA: Monticello, 1945). Probably the most extravagant formulation, however, is Harold S. Gladwin’s Men Out of Asia (New York: McGraw–Hill, 1947), in which the author has Alexandrine Greeks starting in the Red Sea and then traversing the Pacific in quadrimeres to land on the Peruvian coast. 195. Berry Fell, America, B.C. (New York: Times Books, 1976); Saga Americana (New York: Times Books, 1980). 196. See, as examples, Sir Wilson Daniel, The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Problems (New York: Macmillan, 1892), Lewis Spense, Atlantis in America (London: Ernst Benn, 1925), Ignatius Donnelly, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (New York: Harper & Row, 1949); Edgar Evans Cayce, Edgar Cayce on Atlantis (New York: Paperback Library, 1968); Charles Berlitz, The Mystery of Atlantis (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1969); Otto Muck, The Secret of Atlantis (New York: Pocket Books, 1979). 197. Wishar S. Cerve, Lemmuria: Lost Continent of the Pacific (San Jose, CA: Rosacrucian Press, 1954). 198. James Churchward, The Lost Continent of Mu (New York: Paperback Library, 1969 reprint of 1932 original); The Cosmic Forces of Mu (New York: Ives Washburn, 1934). 199. Goodman, American Genesis, p. 36. 200. See, e.g., Rudolf Steiner, Cosmic Memory: Atlantis and Lemmuria (Blaunett, NY: self-published, 1959). Overall, see Robert Wauchope, Lost Tribes and Sunken Continents: Myth and Method in the Study of American Indians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); Robert F. Marx with Jennifer G. Marx, In Quest of the Great White Gods: Contact Between the Old and New World at the Dawn of History (New York: Crown, 1992). 201. Erich von Da¨nekin, Chariots of the Gods (New York: Souvenir Press, 1997 reprint of 1970 original). 202. Goodman, American Genesis (New York: Summit Books, 1981) p. 37.

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203. E.F. Greenman, ‘‘The Upper Paleolithic and the New World,’’ Current Anthropology, Vol. 4, Feb. 1963. 204. Goodman, American Genesis, pp. 66–67. 205. His advocacy of the theory, along with his legal posture, has made Bonnichsen something of a hero among neonazis in the Pacific Northwest; see, e.g., Stephen A. McNallen, ‘‘Kennewick Man: Ancient Caucasian in North America,’’ The Runestone, Summer 1997. 206. Emilio Estrada and Betty J. Meggers, ‘‘A Complex of Traits of Probable Transpacific Origin on the Coast of Ecuador,’’ American Anthropologist, Vol. 63, No. 5, 1961; Emilio Estrada, Betty J. Meggers and Clifford Evans, ‘‘Possible Transpacific Contact on the Coast of Ecuador,’’ Science, Feb. 2, 1962; Heather Pringle, ‘‘Traces of Ancient Mariners Found in Peru,’’ Science, No. 281, 1998. The latest shtick, based on an 11,500-year-old skull recently unearthed near Lapa Vermelha, Brazil, is to argue that the first Americans came from Australia; Larry Rohter, ‘‘An Ancient Skull Challenges Long-Held Theories,’’ New York Times, October 26, 1999; K. Kris Hirst, ‘‘Excavating the News: Did Australians Colonize the New World,’’ AboutArchaeology.com, October 27,1999. 207. Thor Heyerdahl, Kon-Tiki (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1951); American Indians in the Pacific: The Theory Behind the Kon-Tiki Expedition (London: Allen & Unwin, 1953); Aku–Aku: The Secret of Easter Island (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1958); Sea Routes to Polynesia (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1961); The Ra Expeditions (New York: Doubleday, 1971). 208. Werner Mu¨ller, America: The New World or the Old? (New York: Peter Lang, 1989). On Polynesia, Jesse D. Jennings, The Prehistory of Polynesia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979); John H.R. Gibbons and Fergus G.A.U. Clunie, ‘‘Sea Level Changes and Pacific Prehistory: New Insight into Early Human Settlement of Oceania,’’ Journal of Pacific History, No. 21, 1986. 209. Mu¨ller, America, esp. pp. Maps 1 & 2. Interestingly, such a dating corresponds quite well with the time when Cro-Magnons – that is, the first modern humans – are thought to have arrived in Europe, beginning the process of displacing the Neanderthals. Since the locale in which the Cro-Magnons themselves originated remains ‘‘controversial,’’ Mu¨ller’s dating obviously suggests the possibility that ‘‘archaic’’ American Indians comprised the founding population of Europe rather than the other way around. See generally, Randall White, ‘‘Rethinking the Middle/Upper Paleolithic Transition,’’ Current Anthropology, No. 23, 1982; Christopher B. Stringer, ‘‘Documenting the Origin of Modern Humans,’’ in Eric Trinkhaus, ed., The Emergence of Modern Humans (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1989) pp. 67–96; Heidi Knecht, Anne Pike-Tay and Randall White, eds., ‘‘Introduction,’’ Before Lascaux: The Complex Record of the Early Upper Paleolithic (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 1993) p. 1. 210. To every rule, there are exceptions. One of them, in this connection, was W.D. Strong, who, rather early on, began to assess indigenous stories in terms of possible factual content; see his ‘‘North American Indian Traditions Suggesting Knowledge of the Mammoth,’’ American Anthropologist, No. 36, 1934. Also see M.F. Ashley Montague, ‘‘An Indian Tradition Relating to the Mastodon,’’ American Anthropologist, No. 46, 1944; Ludwell H. Johnson III, ‘‘Men and Elephants in

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America,’’ Scientific American, October 1952; Jane C. Beck, ‘‘The Giant Beaver: A Prehistoric Memory,’’ Ethnohistory, No. 19, 1972. 211. See, e.g., David M. Pendergast and Clement W. Meighan, ‘‘Folk Traditions as Historical Fact: A Paiute Example,’’ Journal of American Folklore, No. 72, 1959. 212. To the contrary, as Deloria points out, long after the native stories had begun to be borne out, there were many who continued to quote Edward Sapir – who’d been demonstrably wrong about nearly everything – to the effect that native stories were not simply ‘‘less credible than accepted scientific explanations,’’ but, because of their reference to the ‘‘supernatural,’’ altogether incredible. Thus, by definition, the scientific tradition is correct (superior), even if its conclusions are wrong; all other traditions are wrong (inferior), even if their conclusions are correct. See Deloria, Red Earth, White Lies, pp. 160–161; citing Lord Raglan, ‘‘Folk Traditions as Historical Fact,’’ Journal of American Folklore, No. 73, 1960. For a good dose of Sapir, see his ‘‘Culture: Genuine and Spurious,’’ American Journal of Sociology, No. 29, 1924. 213. Frank Waters, The Book of the Hopi (New York: Viking, 1963); Harold Courlander, The Fourth World of the Hopis (New York: Fawcett, 1971). 214. It should be noted that the traditional histories of many native peoples – the Salish and Kootenai, for example, as well as the Spokanes, Nez Perce and numerous others – included accounts of periods in which there was sustained flooding. Most of them appear to correspond more to a period of rapid glacial melt which lasted for about two millennia (10,000–12,000 years ago), however, rather than the much earlier flood recounted in Hopi tradition; Deloria, Red Earth, White Lies, pp. 207–230. Also see Ella C. Clark, Indian Legends of the Pacific Northwest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952); Indian Legends of the Northern Rockies (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966); Warren C. Hunt, ‘‘Catastrophic Termination of the Last Wisconsin Ice Advance: Observations in Alberta and Idaho,’’ Bulletin of Canadian Petroleum Geology, Vol. 25, No. 3, 1977. 215. Philip King, The Evolution of North America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977) p. 131; Ekkehart Malotki and Michael Lomatuway’ma, Earth Fire: A Hopi Legend of the Sunset Crater Eruption (Flagstaff, AZ: Northland Press, 1987). 216. Deloria, Red Earth, White Lies, pp. 179–206; Dorothy Vitaliano, Legends of the Earth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973). 217. Most spectacularly, this includes the description offered by the people of the Warm Springs Reservation of the gigantic eruption of Mt. Multnomah, once by far the largest mountain in central Oregon, and the resulting creation of the much smaller cluster of peaks called the ‘‘Three Sisters’’ (these being all that remains of the original, huge peak). Conventional estimates have been that the blast occurred during the third phase of the Miocene Era, some 25–27 million years ago; Edwin Hodge, Mount Multnomah (Eugene: University of Oregon Press, 1925) p. 118. Since, obviously, no humans could have been around to observe the cataclysm that long ago, it has always been considered mysterious how the local Indians could have known with such precision what had happened. The answer turns out to be that Multnomah actually blew up much more recently, almost certainly within the last hundred millennia; Deloria, Red Earth, White Lies, pp. 201–202. 218. Clark, Indian Legends of the Northern Rockies, p. 306. Interestingly, both explanations may be partially accurate in this instance. As Deloria points out, the

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‘‘curious thing about Devil’s Tower is that the rock appears badly eroded about a quarter of the way down and the remainder of the structure seems to have rock of a much cleaner and fresher look. It does look like the greater percentage of the rock has recently been pushed upward and that the original top part had been subjected to erosion for a considerable period of time’’; Deloria, Red Earth, White Lies, pp. 226–227. 219. Clark, Indian Legends of the Northern Rockies, pp. 309–310. 220. Following the standard sources, Edward Lazarus, for example, dates the initial arrival of Lakotas in the Black Hills at 1775, their ‘‘seizure’’ of the region from the Kiowas at 1814. Only toward the end of his study does he mention, in passing, the Lakotas’ own belief that they emerged from a cave in the Hills called Wamaka Og’naka many thousands of years ago and spread out from there; Edward Lazarus, Black Hills, White Justice: The Sioux Nation versus the United States, 1775 to the Present (New York: HarperCollins, 1991) pp. 3–7, 417. In a Jeffersonian sense, long enshrined as a legal principle in the United States, the question of whether the Lakotas are ‘‘really’’ indigenous to the Hills has considerable bearing upon the nature of their land rights in the area. For analysis of this issue, and a survey of the evidence supporting the Lakota claim of having originated in the area, see the special issue of Wicazo Sa Review (Vol. 4, No. 1, 1988) devoted to their Black Hills land claim. 221. For the Cherokee accounts, see James Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee (New York: Dover Books, 1995 reprint of 1900 original) pp. 239–240. On Colville, see Clark, Indian Legends of the Pacific Northwest, p. 81. 222. Inexplicably, the Tohono O’odam (Papago) appear to still be in possession of an unfossilized dinosaur bone they say was removed from a dead Etoi by their ancestors; Deloria, Red Earth, White Lies, p. 241. The point here is not that the Indians have been around since ‘‘dinosaurs ruled the earth,’’ but that some variety of dinosaur might well have survived the late Jurassic extinctions and remained in existence until fairly recently. The plausibility of the idea is amply supported by the discovery of living specimens of numerous other species – the coelacanth ‘‘fossil fish’’ caught off Madagascar in 1938, for example, and Anne Warren’s 1978 finding of temnospondyl-class reptiles – which had long been declared by science to have become extinct during the same period; see generally, Gordon Rattray Taylor, The Great Evolution Mystery (New York: Harper & Row, 1983). 223. The Havasupai petroglyphs, which are very old and include dinosaur imagery as well as depictions of ibex, were discovered by Oakland Museum archaeologist Samuel Hubbard and Charles W. Gilmore, Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the National Museum, in 1924. They have never been satisfactorily explained; Deloria, Red Earth, White Lies, pp. 245–246; citing Samuel Hubbard, The Doheny Scientific Expedition to the Hava Supai Canyon, North Arizona (unpublished manuscript contained in the archive of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University). 224. For analysis, see Edward Said, ‘‘Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors,’’ Critical Inquiry, No. 15, 1989; Linda Alcoff, ‘‘The Problem of Speaking for Others,’’ Cultural Critique, Winter 1991; Asad Tala, ‘‘From the History of Colonial Anthropology to the Anthropology of Western Hegemony,’’ in George Stocking, ed., Colonial Situations: Essays on the Contextualization of Ethnographic Knowledge (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992) pp. 314–324.

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225. See Carnoy, Education as Cultural Imperialism. More specifically, see David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1924 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995); J.R. Miller, Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996). 226. Deloria, Red Earth, White Lies, p. 251. For Binford’s views, see, e.g., the introduction to his edited volume, For Theory Building in Archaeology (New York: Academic Press, 1977) pp. 1–13. Also see the concluding chapter in his Faunal Remains from Klasies River Mouth (New York: Academic Press, 1984). 227. ‘‘Scientians’’ are those who are guilty of scientism; that is, of extending an ‘‘exaggerated trust in the efficacy of the methods of natural science in all areas’’; Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, 1989) p. 1051. In other words, scientians are those whose proselytizing embrace of ‘‘science’’ exhibits a religiosity that nullifies skepticism and thus the utility of science itself. Although the line separating scientians and scientism from science and scientists is often rather nebulous, we should try to distinguish between the two pairs. 228. The proposition is not dissimilar to that popularly expressed by Ju¨rgen Habermas in his Legitimation Crisis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975). For a fuller and more technical explication, see Habermas’ Theory and Practice (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973). 229. Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1970). Much more comprehensively see the series of books authored by Paulo Freire, beginning with his Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970), and extending through Education for Critical Consciousness (New York: Continuum, 1973), Pedagogy in Process: The Letters to Guinea-Bissau (New York: Continuum, 1983) and A Pedagogy of Hope (New York: Continuum, 1994). Of obviously related interest is Freire’s, coauthored with Antonio Faundez, Learning to Question: A Pedagogy of Liberation (New York: Continuum, 1989). 230. Again, the idea is related to – but goes far beyond – the liberatory strategy articulated by Illich, Freire, and such educational theorists as Henry A. Giroux in his Ideology, Culture, and the Process of Schooling (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981). 231. For somewhat analogous formulations, see the essays assembled in Peter McLaren’s edited volume, Revolutionary Multiculturalism: Pedagogies of Dissent for the New Millennium (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997). 232. See notes 9, 10, 16–23 and accompanying text. 233. Generally speaking, this formulation is consistent with that advanced by Bernard McCrane in his Beyond Anthropology: Society and the Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). Also see Vine Deloria, Jr., ‘‘Indians, Archaeologists and the Future,’’ American Antiquity, Vol. 57, No. 4, 1992. 234. Robert Owen, lecture at the University of California/Riverside, March 1984 (notes on file). 235. Knecht, Pike-Tay and White, ‘‘Introduction,’’ Before Lascaux (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 1993) p. 1. 236. Goodman, American Genesis, p. 162. For a technical discussion of the great similarities between projectile points recovered from the Laurie-Haute Cave in France and a much old site discovered at the Sandia Cave in New Mexico, see Franc- ois Bordes, A Tale of Two Caves (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).

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237. A.P. Kreiger, ‘‘Early Man in the New World,’’ in J.D. Jennings and E. Norbeck, eds., Prehistoric Man in the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964) p. 47. 238. Jennings, Prehistory of North America, p. 57. 239. Lorenzo, ‘‘Early Man Research,’’ p. 6. It should be noted that corn does not exist in nature. Its very existence depends upon human intervention to effect a particular hybridization of wild grasses. 240. P. Manglesdorf, R. MacNeish and W.C. Galinant, ‘‘Domestication of Corn’’; W.C. Galinant, ‘‘The Evolution of Corn and Culture in North America’’; both in S. Streuver, ed., Prehistoric Agriculture (New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1972) pp. 474, 534. 241. Kreiger, ‘‘Early Man in the New World,’’ p. 33. 242. C. Reed, ‘‘Animal Domestication in the Prehistoric Mideast,’’ in Streuver, Prehistoric Agriculture (New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1972) p. 436. 243. Quoted in Thomas Canby, ‘‘The Search for the First Americans,’’ National Geographic, Sept. 1979, p. 348. 244. On relevant Andean finds, see Carter, ‘‘Uhle’s Mastodon,’’ p. 21. On Fukuki and Senfukuji, see Ikawa-Smith, ‘‘Early Prehistory.’’ (Los Altos, CA: Ballena Press, 1982). 245. Bryan, ‘‘Overview of Paleo-American Prehistory,’’ (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1994) pp. 309–310. 246. Janice Austin, ‘‘A Test of Birdsell’s Hypothesis on New World Migrations’’ (unpublished paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for California archaeology, 1976; abstract, pp. 3–5). 247. Goodman, American Genesis (New York: Summit, 1981) p. 179. 248. For discussion of this and related issues, see Bernard Wood, Lawrence Martin and Peter Andrews, eds., Major Topics in Primate and Human Evolution (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 249. See, e.g., F. Weindenreich, ‘‘The ‘Neanderthal Man’ and the Origins of Modern Humans,’’ American Anthropologist, No. 42, 1943. For rebuttal, see, e.g., F. Spencer, ‘‘The Neanderthals and Their Evolutionary Significance: A Brief Historical Survey,’’ in F.H. Smith and F. Spencer, eds., The Origins of Modern Humans: A World Survey of the Fossil Evidence (New York: Alan R. Liss, 1984); M.H. Wolproff, ‘‘The Place of the Neanderthals in Human Evolution,’’ in Trinkhaus, Emergence of Modern Humans, pp. 97–141. 250. Frederick C. Howell, ‘‘Preface,’’ in Smith and Spenser, Origins of Modern Humans, p. 13. 251. Sally McBreaty, ‘‘The Origin of Modern Humans,’’ Man, No. 25, 1990. 252. Goodman, American Genesis (New York: Summit Books, 1981) p. 128. 253. MacNeish, ‘‘1992 Excavations’’; Lewis R. Binford, Working at Archaeology (New York: Academic Press, 1983); Bruce MacFadden, ‘‘Chronology of Cenozoic primate localities in South America,’’ Journal of Human Evolution, No. 19, 1990; Eric Delson and A.L. Rosenberger, ‘‘Phyletic Perspectives on Platyrrhine Origins and Anthropoid Relationships,’’ in Russel L. Ciochon and A. Brunetto Chiarelli, eds., Evolutionary Biology of the New World Monkeys and Continental Drift (New York: Plenum Press, 1980); Nelson Eldredge and Ian Tattersal, The Myths of Human Evolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).

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254. MacFadden, ‘‘Chronology,’’ p. 7. 255. Hicks, ‘‘Rethinking Homo Sapiens,’’ p. 5. Also see Delson and Rosenberger, ‘‘Phyletic Perspectives’’; John G. Fleagle, Primate Adaptation and Evolution (London: Academic Press, 1988) pp. 316–317. 256. Hicks, ‘‘Rethinking Homo Sapiens,’’ (London: Academic Press, 1988) p. 6. 257. The term is used in the sense elaborated by Weindenreich in his ‘‘Origins of Modern Man’’ and Wolproff in ‘‘Human Evolution.’’ 258. See generally, Eldredge and Tattersal, Myths of Human Evolution. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). 259. Lewis R. Binford, Faunal Remains at the Klasies River Mouth (New York: Academic Press, 1984).

PART II: A CONTEMPORARY ARGUMENT ‘‘FOR SOCIAL THEORY’’

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FOR SOCIAL THEORY: ALVIN GOULDNER’S LAST PROJECT AND BEYOND Robert J. Antonio ABSTRACT Theorists often point to social theory’s normativity, but Gouldner’s later works provide the most explicit, comprehensive treatment of it as posttraditional normative discourse – a practice distinct from sociology and sociological theory, yet linked historically and analytically to them. His argument about the need for a discourse space to debate social science’s normative directions and to strengthen its connections to civil society is relevant today. Because Gouldner’s approach has gaps and is somewhat fragmented I will reconstruct his argument about social theory per se. Although I point to problems that derive from his incomplete pragmatic turn, his approach offers an excellent departure point for discussing the meaning of social theory.

What are y social theorists y really up to? (Gouldner [1971] 1973c, p. 70)1 Alan Sica (1999a, pp. 352) declared that Alvin Gouldner’s ‘‘oeuvre’’ was among the best of his highly talented generation of sociologists and that his later theoretical works, composed in the final decade of his life, constitute

Social Theory as Politics in Knowledge Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Volume 23, 71–129 Copyright r 2005 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0278-1204/doi:10.1016/S0278-1204(05)23002-5

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the ‘‘highest level,’’ critical analysis of the major wave of left-leaning social theory that spread through sociology and related disciplines, during the 1970s. Ron Eyerman (1987, p. 105) described this phase of Gouldner’s work as ‘‘one of the great achievements of American sociology in the last decades.’’ He rethought the relationship between ideology and theory, addressed critically sociology and Marxism, posed new theories of class and intellectuals, and offered his own versions of then emergent, major theoretical turns to culture, language, and civil society. Left incomplete, because of his sudden death, these works have received relatively little attention. I call them Gouldner’s ‘‘Last Project.’’2 At the start of the Last Project, Gouldner declared, ‘‘y Academic Sociology is a science of repeatedly new beginnings; which is to say, it has a strange tendency towards amnesia’’ (1970, p. 159). Penning these words at the height of his prominence and stressing his discipline’s receptivity to new ideas as well as its forgetfulness, he was not likely intending to presage his own fate. However, Gouldner is seldom read today. His Last Project and other theoretical works are usually not even discussed in theory textbooks, or they are mentioned only in passing.3 Other major sociologists of his time share a similar fate. After all, ‘‘who now reads Parsons?’’4 My aim, however, is not to compare Gouldner to Parsons or to analyze why once-important theories disappear from sociology. Rather I will address an enduring theme of Gouldner’s Last Project, or its historically based inquiry about ‘‘social theory’’ and its relation to sociology. In the late 1950s and 1960s, the viability of broad, classical-type theorizing was debated by sociologists, usually as part of wider critical exchanges over the emphatic scientific turn in post-World War II American sociology.5 During the 1980s and 1990s, this debate grew more intense in the wake of the accelerated, interdisciplinary spread of broad theorizing and of the rancourous battles over postmodernism.6 In the late twentieth century, sharp, multisided divisions persisted over classical-type theory and its relevance for sociology. Critics as well as advocates of broad theorizing held that it has a stronger normative component than empirical work and ‘‘middle range’’ theory. However, their main emphasis usually has been on classical-type theory’s greater breadth and less direct connection to empirical research. Sometimes they employ the term ‘‘social theory’’ to distinguish this practice from more narrowly drawn, empirically oriented ‘‘sociological theory.’’ However, the two terms are seldom deployed consistently and precisely and often are used interchangeably. This is not surprising because the borders between the two theoretical practices tend to be blurred and fluid. Moreover, the new versions of classical-type approaches vary in scope, method of

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argument, and the balance between their normative and empirical–historical content. The inconsistent usage and lack of consensus over the meaning of social theory is readily apparent in recent sociological discourse over the topic.7 Social theory has always had multiple, contradictory meanings, and it remains a contested terrain. This essay cannot resolve this long debate. However, it will provide an explicit vision of social theory per se that could sharpen the focus of the debate. The expressed intent and primary concern of Gouldner’s Last Project was exploration of the historical roots and nature of social theory as post-traditional normative discourse. The Last Project is the most comprehensive inquiry by a sociologist with this explicit concern. Yet this core theme was hardly noticed and little discussed. Gouldner agreed with Weber that social science’s foci are ultimately value-driven – ‘‘worth being known’’ – and that the consequent normative question – ‘‘which of the warring gods shall we serve?’’ – is beyond science’s scope and usually is left tacit (Weber [1918] 1958, pp. 143, 153). He also shared Weber’s view that traditional normative discourse, religious, and philosophic,8 does not provide an adequate language to address the value splits over science and their connection to public spheres. Although advocating that normative differences should be studied sociologically and negotiated politically, Weber had a fateful attitude about fundamental value conflicts and grave doubts about achievement of consensus. Thus, he did not entertain an alternative normative language to address them. By contrast, Gouldner argued that social theory provides post-traditional cultural means to identify, promote reasoned debate over, and mediate social science’s value directions and link them to civil society’s plural, secular, and socio-political circles. Stressing a single, albeit important, thread of theory, Gouldner understood that existent ‘‘social theory’’, only approximated his vision of post-traditional normative discourse. His theory of social theory is itself, in part, normative; he considered social theory as a worthwhile project inhering in modern democratic culture and social thought, but requiring agency to bring it fully into being. Thus, he advocated ‘‘for social theory’’ as well as analyzed it in the Last Project. This essay will address social theory as a post-traditional normative practice that is distinct from sociology and sociological theory, yet is linked historically and analytically to them. Gouldner acknowledged basic differences and tensions between the practices, but he believed that recognition and cultivation of their interdependent features would enhance each of them and strengthen their connection to civil society. Gouldner developed his theory of social theory by engaging leading substantive theories of his day

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and, especially, by addressing the unresolved problems and unfulfilled possibilities that he saw in Marxist Theory. Although declaring the main aim was to analyze social theory per se, Gouldner also attempted to frame a basis for Post-Marxist Critical Theory. A contradiction between his conception of social theory per se and Critical Theory will be explored to address a problem in his thought – overestimation of the powers of theory and theorists – that has relevance for today’s wider theoretical practices. I suggest that this problem can be overcome and a better departure point for continued dialogue about social theory could be achieved by carrying out further Gouldner’s incomplete pragmatic turn. Because the Last Project was left unfinished, I extrapolate at certain junctures to fill gaps in Gouldner’s approach and tease out certain facets from his critiques of Marxist Theory and other substantive theories. I reconstruct his somewhat fragmented ideas about social theory with the aim of stimulating fresh dialogue about theory and about sociology’s normative foundations.

NORMATIVE REFLEXIVITY AND SOCIAL RUPTURE: SOCIAL THEORY CONTRA TECHNOCRACY The present study is part of a larger work plan y whose objective is to contribute to an historically informed sociology of social theory. The plan envisages a series of studies called ‘‘The Social Origins of Western Social Theory.’’ (Gouldner, 1970, p. vii)

Announcing the start of the Last Project, the passage above appeared in the preface to Gouldner’s The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. There he declared that ‘‘we theorize today within the sound of guns,’’ or in a ‘‘crumbling social matrix’’ (1970, p. vii). Although Gouldner thought that the normative directions of science and society should be made problematic even in the best of times, he argued that such questions, which are often ignored or suppressed under normal conditions, can hardly be avoided during periods of major change, conflict, and crisis.9 He framed the problem of social theory per se in light of the multiple ruptures of the late 1960s and early 1970s (e.g., the Vietnam war, racial conflicts, urban riots, student protests, Watergate, and recession) and emergent claims that recently dominant, normatively oriented modernization theories of the right and the left, were in shambles. From this vantage point, the renaissance of alternative theories, which had started to sweep through sociology and related disciplines, arose in response to a shift from the post-World War II era politicaleconomic, geopolitical, and socio-cultural systems to a new, more global

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system of institutional and cultural regulation. Consequent dislocations called for rethinking of the whole orbit. In this sense, we still live in the tracks of the Last Project. Gouldner held, however, that the cultural means for addressing such fundamental change and consequent matters of normative foundations were poorly understood, conflated with science, and obscured by technocracy. He aimed to enhance reflexivity about these matters. Following C. Wright Mills, Gouldner had already rejected, long before the Last Project, the ascendent view of theory in post-World War II American sociology – that empirically based ‘‘sociological theory’’ makes obsolete and supplants the classics’ highly speculative, overly political, and excessively sweeping, ‘‘armchair theorizing’’ and that this shift warrants sociology’s status as a science. Leading postwar sociologists argued that classical theory is a rich heritage of great intellects (especially Durkheim and Weber) that should be plumbed for concepts, problems, and hypotheses, but that new theoretical work in the classical style (i.e., ‘‘social theory’’) retards scientific sociology’s progress.10 By contrast, Gouldner held that American sociology lacked a distinct language to debate its normative directions and that this absence capitulated to postwar technocracy. He dismissed the idea that modernized, ‘‘postindustrial’’ regimes had overcome capitalism’s contradictions and that their consequent substantive legitimacy precluded the need for normative debate.11 Gouldner saw the claims about the end of social theory to be premature and to be entwined with modernization theorists’ ‘‘end of ideology’’ discourse, which, in his view, manifested postwar culture’s constricted public sphere, rather than normative consensus. Aiming to preserve and extend classical-type, theoretical practices as a living tradition, Gouldner argued that ‘‘social theory’’ diagnoses social ‘‘ills,’’ suggests ‘‘therapy,’’ and frames images of possible worlds free of said ills. He declared that to: ‘‘be a social theorist is not simply to describe or analyze the world y it is also to pronounce judgement on it, even if it is done in a ventriloquist’s voice’’ (1965, pp. 171, 197). He rejected the tendencies to treat social theory as a scientific practice (i.e., as a broad type of empirical–historical theory), or to dismiss it as flawed science (i.e., as too broad and speculative). Gouldner thought that such views deny social theory’s distinctiveness and its relationship to sociological theory and sociology. Conflation of social theory with science, he thought, mutes the normativity of both practices, but does not eliminate normative steerage – it merely conceals directive values and stifles discourse about them. By contrast, he argued that self-conscious social theorizing brings tacit values to the foreground and generates debates about their worth. Gouldner did not

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suggest that social theory should replace empirical work, as his critics sometimes suggested. Rather he held that clarifying social theory’s normative thrust and creating a distinct discourse space to employ it would favor critical discourse about the value of sociological knowledge and its connections to the public sphere. Gouldner also held that social theorists should employ sociological knowledge in their theories. He saw this sociological moment to be a definitive, albeit subordinate, feature of social theory’s posttraditional normative argumentation and essential to its historicist break with absolutism.12

BETWEEN SCIENCE AND POLITICS: SOCIAL THEORY AS REFUGE AND MEDIATOR It is not possible to write a viable history of social theory today without creating a new intellectual genre – a genre which will be one part history, one part sociology, one part criticism, the whole encompassed in a membranous boundary permitting mutual access of facts to values and of technical analysis to cultural interests. (Gouldner, 1965, p. 168)

In The Coming Crisis, Gouldner argued relentlessly that Parsonsian functionalism legitimated the status quo (i.e., postwar United States ‘‘welfare and warfare’’ policies and liberal modernization ideology) and was the prime root of American sociology’s major blindspots and errors.13 His ideas converged with C. Wright Mills’ earlier critique of Cold-War era sociology.14 The Coming Crisis appeared in the wake of late 1960s anti-war protests and counterculture, when distrust of the state and big business had risen sharply. Gouldner was then a major figure in the ‘‘new sociology’’ or ‘‘critical sociology,’’ which claimed to revive Mills’ spirit.15 He already had produced a major corpus of more conventional organizational sociology and sociological theory, and he had been chair and builder of Washington University’s then, highly regarded sociology department. Thus, The Coming Crisis drew attention from the sociological mainstream as well as from the left. Although highly publicized, the work generally was not well received. Sica refers to it aptly as Gouldner’s ‘‘best-known, though not necessarily most respected book’’(Sica, 1999a, p. 351). Sociologists berated his thesis that Parsonsian ideas suffused ‘‘Academic Sociology’’ and reduced it to a ‘‘market researcher for the Welfare State’’(1970, pp. 438–439). Gouldner hit a nerve in many sociologists, who felt that they were caught in a pincers movement between New-Left rhetoric and a nascent neoconservative reaction that blamed them for encouraging cultural and political radicalism,

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raising too quickly minority expectations for social reform, and spearheading costly, failed social experiments and bloated state bureaucracy.16 Dismissive critics saw The Coming Crisis to be an excrescence of Gouldner’s notoriously cranky personality and hyperpolitical moments.17 Yet they exaggerated his critique of sociology. Gouldner (1970, p. 442) praised the discipline’s ‘‘viable elements and liberative potentialities.’’ He argued that a strong sociology is needed to frame adequate social theory and an intelligent plan of progressive social change. However, such points did not dispel his sociological critics’ doubts. Also, New-Left opponents charged that he abandoned social criticism for the ‘‘navel-gazing’’ practices of sociology and social theory. He countered that the New Left’s disregard for ‘‘self-conscious theory’’ mirrored its ‘‘small-town Babbitt-like, anti-intellectualism and know-nothingism,’’ which derailed its aspirations for radical change (1970, pp. 4–5; [1972] 1973d, e; see Chriss, 1999,123–129). His self-image as a rebellious ‘‘ridge-rider’’ or ‘‘outlaw’’ rings true ([1976] 1982a, p. xiv). However, just before the publication of The Coming Crisis, Gouldner chose the title ‘‘Max Weber Research Professor of Social Theory’’ for his new chair.18 This move was more telling than his radical rhetoric. He was ambivalent about politics. Gouldner’s ([1961] 1973a) famous ‘‘Anti-Minotaur’’ essay on Weber and the ‘‘myth of value-free sociology’’ foreshadowed his late 1960s and early 1970s critiques of technocracy, and was cited often in the ‘‘new sociology’’ debates.19 He held rightly that Weber’s concept of value freedom calls for distinguishing statements of value from statements of fact, rather than, as it has often been interpreted, to be advocating ‘‘moral indifference.’’20 Gouldner contended that many sociologists, claiming to share Weber’s view, misunderstood his argument or had not even read it. Gouldner charged that they made the concept into a ‘‘hollow catechism’’ presuming the neutrality of technical procedure and an impossible valueless stance.21 He maintained that this flawed version of value freedom blinds social analysts to conventional values embedded in their practices and favors kneejerk dismissal of critical perspectives as ‘‘biased’’ or ‘‘political.’’ Gouldner’s essay was primarily a plea for sociologists to reflect on the role of values in their work and to exercise ethical responsibility about the interests that it serves. He advocated ethically engaged sociology, rather than partisanship (1973a, pp. 6–7, 13–14, 25). During the late-1960s height of student radicalism, he warned that ‘‘glib acceptance’’ of the distorted version of value freedom was being replaced by a ‘‘no less glib rejection’’ of the overall ideal. He criticized Howard Becker’s call for sociologists to identify with ‘‘underdogs’’ and champion their causes.22 Like Weber, Gouldner eschewed

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overly politicized sociology, upheld a qualified ideal of objectivity, and stressed a commitment to ‘‘values’’ rather than to ‘‘factions’’ (Gouldner [1968] 1973b, p. 68). My point is not to paint Gouldner as a Weberian, but it is to stress that he shared Weber’s view that sociologists should avert partisanship, try to clarify and take responsibility for the normative direction of their work, and think critically about its relations to the broader culture. Gouldner said that he began to formulate his Last Project in Enter Plato (1965), where he analyzed Platonic philosophy’s ties to Hellenic culture and society. There he argued that social theory is not exclusively a product of cognition and intellectual debate, but that it is shaped historically by events and conditions in a theorist’s personal life and by his or her experience of the social conflicts and problems of his/her wider social world. Gouldner held that Plato’s disillusionment with political factions led him to search for a ‘‘rational substitute’’ for politics and, thus, to become the ‘‘first great social theorist in the Western Tradition’’ (1965, p. 172).23 The portrayal of Plato’s flight from politics to theory parallels Gouldner’s own path away from his youthful communism.24 Gouldner saw social theory as ‘‘an alternative to politics’’ that transcends narrowly partisan thought in historical purview, analytical rigor, and moral worth. He considered social theory to be a mediator between science and politics.

FROM PHILOSOPHY TO SOCIAL THEORY: GOULDNER’S RETURN TO CRITICAL THEORY Marxism constitutes itself by developing a critique of ‘ideologies’ (Gouldner [1976] 1982a, p. 5)

The Last Project addressed diverse theories, but it engaged centrally and critically the Critical Theory tradition originating from Marx. Gouldner described himself as ‘‘half sociologist and half Marxist,’’ and he employed some Marxist ideas. From the start, however, he declared himself to be an ‘‘outlaw’’ to Marxism, stressing its ‘‘dark side,’’ ‘‘mystification,’’ and ‘‘grotesque political monstrosities’’ (1982a, pp. xi–xvi). He portrayed Marx in a very one-sided way as a doctrinaire, authoritarian, and male-chauvinist who sublimated his personal thirst for power into a duplicitous theory of proletarian revolution designed to favor the Marxist intelligentsia’s desire to seize total power.25 Still Gouldner saw himself to be Marx’s fellow traveler in, at least, one important respect – Marx too, he claimed, fled to social theory as ‘‘a refuge from politics and political failure’’ (1985, p. 140).

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However, he saw Marx to personify Critical Theorists’ tendency to be too easily tempted by political power and to fail to complete the flight from politics. Gouldner tried to frame a Post-Marxist Critical Theory that would be immune to this temptation, but he also feared that this flaw may inhere in social theory per se. Gouldner said that he wanted to ‘‘rescue’’ Marxism’s ‘‘productive and rational side’’ from its ‘‘flawed, erroneous, and irrational parts’’ ([1980] 1982c, p. 9). In his view, however, almost all the tradition’s worthy features derive from it’s Left-Hegelian roots. In the spirit of Enlightenment secularization, he explained, Hegel shifted from transcendental to ‘‘immanent’’ or ‘‘historicist’’ normative justification, attempting to derive ‘‘what should be’’ from ‘‘what is’’ or from ‘‘what is coming to be.’’ Gouldner held that Marx aimed to advance this historicist move by dumping Hegel’s abstract emphasis on ‘‘spirit’’ or ‘‘consciousness’’ for an historically specific materialist method and ideology critique that roots normative critique in the contradictory relations between bourgeois society’s class-based social structure, ideological claims about freedom, equality, and plenty, and nascent social movements that seek to realize these ideals.26 Thus, Gouldner implied that Marx shifted to a more sociologically based normative argument, or ‘‘social theory.’’ However, Gouldner aimed to radicalize this move by strengthening its sociological moment, eliminating its transcendental taints (i.e., warranties about inevitable proletarian revolution or certain proletarian emancipation), differentiating social theory from ideology and social science, and explaining the determinate historical roots and interdependence of all three practices. Gouldner does not credit Marx sufficiently for his contribution to the rise of social theory. However, Marx’s claim that he was only doing ‘‘Science’’ obscured the normative thrust of his work and the fact that it was indeed social theory. Thus, Gouldner pointed rightly to unresolved tensions between the normative and scientific aspects of Marx’s work. He aimed to recover Marx’s Left-Hegelian roots by turning them against what he saw to be his fatal dogmatic flaws. This watershed move distanced Gouldner from Weber as well from Marx. A harsh critic of Hegelianism, Weber held that efforts to develop Critical Theory from the so-called tracks of history cloak politics with pseudoscience.27 In the Last Project, Gouldner steered a course between Marx and Weber as well as between politics and science.28 Gouldner stated: ‘‘My relation to the first generation of the Frankfurt School, for and with whom I worked while they were in exile in the United States has been a lasting, if hybridized influence’’ ([1976] 1982a, p. 22).29 The Frankfurt School employed Left-Hegelian methods to criticize and offer

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alternatives to doctrinaire forms of Marxism. Their historicist move stressed constant reevaluation of normative claims and related political ends in light of socio-cultural change. During wartime American exile, however, leading Frankfurt School theorists broke with Marxism. Holding that it could not take stock of Stalinism, Fascism, the Holocaust, or the American ‘‘culture industry,’’ they shifted to a cultural critique borrowing heavily from Nietzsche, Weber, and Freud and criticizing Enlightenment rationality and its roots in early western culture.30 They gave up on the revolutionary working class, arguing that its will to resist domination was obliterated by the total state’s propaganda machine, orchestrated spectacles, and official enemies and by capitalism’s cheap entertainment, material consumption, and irrationalism (e.g., anti-Semitism). This pessimistic branch of the Frankfurt School held that the lack of animate critical norms and receptive publics dissolved Left-Hegelianism’s cultural bases. In their view, the total state and mass culture blurred the line between the ideal and real, obscured contradictions between ideology and social reality, and, thus, neutralized ideology critique. When Gouldner was a Columbia University graduate student, in the mid1940s, his mentor Robert K. Merton and Paul Lazarsfeld advised Max Horkheimer and other Frankfurt School scholars in exile, who were working on research there. On Merton’s recommendation, Gouldner was hired to assist Nathan Ackerman and Marie Jahoda on their anti-Semitism study (Merton, 1982, p. 918; Wiggershaus, 1994, pp. 427–428). Gouldner was then a communist who could not have shared Frankfurt School views about Marxism’s exhaustion. In his first academic job, however, he engaged their ideas seriously. Doing much critical reading and soul searching, Gouldner broke with communism, withdrew from left politics, and either abandoned Marxism or suppressed its visibility in his work. He also formulated seeds of his Last Project. As editor of Studies in Leadership, he included essays by Frankfurt theorists Theodore W. Adorno and Leo Lowenthal and by Norbert Guterman. Gouldner seldom mentioned Marx in his sections, but referred often to Weber.31 He charged that Marxism had become a tool of ‘‘political pundits who used it more to legitimate than guide policies y’’ and that ‘‘Marxist theory’’ could not address its problems and grow. He also held that Marxism lacked the rigorous social science needed to elaborate a sound basis for socialism or provide even sharp criticism of fascism and capitalism (1950b, pp. 8–9).32 By 1950, Gouldner’s position seemed to be closer to Weber than to Critical Theory. He did not admit any Frankfurt School influences until his Last Project. Then he held that Left-Hegelianism inspired even his early organizational studies and functionalist essays.33 In

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the Last Project, he broke with Marxist Critical Theory, but he still followed in the Frankfurt School’s hybrid, and antidogmatic, tracks.34 Gouldner embraced avidly their view that theory must be continually criticized and adjusted in accord with historical tendencies and possibilities. Gouldner’s renewed identification with Left-Hegelianism and the Frankfurt School was spurred, in part, by a late 1960s and early1970s revival of Critical Theory offering cultural alternatives to Marxist materialism, workerism, and structuralism and critical rational alternatives to anti-intellectual, eschatological, and irrational types of New Left positions.35 The NorthAmerican journal Telos played a major role in this revival, translating, and reprinting classic and fresh Left-Hegelian work, publishing and reviewing new work by Habermas and other second-generation Critical Theorists and their students, and providing related substantive analyses of European and global politics and culture. Founder and editor, Paul Piccone brought Telos to Washington University’s Sociology Department in the early 1970s. It remained in Saint Louis while Gouldner worked on his Last Project. Except when he was on leave at Amsterdam University, the journal’s location facilitated interchanges with Piccone and the Telos Circle. On many issues, Gouldner’s views paralleled those of Telos – e.g., the break with Marxism, shift from economics to culture, impassioned anti-Stalinism and anti-communism, opposition to the Old Left and the New Left, and criticism of welfare-state reformism and bureaucracy. Gouldner and Piccone shared the view that postwar liberalism and radicalism were bankrupt and that the New Social Movements did not pose an alternative to welfare-state capitalism or reconstitute the Left.36 It is unclear how much Piccone’s ideas influenced Gouldner, or the converse, but both theorists aimed to rethink Critical Theory and put it on post-Marxist, Left-Hegelian grounds.37 However, Piccone and his closest associates revived the wartime and early postwar-era, Frankfurt-School argument about ‘‘one-dimensional’’ culture undermining ideology critique. They deployed it against the more rationalist, reformist Habermas and his supporters in the Telos Circle. Piccone and friends reconstructed the older Frankfurt School position into exceptionally pessimistic ‘‘totally administered society’’ and ‘‘artificial negativity’’ theses. They not only held that cultural homogenization and social regimentation neutralized the historical or socio-cultural bases of ideology critique, but they alleged that ‘‘pseudo-left’’ reforms (e.g., affirmative action) simulate progressive change, conceal the welfare state’s repressive nature, and shut down critical thought about alternatives. They portrayed New Social Movement activists and other reformist successors to the New Left as servants of welfare-state bureaucracy (Piccone, 1977, 1978; Luke, 1978). Telos

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flirted with the emergent neoconservative view that progressive-liberal and left professionals, operating in academe, foundations and think tanks, federal and state agencies, and movement organizations constitute a ‘‘New Class’’ who use secure, well-paid bureaucratic roles to exert hegemonic cultural power and reap personal benefit (see Steinfels, 1979, pp. 272–294). Although Gouldner was critical of the New Left and the welfare state and said little about the New Social Movements, he did not share Piccone’s scathing views of them. The Last Project dropped polemics against the New Left and made a few brief yet friendly gestures to feminism and environmentalism. Also, as will be explained below, Gouldner’s parallel concept of New Class treated this stratum in a much more ambivalent and hopeful way. He also disagreed totally with Piccone’s dismissal of sociology as an irredeemably corrupt servant of the welfare state. Gouldner’s view that sociology was vital to Critical Theory and social theory per se was anchored in his self-identified ‘‘ideological vision’’ and its critical, but affirmative approach to modern culture, rationality, and science.38 In his view, ideology was not a simple distortion of reality. Stressing its historically based vision of ‘‘what society should be,’’ he considered it to be a vital normative resource for secular-democratic societies, operating in Enlightenment tracks. He criticized scientism and technocracy, but he embraced a critical, universalist rationalism that Piccone rejected vehemently as homogenizing liberalism. Gouldner feared that antirationalism opened the way for a dangerous antimodern, aestheticization of culture, and proto-fascist politics (1982a, p. 249). The Last Project was posed against ‘‘tragic’’ sensibilities, which he believed are the breeding ground for such reactionary tendencies and which were already visible in certain facets of the postmodernist tendencies emergent from the ruins of modernization theory.

AN END TO IDEOLOGY?: ELECTRONIC MEDIA AND ONE-DIMENSIONAL CULTURE There is now a growing mass of the populace in advanced industrial countries who are incapable of being reached by ideological appeals and who are insulated from ideological discourse of any political persuasion. (Gouldner, 1982a, p. 176)

Following an historicist agenda, Gouldner rooted his ideas of social theory per se and Critical Theory in the early modern emergence of ideological discourse (which he saw as a key facet of the transition from feudalism to capitalism and rise of the bourgeois public sphere). He held that, in towns,

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increasingly diverse groups, released from feudal status orders, associated more freely, contested existent norms, framed new ones, and brokered agreements about them.39 In his view, ideologies arose when these groups, seeking allies, translated local views into more context-free, universalistic positions (1982a, pp. 219–224).40 He argued that ideological discourse clarifies, systematizes, and extends socio-political perspectives, offering nascent publics cultural means to identify themselves and forge solidarities. Acknowledging, however, that participation in bourgeois civil society was constricted by social inequalities, especially class hierarchy and patriarchy, he held that ideology secured the loyalty of the male-dominated, middle classes to the emergent, dominant capitalist class. He saw the new form of ideological hegemony to fit a new class system in which capitalists, occupied with the day-to-day affairs of finance and production, had to negotiate their rule with and depend upon other relatively autonomous military, political, and intellectual elites. Early modern ideologies, he held, were products of intelligentsia, who used their refined symbolic skills to bind intermediate classes to bourgeois interests (lower classes and other marginalized strata were controlled largely coercively) (1982a, pp. 125–137). However, Gouldner still maintained that the ideology-producing intelligentsia facilitated democratization. In ideological discourse, he contended, participants ‘‘take the role of the other’’ (emphasis in the original) with more diverse, impersonal, geographically distant people, expanding their communicative capacities and instituting a new cultural politics based on wider, discursively mediated identities, solidarities, and movements (1982a, p. 205). Overall, he saw ideological discourse to be the keystone in the fundamental shift from the ‘‘Traditional Culture of Discourse’’ – normative justification based on authority per se and social position – to the ‘‘Culture of Critical Discourse’’ (CCD) – normative justification based on increasingly open, reflexive discussion (1982a, pp. 17, 24, 58–63). He argued that the nascent CCD cultivated ‘‘critical rationality,’’ which stressed the plural, discursive facets of socio-cultural life and temporal, contingent forms of inquiry into it. He held that this cultural resource of ideological society helped gave rise to civil society, discursive mediation of conflicts, democratized culture (e.g., print media, news, public debates, and openness), and, in the long-term, more inclusive, robust political democracy (1982a, pp. 50–52, 91–117). Thus, Gouldner feared that, if ideology really came to an end, the prospects for democracy would be undermined. While Gouldner was writing the Last Project, diverse theorists, beyond the Telos Circle, moved in the direction of the revived ‘‘one-dimensionality’’ thesis, which implied that a quietist, minimally just version of liberal

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democracy rules so firmly that its legitimacy is tacit in the system’s normal operation and it no longer needs ideological justification. For example, this view was already visible in Jean Baudrillard’s emergent work, which culminated in the argument that ‘‘simulation’’ eradicated the reality principle, demolished the cultural basis for immanent critique, and ended history, politics, and the social (Telos Press published translations of Baudrillard’s work; 1975, 1981). But even the supposedly ‘‘optimistic’’ Habermas ([1976] 1979, p. 97) turned to a nonhistorical, quasi-transcendental critique declaring that ‘‘bourgeois ideals have gone into retirement’’ and ‘‘there are no norms and values to which an immanent critique might appeal y’’ Daniel Bell ([1978] 1996, p. xxix) portrayed eloquently the somber mood: ‘‘We stand, I believe, with a clearing ahead of us. The exhaustion of Modernism, the aridity of Communist life, the tedium of the unrestrained self, and the meaninglessness of the monolithic political chants, all indicate a long period is coming to a slow close.’’ Gouldner opposed renewed end of ideology arguments, which implied that efforts to rethink democracy and capitalism or to institute basic changes are futile. Also, he feared that this pessimism opens the way for tragic sensibilities and even aestheticized, far-right politics. By contrast to Habermas, moreover, he contended that a quasi-transcendental defense of critical rationality has no effect on public life. Gouldner held that the claim that ideology was attenuated must be engaged seriously on historical grounds. He said that a ‘‘radically new communications era’’ had dawned, accelerating greatly a longer-term shift ‘‘from conceptual to iconic symbolism’’ (begun by cinema, radio, and TV) and revolutionizing politics and culture. Gouldner argued that cable-TV, new generation computers, and other emergent communication technologies were proliferating low-cost electronic messages much more widely, in much greater diversity, and faster than ever before. In his view, the consequent cacophony and phantasmagoria drown out ideology and social theory; audiences lacking ‘‘critical distance’’ from the immediacy of fragmented images and sounds cannot take stock of them rationally and evaluate them critically. Gouldner’s account of ideology’s depleted state implied that civil society’s democratic public culture, anchored in the print media and voluntary associations, was giving way to the bewilderment of ‘‘consumerism’s’’ polymorphous commercialism, fascination, and privatized home entertainment (1982a, pp. 168–176, 187–189, 262). Still Gouldner rejected views that Lefthistoricism and its search for ‘‘totality’’ (i.e., wider, more just democracy) were exhausted. Disputing claims that ideology has ended, he held that intellectuals still produce and debate it even though their ideas fail to

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capture average citizens’ attention. He argued that ideological discourse would heat up and attract much wider public attention when consumption and life-style are interrupted again by a major economic crisis or war.41 However, Gouldner also called for a new cultural politics to invigorate ideology, suggesting that if social critics targeted the media, they might develop fresh cultural means to reach citizens (1982a, pp.176–178, 229–249). Revived Critical Theory and social theory per se, he implied, could help achieve this aim.

THE CARRIER OF CRITICAL RATIONALITY?: THE ‘‘NEW CLASS’’ AND ‘‘CULTURE OF CRITICAL DISCOURSE’’ East and West, the class in power faces a common challenger. (Gouldner [1979] 1982b, p. 91)

Intending to avert Parsonsian idealism and Habermasian quasi-transcendentalism, Gouldner followed Weber’s and Mannheim’s view that ideas must have social carriers if they are to be effective historical forces.42 Recall the Telos Circle’s portrayal of the New Class as the architect of ‘‘artificial negativity’’ and manager of the ‘‘totally administered society.’’ Daniel Bell argued even earlier that a key fragment of this class orchestrated the postmodern media and consumption, which undercut ideological discourse and critical thought (Bell [1978] 1996, pp. 22, 81, 108). Although influenced by Piccone and Bell, Gouldner theorized the New Class in a much more optimistic fashion. In his view, it is the carrier stratum of critical rationality as well as of one-dimensionality. He took Marx to task for failing to address the intelligentsia in his class theory. Gouldner argued that Marx and his fellow Marxist theorists were forerunners of today’s New Class, but that their aspirations for political hegemony overruled their critical sensibilities. Gouldner also held that the New Class, rather than workers or capitalists, are today’s ascendent class. Thus, Gouldner’s ideas about the New Class and the potentialities that inhere in its critical rationality are bound up with his radical break with Marx’s theory of class and politics. Gouldner contended that advanced industrial society’s highly educated and much more numerous and differentiated New-Class intelligentsia create and apply the technical knowledge essential for information-based, consumer capitalism as well as for modernized state-socialism. They direct the production and delivery of goods and services and coordinate socio–cultural

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reproduction.43 He argued, the old ruling classes were illegitimate and vestigial and the New Classes were poised to take power when current system of rule goes into crisis.44 However, he said that the old-capitalist and oldbureaucratic classes still hold ultimate power, set direction of overall policy, and stifle New-Class creativity and autonomy. He held that ‘‘cultural capital’’ is the key to New Class’ power and legitimacy; they share a highly advanced version of the Culture of Critical Discourse’’ (CCD).45 Gouldner claimed that their CCD’s ‘‘context-free’’ speech – the ‘‘latent but mobilizable infrastructure of modern ‘technical’ languages’’ – democratizes truth by separating knowledge claims more sharply than ever before from a speaker’s status, wealth, and power (1982b, pp. 3–4, 28–29, 59).46 Paralleling Habermas’ linguistic turn, Gouldner held that the CCD negates blind obedience to traditional authority and enhances critical reflection about political and economic interest. He argued that its ‘‘essence y is in its insistence on reflexivity,’’ calling on speakers to perform ‘‘auto-critiques’’ and correct deviations from its codes (1982b, pp. 59–60). Like Habermas, he implied that the CCD is an evolutionary capacity that resists the destruction or total colonization by one-dimensional culture. By contrast to Habermas, however, Gouldner held that the critical linguistic capacities are most highly developed and more likely activated by specific carriers – the New Class’ ideological and theoretical substrata.47 Also, recall that Gouldner links his claims about the current advances in the CCD to long-term historical development, rooted in the rise of ideology and civil society. Gouldner also suggested a more contingent, contradictory view of critical rationality than Habermas’ account.48 He contended that New Class knowledge production is enmeshed with the search for power, status, and money and that they often use their CCD as a badge of authority. Gouldner argued that the New Class seeks a monopoly over truth and ‘‘to control everything’’ – employing their credentials, technical jargon, and offices to manipulate, befuddle, or intimidate and to justify exclusion, domination, and brutality (1982b, pp. 3–4, 28–29, 59–60, 83–85). However, he still argued that the New Class is still the seed of a genuinely ‘‘universal class.’’49 In his view, the most reflexive New Class substratum of scientifically oriented technical and humanistic intellectuals share roles that are justified by much more highly developed norms of critical rationality and critical inquiry, which enhance their CCD’s critical side. Gouldner held that their normative views conflict with the bottom-line power and economic interests of the technicians, advertisers, and other experts who create or deliver popular culture and manage bureaucracy.50 Gouldner did not specify whether the

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abusive usages inhere in the CCD, or if they derive entirely from the New Class’ contradictory locations and attributes. However, he believed that the decoupling of their CCD’s potential for critical rationality from the pursuit of power was a primary radical democratic task.51 He wanted Critical Theorists to take the lead in this task, but, ultimately, his hopes about his matter were manifested best in his vision of social theory per se.

AFTER ABSOLUTISM: IDEOLOGY AS PROTO-SOCIAL THEORY Ideologies are reports about the world, or social theories, that are both rationally and empirically supported. Almost all the major ‘‘scientific’’ theories of society had the plainest ideological linkages. (Gouldner [1976] 1982a, pp. 31–32)

Gouldner contended that social theory arises in response to tensions between ideological ideals and actual social conditions, a move which bears the imprint of his critical engagement with Left-Hegelianism and Critical Theory. He held that a ‘‘post-traditional symbolic complex’’ – ideology, social theory, and social science – emerged with capitalism and civil society (1982a, pp. 1–5, 16–19). He said that ideology nurtures a ‘‘critical rationality’’ that subjects norms to public debate, provides historical means to rank them, and creates the cultural basis for development of social theory and social science. By contrast to ‘‘tragic vision’s’’ belief in ‘‘unchangeable fate,’’ he contended, ‘‘ideological vision’’ nurtures the belief that historically informed and theoretically guided collective actions can solve social problems and spur social progress (1982a, pp. 74–76). In the long run, he argued that ideology generates a CCD that comes to terms with the uncertainty of normative judgments and politics. Gouldner held that traditional legitimation, based on religion and metaphysics, demands belief in the certainty of a value’s rightness and limits sharply contestation of it. Conversely, he argued (1982a, pp. 34, 87, 90), ‘‘ideology always secularizes transcendence,’’ requiring a defense of ‘‘what should be’’ on the basis of ‘‘what is’’or ‘‘what can be done.’’ His view of ideology as a ‘‘report about the world’’ implied that its validity depends on sociological claims as well as normative principles; a value’s rightness must be supported by empirical–historical argument about its social consequences. Transhistorical presuppositions may linger, but they no longer suffice to justify values. Absolutist claims are entwined with and conceal thinly

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normative justification based on a speaker’s social status and authority per se, which is also insufficient under modern conditions. Gouldner saw ideologies to be proto-social theories, which articulate the existent, emergent, and possible social conditions that favor cultural reproduction of desired values and which call for practical actions to secure them. Ideological discourse, which treats values as empirically contingent and dependent on specific historical contexts is, at least, in principle, open to challenge and falsification, and, thus, cultivates ‘‘epistemological anxiety’’ ‘‘reflexivity,’’ and, ultimately, a ‘‘culture of critical speech.’’52 Gouldner held that these conditions are the cultural seed-bed of social theory and social science (1982a, pp. 16–18, 30–35, 56–62, 90). By contrast, he implied, claims of certainty loop back to traditionalism and absolutism. Gouldner agreed with C. Wright Mills’ view about the importance of personal experience in social thought and with the broader pragmatist position that all communicative practices have nonrational facets, anchored in the body and feeling. Gouldner argued that ideology’s rational, discursive foreground has a ‘‘paleosymbolic’’ background of aesthetic sensibilities, emotional inclinations, habits, and other semiconscious or subconscious facets, which add layers of tacit meaning as well as glosses, distortions, and silences. Thus, a shared ideological foreground of public symbols does not constitute per se consensus. For example, ‘‘free-market’’ is interpreted, applied, and lived locally by individuals and groups, with diverse histories and experiences and consequently different paleosymbolism. Therefore, ideological speakers may employ the same word to signify different ideas, conditions, feelings, and actions. Gouldner held that ideological discourse manifests a ‘‘contradiction between the part and the whole’’ – universal claims, stressing a wider community of interest, are refracted through lenses of multiple fields of lived experience, local discourse, and ideographic meaning (1982a, pp. 219–227, 282; 1985, pp. 262–299). The two realms are entwined complexly; paleosymbolism distorts the ideological foreground, but it also enables potential carrier strata to ‘‘see’’ and ‘‘feel’’ ideology in a vital way that stirs emotions and compels them to struggle to remake the world accordingly. Challenging Cartesian illusions about the split of mind and body and paralleling arguments of Deweyan pragmatism, Gouldner’s emphasis on the paleosymbolic horizon stresses the uncertain, complex, interpretive, and, especially, embodied nature of post-traditional thought and ethics. Gouldner contended that ideologists, attempting to win political converts, produce systematically distorted discourse as well as the aforementioned openness, public debate, and compromise. He argued that they try

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to hide or diminish discordant factors that might undermine their appeal to certain groups; the politically interested process of focusing concern, inquiry, and debate on some issues succeeds, in part, by selectively excluding, ignoring, or distorting others. For example, classical-liberals occlude inequality and corporate power in their justifications of capitalist property rights and critiques of state power. By contrast, socialists, who provide optics to address these excluded themes, create different blind spots. Gouldner held that ideology’s entwinement with politics produces ‘‘thick and dangerous silences,’’ attenuating awareness of gaps, distortions, and unexpected consequences and about how interests limit as well as energize knowledge production. Overall, he argued that ideologists share a crucial ‘‘defect of reflexivity’’ (emphasis in the original), deriving from their deploying analytical resources largely to consolidate allies and skewer enemies (1982a, pp. 156, 215). Gouldner did not elaborate the differences between ideologists and ideologues (i.e., whose rabid desire for political victory destroys entirely ideology’s reflexive facets and uncertainty), but he did warn that manipulation of paleosymbolism can generate a fanatical politics that hardens ideology into propaganda. He believed that zealous Marxists evaporate their approach’s historical and sociological side. He implied that this tendency is exacerbated by their one-sided rationalism, which lacked sufficient reflexivity about their mobilization of paleosymbolism for their cause.

SOCIAL THEORY BEYOND POLITICS: UNCERTAINTY, REFLEXIVITY, AND THE SOCIOLOGICAL MOMENT It is theory’s systemic concern that constructs a structure of thinking that can enable it to correct for, to avoid, or to transcend the problem-focused limitedness of political action, and to speak the silences of problem-focused ideologies y [emphases in the original]. (Gouldner, 1982a, p. 156)

Gouldner maintained that social theory, which he held sprung from ideology, offers a more reflexive alternative to ideological discourse as well as to religious or philosophical normative justification. Absolute or transcendental beliefs remain important in private spheres and individual lives and sometimes burst into and even dominate politics, but they cannot sustain democratic legitimacy in culturally diverse public spheres. Like ideology,

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Gouldner held, social theory is an embodied activity, rather than pure cognition and speech; its nonrational facets prevent it from being fully conscious and transparent. Thus, he saw a significant gap between the ideas that theorists take responsibility for, or ‘‘the theory,’’ and its paleosymbolic background of feelings, attitudes, habits, and nonrational meanings.53 However, Gouldner still privileged social theory’s rational side. He did not offer a history of social theory, but he implied that it originated from the pathbreaking work of Marx and other later nineteenth century classical theorists. Also, Gouldner did not explain the relation of classical theory to then emergent social science, even though he argued that the two practices were entwined and interdependent.54 By contrast to ideologists, he held, social theorists express a heightened capacity for reflexivity, consequent of their flight from politics to the border of social science. Thus, they are less likely to become fanatics. But Gouldner did not hold that this relative autonomy from politics absolved social theorists from public responsibility. Rather he believed that they should be attuned to and draw resources from public life as well as from social science.55 Social theory’s capacity to link these relatively autonomous spheres animates its potentiality as a posttraditional normative discourse. Recall Gouldner’s point that, in post-traditional regimes, values must be justified by arguments about their empirical–historical consequences, rather than exclusively by declarations about their abstract rightness or the status of their carrier strata. He implied that the incorporation of a sociological moment in normative argument was decisive for the rise of social theory. In his view, social theorists embrace, at least, tacitly the social-scientific norm of inquiry; its practical, contingent truth-seeking makes normative principles problematic and, thus, increases reflexivity about them. For example, Marx’s extensive historical research in the British Museum and consequent sociological defense of his normative views set his work off from earlier types proto-social theory (and from absolutist facets of his own political ideas), which did not demand evidential inquiry. Marx and other firstgeneration, modern social theorists employed much more widely sociological facts and concepts in their normative arguments, calling for the creation of a specialized social science that would enhance their practice. Gouldner held that the new additions – social theory and social science – to the post-traditional symbolic complex differentiate and enrich the CCD (i.e., add fresh layers beyond ideology, news, and open political discourse). The more reflexive sociological moment of social theory distinguishes it from ideology as well as from transcendental religious or philosophical

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theories and from more narrowly focused, ontologically argued, normative political theories.56 Sociological evidence does not substitute for abstract principles, but it must be employed to support and illustrate ethical claims about ultimate rightness; the consequent arguments about the social conditions needed to sustain or resist certain values and estimate possible consequences of different policy interventions in their behalf are, in principle, subject to challenge, debate, and falsification. Gouldner’s stress on the sociological moment was not a scientistic assertion that empirical methods and facts would be sufficient to resolve normative conflicts. Rather, he believed that consideration of such matters brings values down to earth, opening normative discourse and making it attentive to particular conditions of specific situations. Overall, Gouldner suggested that social theory, largely because of its sociological moment, historicizes and sociologizes normative claims, making them more transparent, intelligent, public, discursive, and democratic. Gouldner implied that social theory discourse, although normative in thrust, augments sociology’s and social science’s truth-seeking normative fundament; i.e., genuinely ‘‘scientific’’ practices should be amplified by a critical awareness and discussion of the norms that set its directions. His assertion that sociological work is always informed by, at least, tacit social theories reflects his agreement with Weber’s highly qualified idea of ‘‘objectivity,’’ which dismissed objectivist claims that social scientists can work without values as well as subjectivist views of the world as a mere text. Social scientists often do operate without awareness of the normative presuppositions governing their choices of problems and coloring their analyses. Although these presuppositions cannot be made entirely transparent, Gouldner believed, properly practiced social theory makes such normative content problematic, increases its visibility, and opens it to inquiry and debate. He contended that sensitizing analysts to the ways in which ideal and material interests mediate their interpretations of the social world also enhances their ability to come to terms with its obdurate, external facets. Gouldner said that ‘‘To conduct a study of social objects y without simultaneous reflection on some social theory is to generate false consciousness that believes all that it is doing is mirroring passively an out-there world, and which fails to understand how it itself has participated in constructing the very object it takes to be problematic’’ (1982a, pp. 10–11). Conversely, attentiveness to the constitutive role of normative fundament increases reflexivity about epistemological assumptions, analytical methods, and overall rationality of sociological practice. Gouldner believed that

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efforts to extend such reflexivity affirms science’s norms of autonomy and responsibility, providing its practices with legitimacy by warranting the intent to execute them in a critical, prudent, honest, and uncoerced way, and to link them to the discourse and needs of wider communities. Gouldner implies but did not develop adequately the complex relationship between social science and social theory. He expressed their relative autonomy and interdependence, but he did not specify the degree, to which the normative vision of science interpenetrates social theory and shapes its normative basis and distinctness. Earlier Nietzsche, Weber, and Dewey held that the ethical calling of science is rooted in the ‘‘belief in truth,’’ which they held, as a key facet of the transition to a post-traditional civilization, was being scaled down greatly from Plato’s light and certainty to systematic doubt, endless inquiry, and illusion-free realism. This call for methodical inquiry, openness to falsification, and modesty in claims, distinguishes genuine ‘‘science’’ from politics and animates the historicist thrust and sociological moment of social theory. Like these earlier thinkers, Gouldner knew that the practice of modern science far too often contradicts its normative foundations. For example, Weber sometimes slipped his political views into the very discourses where he instructed and moralized about the need to separate factual claims from normative ones. As Gouldner stressed, even the most upright members of the theoretical stratum err in this way. In his view, social theory’s intense CCD and heightened reflexivity do not eliminate entirely the all-too-human side. Slippage is especially likely to occur when social theorists act the part of prophets. He contended that such hubris was a fatal flaw of Marx. However, that the borders between science, social theory, and politics are blurred often in practice, Gouldner believed, neither negates the fact that they are relatively autonomous cultural spheres, based on different forms of judgement, nor diminishes the need to call for more clarity and truthfulness, less we give in to demagoguery. Addressing issues that concern socio-political conflict, Gouldner argued, social theorists have to work out pragmatically the very delicate and historically variable balance between their theoretical practices, science, and politics. His highly qualified, critical rationalism calls on theorists to acknowledge their practices’ inherent plural, temporal, uncertain, partial, open-ended nature and to swim against the tide of technocratic scientism as well as formulaic political chants, conventions, and morality. Gouldner’s hope for social theory was based on its potential reflexivity about such limits and pitfalls and its fit for a post-traditional world still on the rise. He thought that social theory’s carrier stratum is vital to this hope and aversion of the problems that he believed inhered in Marxism.

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THE COMMUNITY OF SOCIAL THEORISTS: POST-TRADITIONAL VOICE OF THE SACRED? Then as now the problem was: who speaks for the totality? (Gouldner, 1985, p. 283)

Gouldner stated eloquently: ‘‘The quest for the totality is the hidden place of the sacred in secular social theory, a palimpsestic archaeological site in which the secular tradition builds its new alter overlapping the old pagan worship place, hiding it, yet affected by its presence’’ (1985, p. 282). He saw social theorists to be post-traditional spokespersons for ‘‘totality’’ or the ideal of a just and free society (albeit open to very different interpretations). Gouldner understood that social theory’s break from religion and transcendentalism, or traditional ways of symbolizing totality, is neither absolute nor a plunge into arbitrariness and relativism. Historicism has roots that stretch back, at least, to Augustine and that were later reformulated by modern thinkers who held that the vitality of values and entire cultural complexes depend upon efforts to adjust them to new conditions.57 Gouldner’s post-traditional approach does not call for abandonment of cherished values. Rather he thought that social theory could enable more self-conscious, critical, public resymbolization and, in this sense, advance the cause of democratic societal legitimation. Gouldner warned that elitist intelligentsia can go far astray when they totalize. Still he held that social theory is distinguished by its normative ‘‘holism’’ (1985, p. 283). Like Habermas (e.g., 1984, pp. 265–271), he believed that formal-legality does not substitute adequately for substantive legitimacy. He thought that the normal socio-cultural fragmentation that inheres in modernity’s highly differentiated institutions and value spheres, conflictive interests, diverse groups, and overall pluralism, intensified by the technical intelligentsia’s inability to give culture reflexive normative direction, calls forth social theory’s ‘‘latent project’’ – creation of historically determinate, sociologically based, potentially achievable visions of ‘‘good societies.’’58 For Gouldner, giving up the search for totality abjures ethical responsibility to make institutions democratically legitimate and concedes to tragic sensibilities. He saw social theory’s resurgence to manifest growing awareness of the need to recover, enrich, and pluralize the discourse about totality and democratic legitimacy (1982a, p. 285; 1985, pp. 235–239, 263–299).

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Gouldner’s affirmation of totality was qualified by his understanding that social theory is a discursive practice of plural communities of theorists with overlapping but diverging ideas about the good society. This idea was already visible in Enter Plato where he interpreted Socrates; dialectic as a discursive method to ‘‘bridge value differences’’ and stressed that ‘‘social theory y is continually enmeshed in, and emergent from the ongoing stream of y conversation in a community of adjoining scholars y’’ (1965, pp. 265, 273). At the start of the Last Project, he called for the creation of ‘‘rational communities’’ (emphasis in the original) or ‘‘theoretical collectives’’ ([1971] 1973c, pp. 78–81). His posthumously published Against Fragmentation ended with the same plea, calling for diverse communities of theorists to rethink totality and employ their ideas to build bridges between themselves and between social science and the broader culture (1985, pp. 284–299).59 While writing the Last Project, he sought to create a starting point for this community, launching the journal Theory and Society60 with the intent of bringing together publicly interested social scientists and social theorists to debate critically theoretical practices and their relation to civil society (see Chriss, 1999, pp. 135–139; Aya, 1982). He hoped that PostMarxist Critical Theory could be cultivated in this community. However, it would belong to a more diverse, inclusive discursive field of social theories that would parallel roughly the diversity of civil society. Gouldner did not suggest explicit boundaries to the community’s discourse, but he implied that theorists’ would share a commitment to the creation, reproduction, and extension of democratic regimes, which he believed inhered in their CCD. He saw social theorists to be today’s spokespersons for totality, but they do not speak in a singular, transcendent voice; their contingent, plural, public, and discursive ways break emphatically from the Traditional Culture of Discourse.

NIGHTMARE MARXISM: GOULDNER’S TRAGIC SIDE The pursuit of utopia prepares for a regression to the tragic view. (Gouldner, 1982a, p. 89)

Gouldner’s ambivalent and often dismissive approach to Marxist theory was manifested throughout the Last Project and impacted powerfully on his views of Critical Theory and social theory per se. He viewed Marx to be the founder of social theory and the ultimate example of how it can be derailed.

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Gouldner held that Marxist theory was communism’s ‘‘germ plasm,’’ inspiring the Bolshevik Party’s original ‘‘cohesion,’’ ‘‘tactics,’’ and ‘‘sense of historical mission’’ and prefiguring communist total states ([1980] 1982c, pp. 3–8). He held that communism’s rule over one-third of the world’s population testified to the power of the theoretical stratum and social theory. Gouldner broke with Marxism largely because he thought that it failed to live up to its expressed emancipatory intent or its normative ideal of totality. His fundamental objection was manifested in his charge that its ‘‘y very conception of the proletariat as the universal class was a mystification behind which a new elite prepared its hegemony’’ (1985, p. 292). Gouldner’s historicism was rooted in Critical Marxism, but he held that this tradition converges with Scientific Marxism. In his view, Critical Marxism ‘‘normalizes’’ the core mystification of Marxist theory, manifested in the claim that it is an advanced form of critical consciousness representing proletarian and other subaltern class interests, explaining how they can be realized, and serving mass emancipation and empowerment.61 Gouldner argued that both traditions suppress the reality that Marxists are a New Class intelligentsia seeking total political power (1982c, pp. 32–60, 289–321).62 Thus, he held Critical Theory must be reconstructed on Post-Marxist grounds. Gouldner ended the final volume of The Dark Side of the Dialectic trilogy (his last work published during his lifetime) with his highly pessimistic ‘‘Nightmare Marxism’’ chapter. He explained that Third World Marxist insurgencies were as bankrupt as Soviet-style communism and that emancipatory communism was a pipedream. He declared that Weber’s prediction had come true – communism is ‘‘the dictatorship of the official.’’ Implying that Nietzsche and Smith also may have been right, he speculated that Marxism could be nothing more than another resentful religion of the oppressed and that private property might be society’s ultimate basis (1982c, pp. 355–372). Importantly, there is relatively little in his final volume that builds on the preceding volumes’ hopeful side of his views of ideology, the New Class, and social theory. Gouldner’s one-sided assessment of Marxism ignored its historically contingent sociological side and the critical tools it offers for analysis of capitalism.63 But he shed light on how Marxism went politically awry. Repeating criticism posed in his Studies in Leadership (Gouldner, 1950a), he held that Marxism’s instrumental ‘‘success’’ came at the cost of its ‘‘capacity for self-understanding and development’’ (emphasis in original) (1982b, pp. 86–87). If Marxists addressed state power honestly, he contended, they would have had to confront the unresolvable contradiction between their political sine qua non and their ideal of a just society free of unnecessary

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domination and privation. In his view, they were blind to this fundamental anomaly, because their political aims overruled their historicism and its consequent sociological prudence, undermining recognition and accommodation to the social world’s contingency and blurring the line between their social theory and the Traditional Culture of Discourse. Gouldner held that claims about their political scenario’s ‘‘historical necessity’’ neutralized critical thought and debate and justified repressive means that caused ‘‘new suffering’’ and ‘‘cruelty.’’ He stressed how acting with certainty and necessity in the cause of good can turn one into ‘‘the Grand Inquisitor and Sacred Torturer of History’’ (1985, pp. 260–261). He saw Marxists’ related assertions about inevitable revolution, objective class interests, and their vanguard role to eviscerate social theory’s sociological moment and to recycle absolutism in modern dress. Gouldner thought that the consequent obliteration of uncertainty and open inquiry short-circuited Marxism’s radicalhistoricist turn and reflexivity. Overall, he argued that this closure of critical discourse and elimination of competitor theories truncated Marxist Theorists’ flight from politics to social theory and cleared the way for authoritarian regimes. In various parts of the Last Project, Gouldner called for a Post-Marxist Critical Theory. He stressed the same theme alongside his final points about social theory per se at the end of his posthumously published volume. His hopes about creating a Critical Theory that escapes the pitfalls he saw in Marxism were entwined complexly with his broader view of social theory and its distinctive ‘‘critical rationality.’’64 His call for recovery of theoretical ‘‘holism’’ affirmed the Left-Hegelian tradition abstractly. However, he backed off of this goal substantively. Gouldner’s historicist presuppositions and view of social theory per se called for immanent criticism that leads to historically based visions of achievable just and free societies. But he did not even imply that such a positive program was on the horizon. Unable to detect determinate emancipatory possibilities and cautious to avert Marxism’s political errors, he restricted Post-Marxist Critical Theory to deconstructive tasks of telling ‘‘the bad news’’ and exposing silences, contradictions, and ‘‘limits’’ (1982a, pp. 157–158; 1982c, p. 18; 1985, pp. 284–299). His ‘‘negative dialectics’’ was reminiscent of the Frankfurt School’s pessimistic phase (1976, p. 11). Gouldner converged, ironically, with pessimistic versions of poststructuralism and postmodernism, which revived the one-dimensionality thesis, end of ideology discourse, and tragic vision.65 As quoted at the head of the section, Gouldner held that utopian ideas pave the way for a later tragic turn. Fleshed out, this idea might have

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provided insight into the recurrence of end of ideology theories and into his own convergence with this pessimistic theme. However, Gouldner neither developed this idea in detail nor related it to his own thought. His tragic side may reflect limits of Critical Theory’s historicism – what happens when ‘‘history fails?’’ In these times said Theodore W. Adorno: ‘‘There are no more ideologies in the authentic sense of false consciousness, only advertisements for the world through its duplication’’ – the ‘‘immanent method’’ is ‘‘overtaken,’’ or ‘‘dragged into the abyss by its object,’’ and culture loses its ‘‘salt of truth.’’66 Accordingly, when determinate prospects for progressive social change are scant and no historical carriers speak for totality, Critical Theorists often shift from immanent critique to nonhistorical methods. Gouldner’s unresolved tragic sensibilities manifested wider cultural and political currents, which led others to take parallel but more pessimistic courses. However, his tragic side is likely rooted ultimately in utopian facets of his former Marxism, or, ironically, the radically democratic, egalitarian and participatory side of its idea of totality he hoped to preserve.

PROMETHEAN THEORISTS/SPECTATOR THEORIES: GOULDNER’S INCOMPLETE PRAGMATIC TURN y the Marxist outlaw is a Socratic y (Gouldner, 1982a, p. xvi). The age of the Socratic Man is over y (Nietzsche [1872] 1967, p. 124) y knowing is not the act of an outside spectator, but of a participator (Dewey [1929], p. 157)

In the preface to the trilogy, Gouldner declared that ‘‘Socratic social theorists,’’ like himself, refuse to offer any ‘‘positive doctrine.’’ He added that his new work would be hard to grasp without a glance back at Enter Plato, where he praised Socrates’ negative dialectics. Thus, he had strong doubts about constructive social theory even before he began the Last Project.67 His ‘‘Socratic’’ move contradicts his prescriptive view of social theory per se, which calls for positive doctrine as well as critique. However, he thought that a defensive strategy was needed to advance theoretical ‘‘modesty,’’ or ‘‘reconciliation’’ with the limits to social knowledge.68 Gouldner said that: ‘‘The atheist claims he does not believe in God, but he acts like Prometheus. The truly modest know they are neither God nor [emphasis in the original] Prometheus’’ (1976, pp. 14–15). However, Gouldner had a Promethean side. Although rejecting the conception of all-seeing, disembodied eyes looking

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down from pristine heights and rendering the world Objectively, his view of theorists as the advanced guard of New Class rule and ‘‘‘collective conscience’ of the sociological community’’ was anything but modest (1970, p. 483). Also immodest was his self-portrayal as ‘‘Socratic,’’ ‘‘Marxist outlaw,’’ ‘‘prisoner-soldier,’’ ‘‘ridge rider,’’ which warranted his claim to special reflexivity. And his view of Marxist Theory as the ‘‘germ plasm’’ of communism exaggerated theorists’ ability to direct political action (1982a, pp. xiv–xvi; 1982c, p. 6 ).69 Gouldner’s Promethean view of theorists, ironically, led him to neutralize what he implied to be their raison d’eˆtre – provision of historically determinate, sociologically possible visions of good societies – and, thus, to converge with the tragic sensibilities that he claimed to reject. Gouldner adorned the inside covers of five of his last six books with passages from Nietzsche – a theorist that he never engaged textually. The quotes from that self-described ‘‘last anti-political man’’ and master of the ‘‘tragic’’ view, who raved about modernity’s exhausted, demagogic character and preached the doctrine of ‘‘eternal recurrence,’’ was likely Gouldner’s way of acknowledging his own tragic side. Nietzsche saw Socrates as a warped character who gave undue privilege to ‘‘theoretical man’’ and, thus, inspired western culture’s inward, guilt ridden ways. However, he also spoke in awe about Socrates as the master theorist who created the cultural foundations for the modern civilization that replaced pre-Socratic, ‘‘Tragic Culture.’’ He wanted to follow Socrates’ tracks, employing world-historical theoretical powers to forge a genuinely postmodern break with ‘‘Socratic Culture.’’ Although calling for a new, ‘‘modest’’ approach to knowledge, Nietzsche upheld Socrates’ elevated view of theory and the theorist.70 Gouldner’s ambivalence about Marx parallels Nietzsche’s treatment of Socrates as evil buffoon and cultural genius. Gouldner railed that Marx’s immodest view of theory paved the way for New Class hegemony, but he also held that the political consequences of his work demonstrates the power of theory. Gouldner aimed to radically historicize theory, bringing it down to earth and scaling down its promises, but, as in the cases of Marx and Nietzsche, this goal was undercut by his Promethean view of the theoretical stratum, which was bound to be deflated. Still Gouldner’s central emphasis on a scaled-down, embodied, contingent, and discursive form of critical rationality is indicative of his effort, albeit incomplete, to achieve a modest view of social knowledge. Even his Socratic move stressed a discursively mediated, plural view of theoretical practices. As implied at several points above, these themes converge with pragmatist ideas.71 Gouldner’s many references to critical discourse,

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democratic publics, the fluid borders between facts and values, the interdependence of science and politics, and, especially, his effort to frame a historicist, post-traditional basis for normative justification are reminiscent of Deweyean pragmatism.72 But Dewey deconstructed more radically the Promethean view of social knowledge, or what he called ‘‘spectator’’ approaches, which privilege theory over practice. He offered a ‘‘participator’’ perspective that stresses social knowledge’s embeddedness in social action and theory’s status as a heuristic tool.73 His ‘‘theory of inquiry,’’ and ideas of ‘‘values-in-view’’ and ‘‘reflective morality,’’ supplemented by George H. Mead’s social psychology, provide a broader, yet genuinely theoretically modest view of post-traditional values, which meshes well with and could supplement Gouldner’s theory of social theory.74 Dewey did not provide the type of comprehensive inquiry into social theory executed by Gouldner.75 Stressing the importance of broad theorizing, however, Dewey ([1929] 1988c, p. 248) declared that ‘‘The need for large and generous ideas in the direction of life was never more urgent than in the confusion of tongues, beliefs, and purposes that characterizes present life.’’ He saw broad theorizing as a ‘‘search for values’’ that can be ‘‘shared by all’’ and that is rooted in the ‘‘foundations of social life’’ [i.e., social interdependence]. Dewey argued that reflective morality and normative theory grow ‘‘out of the conflict of ends.’’76 He saw theory as a ‘‘messenger’’ or ‘‘liaison officer’’ mediating between ‘‘reciprocally intelligible voices speaking provincial tongues, and thereby enlarging as well as rectifying the meanings with which they are charged’’ ([1925] 1988a, p. 306). He cautioned about the danger of ‘‘monistic’’ approaches (e.g., Stalinism, Nazism, and Fascism), but he did not see this type of totality to be an inherent danger of social theory per se. However, he was aware that even the most modest, qualified social knowledge could never foreclose abusive applications. Dewey contended that this realization is itself central to coming to terms fully with the social world’s uncertainty and averting the overly ambitious promises, inflexible plans, arbitrary use of political power, and ultimate deflation that follows from the ‘‘search for certainty’’ and its claims to warranted Truth. By contrast, Gouldner’s defensive move is indicative of the fact that he neither broke entirely from spectator theory nor embraced fully the uncertainty called for by his own historicist emphases on the sociological moment. For Dewey, abstaining from posing positive programs would diminish the richness of theoretical debate, truncate its potential contribution to civil society, and, ultimately, concede to the tragic view. Gouldner began a pragmatic turn that he did not complete. His theory of social theory would benefit from a critical engagement with Deweyean

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thought. Much of the work that would be directly pertinent to Gouldner’s framework is in Dewey’s original work on social knowledge and ethics, but the engagement should consider neopragmatist works, including new readings of Dewey and Mead.77 The fuller pragmatic turn would counter Promethean views of social theory and help stem the tendency to drift toward quasi-metaphysical or nonhistorical grounds. It would not solve all the problems in Gouldner’s Last Project, but it would strengthen the approach.78 What then is worthwhile about Gouldner’s approach to social theory? First, Dewey’s ideas about social theory per se are fragmentary and implicit and neopragmatist works do not attempt a theory of social theory per se. Philosophical and normative political theories tend to be posed on quasimetaphysical or deontological grounds, lacking the historical and sociological thrust of Gouldner’s approach.79 New social theories have been proliferating since he composed his Last Project, but they tend to be pitted against specialized, disciplinary empirical–historical practices. Conflation of normative and empirical argument abound in the often hostile battles between approaches. Also, divergent theoretical approaches (from ‘‘cultural studies’’ to ‘‘public choice’’) often share a religious-like belief in ‘‘Theory.’’ Writing primarily for sociologists, Gouldner implied that social theory was much needed within the boundaries of sociology, albeit in an extra-scientific role. He called for the creation of a discourse space, for holistic normative argumentation about the directions of sociology and its relations to public policy. New theories with classical-theory breadth and normativity usually have not been posed with clear post-traditional normative intent and constitute a mixed type of theory. As Gouldner understood, it would take a community of theorists to clarify what social theorists are up to and how these diverse practices relate to empirical–historical work and disciplinary theory.80 However, his comprehensive argument treating social theory as a type of historically rooted, post-traditional normative discourse provides a rich departure point to think and talk about the nature of theory.

AFTER GOULDNER: CULTURAL FRAGMENTATION AND THE FUTURE OF SOCIAL THEORY More and more, experience comes in bits. (Levine, 1995, p. 16)

The resurgence of broader theorizing that began shortly before Gouldner composed his Last Project continues today inside and outside of sociology.

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These theories arise in a culturally post-modernized context, characterized by multiplex, crosscut cultural, economic, and political splits and by resurgent end of ideology discourses, which imply that early sociology’s and social theory’s object – ‘‘society’’ – has been neutralized and that our political options are nil.81 These fragmented cultural conditions pose constraints for social theory at the same time that they call it forth. Donald N. Levine holds that increased cultural fragmentation already generated a sense of crisis in the social sciences and related disciplines by the 1970s. Since that time, he argues, splits and subareas have multiplied within sociology, disciplinary borders have eroded, and new transdisciplinary aggregations emerged (1995, pp. 271–297). He calls for an approach that comes to terms with the inherent plural nature of theory, but that encourages constructive conversation and draws out connections between divergent traditions. Levine implies that this ‘‘dialogical’’ approach would enhance the ties between sociology and social theory. Stephen P. Turner (2004) also stresses conversation among divergent approaches. However, he contends that social theory has become a mature, distinct practice, autonomous from sociology and convergent with political theory. He holds that social theorists and sociologists belong to sharply divergent cultures and that they neither employ nor read each other’s work. By contrast to Levine, Turner argues that the lively conversation between social theorists cannot breach the cultural gap with professional or academic sociology.82 Steven Seidmen (2003) declares that the era of ‘‘general theorizing’’ about society or culture as a whole is over, displaced by more circumscribed conceptual strategies. He argues that social knowledge is organized increasingly along ‘‘postdisciplinary’’ lines, into ‘‘fields of debate’’ focusing on empirical–historical work and political practices of ‘‘scholarly clusters;’’ thinkers in one field (e.g., globalization) do not know the works by scholars in other areas (e.g., queer theory). Seidman implies that conversation between different theories and forms of knowledge are limited to these bounded domains. Gouldner’s Last Project was itself inspired by concerns about increased fragmentation, following in the wake of the disintegrated postwar consensus. He was aware of the growing divisions in sociology and of emerging transdisciplinary areas (1978, p. xii). The title of his final work – Against Fragmentation – signifies his view of social theory. Also, recall his emphasis on social theorists as a plural discursive community. Levine, Turner, and Seidman are favorable, in varying degrees, to broader theory of some sort to address critically fragmentation and offer, at least, modest hopes of increased coherence, consistent with constraints set by contemporary sociocultural divides and pluralism.83 They employ the term social theory in a

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more general fashion than Gouldner, but they all attach importance to its normative thread. For example, Turner speaks of a convergence with normative political theory, Seidman stresses that the new fields of debate are shaped by political interests as well as empirical–historical foci, and Levine emphasizes the centrality of ‘‘ethical concerns’’ to social theory. Levine argues that the emergence of social science was animated by the ‘‘quest for a rational ethic,’’ but that aim was abandoned when professionalized disciplines arrived on the scene. Holding that normative matters still inspire today’s students to study social science, Levine implies, like Gouldner, a hopeful attitude about linking social theory to sociology. His desire to rekindle the search for a rational ethic parallels Gouldner’s view about the need for a disciplinary discourse space for discussing sociology’s normative directions. Turner and Seidman imply a similar, but more bounded search outside sociology’s disciplinary borders (Levine, 1995, pp. 317, 322–329).84 My central contention throughout this essay is that Gouldner’s inquiry into social theory stressed the development of a post-traditional normative means to find common ethical grounds or to reach understandings about enduring differences. Moreover, his emphasis on the historicist thrust and sociological moment distinguishes his conception of social theory from more general views of normative theory. His comprehensive approach offers a departure point for discussing the creation of a common normative language aimed to advance the interdependence of social theory, sociology, and civil society. Under current conditions, this hope might seem whimsical. However, Gouldner knew that his idea of social theory contradicted much ‘‘academic sociology,’’ most theoretical practices of his day (even most of the new broader theories), and the consumer-oriented civil society. He understood that his position, although historically based, was itself, in part, normative or ‘‘for social theory.’’ He saw social theory to be a potentiality of modernity; but he grasped all-too-well that its prospects for reception and success depended on the cultural context. Gouldner held that the practices of social theory and social science (read broadly) were culturally and historically entwined and would be enriched if their interdependence could be cultivated. His aim was modest – he hoped that his theory of social theory would stir dialogue about the normative thread in sociology and in interdisciplinary theory circles. However, the full development and reception of his ideas was short-circuited by his premature death and by the re-emergent tragic sensibilities of his day. The time might be right for taking up his project again. Today we live after the end of the post-World War II era, global regulatory regime and after the twilight-time when Gouldner composed his

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Last Project. He saw end of ideology discourse to manifest the exhausted theoretical imagination of a historical conjuncture in ruins. He held that war or economic crisis would revive ideological discourse and call forth visions of new regimes. In this Nietzschean ‘‘noontide,’’ he thought, options would become clearer, less abstract, and more determinate; the ennui of end of ideology times would be replaced by sharper, less ambivalent fragmentation. Gouldner warned that the intense conflicts over normative ends might stir up dark-side paleosymbolics. In his view, attenuated ideological discourse and eroded public life pave the way for overheated, irrational political tendencies, which, he held, pose the gravest danger to democracy.85 A renewed search for methods to establish common ground and a via media between science and politics is timely, today, when garrison-state tendencies and war between the civilizations loom on the near horizon in many parts of the world. Even if a major crisis does not eventuate, later twentieth-century arguments about the need to decenter radically rational culture and avert all broad narratives seems very dated in these fragmented times. Today, we need new ideas about positive doctrine. However Gouldner’s hope for recovering social theory and normative vision is aimed to help us find our way in good times as well as bad times.

NOTES 1. Bracketed dates refer to the time of first publication or to when the work was written or first presented. The intent is to provide the time and sequence of important works so that the reader can envision their place in an author’s overall corpus and career. Bracketed dates are given the first time a work is cited and occasionally elsewhere to remind the reader of the context. 2. The Last Project refers to Gouldner’s trilogy, or The Dark Side of the Dialectic, which includes The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology ([1976] 1982a); The Future of Intellectuals and The Rise of the New Class ([1979] 1982b); and The Two Marxisms ([1980] 1982c) and to his posthumously published Against Fragmentation (1985). His earlier Enter Plato (1965) and The Coming Crisis of Sociology (1970) set the stage for the Last Project. A final volume was said to be ready for publication, but did not appear (J. Gouldner and Disco [1984] 1985, p. viii). 3. For example, George Ritzer and Douglas J. Goodman (2004) and Jonathan Turner (2003) make only a few passing references to Gouldner’s works in their leading theory textbooks. Gouldner is cited only once, and is not discussed in any detail in the sweeping Handbook of Social Theory (Ritzer & Smart, 2001). Even works devoted to Critical Theory, which Gouldner was associated with, usually make only passing reference to him or none at all (e.g., Kellner, 1989; Calhoun, 1995; Rasmussen, 1996). Although a few writers of general texts have commented on Gouldner (e.g., Levine, 1995, pp. 71–76) and one recent theory reader includes a

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selection from his work (Lemert, 1999, pp. 428–433), Gouldner’s theoretical work has been generally ignored. However, Sociological Quarterly recently published a symposium on Gouldner’s work; see Pedraza (2002), Chriss (2002), Camic and Gross (2002), Steinmetz and Chae (2002). 4. Parsons ([1937] 1968, p. 3) asked famously the same question about Spencer. Yet Parsons is, at least, discussed in some detail in most general theory texts, and his ideas remain a context for new work in some sociological circles. Deceased theorists of far lesser stature also remain on the horizon of disciplinary memory. Many researchers focus on no more than the last five years of literature, and often are bemused by references to the classics. For thoughtful reflection on sociology’s shortlived theories, see James B. Rule (1997). 5. See e.g., Mills ([1959] 1961, pp. 3–24, 143–226), Aron ([1965] 1989, v–ix, 331–332) and Nisbet (1966, pp. 18–20, 315–319). 6. Many postmodernists declared ‘‘grand narratives,’’ including classical-type social theories, to be moribund (e.g., Lyotard [1979] 1984), while others defended the need for broad, normatively oriented social theories (Fraser & Nicholson, 1988; Fraser, 1989, pp. 6, 12–13, 108). Similarly, academic sociologists saw postmodernism either as a symptom of the need to put classical-type social theory aside or to reclaim it. On the postmodernist debate, see Antonio (1998). 7. For example, see Adams (1993), Alexander (1987, 1989, 1996), Antonio and Kellner (1992), Camic (1997), Chafetz (1993), Levine (1995, 1996, 1997), Phillips (1986), Ritzer (1991, 1992), Seidman (1991a, b, 1992, 1996a, b), Sica (1995, 1997a, b, 1999b), Turner (1996, 1999), Turner (2002), Wardell and Turner (1986), Ward and Grant (1991), Wolfe (1991). 8. Unless otherwise noted, philosophical and philosophy are employed to refer to transcendental or quasi-transcendental types of normative argument (i.e., not to philosophical practice as a whole). 9. Making a similar point about social rupture at the start of the twentieth century, Weber declared that our ‘‘unreflectively utilized viewpoints’’ lose their certainty and ‘‘the road is lost in the twilight.’’ Then, he said, ‘‘science too prepares to change its standpoint and its analytical apparatus and to view the streams of events from the heights of thought’’ ([1904] 1949b, p. 112). 10. Although respecting the classics as a reservoir of brilliant ideas, Robert K. Merton held that the classical type of theorizing, employed today, balkanizes sociology and slows its scientific progress. He argued that general sociological theory should be built-up on the basis of empirical research and of more narrowly focused, empirically verified, middle-range theories (Merton, 1957, pp. 3–16, 85–117). Merton’s (1959) essay on ‘‘problem-finding’’ stressed multiple strategies to formulate research problems and convergence between social science and physical science. He implied that postwar sociology was on the right track, building theory more scientifically and breaking with the overly sweeping, speculative style of the classics. Merton’s clear statements about middle-range theory were widely embraced by postwar sociologists. Aiming to advance scientific sociology, however, he did not address normative discourse. 11. Dorothy Ross (1991) argues that the long-held idea of ‘‘American exceptionalism,’’ stressing a unique national, developmental course that is superior to global patterns, stunted ideological discourse and slowed reception of European-style social

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theory in the United States. See Talcott Parsons System of Modern Societies (1971, pp. 86–143) for one of the clearest expressions of the postwar era, substantively rational view of American society. Portraying the United States as the ‘‘lead society,’’ he saw ‘‘Americanization’’ to be the key to global progress or ‘‘modernization’’ (i.e., ‘‘irreversible change in Western society as a whole’’). Among many signs of stunning progress, he declared, ‘‘the principle of equality has broken through to a new level of pervasiveness and generality’’ and the ‘‘allegedly ‘exploited’ working class has moved far closer to becoming the leisure class y’’ (Parsons, 1971, pp. 112, 118). Parsons and other advocates of the postwar, liberal consensus implied that the lack of ideological debate in the United States derived from its unparalleled achievement of abundance, justice, and liberty. He supported programs to combat racial exclusion and poverty, but he saw such problems to be traces of backwardness, inevitably on the wane. See Hodgson (1978, pp. 67–98), for an overview of this type of thinking. 12. Gouldner’s stress on the importance of sociological knowledge for social theory was not an uncritical endorsement of disciplinary sociology. Like C. Wright Mills, he believed that much of academic sociological work was trivial or served as a means of legitimation. 13. Gouldner saw functionalists as ‘‘conscientious ‘guardians’ devoted to the maintenance of the social machinery of whatever industrial society they are called upon to service’’(1970, p. 332). Stressing what Parsons and sociology allegedly ignored, he aimed to take better account of change, power, ideology, and the formative contexts of theory (e.g., Gouldner [1955] 1973f; [1959] 1973g; [1960] 1973h; 1973e, pp. 131–133, 144–150). Ironically, much of Gouldner’s earlier work on organizations and theory had a definite functionalist thread (albeit a more moderate, Mertonian version) that can be detected sometimes even in his later work. 14. Mills’ The Sociological Imagination ([1959] 1961) also criticized the conformist nature of Parsonsian functionalism and mainstream sociology. Gouldner’s (1970, pp. 481–512) ‘‘reflexive sociology’’ was inspired, in part, by Mills’ (1961, pp. 3–24) call for a critical type of social theory (with broad historical and normative purview) attuned to the relations between ‘‘personal troubles’’ and ‘‘public issues of social structure.’’ Gouldner stated that his approach ‘‘at its most fundamental levels’’ followed in Mills’ tracks. But Gouldner held that his position was ‘‘more ‘European’ and less ‘wholesomely’ American than Mills’’’ ([1976] 1982a, p. xiv). 15. The climate is reported in a Time Magazine (1970) article – ‘‘The New Sociology.’’ Gouldner’s former colleague and beˆte noir, Irving Louis Horowitz received top billing. However, Gouldner’s picture and comments appear prominently in the piece. Time applauded the new sociology as ‘‘certainly and excitingly freeing sociology’’ (i.e., from its ‘‘esoteric, obfuscatory, exclusive, elusive’’ ways). Gouldner’s hope for social theory was entwined with the apparent growing public receptivity to critical sociology among educated, middle-class circles. 16. Many sociologists felt that The Coming Crisis’ core themes were not only false, but were very damaging to sociology, favoring undue politicization and rejection of science. They believed that the work needed to be put in its proper place. The American Journal of Sociology took the unusual step of devoting a special section of critiques of the work in its article section, after they had already published a critical review symposium in an earlier volume. For the mostly very negative critiques and Gouldner’s heated response, see AJS (1972, 77(2); Gouldner, 1972, 78(1); 1973,

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78(6); 1973, 79(1); Gouldner (1973e). Sica (1999a, p. 351) holds that The Coming Crisis ‘‘initiated a national debate about the value of sociology that plagued the discipline for the ensuing quarter century.’’ As Sica implies, it contributed to a wider anxiety about the effectiveness of sociological methods and veracity of its knowledge. Morris Janowitz (1978, pp. 6, 403) cited the work as evidence of lost confidence in sociology, following 1960s ‘‘tensions and disruptions.’’ John J. Cerullo (1994, pp. 170–171) holds that it was a major stimulus of an antipositivist ‘‘epistemic turn’’ that broke with conventional sociological methods and led to postmodernism. Conservative sociologists argue that these trends and the related politicization caused sociology’s ‘‘decline’’ or ‘‘decomposition’’ (Berger, 1992; Horowitz, 1994). 17. For example, Don Martindale (1981, pp. 535–536) held that Gouldner reinvented ‘‘ad hominem’’ and ‘‘erroneous forms of reasoning’’ and that he was ‘‘the most gifted railer, relentless fault finder, and venomous critic of contemporary sociology.’’ This image, arguably confirmed by some of his words and deeds, helped marginalize him professionally, and likely reduced the potential readership of his Last Project. Even his mentor and friend, Robert K. Merton explained that he ‘‘became estranged from every department of sociology he joined’’ and that his ‘‘spiky character’’ probably blocked him from becoming President of the American Sociological Association (Merton, 1982, p. 936; also see Coser, 1982). For another side of Gouldner’s (1979) personality, see his generous comments about Parsons on his passing. 18. Regarding the choice of title, Lemert and Piccone (1982, p. 742) said that: ‘‘If Weber was not Gouldner’s foremost intellectual guide, he was at least an emblem of all the dichotomies by which Gouldner lived and worked.’’ He was banished to this distinguished chair outside the sociology department which he helped to build. In the late 1960s, Washington University administrators removed him, because they considered him to be a central polarizing figure in the departmental fights, who led many of his most prominent colleagues to leave (Etzkowitz, 1988, pp. 98–100). 19. The essay was based on Gouldner’s 1961 Presidential speech to the Society for the Study of Social Problems and later published in its journal Social Problems. It was also reprinted in Irving Louis Horowitz’s (Ed.) The New Sociology (Horowitz, 1964), a collection of essays written by New-Left and progressive-liberal social theorists, sociologists, and other social scientists and dedicated to the spirit and memory of C. Wright Mills. This widely read collection prepared the way for the ‘‘new sociology’’ that arose later in the decade and was discussed above. 20. Gouldner criticized Weber for trying to ‘‘segregate’’ fact and value, or reason and faith, and, thus, understating their interconnection and dehumanizing people. This critique is flawed. It fails to engage Weber’s emphatic points that only a ‘‘hairline’’ divides science and faith and that facts and values are entwined inextricably (e.g., Weber [1904] 1949, pp. 107–111, [1917] 1949). Weber believed that being clear about whether we are speaking normatively or empirically and trying to ‘‘keep a cool head’’ about our own values is a necessary facet of truly critical analyses, which ‘‘swim against the tide.’’ In part, Weber’s value freedom refers to a kind of heroic realism that originates from Nietzsche – resisting uncritical moralizing reactions, being open to the unexpected and unusual, and, above all, seeing ‘‘without illusions.’’ Weber saw the idea of sanitized facts, fully independent of values, to be an illusion (Antonio, 1995, pp. 22–23).

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21. Gouldner shared Weber’s view that people are cultural beings, who cannot escape taking normative stances toward their worlds. In this view, the choice of a research or theoretical topic depends on values, which distinguish what is ‘‘worth knowing’’ from the vast range of events and experiences to be ignored. For both thinkers, ‘‘objectivity’’ means attaining as much clarity as possible about the values that bear on our work and attempting to establish a critical distance that regulates or moderates their effects. However, Weber and Gouldner thought that it was impossible, even in the case of very delimited subject matter, to identify all the diverse values and normative inclinations that influence our analysis and to control for all their effects. 22. Like Gouldner’s earlier essay, Becker’s piece was a Presidential address to the Society for the Study of Social Problems, published soon after in its journal, Social Problems. Gouldner later said that he did not ‘‘do full justice’’ to Becker’s view (Gouldner, 1973j, p. 463, note 2). 23. In the Last Project, Gouldner held that social theory arose from modern civil society and ideological discourse. From this vantage point, Plato might be a protosocial theorist, but could not be a full-fledged part of this modern tradition. Gouldner did not clarify this ambiguity. 24. Martin Jay explains that Gouldner abandoned politics after ‘‘a brief and unhappy involvement in Communist politics in the 1940s’’ and, thereafter, lacked ‘‘faith in a concrete class, movement, or party capable of revolutionizing society’’(Jay, 1982, p. 760). 25. With no mention of the father, Gouldner dedicated the Last Project to Henry Demuth, or Marx’s unacknowledged, out-of-wedlock son with his maid. He portrayed Demuth as ‘‘an historical nonperson y Who knew something of the dark side of the dialectic’’ (emphasis in the original) and also implied that Marx treated Demuth’s mother poorly and was a male chauvinist (1982a, pp. v, 104). Gouldner argued that Marx should have anticipated the sorry authoritarian regimes that his theory supposedly called forth, but that his lust for power and personal frailties distorted his thought. He charged that Marx used his theoretical powers to bully and marginalize the artisan Wilhelm Weitling in Communist League politics and that he was a ‘‘dictator,’’ who manifested ‘‘doctrinaire and authoritarian rigidities’’ in politics and as an editor. Gouldner also claimed that Marx was ‘‘an abrasive person’’ who drove away all his friends (1982c, p. 281; 1985, pp. 93–100, 123, 145). He even held that Marx’s negative treatment of commerce and stress on production over circulation were rooted in his anti-Semitic stereotype of Jewish huckstering (1985, pp. 72–87). See Seigel 1993, for a much, more balanced treatment of Marx’s character. 26. Young Marx summed up this historicism in a letter to his father explaining his conversion to Hegelianism – ‘‘I arrived at the point of seeking the idea in reality itself. If previously the gods had dwelt above the earth, now they became its center’’ (Marx [1837] 1975, p. 18). In ‘‘immanent critique’’ or ‘‘ideology critique’’ the consequent, critical normative standpoint is not drawn in tact from history per se, but is framed and justified by engaging historical norms and conditions with the intent of developing practical means to bring ‘‘what should be’’ into being. Marx’s stress on ‘‘emancipatory’’ critique and praxis distinguishes his ‘‘Critical Theory’’ from social theory per se. See Benhabib (1986), Antonio (1981, 1989, 1990).

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27. Weber’s methodological arguments stress the development of a policy-oriented historical sociology that stops short of social theory (as conceived by Gouldner) as well as of Critical Theory. He held that normative theory is too partisan and has no place in ‘‘science.’’ But his corpus of work includes social theory, and, thus, goes beyond his own methodological strictures. This point is admittedly debatable, but is too complicated a topic and too distant from the main focus of the paper to address here. See Breiner (1996) for analysis of Weber’s position. 28. Although criticizing partisanship, Gouldner’s work had an activist side, which was manifested in his emphasis on ethical-engagement and efforts to make sociology relevant (e.g., stressed in his editorial roles at Ideas in Action, Trans-action, and Theory and Society). His ‘‘engaged’’ approach will become clearer as I articulate his vision of social theory per se. 29. This quote appears at the end of a bibliographic note about the thinkers that influenced the Last Project. The list is very eclectic; e.g., including Marx and Engels, Robert K. Merton, Thomas Kuhn, Karl Mannheim, Gaston Bachelard, Paul K. Fyerabend, Karl Popper, Talcott Parsons, Edward Shils, Basil Bernstein, Albrecht Wellmer, Alan Blum, Louis Althusser, Imre Lakatos, Ju¨rgen Habermas, and Michel Foucault. But the influence of the Frankfurt School is easiest to detect in his Last Project (Gouldner, 1982a, pp. 19–22). 30. Martin Jay (1973, p. 256) said that: ‘‘The desperate hopes of Horkheimer’s wartime essay on the ‘Authoritarian State’ soon gave way to a deepening of gloom about the chances for meaningful change. Disillusioned with the Soviet Union, no longer even marginally sanguine about the working classes of the West, appalled by the integrative power of mass culture, the Frankfurt School traveled the last leg of its long march away from orthodox Marxism.’’ On that move, also see Dubiel (1985, pp. 69–112). 31. Dennis H. Wrong held that Gouldner belonged to American Communist Party, associated with communist students, supported the Soviet Union, and did not leave the Party until the end of the 1940s. Wrong speculated that Gouldner likely kept his politics and science separate as did others of his generation of American Marxists in academe (Wrong, 1982, pp. 899–901). Maurice R. Stein (1982) held that Marxist ideas suffused Gouldner’s intellectual activities as a young faculty member at the University of Buffalo in the late 1940s. Describing Gouldner’s ‘‘Early Marxism Project,’’ he explained that Marxian ideas helped to animate his former teacher’s organizational research, but were muted, because of the McCarthyite climate and of the ‘‘value-neutral, structural-functionalism’’ of his Columbia professors to whom he submitted the work as a Ph.D. dissertation in 1952. However, Stein also reported that Gouldner used Frankfurt School texts by Franz Neumann and Eric Fromm in his sociology of fascism class and engaged seriously the broader tradition (e.g., he apparently read Herbert Marcuse’s Left-Hegelian classic, Reason and Revolution (Marcuse [1941] 1960)). Stein also held that Gouldner read other critics of Marxism (e.g., Hans H. Gerth’s and C. Wright Mills [1946] 1958 edited volume of Weber’s work, which included the bureaucracy essay and an editors’ introduction that compared Weber to Marx). Stein stated that: ‘‘y Al and others of us became sharply aware of the limits of the sentimental pro-Sovietism we had carried over from the halcyon days of the Great Alliance against Fascism of World War Two. We were also continually reminded of the manipulative and vulgar authoritarianism that

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characterized the Left parties in Buffalo. This in turn led us to question the fundamental principles of Leninist vanguardism y’’ (1982, pp. 892–893). Stein stressed that Gouldner broke with orthodox Marxism and communist politics well before he left Buffalo in 1951. If he is correct, Gouldner was not likely an active Communist Party member at the end of the 1940s. For more on Gouldner’s ties to Marxism and the Frankfurt School, see Jay 1982; Lemert and Piccone, 1982. 32. Gouldner said that his ‘‘only commitment y is to democratic values and form’’ and that ‘‘democracy’’ can be furthered under capitalism (1950b, p.12). Signifying a change in process, he opened this work with a quote from Marxist George Plekhanov alongside passages from Max Weber and Lewis Mumford (Gouldner, 1950b, p. vi). 33. In a scolding letter to me (May 18, 1979) about my misguided critique of his early organizational essays, Gouldner asserted emphatically that they were inspired by ‘‘the perspective of Critical Theory and/or Hegelian Marxism.’’ See also Gouldner (1982a, pp. 273–274) (Note). 34. Jay (1973, p. 41) asserted that: ‘‘At the very heart of Critical Theory was an aversion to closed philosophical systems.’’ Describing its ‘‘open-ended, probing, unfinished quality,’’ he argued that it developed through its critiques of orthodox Marxists and other traditions. 35. Herbert Marcuse published important works that influenced the New Left, during the 1960s. However, many English-language translations and reprints from the Frankfurt School and Western Marxism appeared, during the early and middle 1970s; e.g., Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy (Korsch, 1970); Georg Luka´cs, History and Class Consciousness (Luka´cs, 1971); Antonio Gramsci, Selections From the Prison Notebooks (Gramsci, 1971); Ju¨rgen Haberman Knowledge and Human Interests (Haberman, 1971); Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory (Horkheimer, 1972); Max Horkheimer and Theodore W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment ([1944] 1972); Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason ([1946] 1974). 36. Gouldner aimed to reconstruct the Left-Hegelian ideal of ‘‘totality’’ or general emancipation, which clashed with the emergent cultural left’s ‘‘local politics.’’ He supported their emphases on inclusion and difference (e.g., see his comments on patriarchy and ecopolitics; 1982a, pp. 99–104, 271–273), but he did not believe that such social movements offer alternatives to market-centered liberalism. On the shift ‘‘from classes to movements’’ (emerging in the 1970s) and related critiques of historicism, see Touraine (1995, pp. 233–253) and Mellucci (1996). 37. Gouldner (1973i, p. 425) thanked Piccone for help on his essay ‘‘The Two Marxisms,’’ which prefigured the Last Project. Describing Gouldner’s interest in the Critical Theory revival, John Alt (1981, p. 200) portrayed his former teacher as ‘‘a kind of senior Telos-fellow traveler.’’ Piccone’s (1981) selection to write a eulogy for Gouldner in Theory and Society (Gouldner was founder and editor) manifests the tie between the two theorists. Earlier, Piccone published Gouldner’s (1977–1978) ‘‘Stalinism: A Study of Internal Colonialism’’ as the lead article in Telos, and strongly praised the piece (Piccone, 1977–1978, p. 3). For insight into the relationship between the two theorists, see Piccone’s reviews of Gouldner’s work (Piccone’s, 1974, 1976) and his co-authored assessment of Gouldner’s thought (Lemert & Piccone, 1982). 38. Piccone did not share Gouldner’s positive views about ‘‘critical rationalism’’ and rapprochement between Critical Theory and sociology. Most participants in the

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Telos Circle, sympathetic to Gouldner’s positions, left the journal in the 1980s, when it drifted away from Frankfurt-style Critical Theory and began to devote attention to Carl Schmitt, the far-right, Weimar-era, political theorist (e.g., see, Telos, nu. 72). In the 1990s, Piccone was more ‘‘optimistic’’ about socio-political change. Claiming to move ‘‘beyond left and right,’’ he severed Telos’ ties with the left and engaged seriously the European New Right and North-American Paleoconservatism (enlisting thinkers from these camps to write regularly for the journal). Piccone’s (1995) politically ambiguous ‘‘postmodern populism’’ appropriated some of their core ideas, and shared their strong antiliberal stances. 39. Gouldner argued that the changes began in medieval Europe’s market-centered towns when feudalism’s hereditary status orders, religious domination, and corporative social ties were being replaced by citizenship, voluntary association, and democratic politics. He made passing reference to ideology’s ultimate ‘‘JudaicChristian’’ roots, but he did not explain this point (1982a, p. 87). Retaining taints of modernization theory, he argued that increased reflexivity inheres in socio-cultural differentiation and consequent rationalization. Gouldner held that ideology organizes related complexes of values and interests into broader normative visions. 40. For example, a medieval town’s merchants and craftsmen, taxed heavily by a manorial lord, might reformulate a local narrative of repression into a philosophical argument for liberation from feudalism. Seeking to enlist diverse groups and other towns into a common struggle, they frame abstract principles about autonomy, citizenship, and right-to-arms, publicize them in media, and debate and revise them in exchanges with opponents and potential allies. Gouldner implied that modern liberal ideology arose through exactly this type of generalizing of normative claims, negotiating, and consensus building. 41. Gouldner anticipated recent arguments about the new electronic media and socio-cultural and political fragmentation. Social theorists and cultural critics still struggle with his dilemma – how can civil society nurture critical sensibilities and awaken democratic publics if the thrall of mass-media images and ubiquitous consumerism erode the line between fantasy and reality, dull receptivity to print culture and ideological speech, subvert active citizenship, and isolate individuals in their home-entertainment centers? Consensus is lacking, but these matters continue to be debated intensely (e.g., Baudrillard, 1983a, 1987; Jameson, 1984; Putnam, 2000, pp. 166–180, 216–246; Bauman, 2001). 42. Gouldner recognized Marx and Engels to be the ‘‘grandfathers’’ of this socially situated view of ideology, but he referred to Karl Mannheim as the ‘‘father of us all.’’ Gouldner mentioned these theorists as part of a very eclectic list of thinkers, including the Frankfurt School, who influenced his view of ideology (1982a, pp. 19–22). However, he did not mention Weber, who strongly emphasized the role of ‘‘social carriers’’ and was a formative influence on Mannheim (Mannheim, 1955, pp. 7–8, 81, 270; Stephen Kalberg, 1994, pp. 58–62). 43. Milovan Djilas first used the term ‘‘New Class’’ to describe the stratum of communist bureaucrats who claim to work on proletarians’ behalf, but serve their own political interests and those of the industrial and military elites upon whom they depend (Djilas, 1957, pp. 37–69). In the 1970s, American neoconservatives revived the idea, referring to left or progressive-liberal intelligentsia, who support so-called ‘‘adversary culture’’ and work in the welfare state, academia, and liberal think tanks

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(Steinfels, 1979, pp. 53–69, 188–213, 260–262, 283–290). In the late 1970s, divergent theorists criticized Marxist theories of the working class and gave increased attention to the role of the academic and technical intelligentsia. The Telos Circle treated welfare-state intellectuals, reformers, and policymakers as a kind of ruling class, paralleling the bureaucratic apparatchiks of Eastern European communist regimes. They read Gouldner’s work along with other works that reframed views of class and intellectuals (e.g., Bell 1973 [1999]; Gouldner, 1976 [1996a]; Konra´d & Szele´nyi, 1979). However, Gouldner theorized the idea of the New Class earlier and more comprehensively than Piccone and his circle. See Gouldner’s (1982b, pp. 94–101) long bibliographic note on the New Class; and see Disco, 1982, on Gouldner’s work about the topic. 44. In capitalist countries, Gouldner explained, New Class technicians and managers felt that they were under-rewarded and not given responsibility and status commensurate with their vital skills. He also argued that the ideological stratum of ‘‘academic intellectuals,’’ suffering from tight job markets and middling status, resented the better-paid technicians and managers as well as the capitalist class. Gouldner believed that these two key New Class strata were alienated from the ‘‘oldmoneyed’’ class, which he saw to be ‘‘profoundly vitiated,’’ ‘‘corrupt,’’ and ‘‘dying’’ (holding tenuously to power by means of their wealth and the imperium of their last national stronghold, the United States). He held that the New Class, in communist regimes, were similarly alienated from their bureaucratic ruling classes, who held on to power by police-state tactics (1982b, pp. 49–53, 58, 69–70, 86–92). Gouldner’s New Class theory anticipated struggles that ended Eastern European communism. Also, his argument that communist-era, New-Class functionaries were easily coopted by ‘‘fringe benefits’’ anticipated the waning of their democratic fervor in post-communist regimes (1982b, p. 92). Szele´nyi and Szele´nyi (1994, pp. 218, 226–227) stress conditions – fragmented elites, new political spaces, increased freedom for dissident intellectuals, a more vibrant civil society, and a ‘‘culture of critical discourse’’ – that parallel Gouldner’s New-Class scenario. They report that the failed legitimacy of old elites contributed substantially to the regime’s fall and that a ‘‘new elite’’ of more highly educated, specialized intelligentsia, arising in the late 1960s, helped generate a new style of rule and later wrested power from the old elite. They argue that Party cadres, including the old elite, eventually saw the authoritarian bureaucracy to be so moribund that they focused more on the acquisition of private wealth than on politics and encouraged their children to join the ranks of ‘‘real’’ professionals rather than the Party. Ivan Szele´nyi held earlier that Gouldner exaggerated the tensions between communist bureaucrats and their intelligentsia (Szele´nyi, 1982, p. 792 and passim). Backing off this critique, Szele´nyi later converged with Gouldner. For empirical analyses of the New Class thesis, see Walder, Li, and Treiman (2000), Hanley, (2003), Hanley & Treiman (2005). However, Gouldner underestimated the resilience of the capitalist class; his claims about their demise and the noneconomistic nature of the New Class seem far off the mark in the wake of the 1990s ‘‘New Economy’’ (1982b, pp. 20, 89–92). The old-capitalist class and New Class seem to have converged in relentless pursuit of stock-portfolio growth and drift toward libertarian economic views (on the growth of the New Class’ income share see, Mishel, Bernstein, and Schmitt, 2001, and on their libertarianism and celebratory materialism, see Gray, 1998; Borsook, 2000; Brooks, 2000; Frank, 2000; Friedman, 2000).

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45. Gouldner likely appropriated the concept of ‘‘cultural capital’’ from Pierre Bourdieu, having read his work on education and cultural reproduction (Gouldner, 1982b, p. 100). 46. Gouldner’s ideas about the CCD are central to his argument, but are stated relatively briefly and in fragments. He saw it as having originated with ideology and civil society, extended by early public education, and refined by the growth and differentiation of higher education and the professions. He said that he borrowed ideas from Basil Bernstein and from Dell Hymes and William Labov (Gouldner, 1982b, pp. 1–4, 65–70,102, note 4). However, like certain other elements of Gouldner’s Last Project, his vision of the CCD is incomplete and unfinished. 47. He believed that the CCD’s critical rationality is employed widely in New Class circles (especially among the academic intelligentsia) and that it looms behind the speech acts of much broader, highly educated groups (including technicians and managers). Gouldner hoped that the mostly latent CCD could be activated much more widely through the agency of the New Class’ more reflexive, ideology-producing fragments and, especially, its social theorists. 48. Habermas’ parallel linguistic turn can be criticized for departing classical Critical Theory’s more concrete historicism (e.g., Antonio, 1989). 49. Although ‘‘flawed’’ by elitist self-seeking, Gouldner held, the New Class is likely ‘‘the best card that history has presently given us to play’’(1982b, pp. 7). He thought that its critical speech capacities make it ‘‘the most progressive force in modern society and y a center of whatever human emancipation is possible in the foreseeable future’’ (1982b, p. 83). 50. Gouldner stressed a contradiction between the ‘‘cultural apparatus’’ and ‘‘consciousness industry.’’ He argued that the ‘‘cultural apparatus,’’ or academic intelligentsia, governs ideological production and is located in universities and related institutions (e.g., think tanks, educational and social-policy organizations). By contrast, he held that the ‘‘consciousness industry’’ is centered in the mass media, which orchestrates consumption and secures mass compliance. Manifesting a ‘‘technocratic consciousness,’’ he contended, its technicians and managers claim to operate strictly technically or scientifically (i.e., in a value-free way) and, thereby, deny the validity of normative or ideological challenges to their activities and uphold their own status and monetary interests as well as their employers’ financial interests (1982a, pp. 171, 260–270). 51. Gouldner held that a shift to New-Class hegemony was well underway, but that battles within the class (i.e., technocrats versus ideological and social theory substrata) will likely determine the degree to which the CCD’s critical side continues to be suppressed or blossoms into discursively democratic culture and institutions. 52. Note that Gouldner saw this historicism to be the primary thrust of ideological discourse. But he did not say that this precludes contrary types of transhistorical claims. 53. Gouldner held that theory is the visible part of a much broader and much more elusive modus operandi, or ‘‘analytic’’; the theory is embedded in a historically constituted complex of inclinations and paleosymbolism that govern the way a theorist works and thinks and that bear the imprint of the socio–cultural and personal contexts, in which he or she lives. He called theory the ‘‘head of the hammer’’ and the background complex the ‘‘handle’’(1982c, pp. 308–312).

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54. Gouldner provides some discussion of the rise of social science and classical theory in The Coming Crisis (1970, pp. 88–163), but this discussion provides primarily a context for his critique of Parsons and discussion of ‘‘reflexive sociology.’’ He did not integrate these matters with his argument about social theory per se in the Last Project. 55. Gouldner’s thoughts on these matters were also incomplete. He did not explain the methods that social theorists would employ to frame approaches that could influence discourse among social scientists as well as inform ideological debates in wider public spheres. 56. Social theorists usually locate political structures and political movements in broader institutional and socio – cultural frameworks. Also, social theory’s connection to particular parties or types of political regimes is usually less direct than in political theory. Moreover, normative political theory is often based on nonsociological and nonhistorical transcendental or quasi-transcendental arguments, converging with philosophy. However, the borders with normative political theory are increasingly fluid; historically based arguments about overall socio–cultural regimes as well as political regimes are not limited to a single discipline and the old disciplinary differences are blurred even further in emergent transdisciplinary ‘‘social theory’’ spaces. 57. Augustine’s rationes seminalis (seminal reasons) referred to potentialities that unfold in time with human development (Copleston, 1962, pp. 91–93). On Jefferson’s historicism, see Matthews (1984, pp. 19–29, 45–75) and Dewey ([1939] 1988e, pp. 173–188). On historicist versus traditionalist visions of moral authority, see Hunter (1991, pp. 42–48, 107–132). 58. Social theorists map overtly or suggest tacitly social regimes, stressing interdependent organizational, associational, cultural, and political facets and providing a critical standard for normative argument (see Kent, 2000). As has been explained above, these historicist normative visions must have an immanent basis in the existing society (i.e., partly existent in current social conditions or, at least, as a potentiality of emergent conditions). 59. Gouldner stressed the need for a dialectic of ‘‘holism and recovery’’ – i.e., that efforts to create new totalities would be counterbalanced by a continuous concern for silences, gaps, and paleosymbolism. Substantively, he hoped that a strong sociology that would correct Marxism’s ideological excesses and impoverished view of civil society. He held that sociology traditionally addressed the plural, democratic features of civil society. Arguing that postwar sociology was mostly a servant of the ‘‘welfare-warfare state’’ that had lost sight of its ‘‘object and historical mission,’’ he called for increased focus on civil society’s progressive social movements and democratic institutions (1982c, pp. 355–372). 60. Gouldner served as chief editor of the new journal, which was a high priority for him and was entwined normatively and intellectually with his theoretical work. See Gouldner (1978), for a concise outline of the intellectual agenda for Theory and Society, which he mapped while he was in the later stages of his Final Project. 61. Gouldner contended that Marxism’s ‘‘primary paradigm,’’ or ‘‘Scientific Marxism’’ (SM), is rooted in Marx’s determinist and materialist writings, stressing the primacy of economic factors, science, structure, and evolutionism. By contrast, he saw ‘‘Critical Marxism’’ (CM) to be a shadow theory emphasizing key

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‘‘anomalies’’ obscured by SM. Gouldner held that CM is rooted in Marx’s voluntaristic, Left-Hegelian political works, stressing culture, consciousness, agency, and revolutionism. Gouldner treated the two subtraditions as ideal types that analytically separate historically related yet conflictive elements of Marxism. For example, Gouldner, saw Frankfurt-School theorist, Herbert Marcuse to be mainly a CM and structuralist, Louis Althusser to be largely a SM, while he portrayed Eastern and Western Communist Parties as mostly SM and Third-World revolutionaries as primarily CM. But he held that threads of both traditions cut across Marxist thinkers, movements, and regimes (Gouldner, 1982c, pp. 1–60). 62. Gouldner rejected strenuously SM’s claim that a Communist Party vanguard would eventually transform the Party State into a democratically legitimate, system of administration (e.g., like public utilities) and CM views that revolutionary communism would overcome the problem of state power (1982c, pp. 299–233). He argued that SM’s economistic reduction of politics denies the autonomy of state bureaucracy. He held that CM critiques acknowledge the problem of state power in such a muted way that they uphold the view that expropriation of capitalists will make it fade away. Portraying the Eighteenth Brumaire as a CM text, Gouldner held that Marx implied that Louis Napoleon’s authoritarian regime was based on autonomous state power. However, Gouldner argued that Marx employed ultimately a deus ex machina that gave the dictatorship a class basis (i.e., the regime ultimately represented peasant class interests). Gouldner held that Marx’s comments about the ‘‘Asiatic mode of Production’’ and the consequent CM debates raised the issue of total-state power, but in way that masked the problem’s depth and implications. He held that Marxist theorists cover their New Class, hegemonic aspirations by claiming to speak for the oppressed. However, he argued that CM revolutionism (e.g., Maoism and Castroism) converges with SM Stalinism; both serve the Marxist intelligentsia’s power aspirations (1985, pp. 180–181; 1982c, pp. 139–154). Gouldner saw CM as Marxism’s ‘‘final survival system,’’ replacing recently spent SM as the primary paradigm (1982c, pp. 318–321). 63. Gouldner said passingly that Marxism offers some useful ‘‘middle-range sociological truths about the economy and society’’ (1982c, p. 167). However, he did not take adequate account of the heuristic value of Marxist political economy or of its other analytical and normative resources. He did not address the value of Marx’s theory for analyzing the emergent neoconservative appeals for neoliberal deregulation, free trade, and reduced welfare. By contrast, he made the Keynesian ‘‘warfarewelfare’’ state the focal point of criticism when its nonmilitary, social arms were under assault or in decline. Having portrayed Ronald Reagan’s failed 1976 presidential bid as a decisive event in the old class’ demise (1982b, p. 92), we can only speculate about his thoughts, in the last weeks of his life, about the 1980 Reagan presidential victory. 64. Left-Hegelianism’s reconstruction, Gouldner argued, requires an immanent critique of its normative standard of ‘‘critical rationality’’ to ‘‘help us transcend certain limits of our historically evolved rationality: i.e., the culture of critical discourse’s reflexive speech’’ (1982c, p. 167). Unfortunately, he never finished the ‘‘later volumes’’ that he said would elaborate this crucial yet obscure point. On Critical Theory, see Gouldner e.g., 1970, pp. 5–6, 12, 113, 409, 450; 1982a, pp. 101, 127–128, 149–150, 283; 1982b, p. 39; 1982c, pp. 16–19, 371; 1985, pp. 241–261.

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65. However, poststructuralists and postmodernists made a much more emphatic post-Marxist move that rejected entirely Left-Hegelian holism. They usually portrayed Marx’s holism as the prototype, modern social theory that obliterates cultural difference. Although a corrective language to the orthodox-Marxist totality and other forms of absolutism, their rejection of holism and, often, of social theory and broad sociological narratives per se, eliminates tools that address critically globalization or defend transnational human rights and minority rights, see Fraser (1989, p. 13, note 2); Antonio (1998, 2000). On the idea of totality in Marxist theory, see Jay (1984). 66. See Adorno ([1967] 1981, pp. 19–34). For the Frankfurt-School on conformist mass culture and exhausted ideology critique, see e.g., Horkheimer and Adorno ([1944] 1972), Horkheimer ([1946] 1974, pp. 23–25, 95–97, 173–178; Marcuse (1964) and Buck-Morss (1977). 67. James J. Chriss (2002) traces Gouldner’s tragic sensibilities back to his earlier work, holding that they simply became more manifest in his 1960s critiques of academic sociology. 68. Gouldner’s defensive move was rooted in his youthful engagement with Communism and his belief that constructive social theories are too easily transformed into all-encompassing repressive political programs (i.e., because of theory’s power to organize the world and theorists’ vulnerability to become power hungry intelligentsia) (1965, pp. 1–2, 172–180, 264–296; 1976, pp. 7, 11, 14–15; 1982a, pp. xi, xvi). 69. For example, his all-too-certain, near total equation of Marxist theory with mystification manifests the immodesty that he claimed suffuses Marxism. His glowing optimism about the New Class’ critical powers was also immodest. Warning about the New Class’ elitist tendencies, he did not exactly crown them as the vanguard of emancipation, but he argued that their all-too-human inclinations would be minimized by social theory’s special reflexivity. Recall Gouldner praised the New Class’ ‘‘historically emancipatory rationality’’ and their status as the ‘‘most progressive force in modern society,’’ ‘‘the universal class in embryo,’’ and ‘‘the best card that history has presently given us to play’’ (1982b, pp. 7, 83–86). His critics contended that his sweeping idea of ‘‘human liberation’’ desensitized him to local injustices, a type of immodesty (i.e., grand narrative) that feminists, postmodernists, and other critics charge plague the classical theory canon and other theories that follow in its tracks. They hold that this view homogenized otherness and converged with Eurocentric and masculinist inclinations of the older generation mainstream theorists, who he criticized (Jay, 1996; Kennedy, 1996). On feminist critiques, see Sprague (1997), and for related criticism (see Connell, 1997). Recall Gouldner’s friends and critics portrayals of his immodest ways; e.g., Lewis A. Coser said he was ‘‘abrasive, abusive, wounding, and altogether obnoxious,’’ or a ‘‘son of a bitch’’ (Coser, 1982, p. 888; Merton, 1982, pp. 935–936). 70. Nietzsche portrayed Socrates as having forged the basis of a distinctly Western Reason that lords over the body and world and provides theory absolute primacy over sensory knowledge and the theorist superiority over the peasant, artisan, or artist. Seeing the world ‘‘sub specie aeterni,’’ he argued, the carriers of Western Reason ‘‘dehistoricize’’ or ‘‘make a mummy of it.’’ The consequent dualisms (e.g., ‘‘real world’’ and ‘‘apparent world,’’ ‘‘fact and value,’’ ‘‘inner and outer,’’ and ‘‘theory and practice’’), Nietzsche held, produce a depressed inwardness that paralyzes

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human agency. Calling for ‘‘modesty’’ in science and theory, Nietzsche rejected all metaphysical foundations or warranties. On the other hand, he stressed the theorist’s capacity to forge the bases of entirely new civilizations. See Nietzsche ([1888] 1968b, pp. 29–41, 123–125, 162–175; [1873–1876] 1983, pp. 57–123; [1887] 1989; [1883–1885] 1969, pp. 261–264; [1872] 1967, pp. 81–84, 94, 109–144; [1883–1888] 1968a, pp. 231– 247; [1882] 1974, pp. 272–274), and Antonio (1995). 71. Gouldner referred occasionally to Dewey and Mead, and likely was exposed to their ideas through his engagement with C Wright Mills. A former classmate of Gouldner’s reports that his circle read Dewey’s Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (Dewey [1938] 1986) in the late 1940s. But I am unaware of any evidence that Gouldner seriously engaged Dewey and Mead’s work. 72. Dewey called for a parallel type of normative theory against the trend of technical specialization in philosophy. For example, Gouldner’s portrayal of the rise of the Culture of Critical Discourse parallels Dewey’s view of the shift from ‘‘customary morality’’ to ‘‘reflective morality.’’ Gouldner’s ideas of the uncertain, practical, and discursive nature of social knowledge and of a plural community of social theorists converge with Dewey’s treatment of science and social philosophy as conjoint, ‘‘experimental inquiry.’’ Dewey also suggested a parallel type of linguistically mediated critical rationality, saw theoretical practices to be embodied and entwined with nonrational aesthetic facets, held that the fact-value relation is fluid, thought that social science should inform normative discourse, and stressed centrally communication and the formation of publics. Dewey embraced a type of normative philosophical practice that employed knowledge from other fields to criticize values and pose new values or suggest ways to secure better existent ones (Dewey [1925] 1988a, pp. 295–326; [1929] 1988c, pp. 248–250); e.g., on this convergence see Dewey [1939] 1988f and Dewey and Tufts [1932] 1985. On Dewey’s antifoundationalism, see e.g., Hook ([1939] 1971), Hickman (1990), and Joas (2000, pp. 103–123). George Herbert Mead’s, (1934) ideas are also relevant, and exerted an important influence on Dewey; see e.g., Dewey ([1935] 1987b; [1931] 1989), Joas (1985, 1993, pp. 238–261) and Cook (1993). 73. Dewey held that the metaphysical warrants that elevate theory over ‘‘action,’’ ‘‘doing,’’and ‘‘making’’ originate from ancient justification of the hegemony of landowner aristocrats over direct producers. He held that the elevation of theory was rooted ultimately in ruling classes who valorized their own ‘‘spiritual’’ life free from toil and disparaged the labor of slaves and serfs. He argued that religious or metaphysical claims about universal foundations provide comforting psychological effects, but they justify uncritical reproduction of existing cultural and social relations. See Dewey ([1929] 1988c, pp. 3–20; [1925] 1988a, pp. 306, 318–325). Dewey saw theory as a means to compare and analyze specific social relations, processes, structures or imagine revised or fresh versions of them. He held that social knowledge does not represent reality, but it ‘‘points toward’’ relations or processes that are known through ‘‘experimental’’ actions; its ‘‘true object of knowledge resides in the consequences of directed action.’’(1988c, pp. 19, 157; [1938] 1986). He would have agreed with Max Weber’s point that Marxist theory is highly effective when it is seen properly as a heuristic tool, rather than as a certain representation of the essence of historical development. Weber held that ‘‘historical knowledge’’ should be treated

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‘‘as a servant [emphasis in the original] of theory instead of the opposite role’’ (Weber [1904] 1949b, pp. 102–103). 74. According to Dewey, ‘‘inquiry’’ is stimulated by disturbing conditions that cause individuals to detect a problem, consider relevant forms of knowledge at hand, hypothesize different possible lines of action and possible consequences, select a strategy of intervention, test it experimentally, and then reconsider all these steps in light of the consequences ([1938] 1986, pp. 105–122). Dewey held that we employ inquiry in empirical and normative matters, and that ‘‘science’’ is merely a more systematic and rationalized version of the type of inquiry that we apply in everyday affairs. His naturalization or radical historicization of theory stresses that all knowledge is a product of the ‘‘organism and environment relationship,’’ which for human beings is marked by the addition of communicative or cultural interdependence. 75. Dewey’s vision of social philosophy parallels the normative conception of social theory suggested by Gouldner. Dewey’s former student, Sidney Hook (1988, p. ix) stated: ‘‘The distinctive function of philosophy for Dewey, to the extent that it can be marked off for emphasis but not separation from other disciplines, is the normative consideration of human values [emphasis in the original] - or, most simply put, the quest for a good life in a good society.’’ This normative thrust is easily visible in his substantive theoretical works. For example, see Dewey ([1935] 1987a, [1926] 1988b, [1929–1930] 1988d). 76. Dewey held that post-traditional normative discourse can be effective without achieving consensus. Dewey’s framework is underpinned by Meadian social psychology, and provides an alternative to functionalist theories of socialization and normative consensus. Dewey did not see normatively oriented action to be simple conformity to internalized norms. He held that the actor may construe a particular normative principle as binding or universal, but this interpretation is mediated by his or her role-taking or attitude-sharing with the particular people in their specific contexts (at least when action is reflexive and not habitual). Dewey held that normatively oriented action has an emotional-aesthetic side as well as a rational dimension and that its cognitive moments are embedded in networks of external actions, consequences, and responses. In his view, normative action is emergent, contingent, and, if effective, self-corrective. To be ‘‘successful’’ such action need not end in consensus, but can result in ‘‘communication’’ whereby mutual openings or mutual understandings arise between self and other. For example, the resolution of conflict between a parent and child over differences in sexual orientation does not require that both people agree about the worth of the behaviors or values at hand. Rather effective roleplaying and attitude-sharing lead to a compassionate understanding of the other and acceptance of difference. Gouldner makes passing references to these types of processes, but he does not connect or develop the themes and does not express awareness of the divergence from traditional versions of normatively-oriented action. Dewey argued that customary morality stresses the unquestioned authority of norms. In modernity, he held fundamentalist normative views often generate an ethical formalism that erodes normative legitimacy and voluntary compliance (Dewey & Tufts [1932] 1985, pp. 82, 165–166, 275–283; Dewey [1939] 1988f). In this light, he argued that communism and fascism shut down moral discourse, sap the life from politics and culture, and require authoritarian control (Dewey [1939] 1988e).

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77. Mitchell Aboulafia’s, Myra Bookman’s, and Catherine Kemp’s [2002] work on Habermas and Pragmatism, Hans Joas [2000] study of the origins of values, Richard Rorty’s [1998] analysis Deweyan pragmatism and new cultural theories, and Phillip Selznick’s [1992] pragmatic engagement of communitarian theory might be especially helpful. See, e.g., Aboulafia (2001), Anderson (1990), Bernstein (1985), Cook (1993), Festenstein (1997), Fraser (1989), Joas (1985, 1992, 1993), Kent (2000), Kloppenberg (1986), Livingston (1994), Margolis (1986), Martin (2002), Hickman (1990), Rorty (1998), Shalin (1988, 1992), Sleeper (1986), West (1989), Westbrook (1991), and Wiley (1994). 78. Immodesty is not the only problem with Gouldner’s view of social theory. For example, he sometimes spoke as if he equated ideology and social theory and, thus, left the relationship somewhat vague. For example, he did not explore the complexities of translating social theories into more publically accessible types of ideological discourse. Moreover, the special reflexivity that he attributed to social theory derives from its entwinement with the scientific ideal and the consequent privilege that it gives to truth-seeking over power-seeking. Regrettably he did not explore this vital link. He also did not explain sufficiently the differences and connections between sociological theory and social theory. For example, the line between the two can be thin and fluid, because all types of social science theory have empirical and normative content and multiple uses and meanings (i.e., predictive, interpretive, critical, analytical, and normative). A formal theory framed to analyze market behavior may also affirm it, and a normative theory designed to criticize capitalism may frame empirical questions. Also, Gouldner did not explore the ways that expressive appeals about the ‘‘rightness’’ of a social theory and consequent ethical combat might contradict its sociological side. Finally, he did not outline the elements that would compose an adequate substantive theory, or clarify differences with normative political theory. 79. Ju¨rgen Habermas’s (1979, 1984, 1987, 1998) theory of ‘‘communicative action’’ is perhaps the most comprehensive recent effort to analyze social theory per se as normative theory. Like Gouldner, Habermas is concerned with providing a basis for a Post-Marxist Critical Theory in an era when the cultural and historical bases of immanent critique have been weakened by media culture and mass consumption. Although converging with Gouldner’s approach, Habermas ‘‘reconstructive method’’ or ‘‘discourse ethics’’ suggests a quasi-transcendental or nonhistorical foundation that stresses, ultimately, a consensus theory of truth. Mitchell Aboulafia holds that Habermas admits that this quasi-transcendentalism is the hardest facet of his theory to defend, but he insists that we need such a universal ground to avert another ‘‘Holocaust’’ or ‘‘to counter irrationalism and barbarism’’ (Aboulafia, 2002, p. 4). Joseph Margolis holds that Habermas’ ‘‘universalizability principle’’ could not provide ‘‘in any operationally convincing way, either a necessary or sufficient condition for the validity of any substantive norm in practical life or theoretical inquiryy’’ (Margolis, 2002, p. 44). Moreover, Lenore Langsdorf (2002) charges that Habermas ignores the aesthetic and dramaturgical side of theory and communication. See also Rockmore (2002) and Joas (1991, 2000, pp. 160–186). 80. ‘‘The International Social Theory Consortium’’ approximates this type of grouping, but does not stress exclusively normatively oriented social theory (Turner, 1999).

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81. For example, Thomas L. Friedman (2000, p. 106) holds that our political choices have been ‘‘reduced to Pepsi or Coke,’’ and Jean Baudrillard (1983b) sees an ‘‘end of politics.’’ Later twentieth century, end of ideology discourses spoke of a convergence of left and right, but were split between pessimistic views stressing class polarization, cultural homogenization, and bloody ethnic, racial, and religious conflicts and positions emphasizing economic progress, cultural diversity, and awareness of limits or risks. For contrasting views, see e.g., Fukuyama (1999, 1992), Bell (1991a, b), Bauman (1992, pp. 175–186; 2001), Giddens (1994), Gitlin (1995), Bobbio (1996), Rorty (1998), and Jacoby (1999). Compare Bell’s ([1960] 1988, pp. 393–447) earlier view with his afterword, written shortly before Fukuyama posed his thesis. Also see, Bell’s afterword to his Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1996a, pp. 283–339), and Fukuyama’s (1999) ‘‘Second Thoughts’’ about his earlier work. For overviews of this topic, see Kumar (1995) and Antonio (1998, 2000). 82. Turner sees ‘‘standard ‘empirical sociology’’’ to be of little interest to people outside of its specialized professional niches and the idea of a ‘‘science of society’’ to be totally bankrupt. By contrast, he considers social theory to be a thriving practice, which has a capacity to ‘‘inform activity’’ (2004, pp. 146–147, 160). 83. Even Seidman implies relatively broad types of theory addressed to discursive communities, which focus critically on big social issues (e.g., globalization and citizenship). 84. Levine is one of the few contemporary theorists to engage Gouldner’s thought at all. He treats Gouldner as the ‘‘archetypal exemplar’’ of the ideologically engaged ‘‘contextual’’ strain of social theory (Levine, 1995, pp. 69–76, 101). Levine’s categorical point about Gouldner expresses a key thrust of his thought (e.g., his work in Critical Theory). Levine’s work has a very different focus (i.e., tracing various traditions of substantive social theories) than Gouldner’s Last Project (i.e., tracing historical roots of social theory per se and metatheorizing its normative dimension). However, the two thinkers converge with regard to their view of social theory’s discursive, normative, and plural nature, which has affinity for pragmatism. 85. Fearing the re-emergence of violent, aestheticized politics, Gouldner warned about the ‘‘outside’’ political groups that might arise in such times and about the: ‘‘fundamental danger of fascism’’ (1982a, p. 249).

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THE MAYBERRY MACHIAVELLIANS IN POWER: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION THROUGH A SYNTHESIS OF MACHIAVELLI, GOFFMAN, AND FOUCAULT$ Paul Paolucci, Micah Holland and Shannon Williams The rule of the prince results either from the power of the people or that of the nobles, depending on which has a chance to prevail. When the nobles see they cannot resist the people, they start to build up one of their own, and make him prince so that in the shadow of his power they can satisfy their own wants. – Niccolo Machiavelli1

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Theoretical synthesis is often used for interpreting historical events. Developing links between Machiavelli, Goffman, and Foucault provides such an opportunity. Each theorist’s perspective informs the others in revealing ways on the question of power. Mutually informing theoretical viewpoints are applied to the machinations of the Bush administration in its attainment and use of state power.

Social Theory as Politics in Knowledge Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Volume 23, 133–203 Copyright r 2005 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0278-1204/doi:10.1016/S0278-1204(05)23003-7

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INTRODUCTION Machiavelli’s dictums in The Prince (1977) instigated the modern discourse on power. Arguing that ‘‘there’s such a difference between the way we really live and the way we ought to live that the man who neglects the real to study the ideal will learn to accomplish his ruin, not his salvation’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 44), his approach is a realist one. In this text, Machiavelli (1977, p. 3) endeavors to ‘‘discuss the rule of princes’’ and to ‘‘lay down principles for them.’’ Taking his lead, Foucault (1978, p. 97) argued that ‘‘if it is true that Machiavelli was among the fewywho conceived the power of the Prince in terms of force relationships, perhaps we need to go one step further, do without the persona of the Prince, and decipher mechanisms on the basis of a strategy that is immanent in force relationships.’’ He believed that we should ‘‘investigateyhow mechanisms of power have been able to functionyhow these mechanismsyhave begun to become economically advantageous and politically usefulyin a given context for specific reasons,’’ and, therefore, ‘‘we shouldybase our analysis of power on the study of the techniques and tactics of domination’’ (Foucault, 1980, pp. 100–102). Conceptualizing such techniques and tactics as the ‘‘art of governance’’, Foucault (1991), examined power as strategies geared toward managing civic populations through shaping people’s dispositions and behaviors. There are parallels between these ideas and Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical analyses in sociology. Goffman’s view endorses the principle that, as an actor, a would-be prince must incorporate tactics of impression management into his dramatic performance so as to maximize his odds of keeping power. Like any role performer, a prince ‘‘typically infuses his activity with signs which dramatically highlight and portray confirmatory facts that might otherwise remain unapparent or obscureyhe must mobilize his activity so that it will expressywhat he wishes to convey’’ (Goffman, 1959, p. 30). Goffman (1959, p. 3) brings insight to how a prince might maneuver in order ‘‘to control the conduct of the others, especially their responsive treatment of him.’’ This is the entry point of Goffman’s (1983, p. 17) critical task for sociology, i.e., the ‘‘unsponsored analyses of the social arrangements enjoyed by those with institutional authority – priests, psychiatrists, school teachers, police, generals, government leaders, parents, males, whites, nationals, media operators, and all the other well-placed persons who are in a position to give official imprint to versions of reality.’’ Synthesizing these views, the discussion that follows analyzes how those in a position to give an official imprint to the policies and developments surrounding the

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events of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent U.S. military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq (e.g., government leaders, generals, and media operators) used strategic tactics and dramaturgical techniques in order to control the conduct of subjects to make them economically advantageous and politically useful.

The Initial Framework Machiavelli forwards his rules on keeping power without a general theory of the state, sovereignty or right. Rather, The Prince’s intended function is as a handbook on power, i.e., exercising it and keeping it while doing so. He does not theorize about justice, morality, or anything other than those strategies that historically have succeeded or failed in using power. This approach has been denounced as amoral, but, in terms of realpolitik, such qualities are the work’s greatest asset. Explaining strategies of princes sans apologetics allows for a study of the tactics of domination through the eyes of those involved in the attainment and exercise of power. Although Foucault and Goffman have been discussed in light of Machiavelli’s views on power before (Clegg, 1989; Pasquino, 1991; Prus, 1999), this facet of their work is not extensively developed. Foucault (1983, pp. 223–224) highlights several techniques involved in power relations that are congruent with Machiavelli’s framework, including the system of differentiations (e.g., law, tradition of status, economic, cultural and linguistic differences, differences in know-how, competence, and so forth), the types of objectives (What ends are being pursued? E.g., maintenance of privileges, profits, creation of law, authority, etc.?), the means of bringing power into being (e.g., threat of arms, effects of the word, economic inequality, surveillance, etc.), forms of institutionalization (including tradition, legal structures, customs such as family relations, or more specific loci such as the military, the educational system, and complex apparatuses such as the state), and degrees of rationalization (e.g., rules that mobilize power ‘‘with processes which are more or less adjusted to the situation’’). Goffman’s work provides an interpretive-analytical framework for reading the behavior of those exercising power as well as the patterned responses their tactics elicit. Bringing the ideas of Goffman, Foucault, and Machiavelli into joint study offers a fruitful theoretical framework for studying power relations in contemporary world history. For empirical application, a dissenter who decried how George Bush’s staff was behaving like a cast of ‘‘Mayberry Machiavellians’’ provided a muse for our study.2 The central

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questions in this context became: What are Machiavelli’s rules? What were the Bush administration’s strategic goals? How was the state apparatus used to achieve them in a Machiavellian fashion? What effect did this have on those subject to power? How do Goffman and Foucault help us interpret these behaviors? The narrative below is broken up into three conceptual sections: (1) exercising and retaining power requires strategies to structure relations with others; (2) matrixes of power, knowledge, and violence subject minds and bodies to techniques of population control; and (3) power relations use moral discourse and produce moral subjects. This theoretical framework was put in place initially, then the empirical research was conducted. The empirical analysis appealed to readily available media sources in the United States, international media, and other internet sources of professional news collecting agencies. Though there was a desire to use sources readily available in public discourse, some supplemental literature was used as well.3 The empirical narrative focuses on how the applied framework enables a particular reading about the activities of the Bush administration. Data were collected, events unfolded, and the model was amended until a clearer picture came into view.

EXERCISING AND RETAINING POWER REQUIRES STRATEGIES TO STRUCTURE RELATIONSHIPS As a realist, Machiavelli (1977, p. 44) claimed that he was ‘‘[p]utting asideyall the imaginary things that are said about princes, and getting down to the truth.’’ Because he believed ‘‘the less one trusts to chance, the better one’s hope of holding on’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 16), those in power should actively and carefully structure their relationships to other powers in favorable ways. In The Prince, he offers several suggestions.

Structuring Relations with Other Powers Princes are not omnipotent and therefore they should try to order the realities around them. Other power relations – sometimes involving groups they rely on – have the capacity to oust them (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 4). These power relations involve the people, confidants, nobles, the military, and external groups.

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In the process of attaining power, a prince must attend to social conditions of the region he aspires to rule. Divided cities are difficult to keep ‘‘since the weaker faction will join with the invader, and the stronger faction will not be able to hold out against them both’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 60). Also, defeated factions might find reason to join with other external powers and form a counter-offensive. Once power has been attained, a prince must manage the power relations between him, the people, and the nobles. Machiavelli (1977, p. 53) advocates ‘‘every effort to keep the aristocracy from desperation and to satisfy the populace by making them happy; this is one of the most important of a prince’s duties.’’ However, the aristocracy and the people carry unequal gravity for the prince. ‘‘The worst thing a prince can expect from a hostile population is that they will abandon him; but hostile nobles may not only abandon him, but attack him directly’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 29). Machiavelli (1977, p. 55) counsels that ‘‘when princes cannot help being hated by someone, they ought first of all to try to avoid universal hatred, and when they cannot do this, they should try as hard as they can to avoid the hatred of the most powerful group around.’’ This often means wielding the state in favor of the most powerful class and this often means protecting the nobles’ interests. Afterward, the people can be kept from turning against the prince by keeping offenses against them to a minimum and keeping those offended scattered and weak (Machiavelli, 1977, pp. 7–8). A prince must also manage his relationships with external powers. Though they can be used against each other, he should not simply play rivals off one another haphazardly. Different configurations of class power create different contingencies. Since one ‘‘who makes another powerful ruins himself’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 12), ‘‘a prince should never ally himself with someone more powerful than himself in order to attack a third party, except in cases of absolute necessity’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 65). A prince, as a consequence, should balance contending powers and carefully forge strategic alliances by being a ‘‘protector of his weak neighbors’’ and ‘‘should try to weaken his strong neighbors’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 8). While alliances are important, a prince must avoid ‘‘being under the control of other people’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 65) and retain his right to unilateralist sovereignty. To avoid a counterattack from the ousted, he should ‘‘extinguish the line of the previous prince’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, pp. 5–6). Such tightening of ranks might elicit hatred from a powerful group, but, since this group might change over time, a prince should maintain a constant vigilance and control over events around him by defining the situation through using discursive and dramaturgical techniques.

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Discursive Techniques and Defining the Situation Because discursive knowledge and power relations are internally related (Foucault, 1980), alternative definitions of a situation can threaten a prince’s rule by persuading a substantial number of people to act and think in undesired ways. Using discursive techniques to structure knowledge reduces the odds of such threats from arising. Managing Historical, Traditional, and Popular Knowledge The dynamics of power involve spatial and temporal relations. Previous princes function as historical examples for studying various strategies. Machiavelli (1977, p. 16) tells us that ‘‘a prudent man should always follow the footsteps of the great and imitate those who have been supreme,’’ a strategy that assists the prince in appearing to be in continuity with historically acclaimed standards of ruling. A prince’s continuity with the past can be projected into the future by making sure ‘‘his various projects have risen one out of the other’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 63), thus keeping populations and foreign powers in check. While rooting his new designs in historical knowledge of the past, a prince should not move too quickly to re-define the myths, rituals, and customs of the populace (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 6). Custom, in fact, can be made into his ally, ‘‘for even though the prince himself may be new, the laws of the state are old, and are set up to receive him just as if he were a hereditary monarch’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 59). A wise prince is one who constructs a discursive continuity for the appropriate spatial and temporal moment by ingraining himself in a community’s traditions by attending ‘‘their gatherings from time to time, giving evidence of his humanity and munificence’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, pp. 65–66), but one who also ‘‘adjusts his behavior to the temper of the times’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 71). Mastering Specialized and Pragmatic Knowledge A prince’s decisions must be made on knowledge appropriate to the question at issue. However, there is no guarantee that a new prince will be an expert in all the matters on which he will have to decide. Power exercised thus often requires specialized knowledge. Given that ‘‘neither priests nor ordinary citizens know much about military matters’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 38), a ‘‘prince should always take counselywhen he wants advice, not when other people want to give it. But he should also be a liberal questioner, and afterwards a patient hearer of the truth regarding whatever he has asked about’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 68). Though external affairs might dominate his attention, the populace is an audience and, therefore, it is pragmatic ‘‘for

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a prince to give special evidence of his ability in internal affairs’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 64). Even if the population remains unaware of their potentiality as a threat, by manipulating and institutionalizing knowledge, a prince might hope to prevent the people from discovering this fact. He might want to fool others, but not himself. Manipulating and Institutionalizing Knowledge Though ultimate truth is irrelevant to power’s exercise, the princes who ‘‘have accomplished mostyknew how craftily to manipulate the minds of men’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 49) and have been ‘‘skillful in hiding [their] intentions’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 21). An important strategy is manipulating and institutionalizing publically available knowledge. Institutionalized knowledge ultimately is a definition of the situation backed by coercive governing force. A prince can disguise his real agenda by manipulating and dispersing knowledge through established institutions: build a military establishment, make allies, establish honors and rewards for service, put on festivals and other public displays, and make ‘‘use of the pretext of religion to prepare the way for still greater projects’’ (Machiavelli 1977, pp. 63–65). Dramaturgical Techniques and Defining the Situation Machiavelli, ‘‘also a theorist of impression management as political strategy,’’4 like Goffman (1959, p. 27), understood that ‘‘When an actor takes on an established social role, usually he finds that a particular front has already been established for it.’’ Because a prince’s role ‘‘requires him to drop all pretenses of being other things’’ (Goffman, 1959, p. 10), to maximize his effectiveness he should mobilize ‘‘the example of his actions’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 20). Goffman (1959, p. 51) explains: In response to the communication contingencies, performers commonly attempt to exert a kind of synecdochic responsibility, making sure that as many as possible of the minor events in the performance, however instrumentally inconsequential these events may be, will occur in such a way as to convey either no impression or an impression that is compatible and consistent with the over-all definition of the situation that is being fostered.

Successfully defining the situation helps structure relations with others by controlling their conduct: This control is achieved largely by influencing the definition of the situation which others come to formulate, and he can influence this definition by expressing himself in such a way as to give them the kind of impression that will lead them to act voluntarily in

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accordance with his own plans. Thus, when an individual appears in the presence of others, there will usually be some reason for him to mobilize his activity so that it will convey an impression to others which it is in his interests to convey. (Goffman,1959, pp. 3–4)

As a dramaturgist, a prince can use several techniques to control the conduct of his subjects. Have a Competent and Loyal Staff As members of a team, the prince and a competent and loyal staff should cooperatively use techniques of impression management to define and control situations. Since key decisions made involve the staff, the decisionmaking process can be mystified by controlling the amount of backstage behavior observable to front stage audiences (Goffman, 1959, p. 93). ‘‘At one extreme there will be individuals who rarely appear before the audience and are little concerned with appearances. At the other extreme are what are sometimes called ‘purely ceremonial roles’, whose performers will be concerned with the appearance that they make and concerned with little else’’ (Goffman, 1959, p. 107); ‘‘those who work backstage will achieve technical standards while those who work in the front region will achieve expressive ones’’ (Goffman, 1959, p. 124). Because staff members possess knowledge of various quality, ‘‘a prince who is not shrewd himself cannot get good counseling, unless he just happens to put himself in the hands of a single man who makes all the decisions and is very knowing’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 68), though, to project the image of the prince’s sovereign authority, this function is often kept from an audience’s view. A staff thus allows a prince to delegate functions and roles to his advisors, such as maintenance of appearances and decision making. In the front region, idealization techniques are used to create favorable impressions and suppress undesired ones. The staff, functioning as the front stage proxy through which an audience can interpret the qualities of the prince, manages and sanitizes the image of the prince available to and given off to audiences. However, ‘‘it is apparent that if members of a team must cooperate to maintain a given definition of the situation before their audience, they will hardly be in a position to maintain that particular impression before one another. Accomplices in the maintenance of a particular appearance of things, they are forced to define one another as persons ‘in the know’’’ (Goffman, 1959, pp. 82–83). Given these principles, a prince needs a loyal staff to manipulate knowledge for public consumption, but not his own. Not only does receiving advice from his staff help his decision making, the staff also insulates him by deflecting attention, blame, and ultimate

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responsibility for poor decisions. This, Machiavelli (1977, p. 66) tells us, ‘‘is a matter of no small importance to a prince, since they [his decisions] will be good or bad, depending on his judgement. The first notion one gets of a prince’s intelligence comes from the men around him.’’ In this way, the staff is a surrogate mediating representation of the prince. This function creates problems, however. A prince is stuck between needing a staff, using them for his own ends, and the possibility of alienating them and having them turn on him. Though the prince ‘‘wants to keep his minister obedient’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, pp. 65–66), the possibility of alienating them guarantees no promise of this, i.e., among the primary functions of a staff is acting as scapegoats. To reduce the dangers of them rebelling, ‘‘the princeyought only to beware of inflicting serious injury on any of his personal servants or those who are employed near him in the service of the state’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 57). A prince, therefore, must make sure that a staff does not reverse the power relation against him. Use Wisdom and Moderation While power might be won by force, guile, or trickery, Machiavelli (1977, p. 65) advises that ‘‘No leader should ever suppose he can invariably take the safe course, since all choices involve risks. In the nature of things, you can never try to escape one danger without encountering another; but prudence consists in knowing how to recognize the nature of the different dangers and in accepting the least bad as good.’’ In making decisions, ‘‘if a prince conducts himself with patience and caution, and the times and circumstances are favorable to those qualities, he will flourish’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 71). With wisdom and a moderate temperament, an effective prince is decisive but not rash, and thus ‘‘should be slow to believe rumors and to commit himself to action on the basis of them.’’ In the final analysis, however, ‘‘it is better to be rash than timid’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, pp. 47, 72). Princes must be carefully calculative in strategy when bold in their initiatives. Use and Display Vices Strategically A prince must learn to act like one. But since ‘‘it is impossible to have and exercise [those ‘many qualitiesythat are considered good’]yA prince must be shrewd enough to avoid the public disgrace of those vices that would lose him his state’’ and avoid ‘‘any compromise to his dignity, for that must be preserved at all costs’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, pp. 45, 66). Nevertheless, ‘‘a prince who wants to keep his post must learn how not to be good, and use that knowledge, or refrain from using it, as necessity requires’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 44). Because there are ‘‘vices that enable him to reign’’ (Machiavelli,

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1977, p. 46), any such discreditable characteristic must be used and presented strategically. The appropriate impression management technique is making sure an ‘‘idealized impression is offered by accentuating certain facts and concealing others’’ (Goffman, 1959, p. 65). Because a ‘‘performanceyin a front region may be seen as an effort to give the appearance that his activity embodies certain standards’’ (Goffman, 1959, p. 107), a prince will be judged against ‘‘the standards of conduct and appearance that one’s social grouping attaches thereto’’ (Goffman, 1959, p. 75). ‘‘If an individual is to give expression to ideal standards during his performance, then he will have to forego or conceal action which is inconsistent with these standards’’ (Goffman, 1959, p. 41). A prince, therefore ‘‘must be a great liar and hypocrite’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 50). Though susceptible to being judged by them, a prince is nevertheless not bound by his audience’s moral codes. To avoid problems, he should magnify his virtues by displaying them publically and keep his extravagant vices away from public inspection to foster the impression that no breach in morality has occurred (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 5). Though lying is an important strategic skill, it violates community standards and thus discreditable truth-claims must be managed with care. Lucky for a prince and his staff, ‘‘it is usually possible for the performer to create intentionally almost any kind of false impression without putting himself in the indefensible position of having told a clear-cut lie. Communication techniques such as innuendo, strategic ambiguity, and crucial omissions allow the misinformer to profit from lies without, technically, telling any’’ (Goffman 1959, p. 62), ‘‘only shame, guilt, or fear prevent them from’’ misrepresenting the facts (Goffman, 1959, p. 58). If strategically mobilizing the appropriate symbolism in his expressive performance is done successfully, ‘‘Everyone sees what you seem to be, few know what you really are’’ and those who see character traits contrary to the virtues of compassion, honor, humanity, integrity, and religiosity cannot damage your reputation so long as their number is kept minimal (Machiavelli, 1977, pp. 47, 51). ‘‘In this way an impression of infallibility, so important in many presentations, is maintained’’ (Goffman, 1959, p. 43).

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION AS MACHIAVELLIAN DRAMATURGISTS Given the above principles, several questions are suggested: How did George W. Bush’s administration structure the United States’s relations to

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other powers? How did they handle the previous line of power holders, both externally and internally? Did they strengthen weak neighbors and weaken strong ones? Did they ally with an equally powerful or more powerful group to attack a third? Did they have their army invade a divided city? What was the outcome? What background and competence is evidenced by Bush’s staff? Did they attempt to control discourse through manipulating information, including historical, traditional, and popular knowledge? In what ways did Bush administration officials attempt to institutionalize such knowledge? Was wisdom and moderation demonstrated by their tactics? How were vices downplayed and virtues magnified?

The Bush Administration’s Strategy of Unilateralist Sovereignty and Tightening of Ranks The capitalist class as a whole did quite well under the previous Clinton administration. However, a sector of it, heavily represented by oil, defense, and energy industries, as well as the religious right, gravitated toward Bush’s candidacy in the 2000 election, though his support was tepid throughout the general population. During the primaries, Republican candidates complained publically that Bush had no real message but comparatively greater amounts of cash with which to dominate the campaign. During the campaign, Bush’s handlers were careful to not offend the leaders of the religious right while at the same time trying to capture voters in the center. Through providing more corporate campaign donations to Bush than any candidate in history, loosely organized efforts of a faction of capitalists played a role in moving him into the White House.5 Further, without disputed ballots and an intervention by the U.S. Supreme Court, Bush likely would not have won control of the executive branch (Moore, 2001). Afterward, a massive public relations campaign urged the country to close ranks around the new commander-in-chief. Even a defeated Gore succumbed to the pressure. Rather than fulfilling his campaign rhetoric about being a ‘‘uniter, not a divider,’’ however, Bush’s policies increasingly split public opinion.6 These divisions in the population became reflected in divisions among political leadership.7 World opinion was decidedly against Bush’s candidacy. The Bush administration closed its ranks around elite circles and interests and, unlike Clintonian liberalism, their service to capital was directed toward a narrower set of capitalist interests. Bush, an oilman from an oil family (Arbusto and Harken), had political ties to energy magnates such as Kenneth Lay, the former CEO of Enron. Vice-President Dick Cheney’s

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background was in both oil and defense industries (Haliburton). National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice was a former oil executive from Chevron. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld also came from a corporate background (former CEO of G.D. Searle and General Instrument). Though he later left the administration, Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill was chair at Alcoa. Together with the two-party monopoly, these corporate interlocks more easily allowed the executive branch to act as an agent for the interests of weapons contractors and oil industry executives. Their policies must be understood in this context. Following the principle that princes ought to avoid, as far as they can, being under the control of other people, the Bush administration followed a decidedly unilateralist-sovereign path. It pulled the United States out of treaties aimed at preventing global warming (i.e., The Kyoto Protocols) and pursued contested nuclear and space-based weapons programs. The administration repeatedly warned that it felt no compulsion to cooperate with global allies and that it retained the right to act unilaterally in economic (e.g., the World Trade Organization), political (e.g., the United Nations and NATO, the International Criminal Court), and military matters (i.e., Afghanistan and Iraq). While this stance was congruent with the position forwarded by former Secretary of State Madeline Albright during the Clinton administration, Bush’s staff’s approach was decidedly more strident and unilateralist. With a disputed election behind them and without a mandate, the administration faced a population that was not clamoring for war but was facing a sagging economy. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the administration promoted the aggressive military agenda that a group of neoconservatives in the Reaganite mold had urged Clinton to pursue.8 This group of ‘‘neocons’’ opposed Clinton’s policies and believed that President Bush’s (Sr.) failure to finish off Saddam Hussein’s regime in the first Gulf War was a costly mistake. However, the disciplined focus the administration had on conquering Afghanistan and Iraq threatened to distract it away from domestic problems within the United States, such as growing ranks of the impoverished, rising unemployment rates, declines in consumer confidence, growing federal deficits, a crisis in the healthcare system, and persistent questions about the president’s legitimacy. As a result, closing ranks took some time. Former members of Bush Sr.’s administration, such as erstwhile Republican loyalists and family friends Colin Powell (Secretary of State at the time), Brent Scowcroft, and former General Schwarzkopf (military leader of the first Gulf War) warned against starting a war with Iraq. Though closing the ranks of the U.S. political class was never complete (former

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military leader Wesley Clark tested the waters for a presidential bid), key staff members coalesced into a working team and the war was later launched. As princes with newly acquired power in another territory, they needed to extinguish the line of the previous prince. First, the Baathist regime and its military was dissolved. Next, unable to locate its key players, the U.S. military released decks of playing cards where each card represented members of Hussein’s regime. Various suits and cards represented a hierarchy of villainy and wantedness. Saddam, predictably, was the ace of spades. As various members of his ruling group were capture or killed, the media reported their name, rank, position, and card representation. The killing of Hussein’s sons was also given prominent play. As the ‘‘cards’’ fell, the media aped military language of ‘‘tightening the noose’’ around Saddam’s neck, representing the fact that his ranks were definitely loosened, dispersed, and extinguished. However, on-going insurgent attacks on U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians constantly reminded that this process was never complete.

The Bush Administration’s Balancing of Contending Powers and Forging of Strategic Alliances After the invasion of Afghanistan and during the lead-up to war with Iraq, the contending powers of interest were France, Russia, Germany, and China. Each needed to be balanced against the other. In line with Machiavelli’s principle about not strengthening competitors, China and Russia were treated as minor players in the debates leading up to war with Iraq and afterward. Capitalists in oil and armaments industries would only be threatened by strengthening these competitors. Bush and his team were careful not to do so. They also did little to court the support from historical allies in France and Germany, which drew closer to one another, temporarily putting aside their historical animosities. The possible reasons why the Bush administration rejected their objections to the invasion of Iraq were not always made apparent to the news-consuming public. Whether Europeans had good moral and logical reasons to oppose the war seemed irrelevant to the Bush administration. Neither allowing moral sentiments to lead policy decisions nor strengthening contending powers was their manifest strategy. Geopolitical realities prevented unilateralist sovereignty from becoming a singular strategy, however. Having gotten the war that was wanted, Bush was moved to discontinue the blanket snubbing of European allies and worked to mend fences. In an apparent move to mollify those offended,

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Bush traveled to Europe (twice) to assure them that the United States was still an ally, that Europe was a friend, and that the administration would stand behind its cross-Atlantic commitments. The first trip to Europe was cast as a way to makeup with France, snub Germany, and court Russia National Public Radio (NPR). The trip also made it clear that Britain is the second lieutenant, and the Bush administration was a prince to be bargained with on terms it dictated. Understanding the utility, Poland, Ukraine, Macedonia, and even Sri Lanka made gestures of help, solidarity and direct assistance, though such support was generally limited. Out of 70 countries whose assistance was requested, only 24 promised aid, some sending as few as two dozen military personnel.9 However, problems continued. As casualties, costs and logistical problems mounted, administration members acknowledged that outside assistance was needed. By late summer 2003, going it alone was proving more difficult than expected and Bush turned to the UN for help. Though read as conceding that its plans had not panned out as expected, the administration still refused to relinquish its right to unilateralist sovereignty over Iraq and came away from the UN practically emptyhanded.10 That the United States needed UN support provided Europe more leverage than was desired and resulted in a loss of U.S. face. Perhaps predictably, the specter of ‘‘another Vietnam’’ was declared in many sectors as the administration found itself bogged down, its claims discredited, and practically alone.

The Bush Administration’s Attempts at Controlling the Discourse The concentration of media ownership by multinational corporations provides a service to capitalist interests by narrowing the range of public information and debate (Bagdikian, 1997; Herman & Chomsky, 1988). From its inception, the Bush administration relied on this fact in its attempt at controlling the definition of the situation, enjoying mixed results. Though the administration’s electoral machinations were given little critical scrutiny by U.S. media outlets, questions and debates lingered and jokes about Bush’s intelligence continued to dog him.11 These facts, combined with the popular assumption that Dick Cheney was in charge of the White House, made the mobilization of symbolic activities necessary to turn Bush into a statesman, a job given to advisor Karl Rove (Moore & Slater, 2003). September 11th provided handlers a sufficient crisis to demonstrate Bush’s newfound presidential skills, such as photo-ops at ‘‘ground zero,’’ and a rhetoric of ‘‘courage,’’ ‘‘resolve,’’ and ‘‘justice.’’

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From its inception, the administration rarely operated in the open and forthrightly, though its initiatives were definitely bold. Cheney organized a task force to set a national energy policy. Later, according to the General Accounting Office, he intervened to prevent exposure of the details of this task force and refused to turn over key documents.12 According to Judicial Watch, a conservative legal watchdog, their deliberations included a discussion about Iraq’s oil and the desire to open the country up to foreign investment.13 They used the post-September 11th climate to push a regressive tax plan through, to increase military spending, and to sacrifice environmental health to corporate profits. It also provided the justification to launch an attack on Afghanistan, one that was long wanted by members of the Bush administration for securing access to Central Asian gas, oil, and other resources (Mosaddeq Ahmed, 2002). Afterward, Iraq was targeted for its geo-political assets. In order to paint the needed picture (i.e., the military action was a war on terrorism), control of the permissible grounds of discourse developed along a multi-pronged strategy. Terms Bush used domestically became part of the contemporary vernacular, e.g., ‘‘evil-doers,’’ ‘‘war on terror,’’ and ‘‘weapons of mass destruction.’’ The attacks were given names like, ‘‘Operation Infinite Justice’’ (Afghanistan) and ‘‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’’ (Iraq), which, according to several reports, was initially slated for ‘‘Operation Iraqi Liberation,’’ a term whose anagram would not, perhaps, provide the desired impression. These discursive constructions omitted the fact that the Iraqi as well as the Afghani people did not support the Taliban, Bin Laden, nor Saddam, rather, they were occupied by them. Attacking these countries threatened bystanders more so than actual supporters of terrorism. Of these potentially competing versions of reality available for public discourse, not all were conducive to the desired policy initiatives. Was it a ‘‘War for Oil’’ or a ‘‘War on Terror’’? In order to define their policies in terms of the latter, controlling the discourse involved depicting their plans as in reaction to the murders of September 11, 2001 and preventing inconvenient facts from becoming part of the popular discourse on the motivations for the war. In fact, as detailed by the London Times (May 1, 2005), a secret, top-level British government memo, written after diplomats met with the Bush Administration, stated that ‘intelligence and facts were being fixed around policy,’ and admittance counter to the public image cultivated by the administration. Though the Taliban and Bin Laden were given heavy play in initial press reports, the origin of most of the hijackers and their financiers, i.e., Saudi Arabia, was not. The administration was successful in deflecting public anger away from this sultanate and toward the regime that had taken over

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Afghanistan. This incongruity was only occasionally a point of public debate, though concerns constantly grew, especially after a government report on September 11, 2001 was released. Bush, against the interests of an informed citizenry, censored the section about these ties, ordering 28 pages cut from a nearly 900 page joint Senate and House report detailing that senior Saudi officials helped distribute yhundreds of millions of dollars to charitable organizations that might have helped finance the September 11, 2001, attacksyThe declassified information includes testimony of several unidentified officials who criticized the Saudi government for being uncooperative in terrorism investigations, but makes no charge that Riyadh financed groups that supported terrorySome people who have read the classified chapter said it is a searing indictment of Saudi Arabia’s ruling elite who have, under the guise of support for Islamic charities, distributed millions of dollars to terrorists through an informal network of Saudi nationals, including some in the United StatesyBut other U.S. officials questioned whether the joint committee had made a conclusive case linking Saudi funding to the hijack plot. They said the stricken chapter retraces Saudi Arabia’s well-documented support for Islamic charitable groups. They said the report asserts without convincing evidence that Saudi officials knew that recipient groups used the money to finance terror.14

Controlling the discourse by censoring a government report about the murder of Americans (and others) in order to protect what has ostensibly been considered, though a U.S. ally, an undemocratic, patriarchal dictatorship raised many questions not immediately answered to anyone’s satisfaction. Bush also had to deal with the issue of international law. The Charter of the United Nations, on the rules of war, states that one country can use military violence legally against another only if the other country presents an imminent threat. His administration attempted to shift the meaning of selfdefense, in the sense of using the military to prevent an attack soon-inprogress, to preemptive war, a situation where an attack is launched before military aggression can be initiated by the other party.15 Through Powell’s influence, Bush attempted to get UN approval of their designs to attack and occupy Iraq, which they termed ‘‘liberation.’’ Such UN approval would institutionalize their program, though it was not forthcoming. In a particularly Orwellian attempt at controlling the discourse, the administration asked that a tapestry be covered during Powell’s presentation at the United Nations.16 This tapestry depicts people fleeing the dogs of war, something the UN was ostensibly created to prevent. Using the UN as a cover to allow such a war would not place the administration in the needed discursive context. During the war, control over the discourse of American news was assisted by ‘‘embedding’’ journalists in military units and by having military spokespersons

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filter out to talk shows and news programs. Both ploys allowed the military to control what the media and the public would or would not see and to place spin on the facts that got loose. ‘‘The Pentagon was not faxing instructions to the newsrooms, nor would they have to,’’ writes Danny Schechter. He continues: MSNBC boasted of how their war coverage brought Americans together and ‘‘emphasized the positive, not the negative’’yFormer TV reporter Michael Burton offered ayview of embedding: ‘‘The idea originated with the Pentagon, where military and political strategists pitched the ideas to editors last year as a compromise. The Pentagon strategists, already planning for the Iraqi war, wanted proud, positive, and patriotic coverage over the national airwaves. If the editors agreed to all their provisions for security reviews, flagging of sensitive information, limitations on filming dead bodies, and other restrictions, then journalists would be welcome. The editors went along and accepted the ground rules without a fight’’yThe cumulative impact of the embedded reporters’ work prompted former Pentagon press chief Kenneth Bacon to tell the Wall Street Journal, ‘‘They couldn’t hire actors to do as good a job as they have done for the military.’’ (Schechter, 2003, pp. 66–67)

When juxtaposed to a wider range of factual details, it becomes clear that the media played the covering role expected of it in the administration’s efforts to control the discourse. The New York Times admitted as much when it apologized to its readers for not taking a more skeptical stand toward the administration’s claims. Like the U.S. media in general, nationalist cheerleading effectively transformed them into a vehicle for propaganda.

The Bush Administration’s Management of Historical, Traditional, and Popular Knowledge The success of the administration’s management of historical, traditional, and popular knowledge was difficult, but remained ever crucial and necessary. Bush’s language struck a chord on both sides of the globe, though quite different ones. In terms of historical knowledge, Bush’s use of the word ‘‘crusade’’ conjured up images of ‘‘The Crusades’’ in Muslim areas of the world. He later dropped this term after wide criticism. Depicting alQaida, Osama Bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein as evil-incarnate meant that their previous ties to the United States should not be made into issues of debate. Few made them so. In terms of managing popular knowledge, their tactics often were crude and mixed in their effectiveness. The U.S. military bombed the most open of Arab society’s media outlets, Al-Jezeera, in what

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was interpreted as an act of intimidation.17 The U.S. military denied targeting the news organization.18 The planners of U.S. aggression counted on the Iraqi people’s hatred for Saddam as a catalyst that would provide a covering role for their occupation. Cheney’s thinking seems to have been that once the tyrant was toppled, Americans would be embraced as liberators.19 While some such sentiment was expressed by people in the streets, it could hardly be called general or overwhelming. It appears the administration might have trusted too much in Machiavelli’s (1977, p. 8) dictum: ‘‘The rule is that as soon as a powerful foreigner enters a district, those in the area who are least powerful flock to him, out of hatred of the strong man who has been ruling over them. Thus the foreigner need to be at no pains to gain over these people, because they will quickly and gladly join in the new state he had acquired.’’ The Iraqi people hated Saddam only a little more than they hate Americans, who were as likely to be seen as occupiers as they were liberators, increasingly so the longer the military stayed in place. Moreover, the Americans created enemies in those who profited under the regime (Baathists) while failing to fill the needs of those who might have been won over. With the dismissal of the Iraqi army leaving no one to protect the borders, and with an inflamed population, counterrevolution and guerilla warfare became a constant threat. Anti-American terrorism had been created where none had existed before.20 The Bush administration seemed to have fooled themselves by believing too much in the story they were concocting for public consumption. In terms of popular knowledge in the United States, Lynne Cheney (the Vice-President’s wife), and U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman (the former Democratic candidate for Vice-President), initiated efforts to monitor and discipline the professorate.21 Dissenting students were visited by FBI officials. Journalism became a division of the military as generals invaded media outlets, and Ari Fleisher and Donald Rumsfeld conducted press conferences to shape the needed frame of discussion. With a quick proclamation of an end to ‘‘formal hostilities,’’ the organized oppositional discourse and social movement that sporadically emerged lost their rallying point. Shows of democratization, such as putting together a council of Iraqi decision makers (and, later, managed elections), were used to win over the Iraqi public and American skeptics. It is likely this was not based solely on altruistic or morally principled reasons but on a strategic assumption supported by Machiavelli (1977, p. 60): ‘‘Those you select for special favor will think themselves obliged to you, and the others will forgive you, judging that men deserve special rewards when they assume special risks and obligations.’’ This post-war governing council, composed of 25 members (mostly men),

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included a cross-section of the country’s ethnic factions. Violating one of Machiavelli’s rules in one of their first decisions, they abolished six national holidays celebrating the Saddam era. But, given the level of antipathy held toward Saddam by the populace, perhaps this violation would not necessarily influence their overall strategic position. Still, the Iraqi people expressed skepticism at the council’s ability to be independent of American influence.22

The Bush Administration’s Mastery of Specialized and Pragmatic Knowledge Though oil interests, including Cheney and Unocal, had long been interested in the Caspian region’s natural resources, they had been unable to get the Taliban to agree to their terms.23 In 1998, according to The Guardian, ‘‘Dick Cheneyythen chief executive of a major oil services company, remarked: ‘I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian.’’’24 A few years after talks failed and two months before September 11, 2001, the administration sent word to the Taliban that they planned military action in the country if they still refused to open it up to foreign investment.25 Information about such long-term relationships had to be tightly controlled during the push to invade Afghanistan. Those who questioned the need to unleash violence on the country were treated as unpatriotic at best, unwitting abettors of terrorism at worst.26 While some questioned why Afghanistan was targeted rather than Saudi Arabia, few took seriously the Taliban’s claim that they would hand Bin Laden over if sufficient evidence of his culpability was presented. Such specialized knowledge was subsequently produced in small and sporadic offerings by a compliant U.S. press. In a pragmatic manner, unilateral attacks against other societies by an ostensible democracy are made easier if there is narrow accessibility to the information necessary for understanding the motives behind such policies. Shortly after taking office, Bush and his staff worked to tighten the secrecy standards at the federal level. The Freedom of Information Act was altered, as were the rules on the release of archives from past administrations.27 Bush’s press conferences were few. Managing access to their backstage and aiding the mystification process, the administration was, as a result, called the most secretive White House in memory.28 After September 11th, draconian measures of population control and surveillance, such as the Patriot Act and the Patriot Act (II), were pushed through Congress. The

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Patriot Act allows increased monitoring of internet use, warrantless searches and indefinite detention of suspects without charges or council, and seizure of library records without warrant, among other things. It opens the door for greater governmental surveillance of news-collecting agencies, including unannounced monitoring of phone lines and email if it is deemed that a reporter has contacted an ‘‘agent of a foreign power,’’ even if it is in the course of doing a story on terrorism and with the provision that content of discussions over the phone or email is still off limits, almost guaranteeing a chilling effect.29 But this was not yet enough. In early September 2003, Bush asked for allowing federal law enforcement agencies to issue ‘‘administrative subpoenas’’ in terrorism cases without bringing such requests to a judge or a grand jury, expanding the death penalty in federal cases to more terrorismrelated activities, and making it harder for those accused of activity in terrorism-related cases to make bail, arguing that the previous policies were ‘‘unreasonable obstacles’’ to his war on terror.30 In effect, Bush, who had first argued that the terrorist acts against the United States were in response to the country’s traditions of freedom, moved to prevent future terrorist acts by reducing that very freedom.

The Bush Administration’s Manipulation and Institutionalization of Knowledge Controlling information and the definition of situations without outright lying presented a problem for the administration.31 Before and after September 11th, as well as during and after the war, knowledge was manipulated, concocted, and wildly distorted. Distortion techniques such as innuendo, strategic ambiguity, and crucial omissions were common. In their most important and consistent spin, administration members attempted to link al-Qaida, Osama Bin Laden, and the Iraqi leadership by defining Saddam’s regime as a supporter of terrorism, as possessing weapons of mass destruction, and as being involved in September 11th. However, in terms of Iraq’s status as a threat, the discourse varied from day to day, from report to report, and from source to source.32 A review of Powell’s UN presentation in the U.S. press concluded that his case was ‘‘thin.’’33 A majority of the world found many of his claims either dubious or not reaching the point of justifying war.34 Claims were made that Saddam was attempting to secure aluminum tubes for producing nuclear weapons, though experts questioned whether such tubes could be used for those purposes.35 Dubious claims in Bush’s State of the Union Speech, meant as a convincing climax of his

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administration’s push toward war, escalated their difficulties in securing the needed definition of the situation (a matter to which we will return). After the war had started, according to a commission charged with investigating the September 11, 2001 attacks, its work was hampered by executive agencies at the federal level, including failure of the Pentagon and the Justice Department to respond with adequate swiftness. An additional complaint was that White House officials failed to allow interviews of personnel without the presence of government colleagues, an act that was interpreted as an attempt at intimidating witnesses.36 Beyond such efforts, spin and the stretching of terms and definitions were, and remain, common methods of controlling the discourse without directly lying. ‘‘‘There’s been an awful lot of work done,’ Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Fox News Sunday in an interview taped last week. ‘A lot of the country is relatively stable.’’’37 This is an ambiguous spin that could fit the definition of almost any situation. Afterward, attacks on American soldiers continued unabated. Similar to the way changes in quantity lead to changes in quality, however, at a certain point the spin on a story transforms it into something that increasingly resembles a lie. Where this point is often is something that the audiences decide. In his State of the Union speech, Bush attempted to make the case for war against Iraq, in part, by claiming that Saddam Hussein had attempted to acquire material needed for nuclear weapons from Niger.38 There was also another attempt to link September 11th with Saddam Hussein: ‘‘Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam aids and protects terrorists, including members of al-Qaida.’’39 Though no such direct connection was established, Congress and the American public accepted the premise as a justification for the war, even after the press had reported the lack of such a link. In June of 2003, for instance, a poll (Knowledge Networks) had found that 52% of Americans believed that a direct connection between Hussein’s regime and the al-Qaida network had been found.40 No such link had in fact been found.41 In mid-late September, Cheney reiterated his contention that linking Saddam with September 11th was a logical conclusion, while only days later Rumsfeld asserted that no links had ever been uncovered. So did Bush, in a particular spin: ‘‘‘There’s no question that Saddam Hussein had al-Qaida ties’, the president said. But he also said, ‘We’ve had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September 11th.’’42 Nor, it might be added, was any evidence of actual weapons of mass destruction ever uncovered. The question of the severity and immediacy of threat Saddam’s regime posed continued to be a matter of debate and speculation after the war’s

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start, with a growing level of doubt even among previous supporters, especially congressional Democrats rediscovering some resolve as elections approached. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.VA.), of the Senate Intelligence Committee, held that the new stance by the administration – that Saddam was developing weapons of mass destruction as opposed to already possessing them – ‘‘was not the basis on which the nation went to war.’’ In a discursive shift, expressing his confidence that the needed information was already attained, Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) held that rather than weapons, evidence of a weapons program would soon be uncovered.43 Former CIA deputy director Richard Kerr led a study that concluded that President Bush and his aides were correct to claim Hussein had sought weapons of mass destruction, but the specificity of the threat, their exact location, and the stage of their development could not be confirmed to the same degree of assuredness with which the claim of their existence was made.44 This contradicted Rumsfeld’s earlier insistence that the administration knew exactly where these weapons were. In the face of criticism over his State of the Union address, the administration ‘‘released portions of a topsecret report from last year that concluded that Saddam Hussein was actively seeking nuclear weapons.’’ Still, defining the situation in their favor and deflecting responsibility away from Bush remained difficult.45 As details of the gap between claims of Hussein’s supposed efforts to secure nuclear material in Niger and the quality of the evidence on which such claims were based emerged (in part, forged documents were accepted and used by British intelligence and forwarded to the Americans), the Bush administration’s veracity, as well as British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s, increasingly came under scrutiny. By July 13, 2003, the press reported that ‘‘two former Bush administration intelligence officials say the evidence linking Hussein to the group responsible for the September 11th terrorist attacks was never more than sketchy at best. ‘There was no significant pattern of cooperation between Iraq and the al-Qaida terrorist operation’, former State Department intelligence official Greg Thielmann said this week. Intelligence agencies agreed on the ‘lack of a meaningful connection to al-Qaida’, and said so to the White House and Congress, said Thielmann, who left State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research last September.’’ Because no direct link existed between the two, Bob Graham, a top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, expressed dismay at the repeated claim that the war on Iraq was part of the war on terrorism.46 It was reported that Cheney paid regular visits to the Pentagon, read as pressuring analysts to come to the conclusions the administration wanted. In a retort, ‘‘The White House on Monday dismissed as a ‘bunch of bull’ charges that

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President George W. Bush used disputed intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq and said there was no need to delve further into the matter which Democrats want investigated.’’47 This did not settle the matter, as insiders in the national security apparatus began accusing the administration of intentionally distorting the evidence presented to the U.S. public and the world.48 Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) accused the administration of fraud in its case for war with Iraq. It is perhaps useful to revisit the fact that the administration publicly floated a proposal about an ‘‘Office of Strategic Influence,’’ which had tasked itself, according to the BBC, with ‘‘the covert planting of disinformation in foreign media.’’49 The office was reportedly closed after criticism depicted it as Orwellian, contrary to the values the administration preferred to be projected. Nevertheless, consider the media coverage regarding the episode involving U.S. soldier, Jessica Lynch. Private Lynch was injured when her vehicle wrecked while in action. After treatment in an Iraqi hospital, she was ‘‘rescued’’ by Marines, accompanied by great media fanfare. The story initially forwarded included the claims that she had been engaged in close combat when injured, that she had fought until she had run out of bullets, that she had been shot several times, and that the Marines were deployed in a dangerous operation that involved engaging the enemy (it turns out they were invited by the hospital staff).50 This story changed from day to day in the U.S. press. Britain’s BBC later broke the story that the tenor of the raid and the level and reported source of her injuries were manufactured. Other foreign media speculated that this was manipulated information coming from an operation out of the White House.51 Skeptics read into statements by Rumsfeld that the Office of Strategic Influence was still operative.52 While some knowledge must be tightly controlled, other knowledge, such as ‘‘the ‘militarized economy’ of the U.S. is a ‘politically forbidden topic’ (131)’’ (Breight, 1996, p. 239). One piece of forbidden information was that a link did exist between Iraq, al-Qaida, and terrorism, though an indirect one that ran through Washington as well as the Bush family. In Washington, as early as the late-1950s, Saddam ‘‘was seen by U.S. intelligence services as a bulwark of anticommunism and they used him as their instrument for more than 40 years, according to former U.S. intelligence diplomats and intelligence officials.’’ Assassination plots and other killings were involved.53 Under the Reagan Administration, Rumsfeld was dispatched to Iraq to cut weapons and oil deals with Saddam during his war with Iran as well as during his attacks on the Kurds.54 The CIA had long supported Islamic radicals as a tool against Moscow (and others), the same radicals that would bring Osama Bin Laden to power (Mosaddeq Ahmed, 2002), an outcome in

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line with the long history of former radicals once used by the CIA turning on them and becoming policy problems in their own right (Johnson, 2000). According to reports in the British press, the Bush family has long-standing ties with the Bin Laden family, including palace visits during George Sr. and Barbara Bush’s trips to Saudi Arabia,55 a Bin Laden brother being a crucial investor in Arbusto, George Bush Jr.’s first oil venture,56 and Bush Sr., Bin Laden’s father, and former British Prime Minister John Major being associated with The Carlyle Group, a defense contractor and one of the world’s largest corporations.57 Long-standing affiliations between the United States and Saudi Arabia, as well as the Bin Ladens and the Bushes58 led to preferential treatment, such as Bush authorizing a plane to pick up Bin Laden’s siblings in the United States and to fly them out of the country after the events of September 11, 2001, while all other flights in the country were grounded.59 These links were not made popularly known in the American press, though they were more direct links to terrorists than the supposed ‘‘yellowcake’’ sought in Africa or any other supposed links that directly connected the Iraqi regime with the crimes of September 11th.

The Competency and Loyalty of Bush’s Staff After his appointment to the presidency, and after September 11th, it was important to depict Bush as a competent Commander-in-Chief, though little suggested he was intellectually prepared for the role. The man in charge of Bush’s search committee for a Vice-President, Dick Cheney, was discovered by Bush as the most qualified candidate for that very job. This is very curious, and suggests a broader orchestration beyond simply Bush making decisions by himself to run for president, picking a running mate, and pursuing public service. Ever since, Cheney was commonly assumed to be the ‘‘real’’ person in charge with other advisors such as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, White House Senior Advisor Karl Rove, defense advisor Richard Pearle, and cabinet members, such as Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, and Donald Rumsfeld functioning as Bush’s (Cheney’s) staff, each of which had extensive experience with the capitalist political-economy and negotiating its organizational prerequisites and priorities. Powell, Cheney, and Rumsfeld served under previous administrations, and though this does not provide the necessary evidence of their competence, such a history suggests they possessed knowledge of the levers of government and had experience with the niceties of ruling. Staff member loyalty was considered a premium.

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The Bush Administration and the use of Wisdom and Moderation ‘‘Hubris’’ is a word often heard in reference to the actions of this administration, even from experienced CIA operatives (Scheuer, 2004). The administration treated questions about their policies as lacking in vision and insight, suggesting a long view involving bold initiatives. What sort of vision is evident? Briefly stated, they see themselves as architects of a global order where international capital reigns and the United States is the sole hegemonic power. This vision is rooted in an administration that sees itself as wise in strategy and bold in statecraft. The questions of their wisdom and moderation are developed further in the conclusion. Using and Displaying Bush’s Vices Strategically There were several facts about Bush’s past that needed to be downplayed by his handlers and the media. One was Bush’s questionable military record, a record which some believe shows him going AWOL on his National Guard unit.60 Another was his past relationship with alcohol and drugs, the former of which he admitted had been problematic (with one arrest for driving under the influence).61 Questions about his past relationship with cocaine were consistently dodged on the campaign trial. His religiosity, acquired during middle age, was offered as making amends for his past indiscretions, though many of those occurred while he was in his 30s. Once appointed to the presidency, many of these issues, which do not convey a favorable impression, were dropped by the media. His often maligned intelligence allowed few spontaneous question-and-answer periods, evidenced by the paucity of his press conferences. In the presidential debates, a controversy erupted over a visible bulge under the back of Bush’s suit jacket, raising speculation of backstage assistance via a hidden microphone.62 Bush’s public persona was (and remains) something constantly managed.

MATRIXES OF POWER, KNOWLEDGE, AND VIOLENCE SUBJECT MINDS AND BODIES TO TECHNIQUES OF POPULATION CONTROL With Foucault’s (1983, pp. 222–223) opinion that a ‘‘society without power relations can only be an abstraction,’’ his approach, like Machiavelli’s, is also, arguably, a realist one. He considered the ways in which the ‘‘human

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subject is placed inypower relations that are very complex’’ (Foucault, 1983, p. 209). Because a ‘‘network of power relations ends by forming a dense web that passes through apparatuses and institutions, without being exactly localized in them’’ (Foucault, 1978, p. 96), power relations unite social structures and individuals, making ‘‘the state’s poweryboth an individualizing and a totalizing form of power’’ (Foucault, 1983, pp. 213– 214). For Foucault (1977a, p. 202), power ‘‘has its principleyin a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanism produces the relation in which individuals are caught up.’’ While the capitalist-state does not stand over society as a single leviathan, it is nevertheless true that, in its population control function, ‘‘the state relies on the institutional integration of power relationships’’ (Foucault, 1978, p. 96). Starting with these principles, Foucault (1980, p. 96) urged that epistemology ‘‘should be concerned with power at its extremities, in its ultimate destinationsyin its more regional and local forms and institutionsythe point where power surmounts the rules of right which organise and delimit it and extends itself beyond them, invests itself in institutions, becomes embodied in techniques, and equips itself with instruments and eventually even violent means of material intervention.’’ There are five central tactics aimed toward structuring the range of possible action at the social extremities through making strategic impressions on minds and bodies: work, non-hatred, fear, obedience, and violence. Work The people must work for survival, so one of the worst mistakes a prince can make is ‘‘confiscating the property of his subjects or taking their women’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 52). The populace’s stability can be insured through keeping them secure at their work, given that ‘‘the man who opens up a branch of trade should not have to fear that he will be taxed out of existence’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 65). Since ‘‘the people generally [want quiet and are] pleased with unambitious princes’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 54), he can achieve compliance when the people are kept busy in their work, remain productive, and he need only resort to force in extreme situations. Non-Hatred Machiavelli (1977, p. 30) warns that ‘‘the prince must have people well disposed toward him; otherwise in times of adversity there’s no hope.’’ If he

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is not to be overthrown, by either the masses or by elite adversaries, ‘‘the prince’s best protection lies in not being hated or despised, and keeping himself in popular favoryActually, the best fortress of all consists in not being hated by your people’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, pp. 52, 62). ‘‘What makes the prince contemptible is being considered changeable, trifling, effeminate, cowardly, or indecisive; he should avoid this as a pilot does a reef, and make sure that his actions bespeak greatness, courage, seriousness of purpose, and strength’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 52). When the people’s desires and the desires of the nobles are opposed, one or the other must be offended, though the prince must remember to ‘‘avoid the hatred of the most powerful group around.’’ Ultimately, princes must manage the desires of the nobles, but, ‘‘since nobles want to oppress others,’’ an inconvenient result is that ‘‘hatred may be earned by doing good just as much as by doing evil’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 55). If doing good for the people angers the nobles, it should be avoided. The populace cannot be ignored entirely, however. Besides securing the everyday needs of the population, the prince should avoid ‘‘suspecting them of cowardice or treachery; both these insinuations will raise hatred against you’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 60). A prince must cultivate the appropriate emotions in the people and the nobles.

Fear A fearful populace is a pliant one. Thus, ‘‘a man who becomes prince against the will of the people, with the aid of the nobles, should try above all things to win over the populace; he can do this quite easily by taking them under his protection’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 30). Managing and using fear strategically can make a population feel protected. One strategy is ‘‘giving his subjects hope at one minute that the storm will soon pass, stirring them up at another moment to fear the enemy’s cruelty’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 32). Likewise, a reputation for not being hesitant to use cruelty is essential because ‘‘to be feared is much safer than to be loved. For it is a good general rule about men, that they are ungrateful, fickle, liars and deceivers, fearful of danger, and greedy for gainyPeople are less concerned with offending a man who makes himself loved than one who makes himself feared’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, pp. 47–49). As a result, the prince must balance both love and fear but avoid hatred. To be feared is a strategic advantage, and, if you cannot be loved, do not be hated. Images exposed to the public mind must oscillate so as to manufacture and avoid each as needed.

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Obedience Managing the population is necessary because ‘‘it is the nature of people to be fickle; to persuade them of something is easy, but to make them stand fast in that conviction is hard’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 18). The obedience of the people, therefore, is of the utmost importance. One way to ensure obedience and passivity is to be ‘‘alwaysyplanning and carrying out some great design which has enthralled and preoccupied the minds of his subjects, and kept them fascinated with the outcome of his schemes’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 63). ‘‘Thus a wise prince will think of ways to keep his citizens of every sort and under every circumstance dependent on the state and on him; and then they will always be trustworthy’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 31). In addition to the people, a prince’s staff must be kept in check, and thus ‘‘the prince who wants to keep his minister obedient should think of his welfare, honor him, enrich him, and load him with honors and offices’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 66). Dependence, external threats (real or concocted), and rewards foster obedience.

Legal Violence Sometimes work, fear, non-hatred and obedience break down. Lucky for the prince, the ‘‘chief foundations on which all states rest, whether they are new, old, or mixed, are good laws and good arms’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 35). Because of historical continuity backed by arms, those who oppose a prince’s laws rarely ‘‘dare take a stand against the general opinion, supported by the majesty of government.’’ Wisely balancing force versus law is an important quality and therefore ‘‘a prince must knowythat one without the other has no lasting effect’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, pp. 47, 49). Violence possesses its own economy and must be used properly. Machiavelli offers several rules. Violence is Inevitable but Must be used Wisely As a realist, Machiavelli (1977, p. 5) argues that ‘‘a new prince must always harm those over whom he assumes authority.’’ Violence is not only for reactionary self-defense; it also must be used proactively. Why is violence necessary? For one, using violence often means protecting yourself from it later: ‘‘Any man who becomes master of a city accustomed to freedom, and does not destroy it, may be expected to be destroyed by it’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 15). Second, persuasion backed by the threat of arms is necessary because ‘‘men don’t really believe in anything new till they have had solid

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experience of ityHence things must be arranged so that when they no longer believe they can be compelled to believe by force’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, pp. 17–18). Violence used strategically is violence doled out carefully. Machiavelli (1977, p. 47) suggests, for instance, that ‘‘to keep his subjects united and loyal’’ a prince can ‘‘make examples of a very few.’’ He elaborates: Cruelty can be described as well used (if it’s permissible to say good words about something which is evil in itself) when it is performed all at once, for reasons of selfpreservation; and when the acts are not repeated after that, but rather are turned as much as possible to the advantage of the subjects. Cruelty is badly used, when it is infrequent at first, but increases with time instead of diminishingy[Therefore,] when a prince takes a new state, he should calculate the sum of all the injures he will have to do, and do them all at once, so as not to have to do new ones every day; simply by not repeating them, he will thus be able to reassure people, and win them over to his side with benefitsyrecurring images keep them suspicious of him. In a word, injuries should be committed all at once, because the less time there is to dwell on them, the less they offend; but the benefits should be distributed very gradually, so the taste will last longer. (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 28)

Violence has its own strategic algebra and must be used wisely. War is Necessary and Requires Superior Knowledge Machiavelli (1977, p. 11) advises that ‘‘you should never let things get out of hand in order to avoid war.’’ As a result, a prince ‘‘should have no other object, no other thought, no other subject of study, than war, its rules and disciplinesyThe quickest way to lose a state is to neglect this art; the quickest way to get one is to study it’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 42). It follows, then, that a prince should master the current political scene and ‘‘keep an eye, not only on present troubles, but on those of the future, and make every effort to avoid them’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, pp. 8–9). It follows that ‘‘no unexpected circumstances [should] ever ariseyfor which he did not have a ready remedy,’’ which is why ‘‘a prince should read history and reflect on the actions of great menyso that he can imitate their successes and avoid their defeats’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 43). War is politically important because ‘‘defenselessness makes you contemptible. This is one of the disgraces from which a prince must guard himself’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 42). For these reasons, a prince must collect information on all domains relevant to violence’s inevitability. Violence Requires Money One of Machiavelli’s (1977, p. 31) rules is that ‘‘princes control their own destiny when they command enough money or men to assemble an adequate army and make a stand against anyone who attacks them.’’ However, in

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weighing the costs of not being defenseless, a prince might have to choose between an army and colonies. ‘‘If you maintain an army instead of colonies, the expense will be much greater’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 7). Still, defense requires violence and violence requires money. Armies are not free and often necessitate taxes, tribute, and forced extraction, putting a prince at risk with either his population or another power from which he attains his riches. As a result, the need for violence and money augment one another reciprocally.

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION AND TECHNIQUES OF POPULATION CONTROL A matrix of inter-connected institutions and discourses involved in the events leading up to September 11th and the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq entrapped minds and bodies of people world-over through both knowledge and violence. These included the international world economic system (with its core-peripheral regions, class systems within each region), financial apparatuses (including the World Bank and IMF), political apparatuses (including the inter-state system of alliances in the United Nations where strong states dominate the weak), as well as racial, nationalist, and religious discourses operative between and within these regions (such as racism, Orientalism, patriotism, Judaic, Christian and Islamic fundamentalisms). Other institutional frameworks included the global mass media, a transportation and production system reliant on oil, and educational systems geared toward supporting these other institutions. The webs entrapping populations worldwide have increasingly come to resemble one another and have driven populations to work, made them vacillate between love and hatred, filled them with fear, brought mixed levels of obedience, and subjected them to violence. The Bush Administration’s Production and use of Work Washington – having promoted export of capital from the United States to peripheral regions of the world economy throughout several administrations – and the Bush administration – having been appointed to the White House during a bursting stock market bubble – could not count on a growing employment base or a generally robust economy that could appease middleclass concerns. With the middle-class shrinking over the previous two decades, and the working class sliding into squalor for even longer,

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domestic conditions in the United States continued to deteriorate in this phase of the world economy. Bush learned how to manage internal affairs only slowly and seemed to rely on jingoism and the media monopoly to play a covering role for the troubled economy and the harsh realities of his policies, most of which centered on reducing funding of federal agencies (save the military) and tax breaks for top income brackets. Minimum wages were not slated for an increase and Bush proposed extending the hours of work needed for overtime pay.63 With productivity up, wages stagnant, and gainful employment increasingly difficult to find, the population was kept busy, dependent, and insecure. As events unfolded, the U.S. dollar lost value in relation to the Euro, the U.S. import/export balance worsened, and the economy as a whole increasingly relied on borrowing from foreign creditors and deficit spending. However, given the configuration of the classes, their levels of organization and political representation, Bush’s strategies took more care of the capital and other elites, the most powerful bloc whose interests he needed to not offend. The Bush Administration’s Production and use of Non-Hatred Bush’s contested award of the White House made him a target for criticism. Witnesses at the presidential inauguration reported that an estimated 20,000 people jeered and even threw refuse at the presidential motorcade (Moore, 2001, pp. 14–15). On the war’s eve, Senator Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), one of the elder statesmen in the U.S. Congress, announced that ‘‘today, I weep for my country.’’64 However, under the prospects of future terrorism, hatred was slow to rise to threatening levels, at least in the United States. Bush still failed to cultivate universal love from his internal subjects. Externally, according to one poll, Europeans considered the United States the greatest threat to world peace, outpacing both North Korea and Iraq by large margins (87.9 to 6.7, and 6.3% respectively).65 Add this to the denunciations of the Iraq invasion throughout the Arab world, and Bush threatened to cultivate global fear and hatred for him, his administration and the United States in general. Such developments did not seem to motivate his administration’s actions or counteractions beyond superficial public relations campaigns. The Bush Administration’s Production and use of Fear In a widely replayed comment, Condoleeza Rice asserted that delaying action against Saddam until a ‘‘smoking gun’’ was found might result in

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finding it in the form of a ‘‘mushroom cloud’’ over an American city. Such and similar rhetoric was a constant. With the need to keep the population afraid and busy working, the dozen or so national holidays provided ample opportunity to raise and lower the ‘‘threat level’’ established by the Department of Homeland Security, stirring up the population one moment, only later to give them hope that the threat abated. The boldness of this Orwellian moniker was outpaced only by the nonsensical system it used, one seemed designed to bamboozle the public.66 This system could be mobilized at will, with vague threats, and admonitions to ‘‘remain vigilant’’ repeated nationwide. Warnings of another inevitable attack were regularly offered. The result? On the eve of the second anniversary of the September 11th attacks, Knight Ridder’s Washington Bureau reported that 28% of Americans felt less safe than they did two years ago, 48% felt neither safer nor less safe, and only 24% felt more safe, while approximately 73% feared the possibility of more attacks in the future.67 Such fear leads to greater odds of obedience.

The Bush Administration’s Production and use of Obedience The prize of fear-peddling was a relative level of obedience from the population, from the media, from the intellectual class, and from Congress. As time went on, tougher questions became more allowable in the U.S. media, especially after a series of claims made by the administration on the Iraq threat came under closer scrutiny. Dissent became less and less a reason for suppression of skepticism from the professorate and journalists began to openly challenge administration members’ versions of events. Still, none of these reached the level of open revolt. The anti-war movement’s ability to sustain a public critique was undercut by the premature declaration of an end to formal hostilities. But protests and guerilla attacks did continue, including in the Occupied Territories contested by Israel and the Palestinians, as well as terrorist bombings occurring in Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and Spain. Securing the obedience of Iraqis was precarious. While there did seem genuine relief that Hussein was ousted, occupation by Americans, and what they were increasingly seen as representing, was progressively resented. Reports suggested that Iraqi youth, who had previously learned English in hopes of coming to American universities, grew disenchanted through observing America’s raunchy television culture, its action movies, and the behavior of its soldiers. Students and young people began investigating panArabist teachings of Egypt’s socialist former president Nasser, appealing to

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the tenets of jihad, and grew ever more angry with the U.S. invasion as it opened the door to criminals, thieves and terrorists to overtake Iraqi civil society. This fear augmented the anti-American backlash.68 The Bush Administration’s Mobilization of Knowledge and Money in the use of Violence Evidence suggests that use of the U.S. military in Afghanistan and Iraq was seen as necessary by Bush administration prior to the events of September 11th.69 Tellingly, in The Grand Chessboard, Zbigniew Brzezinski, founding member of the Trilateral Commission, a national security advisor for the Carter Administration, member of Reagan’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and, in 1988, cochairman of the Bush National Security Advisory Task Force, argued that world power has always been related to control of Central Asia and that this would hold true into the twenty-first century as well. He urged the United States to take control of the region and its resources, during a period which he believed would see the eventual dissolution of the world’s nation-states, where global domination would instead center on banking, financial, and other corporate entities. Without such action, the other option was a world that dissolved into fanatical religious and nationalist factionalism (Brzezinski, 1997). Since geo-political control has always involved a military apparatus at one point or another, and with the U.S. strong militarily rather than politically in the region, armed confrontation was the Bush administration’s most obvious weapon of choice in seizing these assets. Yet, as Machiavelli warns, violence must be used wisely or it may cost the prince politically and economically. With world opinion decidedly against the administration’s plans of invading Iraq, violence could create terrorists where there once were none. If not for the invasion, the global outpouring of goodwill, sympathy, and empathy after September 11th could perhaps have been harnessed for ends other than additional warfare. But doing good is not a prince’s task. Instead, old allies were snubbed and others bullied, bribed, and cajoled into not standing in the way of the administration’s war efforts. With Russia weakened and China unwilling to interfere, the administration concluded that it was the time to grab and secure accessible portions of Central Asia. Thus, the war was not about terrorism, but historical geopolitics, current timing, and opportunity: Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz cited bureaucratic reasons for focusing on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, and said a ‘‘huge’’ result of the war was

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to enable Washington to withdraw its troops from Saudi Arabia. ‘‘The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason,’’ Wolfowitz was quoted as saying in a Pentagon transcript of an interview with Vanity FairyEarlier this week, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction may have been destroyed before the war. Neither Rumsfeld nor Wolfowitz suggested Washington fabricated weapons claims, and an aide to the defense secretary said their remarks were misinterpreted. However, the remarks were widely published in Europe and were seen by skeptical Europeans as a tacit admission that the United States overstated Iraq’s weapons threat.70

Later, ‘‘bad bookkeeping’’ and ‘‘exaggeration’’ by Iraqis was offered as an explanation why the as-of-yet-to-be-located weapons had not been found.71 However, members of the administration, such as Powell, had previously claimed that Hussein had not reconstituted his weapons programs.72 Given its efforts at maintaining global domination and not tolerating contenders, the Bush administration nevertheless saw military action as necessary and inevitable. They were furious with Clinton’s refusal in the 1990s to adopt the neocons insistence on a more aggressive military posture against countries where militant Islam threatened political stability and access to economic resources such as gas and oil. According to Newsweek, this group’s outlook can be expressed as holding that ‘‘in a post-9-11 world, this is no time for oldfashioned conservatism. It is a time to be bold.’’73 Clinton violated Machiavelli’s dictum by letting things get out of hand by avoiding war. September 11th convinced Bush that Wolfowitz’s designs for preemptively attacking Central Asian and Middle Eastern states was the necessary policy.74 If the administration were to preemptively attack Iraq, they needed to learn lessons from past U.S. wars. The world wars taught U.S. planners that capitalism could not suffer more than one military power attempting to dominate internationally. Korea taught them that war could be used to send a political message to other societies. The Vietnam War, and the civilian/solider revolt against it, taught U.S. planners that a war should have clear goals, be well-funded, and, given the political costs of the war at home, victory should be quick, decisive, and have a clear exit strategy (this latter rule has been called ‘‘the Powell Doctrine,’’ a doctrine in-line with Machiavelli’s dictums on the algebra of violence).75 In the 1980s, unable to invade Central America outright and unable to dominate the political climate against parties with socialistic tendencies, the U.S. government learned they could count on the press to play a covering role by casting that undeclared war as a fight against enemies attacking civilization in Americas backyard (e.g., supposedly Soviet-backed and controlled communists in Nicaragua

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were claimed to be a one-day drive away from the U.S. border). They also learned that sporadic massacres of civilians could demoralize a population’s will for radical social change (Chomsky, 1988, 1989). In the first Gulf War, planners learned that press control was even more vital. These lessons contextualize the Bush administration’s conduct of the war, e.g., an early declaration to the end of formal hostilities, being less than forthright on the reasons for the war, not completely explaining the costs of the war, and controlling public knowledge with the ‘‘embedded journalist.’’ Because war requires money, the administration had to deal with the economic costs of their violence. Initially, the U.S. public was told that sales of Iraqi oil would cover the war’s costs, a claim which later proved untenable. Unable to find sufficient allies in support of the war, the administration offered financial incentives, notably to Turkey, which refused these efforts. Unable to locate him, on July 3, 2003, the administration put a $25 million dollar bounty on Saddam Hussein’s head, and other bounties on each of his sons.76 By July 10, 2003, it was being reported that Gen. Tommy Franks, head of the military operation, had determined that any pullout would be unlikely ‘‘for the foreseeable future’’ and that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had increased the estimated costs of the occupation to $3.9 billion a month, almost double the original estimate.77 Bush later asked Congress for another $87 billion dollars, on top of the already $100–200 billion estimated cost of the war.78 The question of this drain on a U.S. economy steadily shedding jobs, and whether these would become political problems for the administration, remained.

POWER RELATIONS USE MORAL DISCOURSE AND PRODUCE MORAL SUBJECTS Foucault (1978, p. 94) believed that ‘‘relations of power are not in superstructural positions, with merely a role of prohibition and accompaniment; they have a directly productive role.’’ Productive power ‘‘implies a knowledge of the conscience and an ability to direct ity[and] consists guiding the possibility of conduct and putting in order the possible outcomeyto structure the possible field of action of othersyin which several ways of behaving, several reactions and diverse comportments may be realized’’ (Foucault, 1983, pp. 214, 221). About such productive relations, Foucault (1980, p. 97) urged us to ‘‘askyhow things work at the levelyof those continuous and uninterrupted processes which subject our bodies, govern

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our gestures, dictate our behaviours, etc.’’ Productive power involves all those ‘‘actions brought to bear upon possible actions; it incites, it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or difficult; in the extreme it constrains or forbids absolutely’’ (Foucault, 1983, p. 220). This struggle involves social institutions, forms of knowledge, and individuals who must negotiate each. Asymmetries of power and the resistance they stir up expose the productive capacities of relations of domination, a process Foucault (1983, pp. 210–212) referred to as ‘‘subjection.’’79 Subjected individuals are those who internalize and perform roles and rituals through a presentation of self with expressive equipment molded by institutionalized norms. Thus, through subjection, power relations can produce types of people, people whose behaviors are rooted in collective representations and are compelled to express in a personal front those ‘‘items that we most intimately identify with the performer’’ (Goffman, 1959, p. 24). Because this often occurs behind their backs, ‘‘the traditions of an individual’s role will lead him to give a well-designed impression of a particular kind, and yet he may be neither consciously nor unconsciously disposed to create such an impression’’ (Goffman, 1959, p. 6). The overall effect, however, is that traditional knowledge produces traditional people with traditional prejudices. Presenting the self in terms of institutionalized norms makes the individual useful, though the internalization and presentation processes are usually not without tension: ‘‘The body is molded by a great many distinct regimes; it is broken down by the rhythms of work, rest, and holidays; it is poisoned by food or values, through eating habits or moral laws; it conducts resistances’’ (Foucault, 1977b, p. 153). Human agency limits power relationships, potentiates struggle, and constitutes possible points of reversal. In other words, the ‘‘relationship between power and freedom’s refusal to submit therefore cannot be separated’’ (Foucault, 1983, p. 221). It follows for Machiavelli (1977, p. 8) that a prince ‘‘need only take care not to let (the people) have too much strength and authority of their own.’’ As a result, norms related to fronts function as knowledge that dominates individuals and modifies their actions. The capacity to manipulate, change and direct these possibilities accounts for the prince’s ability to produce the needed behavior. These are directly observable phenomena. Though techniques of exercising power are amoral questions, a prince, as a role player, should not ‘‘overlook the crucial fact that any projected definition of the situation also has a distinctive moral character’’ (Goffman, 1959, p. 13). This can be used to meet a prince’s needs. ‘‘Presumably (the subjected actor) intercepts or incorporates the standards he attempts to maintain in the presence of others so that his conscience requires him to act

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in a socially proper way’’ (Goffman, 1959, p. 81). Because public morality might clash with what the prince must do, he can use discursive techniques and impression management to shape his subjects. ‘‘Hence a prince should take great care never to drop a word that does not seem imbued with the five good qualities noted above; to anyone who sees or hears him, he should appear all compassion, all honor, all humanity, all integrity, all religion’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 51). Morality, like knowledge, can be used strategically in the manipulation of subjects. There are three general rules. Use Morality Strategically A prince ‘‘has to have a mind ready to shift as the winds of fortune and the varying circumstances of life may dictateyhe should not depart from the good if can hold on to it, but he should be ready to enter on evil if he has to’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 51). Thus, ‘‘if times and circumstances change, [a prince] will come to ruin unless he changes his method of proceeding’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 71). Though a prince must be unprincipled about morality in his exercise of power, this does not relieve him of the need to use it wisely. A wise use of morality can exempt the prince from questions about his capability or his legitimacy for fear that divine and broader principles of justice are on his side and also can be used to manipulate in-group solidarity and to produce hatred and fear of outsiders as needed. This situation contains a point of its own reversal, however, as it provides his subjects reasons for judging his actions as immoral. Thus, the control and management of discourse must set the moral boundaries for interpreting a prince’s actions.

Make Cruelty Appear as Benevolent Justice A new prince has an intractable problem, which is the fact that he ‘‘cannot possibly avoid a name for cruelty, since new states are always in danger.’’ So, though he would like to be loved, in the final analysis he should ‘‘not care a bit if he is considered cruel’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, pp. 47–48). Still, there are better and worse ways to make violence palatable. Obedience arises, in part, from the perception that the exercise of power is morally acceptable. Therefore, a wise impression management strategy is presenting violence, from the audience’s point of view, as ‘‘a policy of pious cruelty,’’ using religion as a pretext (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 63): ‘‘armed prophets always win and unarmed prophets lose’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 18). Used

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wisely, violence toward outsiders will not be considered a vice, but a necessary evil. Cruelty can be passed off as a duty, one requiring the prince’s moral courage and a higher moral code that ordinary people are too squeamish, or otherwise too ill-placed, to enact. Goffman (1959, p. 24) explains how ‘‘we expect that the differences in social statuses among the interactants will be expressed in some way by congruent differences in the indications that are made of an expected interaction role.’’ Thus, the prince depicts his actions as upholding the higher principles accepted by the population and a responsibility that his role foists upon him, one which ordinary plebs are relieved. When this is not possible, cruelty is delegated to staff members, demonstrating to audiences that ‘‘whatever cruelty had occurred had come, not from him, but from the brutal character of the minister’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 22). Produce Subjects as Useful and Docile In addition to the appropriate expressive equipment associated with an institutional role, there are additional modes, morally evaluated ones, to which a presentation of self must conform. As a rule, an individual’s ‘‘performance will tend to incorporate and exemplify the officially accredited values of the society, more so, in fact, than does his behavior as a whole’’ (Goffman, 1959, p. 35). For modern morality, where individuals are evaluated to the extent that they present themselves as useful and docile subjects (Foucault, 1977a), ‘‘the characteristic issue, the crucial concern, is whether [they] will be credited or discredited’’ (Goffman, 1959, pp. 252–253). Useful subjects work and obey and performances that fail to present the self as useful and docile tend to discredit and disqualify the individual. A prince can manipulate public discourse to achieve these ends, and as a result, a discredited role performer will be treated as a morally illegitimate individual.

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION’S USE OF MORAL DISCOURSE AND PRODUCTION OF MORAL SUBJECTS In the power relations surrounding the events of September 11th, how was morality mobilized and what behaviors and types of subjects were produced? Four areas are suggestive.

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The Bush Administration’s Strategic use of Morality According to PBS’s Frontline, the war in Iraq was long planned and was not simply a response to the attacks of September 11th.80 The extent the war construed as a reaction to this terrorism, one goal was to depict American exercise of power as a moral good in itself. Bush is postured as a crusader and the purveyor of a benevolent, if cruel, justice. The world was offered a stark moral choice: you are with the United States (presumably the Bush administration), or you are with the terrorists. This declaration provided the domestic moral cover for a unilateralist war, where the punishment of ‘‘evildoers’’ was much less important than the need to establish military beachheads in oil-rich territory. Once successfully depicted as a ‘‘war on terrorism,’’ the Bush administration had a more open hand in squelching criticisms and dissent. Moral discourse reached levels of hysteria and irrationality. Musicians were protested against and all things French were subject to public ridicule, even food, such as Bordeaux, bleu cheese, and even french fries (which received a new name: freedom fries). Such moral discourse was continually harnessed and returned to by Bush and his proxies. On the eve of the second anniversary of the September 11th attacks, Bush again reiterated that ‘‘we will never forget the servants of evil who plotted the attacks, and we will never forget those who rejoiced at our grief.’’81 Depicting the attacks against the United States as unilateralist, unprovoked, and as stemming from an evil source allowed the administration to depict itself as innocent victim and to deflect attention from the U.S. government’s historical participation in similar acts (e.g., East Timor, Nicaragua, Panama) and to promote further aggression (and refusal to prevent it) and conflict in various regions of the world (e.g., Afghanistan, Liberia, Columbia, Somalia, Rwanda). Though criticism of Bush’s policies was seen as tantamount to providing aid and comfort to the enemy by some, similar moral codes were turned against the administration when its distortions, backroom machinations, and vindictiveness were revealed. Bush and Cheney were publically taken to task for misleading the public and hiding their conflicts of interests in handing out war-related contracts. Bush’s failure to act contrite and apologetic for his disdain of UN procedure was evident and the world reacted with less than enthusiastic zeal to his request for money, military, and financial support in rebuilding the country his government had sacked. The CIA and the Justice Department threatened investigations of the White House over leaks involving the exposure of one of the CIA’s deep cover operatives. Domestically and internationally, demonstrations often found protestors depicting Bush himself

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as evil and a terrorist. Controlling the morality within the public discourse was elusive and enjoyed only mixed success. The Bush Administration’s Producing of Moral Subjects: Iraqi Protestors/ Iraqi Subjects The invasion and hunt for Saddam produced the killing of civilian bystanders. This, and other fracases, produced outbursts of anger at the U.S. and its military.82 It also produced sky-rocketing crime rates resulting from the destruction of civil society.83 The predictable outcome was protest, resistance, anger, and backlash. As casualties84 and criticism mounted, so did the attempts at spin and controlling the definition of the situation.85 The people of Iraq, an occupied citizenry for decades, became occupied under a new authority directed by Washington. It was questionable whether their sovereignty was secured (even when taking the 2005 elections into account) and, given the series of military bases the administration had built on Iraqi territory after the war, they will remain the subjects of an imperialist regime. The Bush Administration’s Production of Moral Subjects: Islamic Terrorists/Islamic Martyrs Over the course of the invasion and occupation, Iraqis and their neighbors, such as Jordanians and Syrians, continued to join the guerilla resistance that developed throughout the country. They saw Israel’s crushing of Palestinian homes and communities as a preface for what they assumed the administration was planning in Iraq. From this farm hidden among tangled grapevines and tall date palms an hour north of Baghdad, guerilla fighters, both Iraqis and foreigners, have set out on some of the raids that have killed 70 U.S. soldiers in the past four months. The farmer’s song is a code from a lookout, to assure commanders that passing boaters can’t see the band of guerillas preparing for the next attackyAbu Abdullah said he wanted to tell people he didn’t consider himself a terrorist, but the enemy of ‘U.S. imperialism’yThe cell leaders themselves said they were guided by a blend of Islamist teachings and pan-Arab nationalism. Abu Mohammed said there was no contact with members of al-Qaida at his level; Abu Abdullah broke off the interview before the question could be asked. But he said his fighters were too valuable to participate in suicide missions, a hallmark of alQaida, and he rejected the label of terroristy‘‘Can you describe a man who defends his country as a terrorist?’’ asked Abu Abdullah, who said he was 31. ‘‘Iraq is the land of prophets and the birthplace of civilization. We will fight until we shed the last drop of our blood for this country.’’86

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One man’s terrorist is another man’s martyr. A historical look at the roots of the religiously that informed violent resistance is instructive. As a result of an earlier British imperialism in Egypt, an ancient and violent form of Islam known as Wahhabism was revived to rally people against external control (Ali, 2002).87 Viewing violence against those refusing to accept this ‘‘true’’ version of Islam as next to sacramental status, this ideology proved attractive to a significant number of young people in the Middle East, Arab societies, and other Muslim areas. Contemporary Wahhabi adherents see themselves in a moral and religious struggle (jihad) with modernity and the West. Factions within the Saudi royal family support the Wahhabist form of Islam. With their vast financial resources, these links provided an infrastructure that bred armed resistance across the Islamic and Arab world. Bin Laden’s long past of mobilizing religion to rally people to his side elevated his strategies for power into a moral cause appealing to alienated and angry men. With the demographic in the region skewed toward young males, invasion by ‘‘infidel’’ armies almost inevitably produced a growing number willing to sacrifice themselves to what they see as a greater moral cause. Though extreme, such resisting subjects can be made useful when external enemies are needed. U.S. policies in the region (e.g., having military bases in Saudi Arabia near one of Islam’s most holy sites, and the unwavering support for the state of Israel’s policies) have antagonized Arab populations. The war undoubtedly produced more people willing to take up arms against the United States, their allies, and their citizens in a (perceived) moral reaction against the violence and threat of violence inflicted by the Bush administration. Add in the moral fervor resulting from religious manipulation, and the result was ‘‘Islamic terrorists’’ (a typical Western view) and ‘‘Islamic martyrs’’ (a view in sectors of the Arab and Muslim worlds). In both cases, the outcome was the production of subjects willing to mobilize morality and die violently for their cause. By early September, U.S. media outlets were reporting that al-Qaida had begun moving into Iraq in response to calls to fight the ‘‘infidels.’’88 Terrorist and suicide bombings continued throughout and into 2005, and U.S. and Iraqi casualty figures continued to rise. These threats can now be used to legitimize and further U.S. policies. The Bush Administration’s Production of Moral Subjects: American Patriots/American Imperialists American ruling class domination, institutionalized through classism, racism, and sexism has made theirs a disunited populace. Regardless of this

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history, external threats unite in-groups and September 11th was such an external threat. People turned to the broadest and most meaningful symbolisms available, e.g., the U.S. flag and songs such as ‘‘God Bless America.’’ These displays reinvigorated the public discourse on the meaning ‘‘American.’’ This meaning – e.g. ostensibly citizen of a freedom loving democratic nation-state – is accepted in broad terms, by both those who unequivocally endorse U.S. power to radical skeptics and dissenters who claim the country has not lived up to these ideals. As a result, presentations of self after September 11, 2001 were distinctively ‘‘American.’’ The national flag became a universal emblem, displayed on houses, car bumpers, shirts, buildings, blimps, candies, magazines, key rings, etc. to an even greater extent than the norm. Supplemented by flags in yards and on vehicles, and ‘‘God Bless America’’ sung at many sporting events, the discourse became an outpouring of emotion, fear, nervousness, trepidation, and boisterous displays of nationalism. Patriotism came to mean, for many, obedience to Bush’s rule. But this was also a contested terrain. Also found in yards and shirts were slogans like, ‘‘Peace is Patriotic’’ and ‘‘No War for Oil,’’ often decked in flags as well. Many of those who questioned the president publically often had their patriotism impugned, even center-right commentators who later criticized the regime in Washington. Musicians, actors, film makers, other artists, and intellectuals who spoke out were targeted for scorn.89 Bush’s administration constructed an ‘‘us vs. them’’ discourse, where ‘‘they’’ seem to be Arab people living on top of oil playing the broad role of ‘‘terrorists’’ and ‘‘we’’ were those shareholders, depicted in discourse as ‘‘patriots,’’ positioned to reap great windfalls once the oil was secured. ‘‘We’’ are moral lovers of freedom, and ‘‘they’’ are ignorant, dangerous, evil, and violent. Thus, to criticize ‘‘us’’ (i.e., the Bush administration) is to become one of ‘‘them’’ (i.e., the terrorists, enemies of the United States, or otherwise lovers of ‘‘freedom’’). From the vantage point of the areas occupied by U.S. forces and their allies, the military action that was undertaken appeared to be a war for oil. Given the very logical connection many made between the presence of oil and the use of miliary force, ‘‘imperialism’’ was the context in which the administration’s actions were interpreted. In the eyes of the occupied, little distinction could be made between liberation and occupation. To the extent Bush’s actions appeared as meant to secure geo-strategic designs, it created imperialists out of its soldiers, soldiers who are interpreted by their own population as fighting for the freedoms of domestic populations both in the United States and abroad. To the extent that such freedom is secured by access to energy resources, and to the extent these are kept affordable, this is

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sadly true. These conflicting definitions of the situation do not detract from the fact that U.S. soldiers, often working-class kids trying to secure money for college and locate an alternative career path, were produced as subjects of power and were treated in kind with violence from angered Iraqis and others opposing U.S. domination.

DISCUSSION What conclusions can be drawn about this administration and its warmaking by mobilizing Machiavelli’s principles in an analytic such as the one above? Theoretical synthesis for simple conceptual gymnastics is not necessarily scientifically useful. Theoretical integration should provide insight into real social phenomena. Machiavelli, Foucault, and Goffman agree that structuring relations of power and tactics of impression management are related to the larger issue of legitimacy, an issue involving the balancing of forces with which princes, presidential administrations, and actors playing roles all must concern themselves. In other words, power is better maintained through legitimacy than by force, and such legitimacy often entails the need for the manipulative skills of a reflexive dramaturgist. Structuring relations strengthens one’s position viz-a-viz other contending powers. Impression management helps achieve acquiescence in those who are ruled. Acquiescence frees the prince’s hand in pursuing larger aims. Those staffing the modern state are tasked with using techniques of power to cultivate and maintain legitimacy within the minds of their subjects. As Nietzsche long knew, power masks itself as morality and Foucault teaches us how knowledge plays a role in that masking. Goffman and Machiavelli help us read the techniques used to master power’s exercise. Goffman’s analytical-hermeneutic allows for an interpretive-description of the types of subjects power has produced, in rulers and the ruled. Institutional power dominates the individuals to whom it promises freedom. For the Bush administration, having attained state power through Supreme Court intervention, and staffing the state with defense contractors and oil industry veterans, the issue of winning legitimacy with the public meant that power would need to be wielded strategically and it would need to appeal to a variety of tactics. It is unlikely such problems were lost on them. One path worth pursuing is the idea that the Bush administration has in fact been significantly influenced by Machiavellian thinking via the influence of the political philosopher Leo Strauss.

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According to his own public estimate and boast before the American Enterprise Institute, President Bush Jr. hired about 20 Straussians to occupy key positions in his administration, many holding offices where they could push American foreign policy in favor of Israel and against its chosen enemies such as Iraq, Iran, Syria, and the Palestinians. It was the Chicago Straussian cabal of pro-Israeli Neo-cons who set up a separate ‘intelligence’ unit within the Pentagon that was responsible for manufacturing many of the bald-faced lies, deceptions, half-truths, and outright propaganda that the Bush Jr. administration then disseminated to the lap-dog U.S. news media in order to generate public support for a war of aggression against Iraq for the benefit of Israel and in order to steal Iraq’s oil. To paraphrase something Machiavelli once advised his Prince in Chapter XVIII of that book: Those who want to deceive will always find those willing to be deceived. As I can attest from my personal experience as an alumnus of the University of Chicago Department of Political Science, the Bible of Chicago’s pro-Israeli Neo-con Straussian cabal is Machiavelli’s The Prince.90

This knowledge suggests a review, albeit a brief one, of Strauss’s ideas is necessary. Leo Strauss, the Neocons, and the Bush Administration Given that he died in 1973, Strauss’s contemporary influence stems mainly from his intellectual descendants and their influx into the halls of government throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s. While some notice was taken of this fact by the elite intellectual press, Strauss’s influence on U.S. domestic and foreign policy has been kept relatively outside the purview of the public. Several works on Strauss’s legacy provide critical insight into his thinking (Behnegar, 2003; Deutsch & Murley, 1999; Drury, 1997, 1988; Udoff, 1991). Having fled Nazi Germany and eventually arriving at the University of Chicago, Strauss had a significant impact on the ideas embraced by key players in the conservative movement. His students and their students have included cultural and political leaders on the conservative right such as Paul Wolfowitz (Deputy Defense Secretary under Bush), Alan Keyes (radio host, politician, and former presidential candidate), Clarence Thomas (Supreme Court Justice), William Bennett (member of the Reagan and first Bush administration, author, and public moralist), William Kristol (editor, The Weekly Standard), Allan Bloom (Closing of the American Mind), and Newt Gringrich (former Speaker of the House). He helped matriculate over 100 graduate students, making him one of the most influential political thinkers of the twentieth century (Drury, 1997). With a somewhat secretive tenor and a writing style that has been described as an intentional ‘‘code,’’ Strauss’s political philosophy mixes a critique of liberalism, modernity, and democracy with an appreciation of the

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elitism of Plato’s philosopher kings, Nietzsche’s ubermensch, and the cunning realism of Machiavelli. He believed that truth was destructive to society. Not everyone is ready for it and it can tear down the myths that prop up needed social institutions. He held that a great society required a religious orthodoxy to control the populace (Drury, 1997, pp. 1–29). Referring to these as ‘‘a unique and disturbing set of ideas that he was reluctant to state clearly and unambiguously,’’ Drury (1988, pp. ix, xi, xii, xiii) points out that ‘‘Strauss does not believe that the same standards are applicable to all peopley(He) believes that men must be kept in the darkness of the cave, for nothing is to be gained by liberating them from their chainsyhe also believed that the truth is dangerous: this is why it must be hidden.’’ This point of view has been adopted by his followers, who, according to Drury (1997, p. 2), ‘‘do not want their ideas discussed openly or even known to anyone outside the charmed circle of initiates,’’ a tenuous position for a group who, as Drury explains, has been called ‘‘the largest academic movement in the twentieth century.’’ Strauss’s (1968, p. 223) writing shows him to believe that Machiavelli’s ‘‘teaching was graceful, subtle, and colorful.’’ He thought that Machiavelli’s sense of ‘‘goodness comes to mean something like fear-bred obedience to the government, even vileness.’’ In respect to maintaining ‘‘new orders,’’ Strauss (1972, pp. 276, 279) held that Machiavelli’s Discourses forwards the proposition that, in contradistinction to the people, ‘‘the introduction of new modes and orders is best done by princes.’’ He viewed Machiavelli as someone who was ymore concerned with the salvation of his fatherland than with the salvation of his soul. His patriotism therefore presupposes a comprehensive reflection regarding the status of the fatherland on the one hand and of the soul on the other. This comprehensive reflection, and not patriotism, is the core of Machiavelli’s thought. This comprehensive reflection, and not his patriotism, established his fame and made him the teacher of many men in all countries. The substance of his thought is not Florentine, or even Italian, but universal. It concerns, and is meant to concern, all thinking men regardless of time and place. (Strauss, 1958, pp. 10–11)

Strauss (1958, p. 11) believed that, ‘‘Patriotism as Machiavelli understood it is collective selfishness. The indifference to the distinction between right and wrong which springs from devotion to one’s country is less repulsive than the indifference to that distinction which springs from exclusive preoccupation with one’s own ease or glory.’’ That is, there is everyday immorality, the one by which individuals judge and are judged, and a higher immorality held by a power elite, one that has a different calculus when applied to reasons of state (Mills, 1956).

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Commentators such as Stanley Rosen (1991, pp. 157–158) see Strauss viewing Machiavelli as the father of modernity, but a modernity where individuality and classical virtue are in conflict. Strauss thought modernity was corrupted by liberalism and democracy, which threatened to prevent the achievement of greatness. His experiences in Weimar Germany brought him to conclude that liberalism, where the world is devoid of absolute truth and religion is destroyed, created a nihilistic malaise upon which a Nazi-like regime can use democratic procedures to take over a government. Straussian conservatives thus criticize liberalism because it ‘‘has a skeptical temper where politics is concerned. For the sake of truth, liberals reject the imposition by those in power of a single and indisputable reality. This liberal stance conflicts with the Straussian conviction that society requires unwavering faith and unflinching devotionyfor zealotry and fanaticism (for Strauss) are preferable to nihilism and skepticism, because the latter weaken society, while the former strengthen it.’’ In Drury’s (1997, pp. 9–10) explanation, it was Strauss’s rejection of ‘‘secular politics, human rights, equal dignity, and individual freedom’’ that made him repudiate liberalism, values which hastened nihilism, mediocrity, licentiousness, disorder, and a dissolution of society. From Drury’s (1988, p. 3) reconstruction, Strauss holds that there exists an ‘‘incontrovertible truth about the nature of things, especially the ‘human things’, the world of man and politics. He taught them the truths that are affirmed by all the wise men of antiquity (and intentionally denied by the modern rebels against antiquity, nay against nature herself)’’ (emphasis in the original). As one reads the commentaries on Strauss, one gets the impression of an intellectual mystic who wrote cryptically, captivated students with visions of political life, philosophical discourse, and court intrigue. Drury (1988, p. 6) refers to the ‘‘clandestine discipleship of the faithful’’ in describing the relationship of students to Strauss, and the fact that Strauss held that philosophers have always hid their true thoughts and that certain ideas are inappropriate for certain audiences: ‘‘Indeed, his whole account of the history of political thought is a story of doom in which the wise, glorious and noble ‘ancients’ are overrun by the barbarous, impudent and vulgar ‘moderns’’’ (Drury, 1988, p. 9). Only the wise know which truths should be told and which ones should not. ‘‘In conclusion, Strauss’s ideas are important not only because they are comprehensive and original, but because they direct and nourish an intellectual eliteyHe has rightfully been described as a ‘guru of American conservatism’ and his influence is said to extend to the state department’s policy planning staff’’ (Drury, 1988, pp. 15–16). For Strauss, history demonstrates that only elites can rule and that philosophers

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must gain the ear of the powerful. Drury (1988, p. 17) asks, ‘‘What are they whispering in the ears of the powerful? How do they hope to change the world?yUnless we understand the political ideas of the man behind this fantastic project, the very meaning of the contemporary conservative movement will remain elusive.’’ In a chilling aside in a later work, Drury (1997, p. 23) notes that ‘‘Strauss thinks that a political order can be stable only if it is united by an external threat; and following Machiavelli, he maintains that if no external threat exists, then one has to be manufactured.’’ Telling even if it turns out to be merely coincidental, Strauss’s position on external threats is in line with Brzezinski’s (1997) position, that in order for the U.S. government to move forward with plans in Central Asia and the Middle East, a massive Pearl Harbor-like event would be necessary in order to secure the needed acquiescence of the American public. One researcher harnesses evidence that purports to show how the Bush administration benefitted from such an event in reference to the mass murders in Pennsylvania, New York City, and Washington, DC, on September 11th. The evidence suggests that government officials had some foreknowledge that an attack was in the planning, that it was likely to involve planes and buildings, and that it would come in early September. Evidence also suggests that operatives in the CIA and FBI were thwarted by their superiors in their investigation and tracking several of the would-be hijackers. According to Mosaddeq Ahmed (2002), as the planes departed from their scheduled flight paths on the morning of September 11th, nothing was done at first, no fighters were scrambled, though the administration would change its story a few days later and claim they had been. However, details show that the fighters that did make it into the air did not follow standard operating procedures and flew at a pace approximately only 20% of their capacity. Further, the Air Force units that were scrambled were ordered to do so a full 20 min after the Pentagon had been notified and this order was given to Langley, which is 130 miles from Washington, rather than Andrews, which is only 10 miles away. The order to scramble fighters above Washington was not given until after the Pentagon was hit, and this was a full 35 min after the period of 8:15 am to 9:05 am when it became clear to the Federal Aviation Administration and the U.S. military that planes had been hijacked and diverted. No fighters were scrambled to intercept the plane that eventually crashed in Pennsylvania. In violation of standard procedures, several Air Force units available to scramble stood down. Additional evidence points to involvement of government employees at the highest levels in the decision-making process of whether to scramble or not. In a very telling instance, Cheney, when asked by Tim Russert on national televison about

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the question of whether or not intercepting the hijacked planes was discussed at the White House, admitted that the administration was in fact contacted about this issue when the jets diverted from their original flight paths. However, whether or not to intercept planes off their flight path is never standard operating procedure nor a matter for White House decision makers. The standard operating procedure, as in the case when professional golfer Payne Stewart’s plane had gone off course, is for a military aircraft to scramble and examine the situation, totally outside White House purview. That White House officials were called on September 11th suggests, but does not necessarily prove, possession of special knowledge, or at the very least a radical break with ordinary procedure that requires explanation. Though perhaps by omission, and perhaps unaware of the scale of the attackers’ designs, there is reason to speculate that such events might have been allowed to occur because of their geo-political utility (Mosaddeq Ahmed, 2002). This must remain, as of yet, at the level of conjecture, but a review of the evidence gathered does suggest a version of events other than the one officially forwarded.

The Bush Administration’s Violation of Machiavelli’s Rules Examining the events that unfolded after the invasion, it appears that the administration did not follow all of Machiavelli’s dictums strictly enough, sometimes selectively picking and choosing from his instructions. With a falling popularity rating, a failing economy, and a disputed election still in the minds of the public, the administration took the events of September 11, 2001 as an opportunity to enact a grand project, one of re-ordering power relations in Central Asia and the Middle East. With the scale of the venture significant enough to capture the imagination of the U.S. public and the world, they invested much of their internal political fate in the outcome of the war, since ‘‘domestic affairs will always be secure, as along as foreign policy is successful’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 52). However, their tactics sometimes undermined their cause. Use of wisdom and moderation was a consistent problem for Bush. During his first election campaign, he referred to a reporter as the ‘‘major league asshole from the New York Times,’’ while, unbeknownst to him, a nearby microphone was live.91 This was one of the gaffes on the campaign trail that belied an image of wisdom for the would-be prince. During the war, he encouraged enemies to attack U.S. soldiers by goading would-be guerills in Iraq to ‘‘bring it on,’’ a violation of Machiavelli’s warnings against rash

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decisions and a presentation of self that was interpreted as cavalier and cowboy-like.92 The concrete retort was escalating guerilla attacks and a bombing of the UN compound in Baghdad, leaving scores killed. Coming so soon on the heels of over 3000 killed in Afghanistan – many innocent bystanders with no connection to Bin Laden – and coming in conjunction with the repression of the Palestinians by Israel, a key U.S. ally, the wisdom of using violence in Iraq with scant evidence of an imminent threat was questionable, and definitely immoderate. There were problems with management of the staff. During the lead-up to the war, Bush allowed bad information to make it into his State of the Union address, which had the ripple effect of threatening the tightness of his staff’s ranks and the willingness of other governmental leaders to tow the party line.93 Subsequent scapegoating allowed a diffusion of blame, but it was so close to his inner-circle that it threatened to harm those close to Bush, making him appear ineffectual. About the president’s aforementioned State of the Union speech, National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice claimed, ‘‘The CIA cleared the speech in its entirety,’’ and, if the CIA director had doubts about the information, ‘‘these doubts were not communicated to the president.’’ Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Pat Roberts, too, asserted that fault lay with CIA Director Tenet, who ‘‘should have told the president.’’ The White House argued that Secretary of State Powell also should have informed the president. Evidence suggests that the State Department, as well as the CIA and the White House, in fact did know of the problems with the British claims. Rice told reporters that the CIA had only once raised objections, and then only about the kind of uranium Iraq was seeking, rather than insisting on the removal of the claim. However, as early as 2002, a former diplomat claimed that Vice-President Dick Cheney’s office knew the claim could not be substantiated.94 Bush’s staff should have been well aware of Tenet’s objections. As of July 13, 2003, ‘‘senior administration officials’’ reported that in fact Tenet ‘‘successfully intervened with White House officials to remove a reference to Iraq seeking nuclear materials from Niger. The removal was from a presidential speech last October, three months before a less specific reference appeared in the State of Union address,’’ and cited the fact that the claim was based only on a single source.95 These facts undermined the administration’s explanation. Regardless of his attempts to scuttle the Niger claim in Bush’s previous speeches, CIA director George Tenet fell on his sword. In a statement released to the press, Tenet stated: ‘‘First, the CIA approved the president’s State of the Union address before it was delivered. Second, I am responsible for the approval process in my agency. And third,

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the president had every reason to believe that the text presented to him was sound.’’ Though he took the blame, he also explained personnel on the president’s National Security Council staff urged the claim be included in the president’s speech, although the CIA and the State Department had previously questioned its indisputability. In response, Pat Roberts offered the possibility that the CIA had initiated an effort to discredit the president through press leaks.96 Political relations seemed to fracture within the U.S. political elite as well as between the United States and its allies. As ranks loosened, reports of internal dissent, controversy over sources, debates over the meanings of data, the question of intentional deception, the possibility of internal dissent (e.g., Colin Powell and Jack Straw versus Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney), and cracks in the transAtlantic alliance of Britain and the United States continually surfaced. In Britain, The Guardian reported that Foreign Secretary Straw and the American Secretary of State privately discussed their concerns over the quality of the evidence given to the public.97 One U.S. congresswoman pondered whether the case for war was the ‘‘greatest intelligence hoax of all time.’’98 Appearing on national news programs, Condoleeza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld qualified the administration’s positions on both the claim about Iraq’s search for uranium and the role Tenet played in the claim’s inclusion in Bush’s State of the Union speech. Each insisted that the claim was technically true, but the establishment of its veracity should come from many sources, contending that therefore it should not have been included in the speech. Rice and Rumsfeld conceded, in fact, that ‘‘CIA Director George Tenet had struck a similar but more narrowly focused assertion from a Bush speech in Cincinnati three months earlier.’’99 Still, the administration pushed on. In an attempt to institutionalize their claims, Bush began referring to his critics as ‘‘revisionist historians.’’ This tactic did not prove successful, and by July 30th, Bush took responsibility for the erroneous statements in his address. This buck was later passed on to a staff worker in the White House. And even still later, during a speech at a national convention of journalists in Dallas, National Security Adviser Rice accepted responsibility.100 Though Machiavelli warns that a staff must be treated with care, Bush threatened himself by inflicting injuries on those he employed. He fired one of his chief economists (Paul O’Neill). Both Christine Todd Whitman (the Environmental Protection Agency) and Ari Fleisher (White House Press Secretary) resigned in their first tenure, each citing the need for ‘‘spending more time with the family.’’101 After it was speculated that Powell and Rumsfeld pursued contending policy positions, former Speaker of the

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House Newt Gingrich, unleashed a torrent of criticism toward the State Department, presumably aimed at Powell. Bush did not appear to distance himself from these attacks. Later, leaks asserted that Powell intended to withdraw if Bush sought a second term. Though Powell at the time denied this, the prediction later proved accurate. Richard Clarke, a long-serving expert on terrorism, went public with complaints that the administration treated terrorism and al-Qaida as low priorities. Administration officials and spokespersons later impugned his integrity. Finally, there was the question of whether the administration broke the law in an attempt to censure former Ambassador Joseph Wilson by exposing his wife’s role as a supposed CIA deep-cover operative.102 In early October 2003, congresspersons were calling for investigations. While Republicans held that Ashcroft’s Justice Department was capable of a fair inquiry, Democrats called for an independent council. In these cases, former staff members threatened to inflict harm on Bush, the latter a situation whose resolution was not settled at the time of this writing. Collectively, these developments signaled the loosening of ranks among the staff. It should be noted, however, that Bush worked to ensure other previous staff members would be less motivated with turning on him by awarding, in congruence with Machiavelli’s advice, the Presidential Medal of Freedom to military commander Tommy Franks, former CIA Director Tenet, former Iraqi administrator Paul Bremer. Reflecting the general situation Bush faced in Iraq, Machiavelli (1977, p. 17) previously warned: And it is worth noting that nothing is harder to manage, more risky in the undertaking, or more doubtful of success than to set up as the introducer of a new order. Such an innovator has as enemies all the people who were doing well under the old order, and only halfhearted defenders in those who hope to profit from the new. The halfheartedness derives party from fear of opponents who have the law on their side, and partly from human skepticismy This is why, whenever the enemies of a new state have occasion to attack it, they do so furiously, while its friends come only languidly to its defense, so that the whole venture is likely to collapse.

Despite this and other Machiavellian warnings, Bush had his army enter a divided city, which allowed a degeneration into guerilla warfare and led to a legitimacy crisis for the interim governing council that was put in place. Later elections split power among Iraq’s three traditional ethnic factions (Kurd, Shiite, and Sunni), with those traditionally powerful edged to the margins through protest and nonparticipation. A moment’s reflection on the bombing of the UN compound in Iraq must be added to any estimation of the wiseness of the strategy of enacting a war on flimsy pretexts and unverifiable information. When such ‘‘disorders occur,’’ stability becomes an

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issue as ‘‘turbulence brings harm to an entire community’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 47). The scandals involving torture at U.S. detention centers also raised the anger of Iraqis, as ‘‘recurring injuries keep them suspicious’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 28). A new generation willing to use violence against civilians was produced, putting an inestimable number of people in harm’s way and threatening to destabilize the region. Further, there is the question of choosing this particular war and the effect it might have on the U.S. position as a world power. Brzezinski has explained that the United States wanted to draw the USSR into Afghanistan as a way of forcing a Vietnamlike entanglement on them to weaken their position in the Cold War. In pursuit of fighting the Soviets – and the Marxist government in Afghanistan, the real target – the United States supported the radical Islamic Mujahideen. After the Soviets left, warring factions left the country in even worse shape, out of which emerged the Taliban as the dominant power and Osama Bin Laden as one if its allies. What a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq will result in is something only the future can tell. Taking care of people’s everyday needs, whether this be in the United States or in Iraq, is an important Machiavellian rule. Beyond gimmicky taxcuts benefitting mainly the top income brackets, the Bush administration neglected the domestic economy, a lesson Bush-the-elder learned the hard way.103 Conquered with an air of invincibility and the claimed mantel of democratic liberation, the vanquished population of Iraq expected a proficient and rapid establishment of everyday services from the U.S. military, which initially failed to even sustain the Hussein regime’s level of caretaking.104 Suggesting continued difficulties, the outlook for the economic well-being of Iraq, based on the assumption that oil profits will benefit its general population, was reported as being less than optimistic. Consumers of U.S. media were made ready for this with the explanation that little wealth was expected to reach Iraqi citizens.105 One can only speculate at the anger this will foster in the future.

Machiavellian Rules that did not Serve them Well The administration’s war plans were in-line with Machiavelli’s rule about not strengthening strong neighbors and strengthening weak ones. They eschewed making strategic alliances with very many other significant powers, save Britain, and relied heavily on unilateralist sovereignty. Machiavelli’s advice aside, excluding Europe and Russia was a contestable strategy. While this provided the administration the opportunity to decide the allotment of

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war-spoils unilaterally, it also put the target on the United States almost alone. This strategy effected Franco-American, Russo-American and German-American relationships, among others (e.g., Mexico) by alienating these former Cold War allies from Washington, especially after Rumsfeld referred to them as ‘‘old Europe’’ and to former Soviet-republics and their allies (e.g., Uzbekistan and Poland) as ‘‘new Europe,’’ discursive constructs which suggest a long-term vision involving the reorganization of world power. It is important that a prince give his advisors ‘‘free licence to speak the truth – and only on those points where the prince asks for it, not on others. But he should ask them about everything, hear his advisors out, and make his decision after thinking things over, according to his own style’’ (Machiavelli, 1977, p. 66). Bush publically described his decision-making style as one that did not rely on newspapers or broadcast media, but on the advice of his counsel. He rarely, if ever, publicly second guessed his decisions. In an instance of what might eventually prove to have been a case of groupthink (Janis, 1982), however, Wolfowitz, Cheney, and Rumsfeld seemed to have fooled themselves and Bush into believing that U.S. forces would be welcomed with open arms, that the fall of Baghdad would be followed by the collapse of other Islamic regimes, scenarios which likely led them to conclude a larger force was not needed. Bush was reported to have believed that no American casualties would result from the war. On the contrary, the number of U.S. casualties and several massive bombings convinced many people, inside and outside the White House, that an insufficient number of troops had been prepared for the war and that plans for rebuilding the country were inadequate and that an exit strategy was nonexistent. Unlike Reagan, Bush’s dramaturgical skills were questionable. Even within the bubble of acquiescence made possible by an uncritical U.S. media, there emerged an increasing by skeptical discourse about Bush’s behavior. One U.S. congressperson muttered about impeachment. The words ‘‘lie’’ and ‘‘lies’’ dogged the administration. When confronted with facts that confounded the definition of the situation they constructed, administration members turned to team work, with different members entering the Sunday rounds of talk shows, offering spin, denial, qualification, and a re-statement of previous assertions. Such techniques involve a process ‘‘in which the audience can be held in a state of mystification in regard to the performance’’ (Goffman, 1959, p. 67). This is why power needs secrecy, secrecy creates mystification, and mystification can augment the maintenance of legitimacy through obedience, especially under a situation of work, fear,

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and uncertainty. Regardless of this, military grunts became disgruntled and their families rebelled.106 Nevertheless, open revolt of the masses was averted.

The Recurring Historical Question of Fascism The militarizing of U.S. foreign policy is not perhaps new, nor is international criticism of it. What is perhaps new is the attempt to re-organize whole regions of geo-political reality on this scale. The United States is poised to have a military foothold in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, Iraq, with allies in Turkey, Kuwait, Egypt, and Israel. With control of channels for the flow of commodities and energy resources, France, Germany, Russia, and China can be kept fractured, dependent, and in a weak bargaining position. According to Wallerstein (2004), the main target of Washington’s maneuvers in the Cold War was less Moscow than it was Paris and Berlin, each of which needed consistent convincing of a certain definition of the situation: capitalism, not communism, Sovietism, Euro-communism nor even socialism, would be Europe’s best future. One goal of invading Iraq, like in the Cold War, was still the prevention of a Paris– Berlin–Moscow alignment, only now with the added concern of preventing Beijing from joining such an alliance. With the assumption that the Japanese, the Australians, the Scandinavians, and the remainder of Asia and Europe would go along with the administration’s designs, and the assumption that Africa, Latin America, and the Asian sub-continent were too weak to mount much of a challenge, the administration could cast Paris and Berlin as an irrelevant ‘‘old Europe,’’ one reason that explains Tony Blair’s decision to follow Washington’s lead. And while perhaps the scale of this project is new, the general approach is not. ‘‘Renaissance Europeans experienced what Michael Roberts aptly termed a ‘military revolution’ in a suddenly global order, and responded by trading and fighting with other cultures, devastating entire civilizations, devastating themselves. This ought to ring a bell’’ (Breight, 1996, p. 241). The bell this ought to ring is one called ‘‘fascism.’’ This assertion is not meant in a hyperbolic way.107 From former U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial-complex to a simple definition offered by Webster’s Dictionary, the concern over fascism’s warning signs has increasingly found expression in criticism and evaluation of the Bush administration and its policies. Fascist states have been characterized by an idealization and conjunction of state and corporate power, extreme

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nationalism, aggressive militarism, a controlled and compliant mass media, the utilization of sexism, racism, and xenophobia to unify the population, a fixation on national security, contempt for intellectuals and human rights, the coupling of religion and government, and widespread corruption, such as that evidenced by fraudulent elections (Adorno, 1950; Britt, 2003). This list suggests that rather than something reducible to personalities (e.g., Hitler, Mussolini), the potentiality of fascism is inherent in capitalist society, something always there whose presence is a matter of degree. If the variables that keep fascism in check – such as vigorous working-class consciousness, participatory democracy, open social discourse and debate, checks and balances on the powerful – are counteracted, then the chance of its overt growth is increased. The Bush administration’s drift has exemplified each of these traits. From the contested election and Bush’s subsequent appointment to the chief executive, to Cheney’s cronyism in handing out contracts to Bechtel and Haliburton,108 to the treatment of Arabs and Arab-Americans as a priori suspect, to the baiting of musicians, film makers, intellectuals and ‘‘revisionist historians,’’ to the constant references to ‘‘God’’ during state functions, to the acquiescent corporate media, to the constant flag-waving, anthem singing, and boisterous nationalism, to the increased intensity of the surveillance society, each of these major tendencies magnified and accelerated fascist undercurrents historically existent in capitalist core-hegemons. Straussians are accelerating the arrival of the fascism their master feared. One reason they misread their complicity in this development is that Strauss believed that ideas create the world and barbarism was the result simply of bad ideas (Drury, 1997, p. 14). This made Strauss and his descendants blind to the fact that fascism is less the product of a personality, something brought on by a rogue prince or others poised with evil intent animated by poorly executed reason, and more the result that springs from the basic roots of the modern political-economy, its state, and the chaos markets create as they throw various cultural and ethnic regions into the same competitive struggle. Fascism is one real outcome of the structural-historical conditions of capitalism and if unimpeded by counteracting forces, the traits that express fascistic tendencies blossom. This both produces and props up charismatic figures who proclaim to have the answers for which people are looking. Personalities of the past may have been visible leaders of fascistic movements, but this trend is the result of fascism’s xenophobic, hierarchical, state-dictatorial thrusts, and its supporters’ fascination with ‘‘great men.’’ These are all themes of modernity, and when unleashed unimpeded they foist notable individuals into view. But it is, nevertheless, a mistake to

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assume that the movement of fascism originates in the minds of individual persons or prince’s themselves. The war on Iraq is not a war against a specific terrorist group nor a direct response to a specific terrorist act.109 The war is one element in a long-term vision, one that was advocated long before the terrorist attacks in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. On July 28, 2003, NPR broadcast comments by Paul Wolfowitz that Iraq was the current central theater in the fight against terrorism, an attempt to define the war as in reaction to the crimes of September 11th and another move to manipulate and institutionalize public knowledge of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. These discursive constructs he reiterated in front of Congress a few weeks later in testimony about the outcome and costs of the war. Wolfowitz long urged the previous administration to use its military might to reshape the world. As a youth, Wolfowitz became enamored by the idea of ‘‘national greatness’’ and as an administration official became ‘‘the Bush administration’s chief intellectual – who pressed Bush hardest to transform the war on terror into a campaign for regime change and democracy in rogue nations, especially in Iraq and the Islamic world.’’110 For instance, ‘‘at the University of Chicago grad school, a haven for right-wing thinkers, Wolfowitz was smitten with the grandeur of great empires, says Charles Fairbanks, a fellow Chicago grad and friendy‘He had just been reading Livy’s history of Rome. He was obviously somehow in love with political greatnessyHe talked for hours at a time about the ancient Romans, about what kind of men they were and what they achieved’.’’ Wolfowitz, perhaps, sees the Unites States as a modern Rome. One hesitates to recall that Rome fell and destroyed many societies and peoples along with it. If there was no connection between the Iraqi regime and September 11th (this much Bush admitted),111 if September 11, 2001 was forwarded as the justification for the war on terrorism, and if the war in Iraq is the administration’s military focus, then it is reasonable to conclude that the Bush administration abandoned efforts to have the central task of the military to be fighting terrorism. Instead, the administration wielded the military as an instrument of foreign policy and economic development for special interests, such as oil, gas, and armaments industries. Are the administration’s plans really long term? Its thinking seems to extend from two poles. On the one hand, there is the grand vision of reorganizing Central Asia and the Middle East. Their plan seems to assume that a successful and rapid U.S. victory would intimidate radical Islamic movements and convince autocrats in the region that they must finally crack down on them. The United States would then be in a position to undermine opposition discourses and enforce its

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political-economic system in the region. This would also augment U.S. support of Israel and its crackdown on Palestinian militants, who, as a consequence, would see the writing on the wall and come to the table for peace talks (or, further rebel and thus provide Israel the reason it needs to finish them off). On the other hand, there is the opportunist grab for energy resources and geo-political advantage. With oil supplies dwindling worldwide and with France, Germany, Russia, and China all making their own deals with various oil exporters, and with the ties between the United States and Saudi Arabia increasingly strained, a U.S. military in Iraq and an allied governing council, the war can function as a means of securing energy resources and as a wedge against the possibilities of allies and competitors rising in power. The Bush administration has become the orchestrator of a ‘‘Project for a New American Century,’’ where U.S. imperialism stands relatively unimpeded for the foreseeable future. As capitalists, they have positioned themselves, their industry, and their state in a manner which serves their long-term interests, whether re-elected or not. These observations must be juxtaposed to the image of the United States as a representative democracy with a general level of legitimacy. If this image stands internally, then historical lessons will not have been learned and the growth of fascist tendencies within the United States will be legitimized by its citizens as something other than what it really is.

NOTES 1. Niccolo Machiavelli. 1977. The Prince. Translated and edited, Robert M. Adams. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., page 28. 2. See: http://www.salon.com/politics/conason/2002/12/04/bush/; http://www. http://65.18.141.122/ democraticunderground.com/articles/03/05/01_gut.html; subscribers/news.php?topicid=621 3. For reasons of flow and continuity, the narrative uses the pronoun ‘‘he’’ and its relatives since Machiavelli often uses ‘‘he’’ in discussing his rules for princes. Additionally, ‘‘the prince,’’ ‘‘Bush,’’ and ‘‘the administration’’ are often used in commensurate ways. The reader may decide if these discursive strategies were successful. 4. See: http://ppm.ohio-state.edu/about_us/04essays/cain.pdf. Also see: http:// www.academy.umd.edu/ila/Publications/Proceedings/2001/mharvey.pdf 5. See: http://www.corpwatch.org/issues/PII.jsp?topicid=106. 6. ‘‘Support for President Bush on Iraq appears to have stabilized after a precipitous drop earlier this summer, but three months after the end of major combat in the Persian Gulf, the public is again sharply dividedyaccording to a new Washington Post PollyThe return to a polarized political climate, coming so quickly after a period of relative unity during the height of the fighting in Iraq, foreshadows a

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contentious re-election campaign for the presidentyA solid majority (56 percent) of those surveyed approve of the way Bush is handling the situation in Iraq, and six in 10 said the war was worth fighting. Those evaluations had been dropping earlier in the summeryBush receives poorer marks on the domestic scene, with 45 percent approving of his handling of the economy and 41 percent saying they approve of the way he had dealt with the federal budget deficit, which will hit an estimated $455 billion this fiscal yearyOnly a third of those surveyed said the state of the economy was good or excellentyAsked whether they were better off since Bush came into office, just 17 percent said they were doing better while 25 percent said they were worse off’’ (Dan Balz and Claudia Deane. The Washington Post. Reprinted in, Lexington Herald-Leader. Wednesday, August 13, 2003, A3). 7. Governmental leaders became divided over whether American troops had been sent over in sufficient numbers to get the job done. After a trip to Baghdad, Senator John McCain (R- Ariz.) urged on Meet the Press that another division (about 18,000 troops) be sent, Senator Joseph Biden (D - Del.), the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee put the number at 40,000 to 60,000 troops needed, while Senator Lindsey Graham (R - S.C.) argued that money not so much troops were what was needed, and Paul Bremer, chief U.S. civilian administrator for Iraq, said on ABC Television that more intelligence, not troops, was what was needed (Brian Knowlton. New York Times News Service. Reprinted in, Lexington HeraldLeader. Monday, August 25, 2003, A1/A6). 8. See: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/iraq/interviews/perle.html. 9. Jim Krane. Associated Press. Reprinted in, Lexington Herald-Leader. Thursday, July 3, 2003, A3. 10. ‘‘The failure to secure foreign help in Iraq comes as polls show growing concern among the public and lawmakers of both parties in Congress that the U.S.-led effort to pacify and rebuild Iraq costs too much, kills too many U.S. soldiers and could be inflaming terrorists more than defusing themyOne day after Bush spoke to the General Assembly, calling on the world to lend the United States a hand in Iraq, senior administration officials said the president, in a series of meetings with world leaders, didn’t ask for specific assistance . . .‘The president came here to lay out a call for the international community to join together in what way people can in supporting reconstruction of Afghanistan and Iraq, and its building of a stable Iraq.’ Bush’s call went unanswered’’ (Ron Hutcheson and William Douglas. Knight Ridder New Service. Reprinted in, Lexington Herald-Leader. Thursday, September 25, 2003, A3). 11. See: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/events/newsnight/1174115.stm. Also see generally: http://www.gregpalast.com/. 12. See: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/0906-06.htm; http://www. truthout.org/docs_01/03.05D.Stirring.Frustration.htm; http://www.washingtonpost. http://www.gwu.edu/nsarchiv/ com/wp-dyn/articles/A1988-2004Jun24.html; NSAEBB/NSAEBB84/findingsopen.htm. 13. See: http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/breaking_news/6335627. htm; http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/WO0307/S00252.htm; http://seattlepi. nwsource.com/national/131558_energy19.html. 14. David Johnson. New York Times News Service. Reprinted in, Lexington Herald-Leader. Saturday 26, 2003, A6.

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15. See: http://www8.cnn.com/2003/LAW/03/17/war.legal.case/. Also see: http:// www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/attack/law/2003/0201powell.htm. ‘‘the Bush administration has embraced the doctrine of preemptive war, including the first strike use of nuclear weapons, and is now applying it to Iraq. Speaking in Davos, Switerland, on 26 January 2003, U.S. Secretary of State, Colin L. Powell, said: ‘We continue to reserve our sovereign right to take military action against Iraq alone or in a coalition of the willingy’ There is no such unqualified sovereign right. On the contrary, as a member state of the United Nations, the U.S. is obliged by law to pursue peaceful means in international relations, as stated in the UN Charter, Chapter 1, Article 2: ‘All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered; and, All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner consistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.’ The UN Charter does recognize the use of unilateral military force by a member state, but only for purposes of self defense and only when an ‘armed attack’ has occurred against that state, as stated in Chapter 7, Article 51 of the UN Charter: ‘Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.’’’ 16. See: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/feb2003/guer-f08.shtml; http://www. http://archives. usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2003-02-05-un-scene-usat_x.htm; tcm.ie/businesspost/2003/04/27/story640995853.asp. 17. See: http://media.guardian.co.uk/iraqandthemedia/story/0,12823,932170,00. html; http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/baghdadreporters_04-08-03.html. 18. Herald-Leader Wire Services. Wednesday, August 13, 2003, A3. 19. See: http://www4.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/03/16/sprj.irq.cheney/. 20. On the morning of September 23, 2003, NPR broadcast a segment with interviews of Iraqi civilians. Their feelings about Bush’s recent UN speech were mixed. And, while they all seemed to share relief at Hussein’s ouster, one man complained that the administration had created a terrorist threat where none had previously existed and that the country was being infiltrated from outside by groups interesting in waging guerilla war against U.S. troops and interim governing organizations. 21. See: http://www.commondreams.org/views01/1213-05.htm. 22. Tom Lasseter. Lexington Herald-Leader. Sunday, July 13, 2003, A1. 23. See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,579071,00.html. 24. See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,579174,00.html. 25. See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/wtccrash/story/0,1300,556279,00.html. 26. Ann Coulter’s book, Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism, is a good example. 27. According to journalist Helen Thomas’s reading of the situation, ‘‘national security,’’ a common excuse for previous administrations, ‘‘is being used to cover any past, current or future questionable government activities under a new order Bush has signed. The six-page document requires anyone seeking papers of past presidents and vice presidents to demonstrate a ‘‘specific need’’ for those papers before they can be produced. And any release then will be at the discretion of the sitting

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presidentyYet the order is clearly protective of the president’s father and officials who are back at the White House in top jobs after serving in the Bush I administration between 1989 and 1993ySome 68,000 pages of confidential messages between Reagan and his advisers were closely reviewed by his presidential library staff and cleared for release. But now the White House has seen fit to put a permanent hold on their disclosure to the public.’’ See: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/ 45766_helen7.shtml. 28. See: http://villagenews.weblogger.com/stories/storyReader$7006. 29. For an alarmed discussion from the mainstream see: Kathleen Parker. Syndicated Columnist; Tribune Media Services. Reprinted in, Lexington Herald-Leader. Tuesday, July 1, 2003, A7. 30. David E. Sanger. New York Times News Service. Reprinted in, Lexington Herald-Leader. Thursday, September 11, 2003, A1. 31. ‘‘Before asking Congress for a Joint Resolution authorizing the use of American military forces in Iraq, [Bush] made a number of unequivocal statements about the reason the United States needed to pursue the most radical actions any nation can undertake – acts of war against another nation. Now it is clear that many of his statements appear to be falseyBush’s statements, in chronological order, were: ‘Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons’ United Nations Address September 12, 2002. ‘Iraq has stockpiled biological and chemical weapons, and is rebuilding the facilities used to make more of those weapons.’ ‘We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons – the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have’ Radio Address October 5, 2002. ‘The Iraqi regimeypossesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons.’ ‘We know that the regime has produced thousands of tons of chemical agents, including mustard gas, sarin nerve gas, VX nerve gas.’ ‘We’ve also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We’re concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVS for missions targeting the United States.’ ‘The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his ‘nuclear mujahideen’ – his nuclear holy warriors. Satellite photographs reveal that Iraq is rebuilding facilities at sites that have been part of its nuclear program in the past. Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons’ Cincinnati, Ohio Speech October 7, 2002. ‘Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent. ’State of the Union Address January 28, 2003 ‘Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised’ Address to the Nation March 17, 2003. During the past two and a half months, according to reliable news reports, military patrols have visited over 300 suspected WMD sites throughout Iraq. None of the prohibited weapons were found there.’’ See: http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20030606.html. 32. ‘‘In the months leading up to Sept. 11, 2001, the al-Qaida hijackers werey in contact with as many as 14 people who have turned up in previous FBI

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counterterrorism investigations – at least four of whom were under active FBI investigation – according to a partially declassified investigation by the joint Congressional Committee on Intelligence published yesterdayyThe U.S. intelligence community ‘failed to capitalize’ on bits of information that might have allowed agents to unravel the hijack plot, the joint committee concluded, and bungled clues that should have led the FBI to two or more of the terrorists before they could act’’ (Susan Schmidt and David Von Drehle. The Washington Post. Reprinted in, Lexington Herald-Leader. July 25, 2003, A1/A10). 33. The sites Powell singled out as locations of chemical and biological weapons ‘‘had undergone 500 inspections in recent monthsy[Hans Blix’s] well-equipped experts found no contraband and no sign that items had been moved. Nothing has been reported found sinceyOn July 24, Foreign Minister Ana Palacio of Spain, a U.S. ally on Iraq, said there were ‘no evidences, no proof’ of a nuclear bomb program before the war. No such evidence has been reported found since the invasionyNo Scud-type missiles have been reported found’’ (Charles Hanley. Associated Press. Reprinted in, Lexington Herald-Leader. Sunday, August 10, 2003, A1/A16). 34. See: http://www.aftenposten.no/english/world/article.jhtml?articleID=511811. 35. See: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A36348-2002Sep18?language =printer&content=article. 36. Philip Shenon. New York Times News Service. Reprinted in, Lexington Herald-Leader. Wednesday, July 9, 2003, A1/A8. 37. Thomas Ricks and Rajiv Chandrasekaran. The Washington Post. Reprinted in, The Lexington Herald-Leader. Monday, July 7, 2003, A1. 38. See: http://www.thenation.com/capitalgames/index.mhtml?bid=3pid=823. 39. Matt Kelley. Associated Press. Reprinted in, Lexington Herald-Leader. Sunday, July 13, 2003, A1/A15. 40. Matt Kelley. Associated Press. Reprinted in, Lexington Herald-Leader. Sunday, July 13, 2003, A1/A15. 41. ‘‘Richard Kerr, a former CIA deputy director who is leading a review of the CIA’s prewar intelligence on Iraq’s unconventional weapons, held a series of interviews with journalists and revealed that his unfinished inquiry had so far found that the intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction had been somewhat ambiguous, that analysts at the CIA and other intelligence services had received pressure from the Bush administration, and that the CIA had not found any proof of operational ties between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s regimeyBush had said that intelligence gathered by the United States and other nations had determined – ‘no doubt’ – that Hussein possessed WMDs, and he had declared that the Iraqi dictator was ‘dealing’ with al Qaeda. Kerr’s statements undermined these vital assertions Bush had made to justify the waryhis findings indicate that there was no hard-andfast intelligence that Iraq possessed ready-to-go chemical or biological weaponsyBush and his colleagues said the intelligence showed – without question – Hussein was armed with biological and chemical weapons, was close to building a nuclear bomb, and was in league with Osama bin Laden. Kerr’s comments offer further proof none of this was true. So did front-page headlines scream, ‘Former Deputy CIA Director Contradicts Bush’s Key War Claims’? NopeyEach piece emphasized Kerr’s endorsement of the CIA’s analysts, rather than the fact that his

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findings revealed that the Bush administration had misrepresented the work of the analysts.’’ See: http://www.thenation.com/capitalgames/index.mhtml?bid=3&pid =800. And, ‘‘Representative Jane HarmanyOn Bush’s prewar assertions about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction: ‘When discussing Iraq’s WMD, administration officials rarely included the caveats and qualifiers attached to the intelligence committee’s judgmentsyFor many Americans, the administration’s certainty gave the impression that there was even stronger intelligence about Iraq’s possession of and intention to use WMD’yOn the supposed Hussein-al Qaeda connection: ‘[T]he investigation suggests that the intelligence linking al Qaeda to Iraq, a prominent theme in the administration’s statements prior to the war, [was] contrary to what was claimed by the administration’yShe asserts that the President overstated the WMD case, ignoring nuances and uncertainties in the intelligence reporting, and created a false impression about what was known about the threat posed by Iraq. She maintains that Bush rashly claimed Hussein was in cahoots with the evildoers of September 11, 2001, when intelligence indicated otherwise.’’ See: http://www. thenation.com/capitalgames/index.mhtml?bid=3&pid=783. 42. Terence Hunt. Associated Press. Reprinted in, Lexington Herald-Leader. Thursday, September 18, 2003, A3. 43. Ken Guggenheim. Associated Press. Reprinted in, Lexington Herald-Leader. Friday, July 4, 2003, A3. 44. Warren Strobel and Johnathan Landay. Knight Ridder Washington Bureau. Reprinted in, Lexington Herald-Leader. Thursday, July 3, 2003, A1. 45. ‘‘But that finding in the classified National Intelligence Estimate, prepared for the White House last October, came loaded with reservations that reflected deep divisions in the intelligence community over Iraq’s weapons programs and were at odds with the certainty expressed by Bush and his top aidesyThe report even quoted intelligence experts at the State Department as describing claims that Iraq tried to buy uranium in Africa as ‘highly dubious’yAlthough the report concluded that Iraq was seeking chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, it acknowledged the scarcity of solid information’’ (Ron Hutcheson. Knight Ridder News Service. Reprinted in, Lexington Herald-Leader. Saturday, July 19, 2003, A1. 46. Matt Kelley. Associated Press. Reprinted in, Lexington Herald-Leader. July 13, 2003, A1/A15. 47. Hyungwon Kang. Reuters. July 14, 2003. Also see: http://www.freepress. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/ org/departments.php/display/13/2003/251; middle_east/july-dec03/wmd_7-11.html. And: ‘‘A senior CIA official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the intelligence agency informed the White House on March 9, 2002 – 10 months before Bush’s nationally televised speech – that an agency source who had traveled to Niger couldn’t confirm European intelligence reports that Iraq was attempting to buy uranium from the West African CountryyThree senior administration officials said Vice President Dick Cheney and some officials on the National Security Council staff and at the Pentagon ignored the CIA’s reservations and argued that the president and others should include the allegation in their case against Saddam. The claim later turned out to be based on crude forgeries that an African diplomat had sold to Italian intelligence officialsyOne senior administration official, also speaking on the condition of anonymity because the intelligence reports remain classified, said the CIA’s doubts

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were well known and widely shared throughout the government before Bush’s speechy‘The intelligence community had generally discredited the Niger angle well before [Powell’s] Feb. 5 presentation, though the (CIA) had caveated the whole matter with ‘‘it’s a possibility’’ type language,’ said one senior administration official. ‘The State Department’s (Bureau of Intelligence and Research) had footnoted the caveat with a ‘‘hardly believable.’’yIt was too bad even to get on the table at the (CIA) by that time’yAmong the most vocal proponents of publicizing the alleged Niger connection, two senior officials said, were Cheney and officials in the office of Defense Secretary Donald H. RumsfeldyCheney alleged in an Aug. 26, 2002, speech that Saddam ‘has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons,’ and this March 16 he went much further, saying: ‘We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.’ On last Sunday’s television talk shows, national security advisor Condoleezza Rice said the White House was unaware of the CIA’s doubts. ‘Maybe someone knew in the bowels of the agency, but no one in our circles knew that there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery’, she said on NBCy However, the inclusion of the uranium story in Bush’s speech appears to support charges that some pro-invasion officials ignored intelligence that could hurt the administration’s case that Saddam was pursuing nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs’’ (Jonathan Landay. Knight Ridder Newspapers. Thursday, June 12, 2003). See: http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/6076178.htm. 48. See: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0531-01.htm. Or: http://www. veteransforpeace.org/US_insiders_say_053103.htm. And: http://www.commondreams. And: http://www.veteransforpeace.org/Ex-oficio_ org/headlines03/0607-09.htm. evidence_060703.htm. 49. Tom Carver. Washington Correspondent, BBC. Wednesday, February 20, 2002. See: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1830500.stm. 50. See: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-6047-648517,00.html. Also see: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/correspondent/3028585.stm. 51. ‘‘On 20 February 2002 the New York Times revealed that the Pentagon, on orders from Donald Rumsfeld and the undersecretary for defence, Douglas Feith, had secretly created the mysterious Office of Strategic Influence (OSI), to generate false news to serve U.S. interestsyThe OSIyauthorised to engage in disinformation, particularly to foreign mediayhad a contract worth $100,000 a month with the Rendon Group, a media consultancy already used in the Gulf waryAlthough officially dissolvedythe OSI must have remained active. How otherwise can we explain the grossest manipulations of the recent war in Iraq, especially the ‘rescue’ of Private Jessica Lynch?’’ (Ignacio Ramonet. ‘‘State Sponsored Lies.’’ Le Monde. July, 2003). See: http://mondediplo.com/2003/07/01ramonet. 52. See: http://www.fair.org/press-releases/osi-followup.html. 53. Richard Sale. United Press International. April 10, 2003. See: http://www. upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20030410-070214-6557r. 54. James Ridgeway. The Village Voice. March 28, 2003. See: http://www. villagevoice.com/issues/0314/ridgewar3.php. 55. See: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/events/newsnight/1645527.stm. See: http://www. cooperativeresearch.org/timeline/main/AAsaudi.html. http://www.americanfreepress.net/10_07_01/Bush___Bin_Laden_-_ 56. See: George_W__B/bush___bin_laden_-_george_w__b.html. And: http://www.inthesetimes.

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com/issue/25/25/feature3.shtml. And: http://informationclearinghouse.info/ article4422.htm. 57. Washington Post. Sunday, March 16, 2003, Style Section, F1. Also see: http:// observer.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12239,919897,00.html. For a documentary on the Carlyle Group, see: http://informationclearinghouse.info/article3995.htm. 58. See: http://newyorker.com/fact/content/?011112fa_FACT3. 59. See: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2001/09/30/archive/main313048.shtml. Also see: http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0110/S00008.htm. And: http:// www.nationalreview.com/york/york091102.asp. 60. See: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7372-2004Feb2?language =printer; http://www.boston.com/news/politics/president/bush/articles/2004/02/05/ bushs_guard_service_what_the_record_shows/; http://www.boston.com/news/nation/ articles/2004/02/12/bushs_loss_of_flying_status_should_have_spurred_probe/; http:// www.boston.com/news/politics/president/bush/articles/2000/05/23/ 1_year_gap_in_bushs_guard_duty/. 61. See: http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-02-11-bush-guard-usat_ x.htm; http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/10/18/cocaine/; http://www.salon. http://www.usatoday.com/news com/people/col/reit/1999/08/25/geob/index.html; /washington/2004-02-12-bush-records_x.htm; http://archives.cnn.com/2000/ ALLPOLITICS/stories/11/02/bush.dui/; http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections /politics/DailyNews/trackingpoll_001104.html. 62. See: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/10/29/bulge/index_np. html. 63. See: http://money.cnn.com/2003/06/26/news/economy/epi/. 64. See: http://byrd.senate.gov/byrd_speeches/byrd_speeches_2003march/byrd_ speeches_2003march_list/byrd_speeches_2003march_list_4.html. 65. See: http://www.time.com/time/europe/gdml/peace2003.html. 66. It has a color coded system where colors such as green, blue, orange, yellow and red are supposed to correspond to threat levels such as ‘‘elevated,’’ or ‘‘immanent.’’ Why not just use the words? If the public has to learn two systems instead of just one, then they can be placed in a larger discursive grid that allows for confusion, mistakes, and flux. Fear is more easily manipulated under such conditions. 67. Frank Davis. Knight Ridder Washington Bureau. Reprinted in, Lexington Herald-Leader. Wednesday, September 10, 2003, A1. 68. Hannah Allam. Knight Ridder News Service. Reprinted in, Lexington HeraldLeader. Wednesday, September 10, 2003, A1/A11. 69. See: http://www.newamericancentury.org/. 70. Herald-Leader Wire Reports. Lexington-Herald Leader. Saturday, May 31, 2003. See: http://www.kentucky.com/mld/heraldleader/5982887.htm. 71. Charles J. Hanley. Associated Press. Reprinted in, Lexington Herald-Leader, Monday, September 8, 2003, A3. http://www.usembassy-israel.org.il/publish/peace/archives/2001/febru72. See: ary/me0224b.html; http://www.thememoryhole.org/war/powell-no-wmd.htm. 73. See: http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/printer_061603H.shtml; http://www. masnet.org/articleinterest.asp?id=173. 74. ‘‘And it was Wolfowitz who, in 1992, authored a Defense planning paper that stirred a huge controversy in Washington by declaring that America intended to

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remain the world’s only great power.’’ See: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/iraq/etc/cron.html; http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/iraq/ etc/synopsis.html; http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/03/24/timep.saddam. tm/; http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:g7V6esZsXvYJ:www.masnet.org/ articleinterest.asp%3Fid%3D173+Paul+Wolfowitz+America+intended+to+be +the+world%27s+great+power&hl=en&ie=UTF-8. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/teachers/lessonplans/iraq/powell75. See: doctrine_short.html. 76. Natalie Pompilio. Knight Ridder New Service. Reprinted in, Lexington Herald-Leader. July 4, 2003, A1. 77. Thom Shanker. New York Times News Service. Reprinted in, Lexington Herald-Leader. July 10, 2003, A1/A10. 78. See: http://216.239.37.104/search?q=cache:YbKN5b5tYMgJ:www.house. gov/budget_democrats/analyses/spending/iraqi_cost_report.pdf+iraq+billions+ %22total+cost+of+the+war%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8. 79. ‘‘This form of power applies itself to immediate everyday life which categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others have to recognize in him. It is a form of power which makes individuals subjects. There are two meanings of the word subject: subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to’’ (Foucault, 1983, p. 212). 80. See: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/iraq/etc/wolf.html. 81. David E. Sanger. New York Times News Service. Reprinted in, Lexington Herald-Leader. September 11, 2003, A1. 82. ‘‘U.S. troops fanning out to reinforce allied control of Iraq came under attack again yesterday in at least three places north of Baghdad. Retaliating, they killed at least seven people, military officials saidyfiveywereycharacterized by inhabitants as innocent bystanders, and by the U.S. military as attackersyIn London yesterday, an Anglo-American research group said that the estimates of civilian deaths in Iraq since the war began range from 5,534 to 7,207’’ (Herald Leader Wire Services. Reprinted in, Lexington Herald-Leader. Saturday, June 14, 2003, A1/A10). ‘‘The shootings outraged local residents, who said the Americans had not offered adequate warnings before firing on the Toyota and on another car half a block away, in which three other people were wounded. The people in the Toyota were members of a family that lived near the site of the raid, said Qais Estefan Ibrahim, who said he was a neighboryThere had been hope that the killings of the Hussein brothers might demoralize the resistance. Instead, their deaths appear to have inspired a wave of revenge attacks’’ (D’Arcy Doran. Associated Press. Reprinted in, Lexington HeraldLeader. Monday, July 28, 2003; New York Times News Service given secondary credit). ‘‘Violence spread yesterday through the sweltering southern region surrounding the city of Basra, where protracted shortages of electricity and gasoline sparked a second day of angry demonstrations in the country’s second-largest city and in nearby towns and villages’’ (Pamela Constable. The Washington Post. Reprinted in, Lexington Herald-Leader. Monday, August 11, 2003, A6). ‘‘In an unrelated incident, one Iraqi was killed and four were wounded in Baghdad

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yesterday afternoon when U.S. soldiers returned fire on demonstrators who attacked them with guns and a rocket-propelled grenade in Sadr City, a largely Shiite neighborhood. The demonstration, which included about 3,000 people, took place after a U.S. helicopter flew past a communications tower at a mosque, blowing down a banner, [military spokesman Sgt. Danny] Martin said’’ (Steven Weisman with Felicity Barringer. New York Times News Service. Reprinted in, Lexington HeraldLeader. Thursday, August 14, 2003, A3). ‘‘Shiite Islamic clerics demanded yesterday that U.S. forces leave a Baghdad slum within 24 hours and never re-enter, a day after soldiers fired into a crowd, killing one person and wounding fouryU.S. military officers have met with local Shiite leaders, but tensions remain high, and angry residents are threatening to kill U.S. troopsyClerics claim the victim was a 10-year old girlyU.S. soldiers ‘are losing their popularity here, and they are losing the support of the Shiite people,’ said Sheik Qais al Khazali, 29, a deputy of Moqtada al Sadr, a controversial young cleric who has a wide following in the neighborhood and who has called for passive resistance against the U.S. force and the governing coalition’’ (Drew Brown. Knight Ridder News Service. Reprinted in, Lexington HeraldLeader. Friday, August 15, 2003, A5). ‘‘Meanwhile, the commander of U.S. ground forces in Iraq said yesterday that an American helicopter crew intentionally dislodged a Shiite Muslim banner from a tower in the capital’s Sadr City district two weeks ago, an incident that sparked violent protests in which U.S. troops killed an Iraqi boyyIn a reversal of the denials issued at the time, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez said that, as a result of a U.S. military investigation, ‘I think the aircraft was getting close enough to that tower in order to blow the flag down’’ (Herald-Leader Wire Services. Lexington Herald-Leader. Friday, August 29, 2003, A7). 83. ‘‘Police have no crime statistics yet, but Baghdad’s morgue handled 47 times as many gunshot deaths last month as in July 2002’’ (Niko Price. Associated Press. Reprinted in, Lexington Herald-Leader. Saturday, August 9, 2003). 84. ‘‘Since May 1, when President Bush declared that major combat operations had ended in Iraq, 47 American servicemen have died in IraqyThe total number of American deaths in Iraq since the war began March 19 is 183, according to the Pentagon’s count’’ (Herald Leader Wire Services. Lexington Herald-Leader. Saturday, June 14, 2003, A1/A10). ‘‘Since May 1, when President Bush declared that major combat operations in Iraq had ended, 129 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq, according to the latest military figures’’ (Jennifer Loven. Associated Press. Reprinted in, Lexington Herald-Leader. Friday, August 15, 2003, A5). ‘‘Maj. Gen. Kevin C. Kiley, the commander of Walter Reed [Medical Center] and a medical doctor, said that since the beginning of July – two months after the official end of major combat operations – there had been only two days his hospital hadn’t received soldier casualtiesyMore than 1,000 injured U.S. soldiers have passed through Walter Reed since the war in Iraq began, and 300 more from the war in Afghanistan since October 2001’’ (Joseph Galloway. Knight Ridder News Service. Reprinted in, Lexington Herald-Leader. August 22, 2003, A1/A6). 85. ‘‘In Crawford, Texas, yesterday, President Bush said there has been ‘good progress’ in Iraq, 100 days after he had declared an end to major combatyShortly after Bush spoke yesterday, the White House released a 24-page compilation of achievement in Iraq titled Results in Iraq: 100 Days toward Security and FreedomyIt presented 10 points of evidence for each of nine areas of progress, starting

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with how the ‘liberation of Iraq supports the war on terror’. Accomplishments on the list included improvements in Iraq’s security and infrastructure; the start of democracy; economic renewal; cultural rebirth; and improvements in the lives of Iraqi women and childrenyMeanwhile, the FBI sent a team to Iraq to lead the investigation into the car bombing of the Jordanian Embassy as a group linked to Osama bin Laden’s al Qaida terror network became a focus of the inquiry, U.S. officials said yesterday’’ (Associated Press. Reprinted in, Lexington Herald-Leader. Saturday, August 9, 2003). 86. Hannah Allam. Knight Ridder News Service. Reprinted in, Lexington HeraldLeader. Saturday, September 13, 2003, A1/A7. Also see: Harry Dunphy. Associated Press. Reprinted in, Lexington Herald-Leader, Wednesday, September 17, 2003, A6. 87. Also see: http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/gulf/wahhabi.htm; http://www.peterbergen.com/bergen/articles/details.aspx?id=112. 88. Peter Finn and Susan Schmidt. The Washington Post. Reprinted in, Lexington Herald-Leader. Monday, September 8, 2003, A3/A9. 89. See: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/2809125.stm; http://www. guardian.co.uk/arts/critic/feature/0,1169,913402,00.html; http://www.sojo.net/index. http://www. cfm?action=magazine.article&issue=soj0307&article=030755; cbsnews.com/stories/2003/03/15/entertainment/main544132.shtml; http://www. nydailynews.com/news/gossip/story/61738p-57672c.html. And: http://www. sundayherald.com/31949. 90. See: http://www.counterpunch.org/boyle08022003.html. 91. See: http://archive.salon.com/politics/feature/2000/09/04/cuss_word/. 92. See: http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/07/02/sprj.nitop.bush/. And: http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2003-07-02-bush-iraq-troops_x.htm. And: http://www.counterpunch.org/goff07032003.html. 93. ‘‘Did senior Bush officials blow the cover of a U.S. intelligence officer working covertly in a field of vital importance to national security – and break the law – in order to strike at a Bush administration critic and intimidate others?yIn a recent column on Nigergate, Novak examined the role of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV in the affair. Two weeks ago, Wilson went public, writing in The New York Times and telling The Washington Post about the trip he took to Niger in February 2002 – at the request of the CIA – to check out allegations that Saddam Hussein had tried to purchase uranium for a nuclear weapons program from Nigery In Niger, he met with past and present government officials and persons involved in the uranium business and concluded that it was ‘highly doubtful’ that Hussein had been able to purchase uranium from that nation. On June 12, The Washington Post revealed that an unnamed ambassador had traveled to Niger and had reported back that the Niger caper probably never happenedy Wilson went public, he prompted a new round of inconvenient and troubling questions for the White House. (Wilson, who opposed the latest war in Iraq, had not revealed his trip to Niger during the prewar months, when he was a key participant in the media debate over whether the country should go to war.)ySoon after Wilson disclosed his trip in the media and made the White House look bad, the payback came. Novak’s July 14, 2003, column presented the back-story on Wilson’s mission and contained the following sentences: ‘Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destructionyWilson caused problems for the White House, and his wife was

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outed as an undercover CIA officer. Wilson says, ‘I will not answer questions about my wifeyIt has always been about the facts underpinning the President’s statement in the state of the union speech’y[If it is the case that his wife is in fact a CIA operative, it will] mean that the Bush administration has screwed one of its own topsecret operatives in order to punish Wilson or to send a message to others who might challenge ityThis is not only a possible breach of national security; it is a potential violation of law. Under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, it is a crime for anyone who has access to classified information to disclose intentionally information identifying a covert agent.’’ See: http://www.thenation.com/capitalgames/ index.mhtml?bid=3&pid=823. Sensing criticism and heat from critics and reporters, ‘‘[o]ther key neocons, like Wolfowitz’s old ally and friend Richard Perle, have withdrawn from public view; Perle resigned as chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board in March amid questions over alleged conflicts of interest related to his business dealings.’’ See: http://www.thenation.com/blogs/captialgames?bid= 3&pid=823; http://www.cbsnews.com/elements/2003/09/30/iraq/whoswho575906_ 0_1_person.shtml; http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/09/30/wilson.cia/; http:// http://msnbc.msn. www.democraticunderground.com/articles/04/07/24_paper.html; com/id/3131258/ 94. Barry Schweid. Associated Press. Reprinted in, Lexington Herald-Leader. Saturday, July 12, 2003, A3/A9. 95. Walter Pincus and Mike Allen. The Washington Post. Reprinted in, Lexington Herald-Leader. Sunday, July 13, 2003, A1. 96. Walter Pincus and Dana Milibank. The Washington Post. Reprinted in, Lexington Herald-Leader. Saturday, July 12, 2003, A1/A8. 97. See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,967548,00.html. 98. See: http://www.myantiwar.org/view/3001.html. Also see: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EE29Ak01.html. 99. William Mann. Associated Press. Reprinted in, Lexington Herald-Leader. Monday, July 14, 2003, A5. 100. Lexington Herald-Leader. Friday, August 8, 2003, A3. 101. See: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2003/05/22/whitman/index_np.html. http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/05/21/whitman.letter/index.html. Also: And: http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/05/19/fleischer.resigns/. And: http:// www.federalobserver.com/archive.php?aid=5875. 102. See: http://www.thenation.com/capitalgames/index.mhtml?bid=3&pid=888. 103. It should perhaps be suggested here that it remains possible the war in Iraq is their domestic economic policy. Also, ‘‘In his first year-and-a-half in the White House, Bush presided over a 36.9 percent decline, almost twice the percentage drop of Herbert Hoover, the president who led the nation into the DepressionyIn other words, in the 75-year existence of the S&P 500, no president has seen the stock market index fall as much as one-quarter, before Bush’s decline of more than onethirdyIn Hoover’s first 18 months, the Dow fell 24.8 percent. In Bush’s 18 months, the Dow’s drop was 24.3 percent. [NYT, July 22, 2002]yIn the 10 trading days since Bush visited Wall Street to promote his economic plans, the Dow has dropped almost 1,500 points or 16 percent. [NYT, July 23, 2002]yMissing from Bush’s economic plan is any initiative that can inspire Wall Street with visions of economic expansion. By contrast, the Clinton–Gore administration promoted technological

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advances like the Internet that created a framework for the private sector to innovate.’’ See: http://www.consortiumnews.com/2002/072202a.html. 104. ‘‘‘Why can’t America, the superpower, get our electricity back to normal?’ asked Thamer al Kubaisi, the owner of an ice factory in Baghdad. The repeated power outages have forced him to cut back production and raise his prices, he saidy‘The Americans can take whatever oil they want,’ he added. ‘Just give us reconstruction and security’’’ (Hector Tobar. Los Angeles Times. Reprinted in, Lexington Herald-Leader. Friday, July 4, 2003, A3/A7). 105. ‘‘Iraq is swimming in oil, but anybody who thinks that such natural wealth translates into a fat and happy middle class is in for a crude awakeningyPrecious resources alone, whether oil or gold or diamonds, rarely raise nations from poverty to prosperity. Countries usually become poorer, more corrupt and more prone to coups, wars and tyranny than their less-endowed neighbors, recent studies showyAmid the violence and chaos in their country, many Iraqis looking longingly to a day when they can share the wealth that had been hoarded by ousted ruler Saddam HusseinyThe Bush administration has promoted that notion in its fitful efforts to pacify an impatient populace and quell attacks on the U.S.-led occupation forceyYet there is little precedent that enormous government oil wealth trickles down and finds its way into improving education and health care and diversifying the economy to create jobs that don’t rely on the swings in the oil markets’’ (Mark Fritz. Associated Press. Reprinted in, Lexington Herald-Leader. Monday, August 11, 2003, A1/A6). 106. ‘‘But some of the 148,000 soldiers in Iraq said nobody told them how long they would remain in the country, where guerillas attack Americans daily and high temperatures often top 120 degreesyThe issue of soldiers’ tours has been contentious, with troops and their families posting missives on the Internet criticizing their government for keeping U.S. forces in Iraqy‘They need to come home!’ Kimberly, the wife of a reservist deployed in February, wrote on the Website of the support organization Military Families Speak Out. ‘Our unit has no re-deployment date in sight, and we are constantly told that they may even be extended’’ (Niko Price. Associated Press. Reprinted in, Lexington Herald-Leader. Wednesday, August 13, 2003, A3). 107. ‘‘Not only has it rapidly multiplied its military outposts and involvements across the world, from the Philippines to Asia (Central, South and West) to Latin America, but it has taken on the status of a direct occupier in Afghanistan, and evidently intends to do so in at least Iraq. Thus it both spreads its forces thin and calls forth much fiercer nationalist resistance than under the indirect rule common in the neo-colonial orderyAt the same time the internal repressive apparatus is being strengthened in the U.S. and panic, submission to authority and other elements of fascism are being manufactured’’ (See: http://www.rupe-india.org/34/behind.html). 108. ‘‘Haliburton, the company formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, has won contracts worth more than $1.7 billion out of Operation Iraqi Freedom and stands to make hundreds of millions more dollars under a no-bid contract awarded by the Army Corps of Engineers, according to newly available documentsyThe size and scope of the government contracts awarded to Haliburton in connection with the war in Iraq are significantly greater than previously disclosedyIndependent experts estimate that up to one-third of the monthly $3.9 billion cost of keeping U.S. troops in

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Iraq is going to independent contractors’’ (Michael Dobbs. The Washington Post. Reprinted in, Lexington Herald-Leader. Thursday, August 28, 2003, A3/A4). By September 19, 2003, it was reported that Haliburton’s contracts had increased to $2 billion, eliciting calls for lawmakers to investigate (Kenneth R. Bazinet. New York Daily News. Reprinted in, Lexington Herald-Leader, Friday, September 19, 2003, A8). 109. See: http://washingtontimes.com/national/20030709-114950-9370r.htm. 110. See: Newsweek. Monday, June 23, 2003. 111. See: http://www.thememoryhole.org/war/no-saddam-qaeda.htm.

REFERENCES Adorno, T. (1950). The authoritarian personality. (With, Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford). New York: Norton. Ali, T. (2002). The clash of fundamentalisms. London: Verso. Bagdikian, B. (1983[1997]). The media monopoly. Boston: Beacon Press. Behnegar, N. (2003). Leo Strauss, Max Weber, and the scientific study of politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Breight, C. C. (1996). Surveillance, militarism and drama in the Elizabethan era. London: Macmillan. Britt, L. (2003). Fascism anyone? Free Inquiry, 23(2), 20. Brzezinski, Z. (1997). The grand chessboard: American primacy and its geostrategic imperatives. New York: Basic Books. Chomsky, N. (1988). The culture of terrorism. Boston: South End Press. Chomsky, N. (1989). Necessary illusions: Thought control in democratic societies. Boston: South End Press. Clegg, S. R. (1989). Frameworks of power. London: Sage Publications. Deutsch, K. L., & Murley, J. A. (1999). Leo Strauss, the Straussians, and the American regime. New York: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Drury, S. (1988). The political ideas of Leo Strauss. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Drury, S. (1997). Leo Strauss and the American right. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Foucault, M. (1977a). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York: Vintage. Foucault, M. (1977b). In: D.F. Bouchard (Trans. and ed.) Language, counter-memory, practice. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality – Volume I: An introduction. New York: Random House; 1980/New York: Vintage. Foucault, M. (1980). Power/Knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings. Colin Gordon, editor. New York: Pantheon. Foucault, M. (1983[1982]). The Subject and Power. In: H. Dreyfus & P. Rabinow (Eds), Michel Foucault: Beyond structuralism and hermeneutics (pp. 208–226). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, M. (1991). Governmentality. In: G. Burchell, C. Gordon & P. Miller (Eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (pp. 87–104). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press. Goffman, E. (1983). The Interaction Order. Presidential Address. American Sociological Association Annual Meeting. American Sociological Review (February)48, 1–17.

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Herman, E., & Chomsky, N. (1988). Manufacturing consent: The political-economy of the mass media. New York: Pantheon. Janis, I. L. (1982). Groupthink. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Johnson, C. (2000). Blowback: The costs and consequences of American empire. New York: Henry Holt. Machiavelli, N. (1977). In: R.M. Adams (Trans. and ed.) The Prince. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Mills, C. W. (1956). The power elite. New York: Oxford. Moore, J., & Slater, W. (2003). Bush’s brain: How Karl Rove made George W. Bush presidential. New York: Wiley. Moore, M. (2001). Stupid white men. New York: Regan Books. Mosaddeq Ahmed, N. (2002). The war on freedom: How and why America was attacked September 11, 2001. Joshua Tree, California: Tree of Life Publications. Pasquino, P. (1991). Theatrum Politicum: The Genealogy of Capital – Police and the State of Property. In: G. Burchell, C. Gordon & P. Miller (Eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (pp. 105–118). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Prus, M. S. (1999). Beyond the power mystique: Power as intersubjective accomplishment. Albany, New York: SUNY Press. Rosen, S. (1991). Leo Strauss and the quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns. In: A. Udoff (Ed.), Leo Strauss’s Thought: Toward a Critical Engagement (pp. 155–168). Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Schechter, D. (2003). Blogging the war away. Z Magazine, July/August, 64–68. Scheuer, M. (2004). Imperial hubris: Why the west is losing the war on terror. Dulles, Virginia: Brassey’s Inc. Strauss, L. (1958). Thoughts on Machiavelli. Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press. Strauss, L. (1968). Liberalism: Ancient and modern. New York: Basic Books. Strauss, L. (1972). Niccolo Machiavelli. In: L. Strauss & J. Cropsey (Eds), History of political philosophy (pp. 271–292). Chicago: Rand McNally. Udoff, A. (1991). Leo Strauss’s thought: Toward a critical engagement. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Wallerstein, I. (2004). Talk at Georgetown University, Washington D.C. Political-Economy of the World System Conference.

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GLOBALIZATION OR HYPER-ALIENATION? CRITIQUES OF TRADITIONAL MARXISM AS ARGUMENTS FOR BASIC INCOME$ Harry F. Dahms SOCIAL POLICY IN THE MODERN AGE: IN THE INTEREST OF MAINTAINING ORDER For sociological perspectives on globalization to do justice to its many facets, they must be informed by an understanding of modern societies as simultaneously complex, contingent, and contradictory – as modern capitalist societies. As is becoming ever more apparent, such an understanding $

I presented an earlier version of this chapter at the BIEN Conference, ‘‘Economic Citizenship Rights for the twenty-first Century,’’ in Berlin, October 2000, and elements of the central argument at the Faculty Seminar, University of North Florida, March 2002, and at the USBIG Conference in New York, February 2003. I thank Claus Offe and Philippe van Parjis for encouraging me to formulate this argument; Lawrence Hazelrigg, Lauren Langman, and Daniel Harrison for helpful comments; and the students in a graduate seminar on basic income at Georg August University Go¨ttingen, Germany, Summer 2000, for their willingness to patiently follow my first attempt to situate and outline the argument developed here.

Social Theory as Politics in Knowledge Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Volume 23, 205–276 Copyright r 2005 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0278-1204/doi:10.1016/S0278-1204(05)23004-9

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of modern societies is the necessary precondition for identifying the defining features of globalization. Yet, for the most part, the history of the social sciences did not produce research agendas, theories, and methods designed to grasp complexity, contingency, and contradiction as core dimensions of modern social life that continually reinforce each other. The social sciences did not evolve as ongoing efforts to grasp the gravity each dimension exerts on concrete forms of political, economic and cultural life, and how the force of each depends on the constant exchange of energy with the other two. To the extent that scrutinizing the impact of globalization on the future – and possible futures – of human civilization is the primary challenge for social scientists to confront today, the current condition presents a unique, and perhaps most unusual opportunity to conceive anew the promise of each and all the social sciences, as elucidating how the complex, contingent, and contradictory nature of modern societies, in the name of advancing social justice, has engendered a regime of managing ‘‘social problems.’’ From the beginning of the modern age, and in a more pronounced manner since the end of World War II, the primary purpose of the political and policy apparatus of the nation-state was to maintain social and political stability, in the interest of insuring conditions conducive to economic activity and continuous economic expansion. Historically, the rise and spread of nation-states accompanied the formation of the market mechanism regulating economic activities, and thus prepared industrialization.1 Yet, lingering questions remain regarding the link between political-economic developments increasing the wealth of nations, the nature of progress, and the advancement of social justice. Were the efforts to reduce a multiplicity of inequalities during the post-World War II era, and related successes, intended consequences of the constellation of business-labor-government relations that took hold during the 1950s and 1960s? Was the constellation a necessary precondition for economic recovery after World War II, and for continuous economic expansion thereafter, under the aegis of modernization and democratization? Evidently, depending on what perspective we apply to frame addressing those and related questions, we will arrive at different sets of answers. At the time, there certainly appeared to be a close link between increasing prosperity at the national level and advancing social justice. To examine the link between overall increases in wealth and productivity and the advancement of social justice today, we first must delineate how the examination of the link is situated within a perimeter of study that is not readily accessible, but increasingly problematic – as is true for most aspects and consequences of the set of transformations we refer to, in the singular, as globalization.

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From one angle, advances in social justice were the result of successful efforts to configure the function and functioning of democratically legitimated governments, the influence and relative autonomy of business organizations, and the role of labor unions, for economic growth to go hand in hand with the declining importance of inequalities in society. Put differently, the post-World War II configuration of business, labor, and government made possible changes in the structure of modern western societies that reduced the impact of inequalities on the life-chances of individuals, while creating proliferating opportunities for economic growth and development – thus the term, economic miracle.2 Viewed from this angle, the emergence of the specific constellation of business-labor-government relations in western societies, after World War II, appears as a major achievement, as it made possible steps toward greater social justice, as was most visible in public policies central to the social welfare state. Along these lines, in the U.S., this constellation was a necessary precondition for the civil rights movement. From another perspective, however, the key question pertains to imperatives relating to necessary preconditions for economic recovery and expansion after 1945. Accordingly, the configuration between business, labor, and government – including, especially, the specific regime of welfare statebased public policies – would have emerged in response to the need to secure social and political stability, as the necessary precondition for continued economic growth and development – under conditions of the Cold War. The configuration, then, would not have taken hold in the interest of advancing social justice. Instead, advances in social justice would have been a necessary correlate of the need to maintain social and political order – containing the potential for social and political conflict – in the interest of economic expansion.3 The configuration prepared changes in the relationship between business, labor, and government which, for now, have culminated in ‘‘globalization.’’ Thus, the advancement of social justice appears to have been temporary in nature, and the result of social legislation during the third quarter of the twentieth century. While it would be premature and highly questionable to conclude that there has not been progress, my purpose is to emphasize the problematic character of the patterns underlying the scale and scope of possible progress – and how those patterns and their impact on social life have become implicitly presupposed, as individuals, organizations, and societies endeavor to meet a myriad of challenges.4 While advocates of the public policy-regime that took hold during the Cold War insist that its superiority over alternative strategies for advancing social justice – especially when compared to the experience of ‘‘actually existing socialist societies’’ – rests with its facility

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to ‘‘solve social problems,’’ the evidence suggests that it is more likely to thwart efforts to resolve any social problem, and that it may even prepare conditions that will further weaken, or preclude, opportunities to tackle social problems.

Theorizing ‘‘Modern Society’’: Complexity, Contingency, Contradiction When situated within their historical context, the priorities orienting developments in the social sciences during the last half-century appear to be more likely to reflect (and implicitly presume the force of) the underlying patterns that shaped the Cold War-public policy regime in western societies, than to reflect critically on those patterns. If conceived along such lines, the promise of the social sciences in general, and of sociology in particular, is more likely to replicate, rather than to transgress, the power of underlying patterns. Most mainstream (i.e., ‘‘traditional’’) theories – and approaches to identifying the nature – of ‘‘modern society,’’ in economics, political science, and sociology, were guided by the endeavor to sustain as legitimate the kind of social research that abstracts from the complex, contingent, and contradictory nature of social life in the modern age, to arrive at social-scientific facts.5 Despite both repeated and sustained attempts to expose as problematic the limitations manifest in mainstream approaches to studying modern society, for the most part, those attempts have remained marginal to the development of economics, political science, and even of sociology. By contrast, critical approaches emphasize complexity, contingency, and contradiction, respectively, as related and central, yet distinct dimensions of social life in modern societies, irrespective of whether they concentrate on one of those dimensions, or combine two or three. The relative reluctance to confront complexity, contingency, and contradiction, may be indicative of a concern that doing so explicitly and systematically would imperil tacit assumptions in the social sciences about the link between social and political order, and economic development and growth. Given that since the Italian Renaissance, the former has been regarded as a necessary precondition for the latter, to formulate a working definition of modern society, we need to contemplate that practices, organizations, institutions, policies, and structures of power may have been evolving in response to the need to contain the (perceived) threat to order and stability posed by complexity, contingency, and contradictions – as much as, or to a greater extent than, to facilitate the pursuit of a specific objective. In turn, recognizing the need for an understanding of modern society that would

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integrate the three dimensions, will draw our attention to the fact that we first must establish whether and how the categories developed in the social sciences during the twentieth century, illuminate the underlying patterns that have spawned trajectories of social, political, and economic change culminating, for now, under the aegis of globalization. The objective of framing the study of globalization in a rigorous manner both necessitates and provides opportunities for acknowledging a possible discrepancy between the categories that facilitated social research during the twentieth century, and categories engendering the kind of research that would have increased opportunities to gain insights preparing us for the onset of globalization. If there is a gulf separating two sets of categories, it is likely to relate directly to two conflicting approaches to ‘‘reconciling’’ facts and norms in the modern age – especially as they relate to public policies. In the interest of ‘‘safeguarding’’ society, the first approach presupposes that specific constellations of political, economic, and social order must be preserved in their specificity – not social order in general, but the social structure of inequality, in its particularity. To attain this goal – sustaining social and political stability as the necessary precondition for continuous economic expansion – decision-makers in politics, the corporate world, and the policy establishment draw on established and accepted notions and practices, especially as they relate to ‘‘shared values’’ pertaining to fairness and social justice, as resources to be molded and utilized in the interest of stabilizing order, to create a buffer for capitalist dynamism. As a result, the underlying patterns determining the direction of change tend to remain submerged, even and especially when tension characterizes the relationship between purportedly shared values, the underlying patterns that bring about a societal reality which threatens to weaken, undermine, or render inadequate, those values, and strategies to identify and advance the ‘‘public interest.’’6 By contrast, the second approach centers around the imperative to scrutinize underlying patterns in ways that open up, rather than close off, future possibilities to synchronize directions of change in society with the actuality of shared values – necessitating continuous efforts to determine the nature and extent of both – the directions of change and efforts to translate shared values into public policies. In sociology, these approaches correspond with two conflicting ways of framing the purpose and promise of social research.7 Difficulties to identify the defining features of globalization are symptomatic of the preliminary character of attempts in the social sciences to make explicit the nature of modern society. Paradoxically, research in the social sciences evolved without coordinated and collaborative efforts to facilitate

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an explicit, shared, and rigorous understanding of ‘‘modern society’’ – of the historically specific formation that spawned the social sciences. In most instances, the meaning of ‘‘modern society’’ remained implicit; in other instances, related working definitions were a function of specific theoretical frameworks, and in tension, or incompatible, with definitions tied to different, competing frameworks.8 With the failure to achieve a shared understanding revealing key characteristics of modern societies social scientists have labored to identify, efforts to establish such an understanding could have been successful if a majority of social scientists representing different approaches had been willing and capable to engage in concerted efforts to transgress the limitations of individual approaches. To do so, proponents of diverse approaches would have had to acknowledge that a truly socialscientific understanding of modern society will remain elusive as long as each individual approach is burdened with the expectation that it can provide the kind of comprehensive perspective that would result from sustained, genuinely collaborative efforts. For the most part, however, progress in the social sciences during the second half of the twentieth century came at the expense of such efforts.9 If social scientists had been willing and able to achieve a shared understanding of ‘‘modern society’’ – thus violating the competitive principle governing modern life – confronting the complex, contingent, and contradictory nature of modern society would have become integral to designing research agendas in each of the social sciences. In turn, that attempts in the social sciences to achieve such an understanding have not permeated the practice of social research, suggests a tension between priorities in the history of the social sciences, and the complex, contingent and contradictory nature of the modern world. More importantly, such an understanding would have compelled social scientists in different fields to recognize that without the collaborative interlinking of research agendas within and between sociology, economics, and political science, rigorous social research that positively relates to the nature of modern society – and, by implication, of globalization – remains elusive. In principle, such interlinking research agendas should have allowed for scrutiny regarding the manner in which tensions in modern society sustain a forcefield between social, economic, and political values, priorities, and imperatives – and how the underlying dynamics of modern societies are tied to those tensions. Such interdisciplinary research is the precondition for formulating criteria for determining degrees of modernity in different societies – and in different social subsystems within particular societies. Such research would also engender appreciation of the variations between societies, along a broad spectrum of practices, forms of

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organization, and public policies in politics, economy, culture and society, as during the twentieth century, industrialized societies developed a variety of modes for containing societal tensions and conflicts – especially those between business, labor, and government. Thus, the focus on modern society as complex, contingent, and contradictory reveals this form of social organization to be a kind of forcefield whose energy derives from continuous efforts to reconcile the irreconcilable. Capitalism, democracy, freedom, solidarity, and justice represent sets of normative, ideological, and organizational principles that are in tension with each other and do not lend themselves to consistent interpretation and application. At least in part, the superiority of modern capitalist societies derives from the expectation that in the not-so-distant future, tensions between different social value spheres will be reconciled, and economic, political, and social conflicts overcome. Yet, in light of globalization, related efforts at reconciliation – especially by means of public policies – not only appear to be less and less likely to succeed, they also seem to be less likely to occur. As demands proliferate that we should interpret globalization as emergent opportunities to solve social, political, and economic problems without determined and sustained efforts, inequalities continue to be on the rise in and between nation-states.10 Indeed, while during the post-World War II era, efforts were necessary to attain a minimum degree of reconciliation within the framework of modern nation-states, to maintain social and political stability – in the form of the modern welfare-states and a corresponding public policy regimes – the official end of the Cold War at the beginning of the 1990s appears to have set in motion sustained attempts to abandon a commitment to social justice, while maintaining language that implies the impending reconciliation of tensions and conflicts.

Traditional Marxism, Basic Income, and the Future of Sociology In the present situation, amplified efforts to bring about qualitative change tend to engender mounting resistance, as the strategies that are available to us, especially those that are socially, culturally, politically, economically, and organizationally condoned in western societies today, appear to be a function of, and tend to replicate, the underlying patterns basic to the postWorld War II era. For this reason, increasing the likelihood that policies advance stated goals is one of the most important challenges, and may not be possible without prior creation of an environment in politics, culture,

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society, and economy reducing the resistance against qualitative, structural change. Among the many attempts to cope with the experience of globalization, two developments that appear to be located at the outer fringes of the sociological imagination, and which may seem not to relate directly to increasing policy success under conditions of globalization, warrant particular attention. While their affinity has remained unacknowledged, their importance for reformulating the agenda of sociology – in relation to scrutinizing globalization – is becoming increasingly compelling. I am referring, on the one hand, to the revived debate about universal basic income, or guaranteed minimum income, whose beginnings as an explicit social policy strategy date to the 1960s’ War on Poverty, and whose origins in the history of ideas date back to the time of the Italian Renaissance.11 Independently of whether and how basic income is a ‘‘viable’’ strategy to tackling social problems that result from and are tied to inequality – especially, though not exclusively, economic inequality – basic income points beyond the social policy paradigm centered on the notion that it is possible and legitimate to determine an individual’s ‘‘worth’’ in terms of the kind of work he or she performs.12 Moishe Postone’s reinterpretation of Karl Marx as the first critical theorist, and concurrent critique of traditional Marxism, on the other hand, provides the most systematic perspective on Marx’s work as motivated by the objective to lay the foundation for a critical theory of the all-embracing and all-defining role of labor in modern capitalist society. While acknowledging that there is a wide spectrum of arguments for basic income, I will set the stage for a constructive engagement between basic income and Postone’s interpretation of Marx as the critical theorist of labor, by framing basic income as a strategy to ‘‘uncouple’’ work and income. Proponents of basic income frequently start out from the observation that in industrialized societies, politicians and policy-makers tend to presuppose as inescapable an array of inequalities and social problems, even though they violate purportedly shared values in democratic societies, preempt policy success in terms of stated goals, and reveal more or less insurmountable obstacles to implementing rational strategies relating to the nature of problems and challenges at hand. Structural unemployment is one of the most conspicuous problems of this kind. To a large extent – though by no means exclusively – the debate about basic income since the 1980s has derived energy from the fact that most western societies expect the vast majority of their members who are ‘‘fit for and to work,’’ to dedicate the bulk of their waking lives to ‘‘making money,’’ or ‘‘making a living’’ – without sustaining labor markets that are sufficiently large to allow all members to

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comply with that expectation. As Postone’s interpretation of Marx’s theory as a critique of labor in capitalism reveals, phenomena such as structural unemployment are symptomatic for the actual depth of the problematic nature of ‘‘work society.’’ More importantly, however, in the absence of a thorough appreciation of the thrust of Marx’s critique of labor in capitalism, attempts to design and implement basic income-related scenarios and proposals are more likely to perpetuate precisely those conditions against whose prevalence they are directed, as the strategy of choice.13 In turn, the most important aspect of Postone’s critique of traditional Marxism, for present purposes, is his analysis of how in modern society, labor molds prevailing conceptions of social problems, their place in both individual and social life, and approaches to tackle them. In addition, Postone’s analysis of labor directly leads to a critical analysis of the tools employed in the social sciences, as an extension of the nature of labor, rather than a means to scrutinize its predominance. Both efforts – to advocate the need for a universal basic income, and to reframe Marx’s theory as a rigorous critique of labor in capitalism – provide theoretical sociologists with important clues for sustaining as central to the discipline the notion that sociology represents a promise, as it is a framework for research directed at facilitating an understanding of modern society that increases opportunities for actors and organizations to move beyond conditions characterized by structural inequalities coining the nature of social relations. As representatives of a professional discipline, sociologists are neither expected nor compelled to conceive of necessary steps to move beyond present conditions, by grasping the multifarious character of globalization. Yet, the willingness of sociologists to recognize the importance of steps in such a direction is vital for sociology to fulfill the function of enlightening modern society about itself, especially insofar as modern society has developed mechanisms to immunize itself against illuminating key features that must become transparent, in order for public policies to be oriented toward amplifying the reconciliation ‘‘between facts and norms.’’14 Clearly, despite the narrow focus of research that is characteristic of sociology as a professional discipline, there is no other social science whose scope and diversity of concerns compare, even remotely, with those of sociology. For this reason, theoretical sociologists may be best positioned to identify, and visualize, links between theoretical perspectives and practical developments that tend to remain latent, and which must be made visible, in order for qualitative change to become possible. After clarifying how it is necessary to frame ‘‘modern society’’ in terms of globalization, alienation, social policy, and sociology, I examine the

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underlying patterns of the social policy paradigm that took hold after World War II. I will try to demonstrate how the construct – ‘‘glass casing’’ – better approximates the meaning associated with Max Weber’s concept of the iron cage. I introduce glass casing to describe the social policy regime that took hold during the post-World War II era, supported by a highly bureaucratic social welfare state, economic policies explicitly oriented toward continuous economic growth, and international relations organized in terms of the conflict between ‘‘capitalism’’ and ‘‘communism.’’ The most explicit purpose of this regime was to contain the destructive impact of social inequalities, as they threatened social and political order at both the national and international levels. However, the objective was to advance this purpose without altering the overall structure of inequality.15 After laying out how basic income is both a continuation of key aspects of the social welfare state and a determined effort to move beyond, I turn to two critiques of traditional Marxism. Van Parijs and van der Veen’s argument for ‘‘a capitalist road to communism,’’ published first in 1986, upon publication acquired the status of a key programmatic text, in the discourse about basic income that has been gaining momentum since the 1980s. I already mentioned Postone’s ‘‘reinterpretation of Marx’s critical theory,’’ published in 1993, as the other critique of traditional Marxism. My interest here is to illuminate how these critiques complement and support each other in crucial ways, how they strengthen arguments for basic income, and how – in different ways – they stress the importance of making explicit the degree to which alienation has become the mechanism through which forms of social, political, cultural, and economic life are being maintained in a stasis that delimits opportunities for qualitative transformation – in ways that tend to be immune to scrutiny. The objective of this comparison of two competing critiques of traditional Marxism – as arguments for basic income – is to illustrate how the social policy paradigm that took hold after World War II constituted a mechanism that enabled decision-makers in business, labor, and government to meet institutional and organizational challenges more efficiently and effectively than would have resulted from any available alternative – given the need to manage the potential of political and social conflicts. In concert with an array of social and economic policies (‘‘Keynesianism’’), the social welfare state helped to secure social and political stability, and facilitated unprecedented economic expansion and development. Yet, as it sustained a network of enduring social and economic inequalities, along with corresponding social problems, the actual purpose of the social policy paradigm that emerged during the Cold War was not the eradication or alleviation of those

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inequalities, and the resolution of corresponding problems – though moving beyond both was proclaimed to be the primary goal in countless political speeches and policy dossiers. The occurrence of, and discourse about, globalization suggests that the Cold War social policy paradigm, in combination with the social welfare state, has run its course. While the Cold War officially ended in 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the social policy paradigm we inherited, continues to function as the principal strategy for implementing social, political, and economic responses to a multiplicity of social, political, economic, and cultural challenges and problems. Ultimately, my effort is directed at illuminating how the continued relevance of sociology appears to depend on the willingness of social scientists generally to appreciate as central the contribution critical theorists have been making to theoretical sociology, and to consider policy proposals whose likelihood of success, under present circumstances, appears to be practically nonexistent. Without a firm commitment to contemplating – and recognizing – how present conditions exclude an entire array of policy strategies that would be more compatible with both the espoused values of modern, western societies, and the imperative to sustain prosperity benefitting all members of society, social scientists in effect support conditions and practices that prevent those strategies from becoming viable.

THE CULMINATION OF MODERN TRENDS: GLOBALIZATION AS HYPER-ALIENATION In recent years, a growing number of theoretical sociologists have begun to address how reconceiving sociology depends on our willingness to reinterpret the classical theorists of modern society – Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and others – in the interest of ascertaining how they did, in fact, predict the coming of globalization.16 At a time when the Zeitgeist (including the mindset of many social scientists) seems bewildered by globalization, this situation may be a necessary precondition for reconstructing the purpose and promise of sociology. Reconsideration of the classical theories along such lines might lead us to an understanding of sociology as the social science that emerged in historical circumstances which produced the first explicit experiences, and related concept, of alienation (see Dahms, 2005). Independent of alienation, it is neither possible to envision sociology as the social science of modern society, nor to determine how it is the discipline tailored to analyze

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globalization. Without acknowledging the manner in which alienation has been molding modern forms of social life, sociology is more likely to perpetuate the prevalence of, rather than making a momentous contribution to overcoming, alienation.17 Clarifying how social policy designers prefer strategies that tend to perpetuate alienated social relations, rather than recognizing them as such, is a necessary first step toward overcoming alienation. In the absence of such clarification, both sociology and social policy may solidify precisely the patterns of inequality which render ambivalent efforts to advance social justice – in the name of social justice. From the start, both in Hegel’s dialectical philosophy and in Marx’s critical theory, the purpose of alienation was to highlight that the society taking shape during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – ‘‘bourgeois society’’ – rested upon a multiplicity of contradictions that could not be reconciled within its own confines. Thus, from the outset, the concept of alienation was meant to facilitate access to the warped nature of social, political, and economic relations in bourgeois society. In this sense, it was conceived in relation to concrete socio-historic conditions.18 In Hegel, and especially in Marx, alienation was not merely an abstract, philosophical concept, but a lens through which to examine the link between key features of social life in bourgeois society, as a social order based on distinct classes. Bourgeois society denotes a structure of inequality whose transformation would bring the end of bourgeois society. While there is a long history of interpreting both bourgeois society and the republican state as embodiments of enlightenment and humanistic principles, Marx pointed out that the realization of those principles in what would be a civil society, was being made impossible by the modern economic system’s need to continuously reproduce an exploited working class – the need to maintain a class structure rendered (and continuing to render) futile efforts to realize Enlightenment and humanistic principles.19 The resulting tension has remained the source of alienation to this day: western societies are synonymous with a socio-political order drawing legitimacy from its claim to advance the interests of all members of society via increasing prosperity at the societal level – a claim that is being thwarted by an economic system relying on a stable structure of class inequality. The type of social relations that prevail in a society with a political system whose legitimacy depends on the acknowledgment of structural inequalities, while lacking the means as well as the commitment to overcome those inequalities, compel members of one class (or race, or gender) to view members of another class (or race, or gender), not primarily as fellow human beings, but as representations of the classes (and class interests) to which they belong. In

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this type of society, equal citizenship simultaneously is being simulated and denied, thus undermining the construction of meaningful life-histories, in the absence of mechanisms that guarantee improvements over time. As the alternative to guaranteed improvements, established policy strategies channel individuals’ perceptions, values, convictions, and goals, in the interest of concealing the simulation. Sociology emerged in response to the socio-historical context in which alienated social relations first took hold. As Habermas put it, [S]ociology originated as the discipline responsible for the problems that politics and economics pushed to one side on their way to becoming specialized sciences. Its theme was the changes in social integration brought about within the structure of old-European societies by the rise of the modern system of [nation] states and by the differentiation of market-regulated economy. Sociology became the science of crisis par excellence; it concerned itself above all with the anomic aspects of the dissolution of traditional social systems and the development of modern ones. (Habermas [1981] 1987, p. 4)

While initially, Marx’s interest in alienation was philosophical in nature, and his concern directed at overcoming alienation by philosophical means, his move to the critique of political economy highlighted the need to investigate the economic origins of alienation. The newly emerging economic system, based on the capitalist mode of production, generated alienated social relations – what Durkheim later was to analyze in terms of anomie.20 The inception of sociology coincided with the emergence of alienated social relations, and a new configuration of sociality that made it impossible for most inhabitants to be ‘‘at home’’ in bourgeois society.21 Most inhabitants were not in the position to conceive of the process by which the values, beliefs, and convictions providing their lives with meaning, were being upended all around them. A succession of mediation processes resulted which concealed the discrepancy between received certainties about the position of human beings in the context of social and political hierarchies. The mutually reinforcing nexus between economy and culture undermined formerly firm certainties that had enabled individuals, as members of social groups, to gain a sense of their place in society. Globalization appears to represent a stage in the evolution of western civilization that generates increasing difficulties to contain the discrepancy between traditional perspectives on the meaning and nature of social life, and the actuality of those conditions. Ironically, depending on how the social sciences respond to globalization, and whether they facilitate genuine responses to the discrepancy between socially and politically condoned constructs purported to represent social reality, and concrete societal conditions, it may turn out that concerns are justified that globalization indeed

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is the first perceivable stage in the devolution of western civilization, as postmodernists as well as theorists of postmodernism have been arguing since the 1980s.22

Modern Society and the Rationalization of Alienation Since the development of Marx’s critique of bourgeois society, the purpose of critical social theory has been to clarify how the economic forces that made possible the rise of modern capitalism, exact costs that cannot be grasped in terms of political economy.23 The thrust of Marx’s critique of political economy was to construct a theoretical framework tailored specifically to identify the nature of these costs. While narrow economic principles have been metabolizing more and more aspects of social, political, and cultural life, it has become more and more difficult to contend that individuals, social groups, and societies as entities, pay a price for economic progress – in light of ‘‘the deep traces that more than one hundred years of the hegemony of industrial capitalism have imprinted on ideas, intuitions, and expectations’’ (Offe, 2001, p. 114). The march of laissez-faire ideology around the world, accelerating under conditions of globalization, keeps reinforcing a mind-set that presumes that at the global level, compared to the benefits of ‘‘free-market capitalism,’’ its costs are negligible – and that the latter must not become an impediment to implementing the necessary preconditions for the former. This mind-set, prevalent among decision-makers in the world of business, has also become an implicit presupposition among politicians of many stripes, among those who design and implement public policies, and among a growing number of social scientists. Resistance to the notion that there is no viable alternative to laissez-faire economic policies has shrunk to the so-called ‘‘anti-globalization movement’’ – a highly amorphous collage of labor activists and organizations, environmental groups, leftists, focus groups, academics, and a small group of more or less violent protesters that serve attempts to delegitimate the claims made by most others. Critics of globalization stress that the manifold processes subsumed under this heading violate many of the values western democratic societies purport to embody. The latter values form the starting point, and their future realization the ‘‘vanishing point,’’ of the critiques of globalization. While the diversity of opponents of economic globalization may suggest broad appeal, the different groups remain internally fragmented and on the fringes of the increasingly managed public spheres of nation-states dominated by transnational corporations not

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recognizable as such (see Sklair, 2001). This trend makes even more necessary a willingness to clearly identify the ‘‘costs’’ of economic modernization, and its cultural, organizational, and structural manifestations – irrespective of whether such an analysis, at this point in time, translates directly into practically viable policies. The possibility that the costs might approach – or exceed – the benefits, especially at the global level, need not compel us to search for venues to eviscerate the social, cultural, and political costs of capitalism, especially if such evisceration would come at the expense of past achievements in terms of wealth, social, political, and economic stability, and technological proficiency. There is no ‘‘necessary’’ link between the willingness to contemplate that the costs of capitalism might exceed its social, political, and cultural benefits, and – if such should turn out to be the case – the conclusion that capitalism must be overcome ‘‘at any price’’ (see Dahms, 1997). Instead, scrutinizing the nature of the costs resulting from the continuous reconfiguration of the modern condition, in the interest of economic progress, is a necessary precondition for the social sciences to illuminate the trends that shape our collective future, and possible futures. Globalization processes generate unprecedented possibilities in certain arenas of human activity, while smashing prospects for qualitatively different, especially preferable forms of life, in others.24 Effective public policies directed at desirable social change, even when reflecting awareness of impediments to such change, are contingent on a clear sense of the losses civilization incurs in the interest of retooling everything existing for purposes of economic survival on the part of individuals, institutions, and nation-states, as dictated by the pursuit of economic gain endemic to increasingly powerful national and transnational corporations.25 However we may conceive of ‘‘democracy,’’ for instance, we must consider that economic transformations, legitimated in relation to what Adam Smith called the ‘‘wealth of nations,’’ and meant to advance the quality of life for all, might undermine the very possibility of democracy and advances in the quality of life for all. Recall Weber’s contention, in 1906, that [i]t is utterly ridiculous to suppose that it is an ‘‘inevitable’’ feature of our economic development under present-day advanced capitalismyas it exists in America, that it should have an elective affinity with ‘‘democracy’’ or indeed with ‘‘freedom’’ (in any sense of that word), when the only question to be asked is: how are all these things, in general and in the long term, possible where it prevails? (Weber, [1906] 1978, p. 282).

The gulf appears to be widening, considering the technologically sophisticated forms of democratic will formation, participation, and decision-making

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that ought to result from the accelerating computerization of life, but are not – even in terms of representative democracy in its current mold.26 The purpose here, then, is to illustrate how the abstract concept of alienation is our best means for delineating the spectrum of concrete costs modern civilization keeps paying – from certain categories of individuals bearing the brunt of negative consequences resulting from economic transmutations and corporate mismanagement, to assimilating health care systems and educational priorities to economic imperatives, to the long-term losses incurred by less-developed cultures and societies that are being forced to undergo rapid economic transformations. Indeed, more and more aspects of modern civilization resemble the consummation of alienation, mediated over and over, with alienation affecting not just certain practices, but the possibility of practice itself. The tendency in the social sciences, to view forms of organization and modes of coexistence independently of their economic foundations, and as expressions of what is quintessentially ‘‘social,’’ ‘‘political,’’ or ‘‘cultural,’’ does not suggest that alienation has ceased to be an analytically relevant category. Instead, this tendency is symptomatic of the fact that alienation never has been more relevant.27 Alienation in this sense is not just an undesirable by-product of the spread of the capitalist mode of production. Instead, it is the matrix of engendering qualitatively new types of social relations, animated by large-scale economic and organizational transformations, whose pace has been accelerating as our ability as social scientists to keep pace with the transformations has been falling behind. Yet, whether new types of social relations are regressive or progressive, remains concealed as long as we presuppose that there is no need to reexamine the specific character of social ties and practices – as in family, friendship, work, voluntary associations, leisure activities – in relation to, and as a function of, capitalist transformations, both spatially, around the globe, and socially, culturally, and politically. Alienation, then, is not the other, darker side of capitalism’s effulgence. Alienation is the mode of changing economic conditions reconfiguring social, political, and cultural patterns of life, in a largely obfuscated manner. As social values, practices, and institutions are being adapted to changing economic conditions, the related vernacular tends to remain the same – in politics, culture, society, and even in the social sciences. Alienation, then, is not a by-product of the capitalist mode of production, but the modus through which economic imperatives shape societal conditions. Indeed, it would be quite appropriate to conceive of sociality in the modern age as a combination of the desire, among human beings, to be ‘‘in society’’ with fellow human beings, of forms of sociality that result from alienation, and of

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attempts to view those alienated social relations as the continuation of unalienated, ‘‘natural’’ patterns and practices that flow from genuinely human desires. As this process continues, seemingly new patterns are being forged between economy, culture, politics, and society: the more advanced these patterns appear to be, the less transparent they become, and the more difficult to discern with the analytical, conceptual, and theoretical tools available, in social science as well as in policy. Marx predicted that with the expanding reach of capitalist principles, their basic features will become increasingly obscure: unless we make sustained efforts to refine and frame the tools we employ to identify these principles, while retaining a rigorously critical distance, the tools are likely to turn into epiphenomena of the processes they are supposed to illuminate – and the social sciences into implicit attempts to rationalize the inevitability of capitalist principles. The need to maintain critical distance is especially urgent under conditions of globalization. In certain regards, however, it also may be less difficult to do so. From a perspective that is critical of sociology as a professional discipline, the challenge to apprehend globalization is a unique opportunity, insofar as it necessitates taking account of the extent and prevalence of flawed assumptions, inaccurate forecasts, and theoretical ‘‘takes’’ in the social sciences, during the twentieth century.28 Despite unquestionable successes on many fronts, assumptions about possible and likely directions of social change, about the nature of social processes and institutions (including the nature of their interrelations), and about the adequacy of chosen methods, concepts, and theoretical designs, appear in an increasingly problematic light. These errors and mistakes may be dismissed as rooted in individual error, insufficient ‘‘information,’’ reductionistic theorizing, and the momentary nature of quantitative methods. Yet, in the context of globalization, the failure to scrutinize the key features of modern social life also may have been a function of the widespread willingness to presume as germane the representations of social, political, cultural, and economic ‘‘reality’’ fostered by and through key institutions central to modern, western, democratic societies, including the social sciences. Marx designed the critique of political economy to identify structural impediments to types of societal practice that will not be bound to reproduce existing institutions, patterns, and routines – especially as they relate to social injustices. It was for this reason that Marx’s theory began as a critique of alienation, then turned toward the critique of political economy – as a critique of the material conditions that foster alienation – and culminated in his critique of commodity fetishism – alienation as ‘‘second nature.’’ It was

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especially in this regard that Marx’s critique of political economy was the inception of critical theory in the sense of the Frankfurt School.29 Alienation, along with later forms of regressive mediation, such as reification (esp. Luka´cs, [1923] 1971; see Dahms, 1998), and instrumental reason (Horkheimer & Adorno, [1944] 1972), are not synonymous concepts for identical phenomena. While these critical concepts relate to distinct experiences, refer to specific socio-historic reference frames, and express different theoretical objectives, they derive their importance from being located along one continuous spectrum. Each mode of mediation corresponds to a specific stage in the development of capitalism and modern society. However, a new stage of capitalist development, and corresponding form of regressive mediation, do neither entail the complete ‘‘overcoming,’’ nor the submergence, of earlier forms. Instead, they constitute layers of mediation, just as multiple stages of capitalist development persist side by side, coincide, intersect, reinforce, and invade each other – and, at times, collide. As ‘‘capitalism’’ today refers to different modes of capitalist process and organization combined, so, too, ‘‘alienation’’ is the generic term for layers of mediation that continue to amplify the complex and contradictory nature of modern life, while making more and more difficult attempts to identify the underlying logic of this process. We may refer to this modern-capitalist modus operandi as ‘‘post’’ modern, in the sense that it increasingly renders unintelligible categories meant to facilitate analyses and interpretations of conditions of life in modern society both pointed and pertinent, and to allow the individual to find his or her meaningful place in the world. Referring to the present as postmodern, however, tends to conceal that our interpretations of the ‘‘essence’’ of the social, may be appearances of ‘‘the social’’ resulting from layers of economic and organizational conditions and imperatives that are becoming increasingly impenetrable, as such.30

Social Policies, the Social Welfare State, and the Containment of Alienation In the current context, alienation highlights the persistence of paradoxes and contradictions prevalent in contemporary society, yet not reconcilable within its basic framework. Inequalities persist, yet are not acceptable as the context for attempts to apply democratic validity claims to the functioning of institutions and organizations.31 At the same time, education and the mass media do little to enhance the ability of democratic citizenries to face up to, and to confront, paradoxes and contradictions. It is not surprising,

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therefore, that modern democratic political systems operate in ways that prevent the development of viable means to resolve related tensions. Discussions of social policy strategies, especially if they relate to sincere efforts to tackle specific problems, need to take into consideration alienation in its multiple forms – not, because it will be empowering, but because it will make it possible to anticipate the nature and scope of obstacles to overcome. It ought to be the goal of pro-active social policies to decrease the degree of systemic disempowerment. Yet, the prevailing assumption is that for policies to be viable, categories such as alienation must not be taken into consideration. Paradoxically, however, if the prevalence of alienation (or a related category – or set of categories – intended to highlight lack of policy success as a systemic problem) is being ignored, the relative irrelevance of social policies directed at inequalities is practically inevitable.32 Today, it appears to be impossible to address the basic contradiction of the modern age, in a manner that opens up opportunities for practice and agency. Tremendous increases of wealth and productivity combine with growing inequalities and a decline of socially compelling visions of how to translate this wealth into a future more compatible with values relating to freedom, equality, solidarity and justice. It is becoming exceedingly difficult to conceive of practical, political-economic strategies geared toward translating wealth and productivity into a better life for all. ‘‘Better life for all’’ – understood not in the sense of economic wealth distributed more equitably, but in terms that remain inconceivable as long as we determine the quality of social and political life on the basis of economic wealth. Rather, the challenge is to conceive of ‘‘better life for all’’ in terms of greater synchronicity between the values purportedly governing modern, western, democratic societies, and the principles according to which institutions and organizations fulfill their respective responsibilities – not in the sense of less technologically sophisticated, and ‘‘back to nature.’’ The challenge is to resist pressures to subscribe to a formula that can be put forth and recited, without requiring a corresponding understanding of the issues involved, and of its overall purpose. What is needed is a clear sense of the necessary preconditions for discussions to begin at the community, state, and national levels, which would allow citizens to address issues in a manner that relates to the nature of the problems at hand.33 At this point, both the ‘‘general public’’ and the ‘‘mass media’’ seem to lack the vocabulary required for such discussions, not because of incompetence, but because of invisible barriers. To take a step in this direction, we need to reconsider from scratch sites that allow for remediating values we claim orient our actions and institutional

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practices that may pervert these values – with visions of the kind of societies we (claim we) want to live in. Social policies are being designed in a context that is permeated by diffuse assumptions, and saturated with highly problematic truisms about the thrust, desirability, and effectiveness of established public policy strategies. To the extent that these assumptions and truisms go unquestioned – when applied in the interest of defining the characteristics of present conditions, the structural and cultural transformations currently underway in economy, politics, and society, and purportedly shared, guiding objectives – they constitute the most prevalent, and the most perilous form of ideology, today. The future, and future possibility, of democracy – as the framework for designing policies – is contingent on more qualitative, socially, and politically compelling perspectives on the complex and contradictory trends summarized under the heading of ‘‘globalization,’’ as it will continue to unfold. It is consistent with these trends that established perspectives on the purpose of the welfare state result, at least in part, from carefully crafted arguments which, in turn, reflect the precarious context in which welfare policies advance intricately formulated objectives. At the same time, the gulf between arguments in favor of maintaining the welfare state and objections to the continuation of welfare-state institutions – both in the mass media and in political discourse – appear to have reached proportions which may no longer be bridgeable. In this context, globalization is hyper-alienation in the sense that alienation has become ‘‘second nature’’ to such a degree that, by default, we view every aspect of reality through the prism of socially, culturally, and politically mediated, reinforced, and rationalized alienation.34 Without collaborative efforts to sustain a critical perspective on the intricacies of public policies, in relation to existing institutions and structures of inequalities, as representations of hyper-alienation, we are bound to replicate, and amplify further, the manner in which alienated conditions and practices coerce actors, organizations, and institutions to comply with, and reinforce the underlying program.

REFORMIST SOCIAL POLICIES AND THE WELFARE STATE: A DEAD END? In a well-known article published in the early 1980s – a classic of the related literature – Claus Offe (1984) examined ‘‘some contradictions of the modern

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welfare state.’’ Since the 1960s, Offe has continued like few others to explore possibilities of innovative policy design, in a manner that is both informed and inspired by critical social theory. In his article on the modern welfare state, he stated that The welfare state has served as the major peace formula of advanced capitalist democracies for the period following the Second World War. This peace formulayconsists, first, in the explicit obligation of the state apparatus to provide assistance and supportyto those citizens who suffer from specific needs and risks which are characteristic of the market society; ySecond, the welfare state is based on the recognition of the formal role of labor unions both in collective bargaining and the formation of public policy. Bothyare considered to limit and mitigate class conflict, to balance the asymmetrical power relations of labor and capital, and thus to overcome the condition of disruptive struggle and contradictions that was the most prominent feature of prewelfare state, or liberal, capitalism. In sum, the welfare state has been celebrated throughout the post-war period as the political solution to societal contradictions (Offe, 1984, p. 147).

Historically, the welfare state was a ‘‘success story’’ in several regards. During the decades following World War II, it was not only based on a farreaching consensus in many western societies, but also decisive for providing the socio-political context necessary to make possible economic miracles: a social and political stabilizer and facilitator of economic growth, despite continued inequalities, and under conditions of the Cold War’s ‘‘competition of socio-economic systems,’’ between the capitalist West and the ‘‘actually existing socialist’’ East. The welfare state contributed to the legitimacy of political institutions and processes and secured mass-loyalty, while thwarting social criticism and political unrest. The welfare state resulted from a unique historical constellation of interests in advanced industrial societies that made possible a constitutional modification, which proved advantageous to all major groups in society. Post-World War II democracy and market economics would not have been possible without a modernized welfare state. The bulk of Offe’s argument was dedicated to counterposing critiques of the welfare state put forth from opposite ends of the political spectrum. The critique from the Left centered on the contention that the welfare state is insufficient in terms of both the social-economic security it provides – which is most often conditional and temporary – and the limitations it imposes on the ability of recipients to determine their way of life. The critique from the Right entailed that the welfare state imposes counterproductive regulatory burdens on the market process, and unnecessarily high taxation on businesses and individuals. Over time, the broad support the welfare state used to enjoy among major groups in western societies, has

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begun to erode, as it was no longer seen as economically beneficial by many – though it continued to be so, given the ‘‘practically viable’’ alternatives. Since western societies appear incapable of eliminating the social problems that presented the welfare state and related social policies as the strategy of choice, even in terms of narrowly stated goals, the pursuit of success tends to come at a price, in the form of ‘‘unintended consequences’’ and in the persistence of the problems. For the foreseeable future, Offe concluded twenty years ago, there are no viable alternatives to the welfare state in sight. Not surprisingly, once the ‘‘competition of systems’’ ended in the late 1980s, it no longer appeared to be ‘‘necessary’’ to maintain it at the same, high, progressively unconditional level. In the U.S., the ‘‘unsettledness of American social politics from the 1960s to the present’’ (Skocpol, 1988, p. 295) became more pronounced, as welfare benefits were reduced in size during the 1990s’ economic expansion, ‘‘to end welfare as we know it,’’ rather than lifting them to a qualitatively higher level (see Sawhill, Weaver, Haskins, & Kane, 2002). In terms of current policy-practice, welfare-towork regimes constitute a return to conditions that preceded the spread of ‘‘social rights,’’ as they are characteristic of a context in which maintaining welfare is no longer viewed as a precondition for securing social and political stability.35

Social Policy, Social Reform, and Structural Inequalities The espoused purpose of social policies is to solve, alleviate, or in some form or other, to tackle social problems. It is an integral feature of advanced, industrialized societies with democratic political systems that such social problems as unemployment, poverty, job discrimination, and exclusion from social and political life, especially as they relate to race, class, and gender, produce unequal life chances. These unequal life chances are in contradiction with the principles of democratic citizenship on which political institutions base their claims of superiority to other forms of government–principles from which they derive their legitimacy, and upon which modern societies purportedly are built – freedom, equality, solidarity, and justice (Dahrendorf, 1979). As modern political systems evolved, institutions and practices in the different spheres of life – the economy, politics, education, etc. – increasingly came to embody these values, however tenuously, and in competition with other values, especially as they relate to individualist conceptions of economic success, on the one hand, and to the

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imperative of maintaining social and political order, on the other (see MacPherson, 1962, 1977). During the post-World War II period, the explicit commitment of democratic governments to combating social problems that impede equal life chances for all members of society, became the primary source of political legitimacy. The assumption was that if institutions, organizations, and public policies converge toward the end of equalizing life chances for a continuously growing number of citizens, success will be inevitable.36 Even at times when parties or politicians who lack or oppose the express commitment to alleviating social problems, control the levers of power, the need to present preferred ‘‘solutions,’’ is inescapable. Politicians and political parties must propose specific policies which, at the very least, simulate a commitment to reducing the impact of social problems on people’s lives, as they result from one, or – as is more frequently the case – from several forms of inequality. Even those less committed or even opposed to social policies must make concessions regarding the need to remedy social problems in the interest of maintaining order in society. By contrast, those more strongly committed to pro-active policies, endeavor to advance the health of the social whole. As it turns out, though, the gap separating the impact of policies resulting from a simulated commitment to reducing the negative consequences of inequalities, from those resulting from a more sincere commitment, may not be as wide as we should wish. How do social policies and welfare state arrangements relate to the social problems they are supposed to ‘‘solve,’’ especially those that are structural in nature, and related to inequalities? In orientation, social policies intervene into the field of tensions between stagnation and change. The idea of social policy reflects the acknowledgment, at the political level, that most ‘‘social problems’’ in modern democratic societies are incompatible with their values, and that efforts must be made to reconcile the conditions that produce social problems, with the values of modern, democratic societies – i.e., to make the former compatible with the latter. By contrast, the practice of social policy is testimony to the fact that in societies with democratic political systems, social policies are indispensable means to secure social and political stability, as the necessary precondition for economic prosperity, in a system of interlocking, mutually reinforcing inequalities that seem impenetrable. With inequalities appearing as a necessary precondition for economic expansion, and the expectation that long-term economic growth will alleviate the negative consequences resulting from those inequalities, the ability of individuals to rely on the actuality of equal life chances should

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increase. Yet, it is a particular type of inequalities that precipitates a specific kind of economic expansion. The concrete practice of social policy – in particular, the expansion of welfare systems in many countries during the third quarter of the twentieth century – reflects the fact that democratic politics cannot ignore the array of social problems that impact on the life chances of members of many groups. At the same time, to actually ‘‘resolve once and for all’’ any social problem that is related to structural inequalities, would be revolutionary indeed, since mutually reinforcing, structural inequalities constitute the foundation upon which modern societies rest. Eliminating any key social problem – and corresponding limitations of life chances and social injustices – would qualitatively alter the condition of modernity, as it has been a social, political, and moral response to mutually reinforcing structural inequalities. If, hypothetically speaking, it should turn out to be possible that even one key social problem that has burdened political systems in western societies, can be solved once and for all – without endangering economic performance and prosperity – the widely accepted limitations on theoretical inquiries that have become commonplace in recent decades, would lose at least some of their restraining character on questions asked and policies envisioned. At the same time, it is exceedingly unlikely that it is possible for any social problem to be ‘‘solved once and for all,’’ since all social problems appear to be so intertwined that for one problem to be solved, strategies will have to be employed that would penetrate several other social problems at the same time. Needless to say, such strategies would be contingent on the willingness and ability of policy designers to rigorously identify the link between the complex and contradictory nature of modern societies, and alienation as the link between the prevalence of specific kinds of social problems and a context of structural inequalities. Continuous attempts to refine methods and theories that were formulated and designed, during the twentieth century, to answer questions relating to the nature of social problems, have engendered unprecedented insights into the empirical conditions and patterns of change around the world. However, especially under conditions of globalization, we need to ascertain which of the questions that have guided the development of the social sciences, remain of central importance, and what kind of effort will be required to formulate the questions that ought to enable us to recognize, and extrapolate from, the patterns of change emerging today.37 Theoretically speaking, social policy is neither entirely compatible with traditional perspectives on social life, nor with critical perspectives. As Ralph Miliband put it,

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piecemeal reform is not sufficient to cure the fundamental evils of the [capitalist] system y The history of reform under capitalism shows it to have been a very partial response to specific ‘‘problems,’’ and to have remained constrained by the logic of capital. Far from seeking to achieve radical cures, conservative governments have viewed reform as a means of preventing radical transformation from occurring by buying social peace with concessions. But even where reforms have been undertaken by social democratic governments, they have not resulted in the abolition of the essential features of capitalism. Nor is this remarkable, since such abolition was seldom what was intended. (Miliband, 1995, p. 9)

For the most part, those who implement social policies, those who oppose them, as well as those in whose interest they are being implemented, do not appear to expect policies to succeed fully. Though social policies are supposed to reduce the extent to which life chances are limited and channeled for members of disadvantaged groups, who tend to suffer from multiple, mutually reinforcing forms of inequality and exclusion, policies have a tendency to reaffirm the patterns of inequality and exclusion prevalent in society.38 To enumerate the major reasons for why social policies fail, would require, and facilitate, a comprehensive sociology of the modern age in its contradictory and contingent complexity. My purpose here is to provide a glimpse of such a sociology of the modern age – no more, and no less.39 To make explicit my related, central hypothesis: due to compounding policy failures, and the cumulative consequences resulting from the unwillingness of many politicians, policymakers, and social scientists to identify how much of an impediment current conditions are for social policy success, and to consider the interest-based motives behind many policy initiatives, a culture of policy discourse has taken hold that is both a manifestation of alienation, and a cause of further alienation. The assumption of clearly identifiable and specific causes for the failure of particular policies prevents the possibility to grasp the nature of the paradox that constitutes the ‘‘ether’’ within which policy is being designed. Effectively, the culture of rationalized policy failures is the culmination of myriad trends in modern society. Policy failures, and subsequent attempts to rationalize those failures, are surface manifestations of how modern societies in general (and each modern society in its particularity) are constituted. Accordingly, ‘‘policy failure’’ can indeed serve as a means to obtain a better sense of the nature of modern society. The forces that collude and collide under the surface of ‘‘modern society’’ make it impossible to examine directly a form of social organization – rather, a form of organizing economic, political, and social life – that is located at the point of tension between processes of modernization and the culture and politics of modernity (see Offe, 1996a).

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Social policies thus are located at the intersection between conflicting interests that are tied directly into the social, political, and economic structure of modern society which, at this point, does not allow for the reconciliation of those interests. As Hegel inferred almost two centuries ago, the etymological similarity between policy and police is not accidental.40 In practice, the primary purpose of policy has been to police social problems, not to solve them.41

CAPTIVES OF THE GLASS CASING: HYPER-ALIENATION AS NORMALCY It is not surprising, then, that for any policy proposal directed at improving the condition of any particular group in, or segment of, the population, those groups benefitting most from prevailing conditions will perceive their interests as threatened. In an increasing number of instances, and an increasingly blunt fashion, vested interests no longer refrain from setting in motion an apparatus whose purpose it is to bring about the failure of a proposed or binding policy.42 Both the protection and attribution of interests occur in a context that posits that interests, while they must not be acknowledged explicitly, are ‘‘natural,’’ and not in need of critical analysis. Despite the ideology of the ‘‘zero-sum society’’ that has taken hold since the 1980s, American society was a ‘‘surplus society’’ during the 1990s, though evidently not all social groups benefitted equally, or at all, as a disproportionately large share of the wealth created during that decade went to the wealthiest few.43 In retrospect, we must wonder about the nature of the link between increasing stock values and productivity increases.44 Yet, even if concerted efforts between government agencies, affected organizations, and concerned interest groups were to take place in favor of a particular policy, without the resistance of vested interests, and, hypothetically speaking, without the unavoidable, expected, ‘‘unintended consequences’’ – in all likelihood, success still would be impossible. The problem does not appear to be surmounting the actual distance between current social policy practice and future policy success, but the nature of the territory to traverse. Even if the gap between current policy practice and the attainment of success in terms of stated goals seems narrow, for the time being, there appears to be a glass casing whose existence impedes policy success, and threatens to thwart efforts to engender social, political, and economic conditions that are compatible with espoused

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social, political, and cultural values. My hypothesis is that such a glass casing preventing social policy success does exist, that it is so much part of modern capitalist work society that its manifestations are ever-present, but that its concrete implications for social, political, and economic life are ever more elusive.45 One set of operating assumptions about social policy practice in advanced industrialized nations appears to be that concrete success is within reach, and that we either have an adequate understanding of the nature of social problems and their relationship to structural inequalities, or that we are well-positioned to attain such an understanding. Accordingly, for policy designers, the main challenge is to identify the strategy best suited to achieve stated objectives. Failure, thus, would appear as the result of a flawed choice of strategy – once the best strategy has been chosen, the objectives will be achieved. The possibility that the specificity of existing conditions may not allow for stated objectives being attained, will not be considered. Instead, if failure results, the response is much greater willingness to conclude that the stated objectives themselves were flawed. A further set of operating assumptions suggests that success should not be part of the equation, in terms of designing policies, of ‘‘solving’’ social problems, or of the limited scope of expressly stated goals. Yet, to concede that a glass casing may exist which, under present circumstances, thwarts the effectiveness of social policies, would challenge the conventional wisdom about purpose and possibility of social policy. And while the purpose of the glass ceiling is immediately apparent (to keep low the number of individuals who might change the prevailing culture and ingrained priorities in business corporations and other organizations), it is more difficult to ascertain whether there is a comparable ‘‘purpose’’ behind the glass casing preventing social policy success. Social policies and welfare systems are one set of venues for tackling social problems; the other venue is the retreat to social, political or economic mechanisms to which their proponents ascribe the power of engendering processes that, sooner or later, will solve problems far better than explicitly stated and transparently designed public policies ever could. The paradigmatic example for such a mechanism is the market (see Hedstro¨m & Swedberg, 1998). The future may confirm the predictions of advocates of mechanisms, as opposed to policies – not necessarily in the sense that the problems will be ‘‘solved,’’ but that the ‘‘objective impossibility’’ of their being solved will become socially and politically accepted, and implicitly presumed. Social problems would come to be regarded as ‘‘quasi-natural’’ facts of social life, along with the concession that efforts to solve social

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problems had been misplaced to begin with, and ought not to be pursued any further. There certainly appears to be greater affinity between the logic of mechanisms and alienated social conditions, than between the latter and social policy. Social problems, then, might ‘‘disappear’’ by becoming invisible as social problems in the modern sense – along with the specifically modern configuration of social and political life. At the same time, it is quite conceivable that the illusion of modernity would continue to prevail: in this sense, the social, political, and cultural costs advanced societies keep paying for maintaining economic prosperity would be mitigated through compounding layers of legitimating rationalizations. The glass casing would be synonymous with a high degree of alienation prevalent in western societies, thwarting most efforts to conceive of the possible implications of any given social problem being solved. Indeed, if our willingness to perceive the continuous, qualitative reconfiguration of social, cultural, and political patterns of modern social and political life that accompanies organizational and technological advances in the global economy were to fall below a certain level – in the social sciences, in politics, or in the world of art – a condition of hyper-alienation indeed would be likely to take hold. In Max Weber’s use, the image of the ‘‘iron cage’’ highlighted the impact bureaucratization processes have on all aspects of social life – limiting the ability of individuals, groups, and institutions to make decisions and choices that lead to the attainment of desired objectives. The iron cage thus makes it impossible to pursue strategies without unintended consequences; instead, categorically, the iron cage perverts desired outcomes. In the interest of avoiding further misunderstandings, I will replace the image of the iron cage, with the projection of a ‘‘glass casing.’’ In my use, glass casing is a better representation of the modern condition than that suggested by iron cage. Glass casing more closely conveys the double character of Weber’s attempt to characterize the increasingly dominant feature of our world, as was explicit in the original phrase he coined: the iron cage is, in fact, a ‘‘casing of bondage hard as steel’’ (eisernes Geha¨use der Ho¨rigkeit). The main difference between Weber’s phrase, and the shorthand version that came to be associated with his theory of rationalization and bureaucratization, in the English language, is that in Weber’s use, the casing of bondage does not appear to be a cage at all, that it is not visible as a cage to those confined by it, and that its confining effect on modern man and woman, nevertheless, is that of an iron cage. As I will try to show, this imagery applies especially well to the nature of the social policy regime that took hold during the post-World War II era.46

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In this context, the primary purpose of this paper is to make explicit how two decades of intensifying attempts to advocate basic income, first in Europe, and now in the United States, are symptomatic of the misery of mainstream social policy approaches, and how basic income is a qualitatively different social policy paradigm. As it turns out, the reconceptualization of Max Weber’s concept of the ‘‘iron cage’’ in terms of a glass casing more effectively suggests a reference frame for comparing basic income with more conventional social policy paradigms.

BEYOND THE WELFARE STATE: ‘‘UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME’’ AS A SUPERIOR SOCIAL POLICY? To remedy the problem of a welfare state perceived to be increasingly ineffective, many academics, intellectuals, and policy experts agree that ‘‘universal basic income’’ (UBI) is the most viable alternative. Tellingly, Claus Offe has become a prominent proponent of basic income, along with a growing number of fellow social scientists.47 What is the thrust and intended scope of basic income? In orientation, is it reformist or revolutionary? Will basic income be politically feasible, and under what conditions, and how, would it modify the basic constitution of the modern state? As an attempt to ‘‘solve’’ the problem of ineffective policies, it necessitates a qualitatively different way of thinking about policy. As I will endeavor to show, basic income is a surreptitious attempt to tackle problems related to alienation, concealed not only to those who are contemplating its merits, but also to many of its proponents. In terms of how proponents justify basic income, it constitutes a social policy strategy in competition with other strategies. The specific arguments presented in favor of basic income, though – as a means to ‘‘uncouple work and income’’ – reveal that it is understood as a qualitatively different, and by implication, superior approach to thinking about, and to tackling, social problems. Indeed, the ambition to introduce basic income as a universal entitlement goes beyond the established strategies of social policy, in theory as well as in practice: it is the model of an alternative strategy for how to conceive of policy responses to social problems more generally. Yet, it is not a model for ‘‘solving’’ once and for all social problems, or for directly ‘‘resolving’’ the underlying conflicts. Instead, most proponents introduce basic income as a strategy that should play a role in the creation of societal conditions in which debates about social policies solving – or meaningfully

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alleviating – social problems, are a recognized and common practice. In this sense, it is a model for preparing the possibility of formulating social policies in a manner that is linked directly to specific social problems, and what it would take to solve them. Put differently, the basic income debate needs to be understood in relation to the prevalence of alienation, starting out from the observation that in many instances, public policies, and government action are based on strategies that reflect concrete and conflicting social, political, and economic conditions, interests, tensions, and ideologies, to a degree that renders difficult, if not impossible, conceptions of politics and policies as directly related to the problems and challenges at hand. However, in terms of how proponents view basic income as a response to the challenge of policy failure, it is an indirect reaction to alienation. Consequently, arguments for basic income tend to resemble the tip of an iceberg, the bulk of which – the underpinnings of the argument – remains under the surface. Most of all, what has been lacking in the debate about basic income is a sustained and rigorous analysis of contemporary societies geared toward scrutinizing the meaning and role of labor in a manner that reflects its socially, politically, economically, organizationally, and culturally integral role. For this purpose, it is essential that the analysis not be confined by preconceived notions about the importance of work, and about what kind of goals, ‘‘realistically,’’ are attainable under present circumstances, as is characteristic of debates that are delimited by preconceived notions of practical political feasibility. Instead, scrutinizing the nature of the barriers that impede the policy-oriented debate about, and the political possibility of, basic income, must be at the center of the analysis. These barriers range from concerns that it is a risky scheme (depending on the specifics of context and manner of implementation), to rigid patterns of social, political, and economic thinking that stultify further as the dynamics of the capitalist process keeps accelerating, and include concerns that basic income would be highly destabilizing, in a multiplicity of regards, and a threat to the prevailing work ethic. This paradoxical situation is characterized by advocates asserting that basic income constitutes a qualitatively superior social policy approach, while hurrying to downplay the likely impact of its unconditional implementation. Proponents contend that the relevance of basic income derives from the difficulties, under present circumstances, to conceive of policy directly in relation to the nature of specific social problems, how they are tied to structural inequalities, and the long-term perspective necessary to conceive of ‘‘solving’’ them by means of social policies. Still, proponents of basic income suppose, at the same time, that the overall framework of western, liberal

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democracy provides the sole context for engendering policies that are directly related to the nature of social problems, and their ‘‘solution.’’ Most often, though, they do not admit that determining how social problems are entwined with the social, political, and economic structures of contemporary industrialized societies, and identifying the required kind of qualitative change, will be necessary for solving any of these problems. To do so, would require that we identify the boundaries of contemporary societies, how they confine our ability to conceive of effective solutions, and how the latter prefigure a future that is different from the prolongation of the present into the distant future. In order to confront this challenge, proponents of basic income first need to examine the nature of successes and failures of past and present social policy practice, from a comparative perspective. My hypothesis is that the effective analysis of contemporary societies depends on our willingness to scrutinize the meaning and role of labor – and whether and how the organization of labor is the systemic impediment to policy success that is part of the implicitly presumed inner matrix of contemporary western societies. Most arguments for basic income presuppose it belonging to the same class of policy projects and as institutionalizing collective bargaining and establishing social welfare systems. Yet, as I will endeavor to show, the notion that basic income can ‘‘uncouple labor and income’’ within the framework, or on the basis, of work society, transgresses the boundaries of the established policy regime. Proponents of basic income share the conviction that establishing ‘‘economic citizenship rights for the twenty-first century’’ will be an endeavor of the same order as the successive establishment of civil, political, and social rights that coincided with the last three centuries, respectively – following T.H. Marshall’s historically oriented argument – and its logical continuation (see Marshall, 1950). Yet, this conviction may be contingent on the willingness to ignore decisive features of contemporary societies whose explicit consideration appears to suggest that the forces assembled against establishing economic citizenship rights are of a different magnitude than those that were opposed to civil, political, and social rights. Historically speaking, the establishment of civil, political, and social rights constituted successive stages of providing the necessary preconditions, in terms of legal, political, and social stability, for economic expansion to continue. Indeed, if implemented in a universal and unconditional fashion, and irrespective of the advocates’ specific goals and intentions, basic income is bound to strike at the very heart of the work society – and the system of control it conceals. If we were to follow Marshall’s logic to comprise

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economic rights, we would have to assume that their establishment will become a necessary precondition for the continuation of economic expansion. This teleology may indeed turn out to apply. However, at this point in time, under conditions of globalization, it is quite apparent that the trend points in the opposite direction: even if the establishment of economic rights would become a necessary precondition for continual economic expansion, the unanimity of opposed forces – all else remaining equal – would be overwhelming. Today, the social and political organization of work can be explained only in part with reference to economic necessities. To understand the role of labor in advanced capitalist societies, instead, we need to conceptualize it as the foundation of a system characterized by a mode of control whose impact is most apparent with regard to the working segment of the population, but whose logic is directly opposed to principles of democratic representation and participation (see Rifkin, 1995; Aronowitz, 2001; Sennett, 2000). To rephrase the challenge for proponents of basic income in terms of the ‘‘glass casing’’: the decisive question is whether breaking the cage is the necessary precondition for establishing basic income, or whether basic income is a necessary (or possible) precondition for breaking the casing – and no longer as momentous and appealing a policy strategy, in terms of its intended purpose, once cracks make visible the casing. Consequently, the more basic question is whether it is possible to determine the nature of the glass casing and what, in concrete terms, it would take – and mean – for it to break. I am inclined to suggest that at the current historical juncture, as multiple trends in economy, politics, and culture intersect under the aegis of globalization, in a manner that prohibits definite predictions, we are in no position to answer the above question one way or the other. The fact that we only could answer the question within the framework of a particular theory, theoretical tradition, or political world-view – whose predictive powers, respectively, will be highly suspect, at this point in time – given the pace and open-ended nature of current changes – presents unique opportunities. We should not try to find an answer to a key dilemma of this age when related issues, pertaining to prosperity, stability, and justice, are at the center of processes that will keep reshaping our societies for some time to come. Yet, for proponents of basic income to participate in shaping the future, it is imperative that the related challenges be confronted in a manner that is likely to enhance the chance that basic income will fulfill a constructive, constitutive, and lasting, purpose. Given current political, economic, and social realities, basic income appears to be the theoretically and practically most viable strategy for reenergizing the

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modernist, qualitatively progressive drive toward translating the wealth produced by ever more powerful economic systems, into qualitative improvements that comply with the values modern democratic societies purport to embody. We need to acknowledge, however, that the relationship between modern institutions and organizations, the nonauthoritarian practices they are supposed to engender, and values relating to freedom, equality, solidarity, and justice, has been fraught with increasingly irreconcilable tensions and contradictions.48 However, reviving the modernist form of progress, which has been eclipsed in recent decades by the nondemocratic practices of multinational and transnational corporations, is contingent on a higher level of critical reflexivity, a categorical willingness to concede the relativity of modernist principles. Related conceptions are geographically and historically situated, and preliminary at best, and we must acknowledge that ‘‘reality’’ does not necessarily operate on the basis of the principles we presuppose. The level of reflexivity called for will have to be on a much higher plane than suggested by ‘‘reflexive modernists’’ like Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens.49 In fact, reflexive, ‘‘second-order’’ modernist theory will have to reach the point of intersection with the postmodernist contention that societal processes do not coincide with the principles we deem both desirable and applicable, the underlying values, and ‘‘our’’ expectations of future progress. Consequently, the required effort will be far greater than, and qualitatively different from, the practical strategies ‘‘modernist doctrine’’ so far has permitted. To take a step toward a solid theoretical justification of basic income, the Marxian tradition is the necessary jumping-off point, as the only tradition that responded directly to alienation as the outgrowth of the socio-economic substructure. Social policies intended to overcome, indirectly, the effects of alienation, without acknowledging alienation as the invisible barrier, are bound to fail – at the very least, they should not be expected to succeed fully – and to produce consequences that may be detrimental to the attainment of the stated objectives. In the interest of shoring up the theoretical foundation of arguments for basic income, therefore, I will keep in mind the above dilemma – basic income first, or broken glass casing? – to examine the problematic perimeter within which social policy is formulated and implemented.

REINTERPRETING MARX: TWO CRITIQUES OF TRADITIONAL MARXISM Our everyday understanding of work, as a function of inherently legitimate market processes, is so deep-seated that the tension between what we regard

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as necessary preconditions of active citizenship (such as economic security, education, and equal treatment before the law), and work as the basis of income, status, and weight in the community more generally, rarely comes to the surface. Whether an individual has the opportunity to work, especially in the area of his or her choice, relates only in part to the individual’s professional and social skills. It is important to recognize the contradiction between the principles of self-determination according to which we should make life choices, and the myriad limitations that constrict the individual’s ability to make those choices, within the context of concrete life chances. The regime of work, as the culmination of power relations in modern industrialized societies, continually amplifies the demands imposed on individuals to conform to the prerequisites of professional success. What is most important, in this regard, is not that all citizens in industrialized societies ought to have the opportunity to make a living as they choose – which they certainly should – but the high degree to which the choice is delimited, when applied to the world of work. ‘‘Modern society’’ is a form of social organization capable of balancing continually remodulated, prevailing definitions of economic imperatives, power structures in economy, society, and the state, economic, gender, and ethnic inequalities, organizational cultures in business, labor and government, and institutionally condoned or reinforced practices in all areas of social life. Although the constellation basic to contemporary societies is characterized by a tremendous variety and dynamism, there is a static core that changes very little over time – if at all. It appears that this constellation, the more differentiated it becomes, begets mechanisms that conceal the underlying contradictions in an ever more sophisticated fashion.50 The social sciences are replete with a peculiar, widespread inability to acknowledge the convergence of power at the cultural, organizational, and structural levels, and to grasp related matters – especially under conditions of globalization. Indeed, as the discord between principles of democratic citizenship and the actuality of power relations keeps increasing, more and more ‘‘inhabitants’’ of western societies appear to be losing the sensitivity to perceive the growing noise.51 It is essential that we recognize, and remain aware of, the inherent obstinacy of the regime of work that has taken hold in industrialized societies. In terms of the underlying developmental dynamic of capitalist society, the formation of the work society is an internally consistent stage.52 Entry into work society is characterized, today, by a high degree of accessibility – a job applicant’s class, gender, ethnic, racial and religious background matters much less than a few decades ago, in the industrialized world. Internally,

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however, work society continues to operate according to the principle of bureaucratic control as it took hold during the age of Fordism and Taylorism – more so, it seems, as time goes by. In work society, bureaucratic control has morphed into a new system of bondage whose omnipresence threatens to undercut most of the espoused values of western democracies. Bureaucratic control does not advance the culture of intellectual and moral equality that is the necessary prerequisite for a truly democratic civilization – whose possibility effectively keeps being undermined by the former. Arguably, Marx’s theory remains the primary reference frame for formulating related, critical categories.53 To claim that Marx’s theory continues to function as an important reference point, however, is not to imply that any of the most prevalent interpretations of his theory were sufficiently adequate, nor that it is possible to ascribe a definite meaning and importance to his theory, independently of specific socio-historical conditions and carefully formulated theoretical challenges. While I posit that Marx’s theory remains uniquely valuable, we need to start out from the premise that most interpretations of Marx’s writings have tended to be more, rather than less, problematic, and that interpreting Marx is a constant challenge. Marx’s theory and the tradition it inspired provide the critical categories facilitating a comparative perspective on contemporary work societies, revealing that while some societies of this type may be moving beyond work as the defining feature, others appear to move headlong in a direction that insures that work will continue to play a decisive role and that, under conditions of globalization, it will play an even more important role – and how this is so. As is becoming increasingly apparent, during the twentieth century, the primary purpose of Marx’s theory was obscured by overly favorable as well as overly unfavorable misinterpretations, misrepresentations, and political and ideological instrumentalizations. If it were not for the uniqueness of Marx’s theoretical contribution, combined with the conspicuous inability of later social theorists to surpass the scope and depth of his vision, the distortions of his writings would not be cause for concern. Yet, if there is a prevalence of distortions in the literature relating to Marx, and even more so in purported ‘‘applications’’ of his writings, we must suppose that these distortions have engendered an increasingly deficient appreciation of the conflicted link between economy, politics, and society – the specific kind of issues his theory was designed to illuminate. Unavoidably, these distortions would radiate their destructive energy to later theories as well, contaminating the basic structure of their design – irrespective of whether they critically responded to his work, constructed their theoretical edifices against his, or

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endeavored to build on his contribution (or certain elements thereof). If it would be possible to readily identify the most important distinguishing feature of Marx’s theoretical perspective, among any of the ‘‘special theories’’ he provided, the challenge of interpreting Marx might have been met some time ago. Yet, his special theories have functioned as the organizing principle of the scholarly reception of his work – such as his ‘‘theories’’ of socialist transformation, exploitation, surplus value, social class, and social conflict.54 Clearly, it is neither possible, nor appropriate, to identify as the gravitational center of his work any of these special theories, and attempts to apply them to later stages of capitalist development. Instead, his contribution must be understood in relation to his overall ‘‘guiding interest.’’ Yet, what was his guiding interest? Can we hope to grasp the conceptual, substantive, and formal evolution of his theory, how exactly different interests and writings form components of a coherent whole, and which, ultimately, are the specific kind of questions he strove to answer – independently of a clear restatement of his guiding interest? The specific meaning, thrust, and relevance of this guiding interest need to be recaptured and reformulated time and time again, in relation to concrete societal conditions and historical context. It is not only not possible to identify it once and for all; indeed, to date, reformulating his guiding interest in a manner that reflects and relates to specific conditions, in an intelligible and compelling fashion, may be one of the greatest challenges social scientists have had the opportunity to confront. We do not know, after all, whether and how the social sciences would have evolved without Marx’s writings functioning as the foil; nor do we know how they would have evolved if his work to a greater extent had been understood and applied, from the start, as he intended. In modern society, the nexus between the continually modulated capitalist mode of production and the corresponding ‘‘relations of production’’ (bourgeois society) makes for a highly dynamic form of economic organization within the context of largely static forms of social and political organization, the combination of which reaches so deep as to shape the theoretical, conceptual, and methodological tools we employ to understand it. Constructing a theory whose purpose it is to track how modern society changes over time, and how these changes affect the constellation between economy, society, and the state, and the social-scientific categories and methods we employ, is possible only if we continually insure that our efforts will not be corrupted by the desire to settle down with positions we no longer need to question. For this reason, Marx’s theory must be appropriated as an attempt to provide a framework for tracking the relationship

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between ‘‘quantitative’’ (economic) and ‘‘qualitative’’ (political, social, and cultural) changes in modern society, as a field of tensions, or forcefield, that never quite is the same at any two moments in time. Grasping this nexus necessitates a theoretical and cognitive framework that forces us to guard against ingrained habits and implicit patterns of ‘‘thinking.’’ Even the most basic assumptions we inherit from earlier social scientists may be highly problematic, as they might draw our attention away from the most conspicuous paradox of advanced capitalist societies – that increasing societal wealth does not translate, inevitably, into decreasing social inequality. Departing from ingrained practices is eminently difficult, as our ‘‘selves’’ are bound up with these practices to a far greater degree than educational systems are equipped to convey to students, and Marx’s critiques of alienation and commodity fetishism must be viewed as addressing precisely this issue. His theory was not so much about the ‘‘objective possibility of overcoming reification’’ (to paraphrase Luka´cs), as about the growing difficulties to overcome the effects of the capitalist mode of production as reflected in politics, culture, and society, with each successive mediation – alienation, commodity fetishism, and reification – repatterning the thoughts, desires, and actions of subsequent generations, making it ever more difficult to conceive of adequate means for analyzing this condition. Since the mainstream social sciences (as they operate on the basis of traditional theories – in Horkheimer’s distinction) do not provide a language to access and verbalize the most problematic dimensions of this condition, an explicit and determined effort was required to develop a framework for elucidating just how much we are caught up in a reality that we presume functions according to readily identifiable principles – a presumption that appears to be a necessary precondition for ‘‘consensual’’ social research.55 To date, as a discipline, sociology has not had the capacity to acknowledge the multiplicity of implications resulting from the close link between the imperative of ‘‘maintaining order’’ in any given society – probably the first sociological fact to consider in the study of any social phenomenon – and the construction of representations of social, political, and economic imperatives that facilitate order. In all likelihood, such representations are correlated negatively with the ability of sociologists to identify features that must be the necessary starting point for the rigorous understanding of modern society, especially as far as formulating policy objectives is concerned, and constructing related strategies.56 The purpose of Marx’s theory was to identify the mode of theorizing required to conceive of possibilities to utilize the productivity and wealth created in capitalism, in accordance with the espoused values of modern

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democratic societies, for the benefit of all members in society. As it stands, ‘‘capitalism’’ is a socio-economic system that continually erodes, at the societal level, the opportunity to conceive of ways to utilize wealth for social ends. At the same time, resources must be allocated for the social good. ‘‘Capitalism’’ does not prevent the utilization of those resources, but it generates ever greater obstacles to conceiving of possibilities to advance the ‘‘public interest’’ or, as Adam Smith put it, the ‘‘general interest of society’’ ([1789] 1937, p. 250). The capitalist economic system keeps reinforcing premodern habits of thought and practices that make it exceedingly difficult to conceive of opportunities emerging with organizational and technological developments, to pursue qualitative changes in politics, culture, and society – changes that would enhance the quality of life for most – or all – members of modern societies – meaning, under conditions of globalization, to human civilization as a whole. Consequently, as technological advances continue, imperatives relating to maintaining social order, insure that our ability to conceive of the global world in ways that positively relate to concrete processes and interrelations, will not keep pace. Capitalism thus does not advance rationality overall, but a certain, truncated, confined type of rationality. Increases in total wealth do not lead, of necessity, to an increased willingness among ‘‘capitalists’’ to share it; nor do they relativize the orientation of regular citizens toward wealth, just as, in the long run, increases in the wealth of nations do not lead to decreasing inequality within and between nations – contrary to what Schumpeter predicted during the 1940s, and Inglehart observed during the 1970s.57

Basic Income vs. Traditional Marxism In advanced, industrialized societies with democratic political systems, the impediments to the transition from capitalism to socialism, and especially to communism, appear to be far greater and deeper than most interpretations of Marx during the twentieth century would have been willing and able to acknowledge. Concordantly, much of what supporters and opponents of basic income conjecture about the relationship between work motivation, Protestant ethic, the desirability of financial security, and the futility of efforts to advance solidarity, must be exposed to scrutiny, not merely because these relationships are highly dynamic, and subject to change. The socially, politically, and culturally controlling nature of the current regime of work society remains obscure to most workers, employers, and policymakers, and the critical theory of work society is sketchy at best.58

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By necessity, arguments for basic income imply a mediation between theory and practice: how to transpose abstract categories from the theoretical and normative levels, to the level of social policy, in a manner that increases communicability, on the one hand, and practical relevance, on the other. In the current situation, there do not appear to be any direct threats to social and political stability in industrialized societies – either from, or in favor of, basic income. Realistically, basic income in its universalist version is not likely to be introduced in any industrialized nation, within the foreseeable future – despite Alaska Permanent Fund, recent developments in Brazil, and the related debate about Iraq (see below, p. 262n13). The reason ought to be immediately apparent: as industrialized societies are the engine propelling globalization, they will insure the protection and continuation of work society. As stated earlier, the idea continues to require further theoretical clarification and grounding. It is necessary and legitimate, for these reasons, to investigate whether the debate about basic income so far has ignored some key issues that are indispensable for attempts to prepare an effective implementation of basic income-related policies, once it will enter the realm of political possibilities. During the initial phase of the current debate about basic income, Philippe van Parijs’ essays written between the late 1970s and late 1980s, and published in the collection, Marxism Recycled (1993), played a decisive role. Among these essays, those coauthored with Robert van der Veen, on ‘‘a capitalist road to communism,’’ are most pertinent in the present context, with regard to theoretical justifications of basic income. Van Parijs has remained the leading theorist in the debate about basic income. Taking van Parijs’s perspective as the starting point, I will introduce Moishe Postone’s Time, Labor, and Social Domination (1993), also a work on Marx that was conceived before, and published after, the collapse of Soviet Communism and the demise of ‘‘actually existing socialism’’ in Europe – at a time when there was little concern with globalization.59 Postone’s work is a comprehensive endeavor to ‘‘recycle’’ Marx, not Marxism: to reinterpret Marx’s critical theory against most versions of Marxism, in terms of Marx’s guiding interest, and as a critique of traditional Marxism. To avoid established preconceptions about the theory of Marx, it is important to stress the need for a mindful rereading of a theorist whose analysis was geared toward identifying the specific nature of the contradictions endemic to modern capitalist society, and in reaction to a multiplicity of historically specific potentialities. In this endeavor, we scrupulously must identify criteria for determining the current value of Marx’s work, to be applied in a manner that is consistent with the explicit purpose for which it was designed, in relation to specific challenges we face today.

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The perspective I will introduce here has as its vanishing point the possibility, in the future, of work that is neither determined by the market, nor a function of the capitalist market process, but supersedes the historical specificity of capitalist organization, and the capitalist mode of production.60 Since Postone interprets Marx’s work as the first critical theory, as a critical theory of labor in modern society, I concentrate on the relevance of Postone’s interpretation of Marx for arguments for basic income, and how the debate about basic income would benefit from his interpretation. As will become evident, the paradox of the basic income debate is that while supporters acknowledge the problematic nature of current constellations of business, labor, and government, they tend to recognize those features in a manner that misapprehends the likely scope of the transformative consequences that would result from the unconditional implementation of basic income: proponents of basic income presuppose a concept of labor that is not sufficiently precise, at the conceptual and theoretical level. First, though, we need to take a step back, and revisit the argument for basic income that has been most central in the present context, as formulated in the above-mentioned article by Philippe van Parijs and Robert van der Veen.

A Capitalist Road to Communism? van Parijs and van der Veen In ‘‘A capitalist road to communism,’’ the central essay both in an issue of Theory and Society dedicated to basic income, and in Marxism Recycled (1993), van Parijs and van der Veen started out from the position that preconceived notions about the succession of societal stages of development, in the Marxist tradition, have become problematic.61 Given that under existing conditions, most stated policy objectives are not attainable, preconceived notions about social progress tend to impede rigorous thinking about viable social policy options. Furthermore, the expectation, prevalent in socialist and Marxist circles, that socialism necessarily follows capitalism – to prepare the rise of communism – appears to comply more with theoretical and ideological dogma, than with the prospects of capitalist transformations during the second half of the twentieth century. Yet, adherence to dogma may make impossible the attainment precisely of the goals theorists on the Left deem most imperative and desirable, as they relate to social justice. Van Parijs and van der Veen contend that if capitalism were to be allowed to run its course, historical development may by-pass the ‘‘developmental’’ stage of socialism, and lead directly to communism. Capitalism is being

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bogged down by bureaucratic welfare regimes, government subsidies that maintain inefficient industries, and the need to foster ‘‘full’’ employment. The Left undermines its own objectives by remaining committed to socialism. To begin with, the Left must abandon its habit of identifying the working class as the most important progressive social force.62 In Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme, he introduced socialism as a means to move closer to communism, as it refers to a society in which workers collectively own the means of production-and in which therefore they collectively decide what these should be used for and how the resulting product should be distributedy‘To each according to his labour’ (ibid., p. 156).

By contrast, communism is defined by the distribution principle: ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’—which implies at least that the social product is distributed in such a way (1) that everyone’s basic needs are adequately met, and (2) that each individual’s share is entirely independent of his or her (freely provided) labour contribution (ibid.).

Accordingly, socialism involves the abolition of exploitation, with workers appropriating the entire social product, ‘‘while communism, as defined, implies that ‘alienation’ is abolished’’ (ibid., emphasis added), with external rewards no longer prompting productive activities. Van Parjis and van der Veen respond to two key points in interpretations of Marx’s theory, pertaining to why socialism is a necessary stage, and why it is not possible to move to communism directly: first, socialism is a means to ‘‘reshape manyinto the altruistic person communism requires’’; and secondly, since communism will fail under conditions of scarcity, socialism will ‘‘develop the productive powers of humankind and thus create the state of abundance in which alone communism can flourish’’ (ibid., p. 157). Corresponding propositions purport, first, that communism will become possible once altruism and productivity have been developed fully, and secondly, that socialism is more likely than capitalism to advance their development. Yet, the authors contend, at least one point about socialism being a necessary step toward communism clearly is incorrect. The issue is whether socialism or capitalism is more likely to promote altruism. As far as the transition from capitalism to communism is concerned, Marx’s theory is most relevant with regard to the need to facilitate altruism. To the authors, this focus on altruism may be misguided: The transition to full communism canybe viewed as a gradual increase of the part of the social product distributed according to the needs vis-a-vis the part distributed

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according to labour contributions. Progress along this dimension does require that material rewards should gradually lose their significance, but does not entail that workers should be increasingly driven by altruistic motives (ibid.).

Nonmaterial, social rewards could replace material ones, as the incentive compelling people to do the necessary work, with ‘‘work, its organization, and the human relations associated with it’’ being modified so that extrinsic rewards progressively will lose their importance, as incentives for ‘‘a sufficient supply of labor. Work, to use Marx’s phrase, could and should become ‘life’s prime want’’’ (ibid.): [T]he improvement of work up to the point where it is no longer work – the transition to communism need not rely in any way on the development of altruism, nor indeed on any other transformation of human nature. It takes people and their preferences as they are, but alters the nature of (paid) work up to the point where it is no longer distinguishable from free time. Even if we grant that only socialism can turn people into altruistic beings, therefore, it does not follow that socialism is indispensable to reaching communism (ibid., p. 158).

The other issue, that socialism will liberate the forces of production beyond what is possible under capitalist conditions, is equally problematic. The authors argue that this too may be dogma, in the absence of compelling reasons for assuming that capitalism unbound will not engender continuous economic expansion and development, to a point where the whole system transforms from capitalism to communism. The question, then, is whether and what steps can be taken, by means of social policy, that will free capitalist production from the constraints currently preventing the kind of flexibility required to reach a level of societal wealth that will make overcoming the negative consequences of capitalism more likely. As van Parijs put it in the introduction to Marxism Recycled, ‘‘a gradually increasing unconditional basic income or universal grant’’ is more likely than socialism to advance what Marx called the ‘‘realm of freedom’’ (van Parijs, 1993, p. 4). It is consistent with this perspective, then, that the objective should not be to facilitate the kind of change that would be contingent on normative transformation and a ‘‘shift in consciousness’’; rather, the latter should result from structural changes and emerging material possibilities. Specifically, the goal should be institutional change of a sort that would trigger, as it were, an array of reforms and changes which it would not be possible to plan, but which might result if conditions were to be engendered that are conducive to changes not possible under existing conditions. [S]uppose something like a universal grant is introducedy The choice of the tax ratey will be determined by power relationships in the context of current material conditions.

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It is these material conditions – basically, rapid labour-saving technical change combined with compelling constraints on economic growth – that will turn the capitalist transition to communism from a utopian dream to a historical necessity, not in the sense that it will happen automatically, no matter what people think or do, but in the sense that, given the material conditions, human rationality can be relied upon to generate, sooner or later, political forces that will bring it about. A crucial part is played in this process by the exploration of alternative futures, by the investigation of their possibility and desirability – the central component of human rationality. Consequently, however sketchy and tentative, the argument of this chapter is of a piece with the historical necessity it ends up asserting, (van Parijs & van der Veen, 1993, p. 172).

The introduction of universal basic income would break the stranglehold of alienation and the glass casing impeding social policy success that is being sustained by alienated social relations. As universal basic income is a reaction to and reflection of the problematic nature of the prevailing constellation of business, labor, and government, it constitutes an attempt to conceive of a strategy that relates to those problems in a manner that is constructive. Basic income is one possible strategy to increase opportunities to design policy to remedy how inequalities limit the life chances of members of certain groups in modern society. Basic income should increase the ability of governments to implement policies relating to inequalities in ways that are more likely to succeed. What is most problematic in the above argument is the assumption that certain material conditions provide the context in which ‘‘human rationality can be relied upon to generate, sooner or later, political forces that will bringyabout (something like a universal grant).’’ Yet, will favorable material conditions suffice to engender practices that allow for strategies to overcome the effects of alienation – or will favorable conditions combined with alienated conditions produce a situation that is far less conducive to designing policies targeting inequalities, in ways that advance stated goals, in terms of shared values?

Postone’s Critique of Traditional Marxism Moishe Postone’s Time, Labor, and Social Domination (1993) arguably is the most comprehensive, and the most sophisticated reinterpretation of Marx’s social theory to date. In the literal sense, efforts to legitimate nonmarket work are compatible with Postone’s critique of traditional Marxism, his interpretation of Marx’s theory as a critical theory of labor, and his perspective as it contributes to, and supports, the debate about basic income. It is telling indeed that this affinity is conspicuously between a highly refined

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interpretation of Marx, on the one hand, and the only serious endeavor to keep alive motives of his thought that point toward practically oriented efforts to engender change intended to be compatible with the political, social, and economic principles guiding western societies. More specifically, the argument put forth by proponents of basic income, that a time might come when ‘‘uncoupling work and income’’ will become a necessary precondition for continued economic growth and development, resonates well with central tenets of Postone’s reinterpretation of Marx. Modern society relies on ‘‘rationalizations’’ of alienated forms of life, practices, and institutional arrangements. Among the paradoxes of social science is that dimensions of social life that are part of the basic design of modern society, and whose consequences manifest themselves at all levels of social organization and activity, tend to remain submerged – and neglected in analyses of social life. In the absence of specifically tailored instruments, the social sciences tend to disguise these dimensions further. If basic income is to function as a means for overcoming the most restrictive aspects of work society, its proponents must be willing to hone in on how labor casts a net over social life, how it necessitates continuous redefinitions of social reality, social organization, social processes, and social action, in a manner that allows for the construction of meaningful life-histories, in a context fraught with irrationalities (see Vidich, 1991). As Postone put it, Marx’s analysis of the historically unique character of labor as a socially mediating activity in capitalism is central to his investigation of the social relations and forms of subjectivity that characterize this society. According to Marx, the dual function of labor in capitalism as abstract labor and as concrete labor, as an activity that mediates people’s relations with one another and with nature, constitutes the fundamental structuring form of social life—the commodity (Postone, 1993, p. 385).

An adequate interpretation of Marx’s theory, then, involves the challenge of understanding the nature of a specific problem – in this case, the role of ‘‘labor’’ in modern society – in a manner that is directly related to the nature of the problem, whether in terms of analysis, or with regard to explicitly acknowledged norms and values. Such an interpretation of Marx’s theory draws attention to the degree to which, in most cases, social science is about framing the analysis of a specific problem in the context of related, accepted notions. For instance, it is impossible to meet the challenge suggested by Postone’s interpretation of Marx, if social scientists are not willing to question the perspective modern society has on itself as inherently progressive and evolutionary – especially insofar as this perspective impedes possibilities to understand the mediated nature of many, or most socially, relevant problems.

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Postone’s critique of traditional Marxism is a critique of most versions of Marxism, as well as a critique of ‘‘actually existing socialism.’’ The purpose of this critique is not to deny across the board the legitimacy of previous interpretations and continuations of Marx’s theory, but to point out a basic flaw in the vast majority of interpretations of his theory during the twentieth century, which can be identified clearly only since the direction of the capitalist transformations underway since the 1970s has become identifiable, in terms of ‘‘globalization.’’ By ‘‘traditional Marxism’’ Iymeanyall analyses that understand capitalism – its basic social relations – essentially in terms of class relations structured by a market economy and private ownership and control of the means of production, and grasps its relations of domination primarily in terms of class domination and exploitation. Within this general interpretive framework, capitalism is characterized by a historical dynamic (driven by class conflict, capitalist competition, or technological development) which gives rise to a growing structural contradiction between the society’s basic social relations (interpreted as private property and the market) and the forces of production (interpreted as the industrial mode of producing) (Postone, 1997, p. 49f).

Starting out from the observation that traditional Marxism has not been an effective means to analyze the transformations of capitalism and its underlying dynamics, Postone endeavors to grasp the nature of the dynamics of current transformations, and the concurrent opportunities for qualitative social change. He points out that many purported critiques of Marx’s theory in fact targeted highly flawed, traditional versions of Marxism. For Postone’s purpose, the key issue is how to interpret Marx’s theory to elucidate ‘‘globalization’’. For our purposes, the consequences resulting from the developmental dynamic of capitalism today for the possibility of effective social policies are most crucial: how to reflect upon necessary preconditions for solving key social problems? Have arguments for basic income been impaired by key tenets of traditional Marxism? Five points that are most central to Postone’s critique of traditional Marxism, as a contribution to the debate about basic income. Especially in its mature version, in Grundrisse and Capital, it is necessary to distinguish propositions in Marx’s theory that were trans-historical universal in nature or intent, and those that were means for analyzing liberal capitalism in the nineteenth century. Put differently, we must clarify in which regards Marx’s theory was historically specific, and which are of continued relevance to us today. As Marx’s theory involved, but did not constitute, a theory of exploitation, a theory of surplus value, a labor theory of value, and a theory of class struggle, these ‘‘theories’’ were aspects of his attempt

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to answer the most decisive question: how to identify the nexus between bourgeois society and the capitalist mode of production, to distinguish between the specificity of nineteenth century liberal capitalism and the dynamic principles of modern capitalism? In his earlier writings, Marx tried to present as trans-historical certain key features of society he later identified as specific features of nineteenth century capitalism. As in modern capitalism, the primary purpose of production is to generate profits, rather than to supply society with the means to satisfy needs, the commodity is the most fundamental form of social relations, revealing the inverted nature of business– labor–government relations in bourgeois society. In turn, the commodity is constituted by labor, the purpose of labor being the production of commodities. In a society where the generation of profits through the production of commodities is the basic principle of the labor process, social relations evolve in relation to the commodity form. This is the case in capitalist society only. We also must distinguish how Marx’s concept of labor was historically specific, and how – in what regards – it was trans-historical. He distinguished between concrete labor and abstract labor, with the latter fulfilling a unique social function in capitalism: to mediate a new type of social interdependence. At Marx’s time, the category of the commodity was an attempt to abstractly identify the underlying features of modern forms of social life most important for social analysis. In order to grasp how the thrust of Marx’s theory was misconstrued by most of his self-proclaimed followers, it is important to distinguish two modes of critical analysis that lead to very different interpretations: ‘‘a critique of capitalism from the standpoint of labor, yand a critique of labor in capitalism’’ (Postone, 1993, P. 5). I hypothesize that under conditions of globalization, the commodity form is a concrete, empirically viable category for social analysis.63 Marx’s theory was both a critique of distribution and a critique of production. Traditional Marxism concentrated on the critique of the dominant mode of distributing wealth in capitalism as a mechanism to reinforce the prevailing structure of social and economic inequality, neglecting the critical analysis of the organization of production – and that it cannot be molded at will. Traditional Marxists used Marx’s theory to criticize the mode of unequal distribution of the wealth produced, independently of the organization of production. Yet, to analyze the specific consequences resulting from the capitalist mode of production, for politics, culture, and society, and to theorize the obstacles to realizing freedom, the critique of political economy must involve a critique of the ‘‘inner logic’’ of the market process in capitalism, as it pertains to both distribution and production.

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Thus, a new form of social domination is endemic to capitalism. What Marx had described in his early writings as ‘‘alienation’’ reappears, in his mature work, as ‘‘commodity fetishism’’ – referring to a ‘‘form of self-generated structural domination’’ (p. 62). Conceiving of this form of domination as class domination, or other forms of concrete political or economic domination, distracts from the fact that it has no determinate locus and, although constituted by specific forms of social practice, appears not to be social at all. The structure is such that one’s own needs, rather than the threat of force or of other social sanctions, appear to be the source of such ‘‘necessity.’’ y The Marxian analysis includes [relations of class exploitation and domination], but goes beyond ity [T]he forms of social mediation expressed by categories such as the commodity and capital develop into a sort of objective system, which increasingly determines the goals and means of much human activity (Postone, 1997, p. 62f).

This abstract form of domination produces a particular kind of dynamic modern society is based upon. This dynamic is highly complex and, which is even more important, it is not linear. Its two key characteristics are, first, that it engenders continuous transformations emanating from the economy, and affecting all aspects of life;64 and secondly, that it continuously reconstitutes ‘‘its own fundamental condition as an unchanging feature of social life’’: labor is the dominant mode of social mediation, and ‘‘living labor remains integral to the process of productionyregardless of the level of production’’ (ibid, p. 63f). Postone’s rereading of Marx sheds light on the specific kind of impediments to understanding and theorizing modern capitalism, attempts to solve social problems, modes of collective social and political action, and opportunities to pursue desirable social change. Implications resulting from these impediments for social policy and the prospects of basic income ought to be immediately apparent. If labor is the dominant mode of mediating social relations in capitalism, than social relations are not independent from the workings of the economy, how the labor process is organized, and how workers, and citizens more generally, experience their position in society. If social policy ignores the specificity of labor in capitalism, and its formative impact on society in all of its dimensions, it is bound to replicate the problematic nature of the context in which policy success is to be achieved, especially regarding existing structures of inequality, as features of modern society that are linked to the dominant mode of organizing the labor process – but not as a function of it. If proponents of basic income start out from the assumption that there is a fundamental difference between the nature of social relations in the labor process and in society, and that the role of labor has not changed qualitatively, as the foundation of alienation, then

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proponents overlook the actual thrust of basic income, and the consequences of its implementation, if successful. Most importantly, if the implementation of basic income is to establish economic citizenship rights for the twenty-first century, without altering the dominant role of labor in its specificity – i.e., in terms of how it mediates social relations – the implementation of basic income will not advance the espoused objectives. If basic income will not affect the manner in which labor structures social relations, what will be its impact?

ALIENATION OMNIPRESENT: CRITICAL THEORY, BASIC INCOME, AND SOCIOLOGY The main difference between basic income and more established social policy approaches is that the former is an attempt, albeit implicit, to design strategies in relation to a specific kind of social problems as a function of structural inequalities. Established approaches to designing social policy, by contrast, move within a perimeter whose boundaries are determined by assumptions about how existing inequalities constitute the confines of the purpose and scope of social policies that its adherents would be hardpressed to explicate. In many instances, these assumptions do not relate, primarily, to the nature of the problems at hand, but they tend to be a function of how a given problem has come to be defined, in the context of political and economic institutions and organizations, in recent decades. Most politicians, policy-makers, and social scientists concerned with policy, do not have an interest in the kind of explicit, self-reflective, and critical exchanges that would be required for a common definition to result – of the societal context in which policy is to be constructed, to which it is to respond, what ends are to be achieved, and which interventions are most likely to be effective. The lack of a dynamic rather than a dialectical perspective on the link between inequalities and social problems, at the levels of culture, organization, and structure, is a major impediment to the conception of social policy as a means of qualitative transformation.65 Basic income-related designs digress from built-in assumptions about the nexus between inequalities and social problems that prefigure discussions about the purpose and scope of social policies. Most policies intended to alleviate specific social problems and conditions rest upon constructions of causality links between societal conditions, the functioning of institutions, and the malleability of ‘‘human nature’’ (or lack thereof), on the one hand,

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and possibilities to alter structural inequalities by means of policy, on the other. By contrast, proponents of basic income contend that under present conditions, we are not in the position to adequately identify the link between existing inequalities and determinations of what kinds of policy designs are possible, probable, and desirable, in a manner that would be consistent with prevailing norms and values in western democratic societies. Yet, as long as assumptions about the nature of relevant causality chains remain implicit, or entirely submerged, they are likely to perpetuate policy failures, as they will tend to be grounded in ideology, rather than in fact. In addition, they often entail implicit attempts to legitimate, or to rationalize, inequality in general, and specific inequalities, in particular. Basic income results from a genuine commitment to put forth policy designs that are oriented toward solving key social problems. Social problems must be seen in relation to existing structures of social and economic inequality, as well as economic and political power, and to past policy decisions and strategies predefining the scope of perceived available options and future choices. At the same time, however, proponents are reluctant to take a clear stand on whether under present conditions – especially in the most advanced societies – the combined political and policy apparatus does, or does not, have the capacity to bring about qualitative change. How, then, do proponents reconcile the assertion that modern political systems are not able to eliminate social problems that emanate from inequalities, with the assertion that those same systems will allow for the implementation of basic income? How is it that basic income would ‘‘enable’’ modern political systems to overcome the societal barriers to social policy success, to implement a new policy regime that is directed explicitly at overcoming the limitations of life chances imposed by structural inequalities? How is it that these systems have been incapable of achieving policy success, but will be capable of implementing basic income? This is the crux of arguments for basic income. To be sure, proponents of basic income are aware of the paradox, and arguments for basic income must be viewed in light of this paradox. The importance of basic income derives directly from the assertion that it is a policy design that ought to allow western political systems, as it were, to jump over their own shadow. Under present conditions, solving social problems relating to inequalities is not an option, yet – so the argument goes – implementing a policy innovation that makes more likely future possibilities to tackle social policies more effectively, must be. Considering that the welfare state has been, a regime to police inequalities – without altering their nature and prevalence – and to protect against threats to social and political stability – while increasing opportunities for individuals to improve

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their life chances, in a manner that is compatible with the principles of liberty, equality, and solidarity – how will basic income become a reality? In particular, how can we make sure that basic income will not be implemented in a manner that perverts the very objectives that inspire the current debate? What if the inability of modern political systems to tackle social problems is symptomatic neither of flawed policy designs, nor of a lack of commitment to solving social problems by altering structures of inequality, on the part of decision-makers in the political and policy establishments? An alternative explanation would be that there are systemic impediments – with corresponding impediments in academia and politics – that thwart attempts in western societies to implement policies that support values relating to liberty, equality, and solidarity. It appears that under conditions of globalization, in the context of increasing concern about the future of the nation-state, inherent, systemic impediments are beginning to become more visible.66 Since the ‘‘bourgeois’’ revolutions of the late eighteenth century, there has never been a consensus in any western society, that the modern nation-state was supposed to facilitate progressive societal reconstruction, toward the elimination of ‘‘inequality.’’ In fact, with inequalities having been rationalized for centuries as the necessary precondition for the functioning of a market economy, the primary purpose of the nation-state was containing and utilizing the potential for social and political conflict resulting from inequalities. In this view, the welfare state was a late, and highly refined rendition of the basic configuration of the nation-state. The welfare state reflected the difficulties to avoid, and the need to manage, expanding, democratically asserted demands on the ‘‘state,’’ especially after World War II – aside from the fact that nation-states were designed in part according to rational criteria, and emerged within concrete socio-historical conditions. Nation-states adapted to constantly changing conditions, and often were provided with a legitimating basis retroactively (as in Hobbes’ Leviathan). For the most part, and for a variety of reasons, decision-makers in politics and policy were not in the position to grasp the contradictory intricacies of those changing conditions, in relation to shifting functions of the nationstate. Today, in light of the debate about the ‘‘end’’ of the nation-state, the transformation of markets, and the ‘‘end of work’’ (see Castells, 1996, 1997, 1998), we must contemplate the possibility that the ‘‘evolution’’ of human civilization may have reached an impasse, and that the underlying program of the existing social, political, and economic systems does not allow for further attempts to alter the nature and extent of inequalities. The current

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concern with ‘‘endings,’’ then, might not relate to the actual end of the organizational form of the nation-state, of markets, and of labor, as such – but to the possibility that the manner in which the nation-state was designed to police inequalities, to facilitate economic expansion and control over the working class, is no longer viable. Liberalism buffered our ability, and our willingness, to face the extent of inequalities in western societies, the corresponding implications for members of certain segments of the population, and the tension between basic western values and concrete conditions.67 It thus legitimated an institutional and organizational framework for balancing political and economic processes in a manner that produced clearly identifiable social, political, and economic benefits.68 Yet, in light of changes in the world economy, we must be skeptical whether liberalism is capable of fulfilling this balancing function any longer, without the kind of major reorientation many liberals might regard as a betrayal of basic liberal principles.69 While it may not be clear whether it is by intent or default, proponents of basic income do not contend that it is possible to readily identify specific strategies to directly confront any specific social problem, such as unemployment. At this point in time, such efforts would not appear to be politically feasible. Instead, the starting assumption is that policy success will be contingent on the willingness of those involved, to conceive of indirect, preparatory strategies and policies: the goal is to allow conditions to emerge that will facilitate change consistent with both stated objectives and increasingly effective policies, within the matrix of modern societies – engendering continuous improvements, without radically altering, endangering, or destroying the achievement of modern society. As proponents of basic income are not oriented toward revolutionary change, they envision concrete, meaningful, and lasting social reforms. Yet, with globalization accelerating, the potential for social reforms appears to erode.70 What, then, is the link between basic income and critical theory? How does consideration of basic income, in turn, make possible clarification of the practical role of critical theory today?

Critical Theory, Basic Income, and Economic Rights: Beyond the Perpetuation of the Cold War In recent years, there has been a steady proliferation of conflicting conceptions and definitions of critical theory.71 Disagreements about the thrust of ‘‘neo-Marxist’’ Frankfurt School critical theory abound. Alternative

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versions of critical theory, such as feminist theory, postmodernist theory, postcolonial theory and critical race theory, as well as various combinations of these and other types of critical theory, have attracted growing attention as well. To identify the contribution of critical theorizing to the social sciences, and to debates about social policy, it is necessary to determine whether different critical theories share a formal or a substantive core. Such a core, once identified, should clarify how the perspective of critical theory, as a generalized perspective, is practically relevant, and how specific versions of critical theory relate to ‘‘traditional theory,’’ and to each other (see Horkheimer [1937] 1986). Traditional approaches start out from the assumption that prevailing perspectives on the parameter and the perimeter of research, both thematically and methodologically, and on the purposes of the social sciences in relation to policy, are legitimate and adequate – if in need of slight modification and refinement. Traditional approaches posit that we can only engage in rigorous – and nonideological – research if we start out from the assumption that there is an intrinsic link between dominant views of social life, and the adequacy of resulting research approaches and perspectives. Consequently, there is no need to question the nature of the relationship between modes of research, the defining characteristics of the society in whose interest, purportedly, mainstream research is being conducted, and the research questions and hypotheses that are being investigated. By contrast, critical approaches to social research posit that implicit assumptions about the nature of modern societies are most in need of rigorous scrutiny. Critical theories are calibrated to examine those dimensions of modern societal life whose systematic analysis is a necessary precondition for the development of strategies for solving social problems that relate to structural inequalities. Traditional, noncritical theories – not including the classics of social theory, Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, who each was more critical than dominant interpretations during the twentieth century would have allowed for – either ignore these dimensions altogether, or regard them as aspects of the ‘‘natural’’ constitution of society. Lack of concern with any of these dimensions, however, makes impossible consideration of the necessary preconditions of meaningful social change that is compatible with, and advances the espoused values of, western democratic societies. I propose the following working definition:72 The purpose of critical theories is to identify those dimensions of societal life that remain implicit in traditional approaches to social-scientific research – but which must be made explicit, and scrutinized, for opportunities to emerge, to identify the kind of conditions that would have to prevail in order for policies to attain success in terms of stated goals.

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Critical theory in this sense comprises neo-Marxist, feminist, postmodernist, postcolonial and critical race theory.

Ultimately, the perspective required may resemble more closely a therapeutic approach than strategic policy designs targeting the attainment of concrete objectives. It may not be possible to break, or crack, the glass casing, without damaging the fabric of modern society – with potentially unforeseeable consequences. After all, we have not been socialized to cope with revelations that force us to acknowledge that the patterns of societal life which determine the conditions of our existence, and modes of our coexistence, may be a function of structures of power and inequality. As these structures are rooted in particularistic interests, and geared toward maintaining social and political stability, they hoist images of society upon us that reinforce the functioning of existing constellations of politics, economy, society, and culture. To emphasize that the sense of realism required of an educated, circumspect, self-confident, and informed public is the exception rather than the rule, in the modern world, is not to imply that the latter is not worth preserving. The discrepancy appears to be widening between how we are taught to conceive of the modern world, and what it would take to grasp how its contradictory and complex nature limits our ability to conceive of more adequate strategies to confront persistent problems – even at the theoretical level. Presently, the most ambitious policy designs may be those that endeavor to prepare the emergence of a more realistic mode of societal organization – both in the sense that its citizens will be more willing and capable to confront the facts of collective life, and to envision a world that is more in line with its purported values. In the most favorable reading, universal basic income is both the most daring, and the most practical step in this direction. Yet, basic income is desirable only if implemented in a manner that it is difficult, or impossible, to reverse, and especially, to pervert. It requires attention to the fact that established practices reflect and perpetuate flawed approaches and problematic presuppositions, and that we may not even have a clear sense of what it would mean to take a perspective on social problems that is less a function of submerged and socially, politically, and economically grounded ideology. In addition, we tend to view policies and strategies within existing contexts, which themselves reflect the disordered condition. If, for instance, basic income were to be implemented in the mode characteristic of the history of failed policies, could it succeed? What would success mean – in light of the fact that the established regime of welfare-state social policies that emerged during, and as a function of, the Cold War, is alienation in its current disguise?

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If Marx’s theory retains merit, in the absence of a major rupture in the prevalence of the capitalist mode of production, we must suppose that today, alienation is far more central to forms of social life than it was at the time when Marx formulated the foundation of critical social theory. Accordingly, if Marx’s theory continues to be unsurpassed, we must accept the fact that ‘‘modernity’’ denotes tensions that are not reconcilable directly, and in a causally predictable manner, within the framework of modernity itself. It will not be possible to strive toward realizing the promise of modernity as a form of social organization and process that is dynamic, reflexive, and critical at the same time, regarding the societal (social, political, and economic) foundations to which it is a reaction, which it continually, and unsuccessfully, tries to overcome, and which will have to transform, and be transformed, in a manner we are ill-equipped to envision. Indeed, while ‘‘globalization’’ may signify that this stage of ‘‘evolution’’ has been reached, the inertia of the language and key concepts we continue to employ, may thwart related efforts. Theoretically rigorous justifications of basic income tend to be hampered by a set of dilemmas that remain unresolved – as they are symptomatic of a high degree of alienation in social and political life – the condition of hyperalienation. Basic income may be conceived of as highly compatible with prevailing values, agreed-upon and widely accepted definitions of social reality, and established policy-related strategies. Yet, proponents of basic income also contend that it is a possible venue for engaging in efforts to facilitate the move toward a qualitatively superior, ‘‘better future.’’ Furthermore, the tension between the set of values oriented toward individual self-realization, and the values oriented toward collective well-being, remains unresolved. While this tension may be endemic to modern society in general, the framing of basic income tends to relate back to the utilitarian hope that the unimpeded pursuit of individual happiness will lead to a greater collective good. In this reading, basic income is superior to earlier versions of utilitarian design in that it is preconditioned on a less compromised, and institutionally reinforced understanding of equal life chances. The issue of how to avoid the coopting of basic income designs, in a manner that will prevent the perversion, and possible inversion, of its intent and purpose, remains a major challenge, for several reasons. There will be predictable, determined efforts by ‘‘vested interests’’ to prevent the success intended, or to soften the impact sought.73 In addition to a multiplicity of economic consequences, attempts to implement basic income will generate an array of unintended consequences, since assumptions about its intended consequences are contingent on the calculation of interlocking causal

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relations basic to contemporary modern societies. The introduction of basic income will engender new constellations and new dynamics, and continue to require that we question established notions about causal links. Prior assumptions about causal links will be revealed as flawed, and entirely new causal links between the nature of the prevalent commitment to work, productivity, and economic security, will emerge. As a matter of principle, justifications of basic income relate to concrete socio-political and economic contexts; consequently, even explicitly theoretical attempts to legitimate basic income tend to be permeated by political considerations that impede the uncompromised consideration of related, theoretical issues. Consequently, establishing economic citizenship rights for the twenty first century is likely to be far more difficult than we might expect. In terms of the above analysis, the obstacles should be greater than can be tackled through policy reform. If Marx’s theory remains pertinent and relevant, for the reasons outlined earlier, and if Postone’s reading of Marx’s theory is warranted, overcoming the condition of labor in capitalism would be more dramatic a transformation than the literature about basic income would admit. For basic income schemes to be more successful, it is necessary that its proponents engage in a related, sustained, rigorous theoretical debate. Economic citizenship rights will have to be achieved against greater odds than was the case for civil, political, social rights – because economic rights strike at the heart of the system. Basic income schemes may contribute to setting the stage in a manner that makes it possible that these issues can be addressed, and tackled, more effectively. For this reason, it is also necessary to question the adequacy of prevailing values basic to modern democratic societies (like freedom, equality, and justice), and the earnestness of struggles against social problems, by means of social policies. Consequently, critical theory is key to identifying unacknowledged dimensions of social life that make direct implementation of basic income impossible, or likely to be ineffective. Even if economic rights would be a necessary precondition for continued prosperity in the twenty-first century, similar to civil, political, and social rights during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries – as suggested by T.H. Marshall – it appears that the regime of global capitalism currently emerging will pose a vastly greater obstacle. If basic income indeed is a strategy that is directly related to the nature of a set of social problems, and not an expression of ideology or unrelated imperatives that impede a straight perspective on the problems at hand – proponents need to continue to concern themselves explicitly with the inner logic of the processes and conditions that generate those problems.

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The ‘‘capitalist road to communism’’ van Parijs and van der Veen proposed during the 1980s, thus would be in imminent danger of pointing the alienated way to communism – by engendering a mechanism that would not require that people understand how economy and society work and are interconnected, and by reinforcing and amplifying the degree of alienation with which we have become acquainted. By contrast, Postone insists that only a rigorously critical understanding of the conditions producing alienation, tied to the centrality of labor as a socially constituting force, can engender the necessary perspective on how to conceive of a nexus between production and distribution that would be both socially just and economically sound. In order for the perspective van Parijs and others have been advocating since the 1980s to bear fruit, the kind of critical-theoretical perspective Postone put forth, is indispensable. For proponents of basic income must strive to design the kind of map that ought to enable us to decide which venues, in the world of global capitalism, increase the chances of reigniting a truly progressive, nonregressive strategy for conceiving of social policies.

CODA FOR THEORETICAL SOCIOLOGISTS The current historical moment is exceedingly unique in that it provides theoretical sociologists with a window of opportunity to heed the proposition, basic to critical theory (if adhered to reluctantly), that the challenge is to envision how all contributions to the theory of modern society – including its postmodern variant – provide fragments of a narrative that has never been told before. The stance such a perspective, and related practices of theorizing, would require all involved to adopt, should enable us to depart from the long shadow of alienation, since how we relate to the work of others would be guided by the certainty that it is not possible for any approach, any specific framework or tradition, to tell the whole story. Instead, in terms of social theory as a vocation, it would be our responsibility to situate diverse contributions to the theory of modern society, as pieces in a puzzle that is not a still photo, but a moving picture. How we ‘‘do theory’’ would have to correspond to this anticipation – that in the end, the purpose of theoretical sociology is not to produce static representations of a societal process, but a never-ending, collaborative activity directed at the unfolding of a mind-set that is increasingly capable of conceiving of implications resulting from the fact that modern social life is contradictory, complex, and contingent. For sociologists to make explicit, and take on, this hitherto submerged mission,

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its center of gravity will have to be placed, not in the past or present, but in the future.

NOTES 1. MacPherson (1962, 1977), Wood (1999), and Wood and Wood (1997); also Dahms (2000, pp. 1–30). 2. The term describes the period following the World War II, especially in Germany and Japan. Regarding the German case, see, e.g., Giersch, Paque´, and Schmieding (1992). 3. Such a perspective necessitates a different reading of works published and concepts developed in the social sciences at the time, such as the conflict theories of Coser (1956) and Dahrendorf (1959), and Lipset’s concept of the ‘‘democratic class struggle’’ (1963). 4. As Richard Ofshe put it in the introduction of The Sociology of the Possible, ‘‘ytheoretically, there is no reason the social world must be organized in the manner in which [we] find it,y, alternative forms of social organization are possible, [though]ythey cannot be attained by fiat. The problem is not so much to design a social system that seems to be more humane, desirable, and fair; it is to figure out how to build it’’ (1970, p. xvii). 5. See Dahms (2005). The distinction between ‘‘traditional and critical theory’’ was Horkheimer’s ([1937] 1986); at its most basic, the distinction refers to approaches as traditional if they treat concrete social formations as quasi-natural, while critical approaches scrutinize those formations as socio-historically contingent. 6. In the U.S., difficulties to reconcile the rise of the modern corporation during the early twentieth century and the emergence of the regulatory state during the late 1940s and 1950s, with basic tenets of laissez-faire and entrepreneurial capitalism, are illustrative cases in point. See esp. Harrison (1997); also Schumpeter (1942). 7. See esp. Mills (1959), who wrote of the promise of the sociological imagination as the ability ‘‘to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within societyythe capacity to shift from one perspective to anotheryto range from the most impersonal and remote transformations to the most intimate features of the human self – and to see the relations between the two’’ (p. 6f). Both the need and the opportunities to do so keep amplifying with globalization, while the ability to shift between perspectives, in sociology, continues to apply more to the discipline as a whole, rather than to individual researchers, practicians, and theorists. 8. As Bernstein (2001, p. 235) has pointed out, even one of the most rigorous and sophisticated critics of modern society, Theodor W. Adorno, chose to refrain from offering ‘‘an explicit account of the modern world in its self-conscious differentiation of itself from the theological and metaphysical past.’’ 9. While problematic in its concrete execution, Horkheimer’s concept of interdisciplinary collaboration at the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt was an explicit step in this direction; see Dubiel (1985), Wiggershaus (1994), and Dahms (1999). 10. See, e.g., Perrucci and Wysong (2003).

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11. For information about basic income, see http://www.usbig.net as well as http://www.basicincome.org. Referring to the leading theorist of basis income, Andrew Reeve has summarized (universal) basic income as ‘‘paid to each ‘full member’ of society without reference to that person’s existing resources, willingness to work, household membership, or location. Such a payment is quite obviously different from standard welfare-state payments, which are often means tested, depend upon a person’s availability and willingness to take employment, or relate to local considerations like levels of rent, or take into account the position of partners or others living in the household. It is a requirement of justice, for van Parijs, that the government should disburse such an income. This is because a free society is identified with a just society by real libertarianism’’ (2003, pp. 5–6). 12. See also proposals such as a negative income tax, as supported by Milton Friedman of the Chicago School (see Moffitt, 2003), or stakeholder grants, as advocated by Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott (1999). See also Widerquist (2001a, b). 13. It is important to keep in mind that basic income, both as an idea and a policy proposal, is characterized by a high degree of affinity with one strain of American values regarding the relationship between individual and society, especially as far as obligations, responsibilities, rights, and entitlements are concerned. Basic income deviates from the work ethic strain of American values insofar as it starts out from the proposition that just as the individual has responsibilities to, so too, does society have responsibilities to the individual, and that it is not compatible with American values and traditions that misfortune on the part of an individual, for instance, releases society from any responsibility toward the well-being of the individual. Tom Paine was one of the earliest advocates of a basic income-related scheme in the United States. During the 1960s, two large-scale socio-economic experiments were conducted in the United States, ‘‘The Seattle Experiment’’ (see Mordecai & Spiegelman, 1971) and ‘‘The New Jersey Income Maintenance Experiment’’ (see Kershaw & Fair, 1976; and Watts & Rees, 1977a, b). Today, the only established basic income regime also is in the United States: the Alaska Permanent Fund (Hartzok, 2002). Note also that the ‘‘Federative Republic of Brazil has become the first national government to introduce a basic income guarantee. On January 8, 2004, President Lula signed a law decreeing the gradual introduction of a universal basic income for all Brazilian residents. The phase-in will begin in 2005, starting with those most in need by consolidating existing federal income support programs. Many of the details are yet to be worked outy’’ See USBIG Newsletter Vol. 5, No. 25, January–February 2004 (http://www.usbig.net) – also for van Parijs’s account of the event. Finally, a basic income has been discussed by U.S. government officials, as a possible solution to problems in Iraq; see Ehrenreich (2003). 14. See Habermas ([1992] 1996). 15. ‘‘A rising tide lifts all boats’’ and the ‘‘elevator effect’’ are two common characterizations of the increasing prosperity that all social groups experienced, in the U.S. and many other western industrialized countries after World War II, without the social structure as such having changed in favor of the lower income levels. See Danziger and Gottschalk (1995, 1993). Also see Beck’s concept of the ‘‘elevator effect’’ employed in the German original of Risk Society Beck (1986), p. 122; there is no reference to this concept in the corresponding chapter in the English translation

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(Beck [1986] 1992), pp. 91–102. See Bourguinon and Morrison’s (2002) study of global inequality between 1820 and 1992. Between 1820 and 1950, inequality was on the rise, while after 1950, the pace of inequality rising slowed. The study does not include developments after 1992, which would have revealed that since then, global inequality has experienced a resurgence, and been on the rise since. 16. Most of all, Postone (1993), as well as Jones (2002); see also Camic (1997) for a collection of re-evaluations of classics from Comte to Mead. 17. I am not suggesting that sociology should be retooled as the social science of alienation, but that the practical and public relevance of sociology is contingent on the inclusion of a perspective on modern society, as a form of social organization that is centered, both, around increasingly alienated social relations, and continuous efforts to contain and rationalize the destructive potential embedded in alienated social relations. Furthermore, I am not suggesting that it is possible to ‘‘explain’’ modern society in terms of alienation, but that neglecting the extent to which sociology emerged in response to alienated social relations is a major impediment to realizing the promise of sociology – both in terms of practical and theoretical realization. Accordingly, the perspective I am presenting here does not involve the claim that alienation is the category that will enable us to unlock the mysteries of modern society, and that alienation is the Archimedean point of sociology. Instead, neglecting alienation as a key dimension of modern social life is synonymous with precluding questions and perspectives that make possible analyses relating to the problematic constitution of modern society. It may be symptomatic of the prevalence of alienation, and the related lack of curiosity about the nature of modern society, that many standard sociology textbooks do not mention either ‘‘alienation’’ or ‘‘modern’’ in the index of their books; e.g., Kornblum (2002) and Charon (2002) – as both are implicitly presupposed, neither are being thematized. 18. In Marx’s later writings, most notably in Capital, commodity fetishism took the place of alienation, with commodity fetishism being alienation as ‘‘second nature’’ (Marx [1867] 1977, pp. 163–77). On the sociological uses of the concept, see especially Torrance (1977) on the differences and affinities between alienation and estrangement, as translations of the German Entfremdung, and their counterparts, appropriation and solidarity; also Me´sza´ros (1970). 19. See Marx’s critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right ([1843/44] 1978). 20. Durkheim’s concept of anomie, as well as Weber’s thesis of the Protestant ethic, can be appreciated more fully in the context of a continual process of reconstituting social relations within the triangle of alienation, anomie, and Protestant ethic. Reading Marx’s writings as a critical theory of alienation, Durkheim’s as a critical theory of anomie, and Weber’s as a critical theory of the Protestant ethic, would engender a perspective on the beginnings of modern society, as follows: with alienation resulting from the new, capitalist mode of production, anomie was the consequence of successive, and increasingly futile attempts to reconcile traditional understandings of the nature of social relations, with a transformation of the material basis of social relations. The Protestant ethic, then, would represent an adaptation to the transformed material basis of social relations – a means to contain the fact that traditional views regarding, and material basis of, social relations, were becoming irreconcilable. Such a coreading of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, as critical theorists of alienation, anomie, and the Protestant ethic, appears to be the

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necessary foundation for a dynamic perspective on globalization as contradictory, contingent, and complex. On the affinity between alienation and anomie, see Ludz (1973, 1975). 21. See Hardimon’s (1994) interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy as an attempt to enable the individual to find a ‘‘home’’ in the modern social world. 22. For example, Harvey (1990), Jameson (1991), and Woodiwiss (1993). 23. From this angle, it would be premature to contend that we live in a postmodern age, since in the context of globalization and alienation, it may be more constructive to conceive of postmodernism as, potentially, a more sophisticated reflection of and on alienated life, rather than an unalienated critique of the ‘‘modern condition.’’ Also, whether we have entered a postmodern age or not is secondary in this context, since the assumption that we have, would render pointless the kind of analysis of the link between alienation and policy at issue here. The determination that a postmodern condition has taken hold, empirically speaking, depends on how we frame the crucial criteria for identifying such a condition. As it stands, there are no pertinent criteria that promise to be agreeable even to a minority of social scientists. See Lemert (1997), Agger (2002), and Antonio (1998). 24. This is one of the central theses of Dahms (in preparation): conditions conducive to economic ‘‘entrepreneurship’’ are being sustained, by means of economic policies, at the expense of most other forms of entrepreneurship. 25. See Kuttner (1997). ‘‘Desirable social change’’ not in the sense of the process of realizing a utopian social order, however conceived, but the kind of change commonly conjured up by democratically elected representatives, to be achieved through the means of ‘‘state’’ power, or on the basis of ‘‘mechanisms,’’ such as laissez-faire economic policies, which both are presumed to lead to desirable outcomes. 26. See Brettschneider (2002), Dahl (1985, 1989), Kaplan (1997), and especially Dahl (2003). 27. I have formulated a related argument with regard to the concept of reification, which succeeded alienation during the 1920s, following Luka´cs, in Dahms (1998). Alienation is the broader, more generic concept. 28. See Kitching (2001) for one example of a sustained argument in favor of globalization, from the point of few of its social, cultural, and political potential. 29. The critical theorists of the Frankfurt School explicitly continued to refine the critique of the link between material conditions, states of consciousness, practices, and modes of social-scientific theory and research Marx had initiated. This type of critique is oriented toward identifying, at successive stages of capitalist development, the most problematic aspects of modern capitalist society, in the form of alienation and commodity fetishism in Marx, reification in Georg Luka´cs, instrumental reason in Horkheimer, identity thinking in Adorno, and functionalist reason in Habermas (see Dahms, 1998). Axel Honneth (1996) purports to represent the ‘‘latest stage’’ in this succession of critiques, in the context of his critique of recognition relations in advanced societies. However, in terms of the logic of critique introduced by Marx, Honneth’s is precisely what he claims it to be – a break with the tradition of critical theory. Whether this break is necessary, in terms of the logic of critical theory, or indicative of a desire to introduce a new paradigm, in the interest of making critical theory more practically and politically relevant, only time will tell. See my manuscript, ‘‘Critical theory or critical liberalism? Honneth’s recognition paradigm as the

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latest stage of Frankfurt School theorizing.’’ For a recent set of assessments of the Frankfurt School, see Nealon and Irr (2002). See also How (2003). 30. This condition explains, at least in part, the proliferation of regressive strategies to cope with the experience of alienation; on the return of mysticism, for instance, see Wexler (2000). 31. There are many different ways of conceiving democracy, and of democratic validity claims. For present purposes, democracy denotes a political process that is guided by a genuine desire to advance what Adam Smith, among others, referred to as the ‘‘general interest of society’’ (Smith, [1789] 1937, pp. 248–250). Accordingly, political processes that conspicuously advance particular interests, at the exclusion of attempts to determine the general interest of society (e.g., by identifying the general interest with the interest of a particular group, class or race), may be democratic in terms of formal decision making processes, but also violate the idea of government by all the people. See Held (1996). 32. I do not consider the conservative across-the-board rejection of pro-active social policies a convincing approach to identifying lack of policy success as a systemic problem, since conservatives tend to be too quick to conclude that the lack of success of a particular policy is indicative of the futility of all attempts to remedy consequences of inequalities that are conspicuously incompatible with democratic validity claims. In an inverted fashion, though, conservative critics of policy are ‘‘correct’’ insofar as policies rarely seem to work. The lack of success of most policies relating to inequalities does not result from their being ‘‘inherently’’ flawed, however, but from invisible barriers that thwart attempts to design policy in a manner that considers how, categorically, the nature of existing inequalities predefine the scope of policies designed to alter (the impact of) inequalities, the prospect of greater societal prosperity, and the pursuit of collective social strategies more generally. Put differently, if policies directed at remedying the impact of inequalities would work, under existing conditions, conservative critics probably would be the first to mount determined resistance, claiming to be motivated by the desire to ‘‘protect’’ western civilization. The fate of affirmative action appears to be symptomatic of the conservative reaction to a strategy that may well have been one of the most successful policy strategies to date, relating to structural inequalities, and in terms of stated goals. As ought to be apparent, the purpose of this paper is not to argue against social policies, but to illuminate how established approaches to designing policy are highly problematic – and to identify what mode of analyzing established strategies would be required to conceive of more effective strategies and modes of implementing democratically decided upon policies. It would be consistent with the perspective I am introducing here, to apply the resulting conclusions, to an examination of affirmative action, and how if may represent a kind of ‘‘qualitatively superior’’ policy strategy – in terms of stated goals, strategies of implementation, and results attained. For an excellent compilation of positions relating to affirmative action, see Post and Rogin (1998). 33. See Robert Dahl’s (1989) proposal for a ‘‘minipopulus.’’ 34. ‘‘[G]lobalization has become ‘normalized’ to an extent where it is hard to perceive any alternative. Sociologically, its power is ‘hegemonic’y . The culture of globalization is so overwhelming that seemingly nothing can stand in its way. Even moderate dissent is interpreted as subversive intent, converting social arrangements

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into putative facts’’ (Newman & de Zoysa, 2001, p. 227). See especially Baudrillard’s ‘‘Hypermarket and hypercommodity’’ (1994, pp. 75–78) and Rifkin (2000). 35. T.H. Marshall’s (1950) thesis about the establishment of civil rights, political rights, and social rights has become a staple in the literature on welfare state and social policy, as well as on basic income. Drawing on the British experience, the centerpiece of Marshall’s thesis was that it is possible, in industrialized societies, to view the eighteenth century as the century of establishing civil rights, insuring equality before the law. The nineteenth century, then, would have coincided with the establishment of political rights, within the context of democratic institutions and processes, as the recognition and establishment of civil rights prepares equal political rights. The twentieth century, finally, was the century of establishing social rights, by means of social policy and social welfare state, acknowledging that social rights are as integral to civil rights as political rights. Extending the same logic to the twentyfirst century requires that we presuppose that it will be the century of establishing economic rights. 36. During the 1970s, this commitment increasingly came to be viewed as problematic, in conservative circles. See the literature about ‘‘ungovernability’’ and the ‘‘crisis of democracy,’’ especially Crozier, Huntington, and Watanuki (1975); Offe (1984). 37. See Dahms (2002); on differences in the use of the concepts globalization and ‘‘globalism,’’ see Steger (2002, pp. 43–80). 38. With regard to the United States, see Quadagno (1994), esp. Chap. 5. Also Jencks (1992, pp. 1–2): ‘‘The only important exception to the rule that Washington did not make social policy, the Social Security Act, was a legacy of the great depression and the new deal. As the name implies, social security was supposed to reduce the risk that individuals who had become used to life in a particular economic niche would suddenly find themselves pushed out of it. Its most important components were unemployment insurance (UI) and old age and survivors insurance (OASI, known in the vernacular simply as ‘social security’). y Like private insurance, these two social-insurance programs reinforced the existing social and moral order. y [B]oth programs reinforced not only the work ethic but the social hierarchy that America had created on the bedrock of wage inequality.’’ During the mid-1980s, Morris and Williamson (1986, p. 169) wrote that ‘‘no matter how much policymakers and the public may wish otherwise, the ability of mostyapproaches (such as employment and training, and education) to reduce poverty appears to be severely constrained. Increased recognition of this fact would be a major step toward relieving these programs of the burden of unrealistically high expectations, and would foster greater appreciation of the actual and potential accomplishments of other approaches. There is no guaranteeythat this recognition will lead to the development of more effective poverty policy. At the very least, however, there is likely to emerge a more sophisticated understanding of the dynamics of poverty in American society.’’ 39. For a step in such a direction, see Glazer and Rothenberg (2001). 40. See Hegel ([1821] 1967), esp. pp. 145–155: ‘‘In the system of needs, the livelihood and welfare of every single person is a possibility whose actual attainment is just as much conditioned by his caprices and particular endowment as by the objective system of needs. Through the administration of justice, offences against

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property or personality are annulled. But the right actually present in the particular requires, first, that accidental hindrances to one aim or another be removed, and undisturbed safety of person and property be attained; and secondly, that the securing of every single person’s livelihood and welfare be treated and actualized as a right, i.e. that particular welfare as such be so treated (pp. 146–147). See also article 242, p. 149, about the problematic nature of government relying on private charity, as a means to remedy poverty: ‘‘Public social conditions are on the contrary to be regarded as all the more perfect the less (in comparison to what is arranged publicly) is left for an individual to do by himself as his private inclination directs.’’ 41. In recent years, there have been two illustrative trends for the policing of social problems, most pronounced in the United States: a shift from policing problems to policing those who suffer from them (as incarceration rates indicate), and community policing shifting some of the responsibilities of policy to the activities of police officers. 42. There are vast differences between countries. The most obvious example in recent years has been, in the United States, the health insurance industry’s barrage of commercials directed against the attempt by the young Clinton Administration, to take significant steps toward health care for all. 43. It is telling, in this context, that the only political entity that supports a version of basic income, the State of Alaska, during the 1990s, became the state in the Union with the lowest degree of inequality. 44. See Thurow (1980). For a highly accessible, general overview of the ‘‘new gilded age,’’ see Krugman (2002). 45. This glass casing resembles the glass ceiling in corporate and political organizations that continues to keep a disproportionately high number of qualified women and members of minorities, in advanced industrialized societies, from entering the higher echelons of political and economic power – and effectively excludes those who might pursue more balanced strategies from a less exclusionary, purposively oriented vantage point. This is not to say that the glass ceiling has not been pervious in individual instances for decades; nor that it does not tend to become more pervious in many societies – at least in terms of demographic representativity. See, for instance, Cotter, Hermsen, Ovadia, and Vanneman (2001); Davies-Netzley (1998). 46. On Weber’s concept of ‘‘iron cage,’’ in relation to the concept of glass casing I propose, see Dahms (under review). 47. (See, e.g., Offe, Mu¨ckenberger, and Ostner (1996). Prominent supporters of basis income in the social sciences include (and included) Bruce Ackerman, Stanley Aronowitz, Fred Block, Ralf Dahrendorf, Andre Gorz, Herbert Simon, and James Tobin. For a recent collection of arguments for, and analyses of, basic income, see van Parijs (2001). See also van Parijs (1992, 1995). For a set of assessments of van Parijs’s work, see Reeve and Williams (2003). 48. Gabel’s work on the link between reification and modes of ‘‘thinking’’ is most illustrative and valuable, in this regard. His analyses of the warped ways of perceiving reality we come to regard as ‘‘normal,’’ ‘‘necessary,’’ and ‘‘natural,’’ as they are manifest both in the frequency of mental disorders and of diagnosing mental disorders independently of the specificity of socio-historical context, remain unsurpassed. See Gabel ([1962] 1975, 1997), as well as Alan Sica’s important, related work (Sica, 1995, 1997).

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49. In this context, see esp. Beck (2000). 50. This perspective suggests a reading against the grain of the theme of the book edited by Hedstro¨m and Swedberg (1998). 51. ‘‘[A] civilization – our civilization – locked in the grip of an ideology – corporatism. An ideology that denies and undermines the legitimacy of the individual as the citizen in a democracy. The particular imbalance of this ideology leads to a worship of self-interest and a denial of the public good.’’ (Saul, 1995, p. 186). 52. The main reason why work society often is analyzed as a phenomenon above and beyond capitalist society may be that social scientists tend to presuppose a level of intellectual and theoretical independence from existing conditions enabling us to apply a largely non-ideological perspective. In the present context, this presupposition would appear to be highly problematic. 53. This does not mean, however, that we can transpose Marx’s concept of labor into and onto the present, as if its significance were clear, and not subject to contest. In fact, how to make Marx’s concept of labor analytically useful, with reference to contemporary work societies, is a major challenge of interpretation, contingent on a willingness to discern the contradictory and complex nature of advanced capitalism, without giving in to the temptation to take refuge in one ideological posture or another. 54. For both highly sophisticated and especially illustrative instances of this reception, see Dahrendorf (1959), Cohen (1982), and Berger (1999). 55. Edward Shils (1961, pp. 1435–1448), distinguished between manipulative sociology, alienated sociology, and consensual sociology, with very different policy implications, respectively, and he advocated the latter as the least ‘‘deformed’’ sociological perspective. 56. While sociology is the discipline endowed with the responsibility to enlighten modern society about itself, and thus to engender strategies for change that follow from the social, political, and cultural values upon which this form of social organization rests, it more often than not tends to function as a brake on, rather than an accelerator of change. As long as most sociologists presuppose that the established research strategies and guiding questions are prevalent because they are adequate and sufficiently ‘‘scientific,’’ the methodologically overdue paradigm shift will not occur. For steps toward the kind of paradigm shift that is becoming increasingly necessary, see S.M. Miller’s ‘‘The Great Chain of Poverty Explanations’’ (1996, esp. pp. 583–586), as well as the perspective Barbara Reskin proposed during the presidential address at the ASA Annual Meeting in Chicago, 2002, regarding the study of compounding inequalities. 57. See Horkheimer and Adorno ([1944] 1972), Schumpeter (1942), and Inglehart (1977). 58. To date, Claus Offe arguably has made the greatest strides in this direction; see Offe (1984) and Offe and Heinze (1992). See also Beck’s forage in this direction (2000). 59. Since then, Postone (1997, 1999) has addressed directly the issue of globalization. 60. This would be compatible with Dahrendorf’s distinction between economy and society being dominated by ‘‘work,’’ as opposed to ‘‘activity’’ replacing work over time; see the related essays in Dahrendorf (1987).

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61. This essay first was published in Theory and Society 15(5) 1986, along with essays by Erik Olin Wright, Alec Nove, Joseph Carens, Johannes Berger, Adam Przeworski, Jon Elster, and a response to these articles, by van der Veen and van Parijs. 62. Van Parijs and van der Veen (1993, p. 155). Note that this very insight transformed the reference point of the critique basic to the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, during the 1930s – away from a prior preoccupation with the proletariat as the ‘‘revolutionary subject of history’’. See Wiggershaus (1994) and Dubiel (1985). 63. ‘‘In a society in which the commodity is the basic structuring category of the whole, labor and its products are not socially distributed by traditional ties, norms, or overt relations of power and domination – that is, by manifest social relations – as is the case in other societies. Instead, labor itself replaces those relations by serving as a kind of quasi-objective means by which the products are acquiredy [A] new form of interdependence comes into being where no one consumes what they produce, but where, nevertheless, one’s own labor or labor-products function as the necessary means of obtaining the products of othersy Instead of being defined, distributed, and accorded significance by manifest social relations, as is the case in other societies, labor in capitalism is defined, distributed, and accorded significance by structures (commodity, capital) that are constituted by labor itselfy [L]abor in capitalism constitutes a form of social relations which has an impersonal, apparently nonsocial, quasi-objective character and which embeds, transforms, and, to some degree, undermines and supersedes traditional social ties and relations of power’’ (Postone, 1997, p. 59). 64. ‘‘[O]ngoing transformations of the technical processes of labor, of the social and detail division of labor and, more generally, of social life – of the nature, structure, and interrelations of social classes and other groupings, the nature of production, transportation, circulation, patterns of living, the form of the family, and so on’’ (Postone, 1997, pp. 63–64). 65. The most compelling effort in the direction of a dynamic analysis of social problems may be Leisering and Leibfried’s (1999) study of poverty in western welfare states. On problems related to the grounding of a rigorous dynamic analysis of modern western societies, see Dahms (in preparation). 66. See the debate about the end of the nation-state, e.g., Strange (1996), Ohmae (1995), and Gue´henno (1994). 67. In A Nation of Agents. The American Path to a Modern Self and Society, James E. Block demonstrates how problematic the western emphasis on freedom, or liberty, has been, with regard to America as the first modern democracy. He contends that this emphasis was ill-conceived from the start, and concludes: ‘‘[t]he agency paradigm,ythe deepest narrative of American nationhood attending to its modernist interweaving of individual and collective, searches for a continued viability in the United States. y [P]erhaps the synthesis between ideal and real, of which agency was one stage on some greater journey, lies ahead to be newly imagined and pursued. Might not the quest for just democracy, genuine selfhood, and diversity within a cohesive community, while indebted to the immense developmental steps taken with creation of the agency world, be advanced through further reconstruction of the human setting? A ‘free individual in a free society’ will not forever look like the

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Protestant agent in liberal society. Brilliant and enduring though it was, it was only the first approximation’’ (Block, 2002, p. 550). 68. In this regard, see the literature in Europe on the ‘‘Third Way.’’ I submit that without innovations like basic income, arguments for the Third Way are in danger of remaining largely vacuous. For the Third Way between capitalism and socialism to be a viable strategy, it requires reflection on, and implementation of, the kind of constitutional changes for which basic income provides the most compelling model yet. See Newman and de Zoysa (2001). See also Habermas’ defense of an ‘‘offensive’’ variant of the Third Way, in Habermas (2002), esp. p. 229f. 69. See Benhabib (2002), esp. Chap. 7, ‘‘What Lies Beyond the Welfare State?’’ With regard to European integration, see also Kleinman (2002), Vobruba (1994), and Calhoun’s (2002) arguments about the need to foster a Europe-wide public sphere. 70. See Teeple (2000); Isbister (2001), esp. Chap. 8; Midgley (1997); Jordan (1997); Kingfisher (2002). 71. For overviews of critical theory, comprising different types of critical theory, such as postmodernist and feminist theory, see Calhoun (1995) and Agger (1998). 72. See also Dahms (2002, p. 306). 73. These efforts will take different forms, and occur through the democratic political process and lobbying, and by defining economic reality and politico-economic possibilities in certain ways, as well as by refusing to co-operate – to name just the most predictable options.

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PART IV: RELIGION, MORALITY, ETHICS? IN MODERNITY, POSTMODERNITY?

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THE CONCEPTUAL COMMON DENOMINATOR BETWEEN BELLAH, GIDDENS, AND HABERMAS AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE Hanan Reiner ABSTRACT This chapter examines the significance of the fact that the fundamental outlook of modern religion according to Bellah, is compatible with the description of reality and the system of analytic concepts crystallized by Giddens and Habermas in their analysis of modern society. The conceptual common denominator between these three researchers indicates that Bellah’s as well as Giddens’ and Habermas’ thought include an antinomological reflexive scientific-educative narrative that reflects a vision of the desired face of human society. A vision calling for the encouragement of continual reflexivity and the personal involvement of the individual in constructing his social reality. This common denominator brings to light a transition in the sociological-theoretical arena – flexing past borders created between theoretical streams in light of the fact that the roots of Bellah’s thought lie in the Functionalistic tradition, Giddens’ in the Positivistic tradition and Habermas’ in the neo-Kantian tradition. Social Theory as Politics in Knowledge Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Volume 23, 279–299 Copyright r 2005 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0278-1204/doi:10.1016/S0278-1204(05)23005-0

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INTRODUCTION The transition from a traditional to a modern society has had implications in a variety of contexts (Giddens, 1972; Tonnies, 1963; Weber, 1978). One of these contexts was expressed in the ‘‘meeting’’ between religion and science. In the traditional society it was assumed that God’s guiding hand was at the foundation of events. Religion thus became the sole source for the legitimacy of social order. In modern society a decline in the status of religion can be observed, in light of the fact that the days when the idea of social order stemming from a single holy source are gone (Ben-David, 1971; Johnson, 1977; Lemert, 1979). At that stage it was even thought that science would take on the role that religion filled in the past and would turn into the driving source and force of social order. These were the days of ‘‘God is Dead’’ and ‘‘the soul’s torch which has been returned unto itself’’ (HenriLevy, 1980). This change did not occur smoothly. The lofty status of religion in society and the fact that it was intertwined in every aspect of human life contributed its part to the arousal of tension and conflicts between supporters of religion on the one hand and supporters of science on the other hand. At the beginning, supporters of science claimed that the wind of progress was blowing through it, indicating a complete separation between the ‘‘religious’’ and the ‘‘scientific’’. This opinion was also prevalent in Sociology (Ben-David, 1971; Johnson, 1977; Lemert, 1979). As the years passed, a change in this attitude could be observed, and the definitive attitudes toward the existence of an absolute separation between religion and science became less prevalent. This wind also blew over Sociology, and the viewpoint that science and religion have both unique as well as common aspects became more and more prevalent (Anthony & Robbins, 1975; Bellah, 1970; Berger, 1974; Douglas, 1973; Dobbelaere, 1984; Robertson, 1977; Merton, 1973). However, the actual existence of this common denominator and its significance, if it exists, were not examined beyond making statements of its existence. Since this is a very broad subject in general and for Sociology in particular, I have chosen to pinpoint the discussion. I have decided to compare the characteristics of modern religions according to Robert Bellah with the socialscientific thought of Anthony Giddens and Jurgen Habermas (Reiner, 1997). A very important point must be clarified at this stage. Placing the focus on the writings of Giddens and Habermas stems from the fact that they are current researchers who have made a substantial contribution to sociological research The other aspect – religion – is presented according to

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Robert Bellah’s viewpoint, since he is one of the prominent researchers in this field. In my choice of these three researchers I am in no way implying that one of them is the sole representative of the field of research in which he deals – as representing religion (Bellah) or as representing science/sociological theory (Giddens and Habermas). Nonetheless, each of these researchers has spun an analytical framework whose analysis can, in light of his significant scientific accomplishments, be the origin for a field of research which has to date not been awarded sufficient attention. Before presenting the conceptual common denominator that has arisen from the comparison, a brief description of the characteristics of modern religion according to Bellah and the social-scientific theory of Giddens and Habermas should be presented.

BELLAH, GIDDENS, AND HABERMAS: CENTRAL RELEVANT CHARACTERISTICS Characteristics of Modern Religion According to Bellah Robert Bellah is considered one of the most prominent figures in the field of research on religion. In one of his works Bellah presented an analytical framework for analyzing religion in society (Bellah, 1970, pp. 20–50). He contends that religion has gone through five developmental stages: primitive, archaic, historic, pre-modern, and modern. Only the modern stage is relevant to the question discussed in this chapter. The central characteristic of modern religion is the ability of the individual to affect the building of the social reality of which he is a part. From this standpoint Bellah apparently claims that man also creates the reality that creates him in the religious context. This does not mean absolute freedom, but compared to previous periods, from the primitive to the pre-modern stage, Bellah affords greater weight to everything related to man’s ability to be an active factor in the process of constructing social reality. This statement serves Bellah in claiming that no single group possesses the truth and that different ideas can have new personal interpretations. According to Bellah, these interpretations indicate the growing personal responsibility of the individual. This is due to the fact that the individual searches for satisfactory criteria for action alongside his/her search for personal maturity and social relevance.

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Here I wish to clarify an important point. Bellah softened this subjectivistic orientation in the chapter ‘‘Religion’’ in his book ‘‘Habits of the Heart’’ (Bellah, 1985). From this viewpoint his later publication can be viewed as the researcher’s personal criticism of ideas that he had himself raised on the role of religion in modern society and on the freedom he attributed to the Subject in his earlier publication. In my opinion, if what Bellah writes in both publications is regarded as a single unit which can help determine the position of religion and the individual in society, it can definitely be concluded that even at the later stage, i.e., in his 1985 publication, Bellah does not negate the creative ability of the individual. He claims that man is not a completely free creature and needs a social-structural context without which his personal activity is meaningless and perhaps even impossible. However, this context does not turn the individual into a solely passive factor.

Anthony Giddens: Central Points in his Thought Anthony Giddens crystallized a clear viewpoint of the individual, society and the interrelationships between them (Giddens 1971, 1974, 1976a, b, 1979, 1981, 1982a, b, 1984, 1986, 1987a, b, 1990a–c, 1991). This viewpoint is expressed, clearly and methodologicaly, in his ‘‘Theory of Structuration’’. The basis for this theory is the assumption that structural and subjective factors have an equal effect on the building of social reality. For Giddens, this means that Subject and structure are two methodological sources that are both dependent and independent (Giddens, 1987b). This is in contrast to structural approaches in which the ‘‘objective’’ takes precedence over the subjective. This precedence indicates one methodological viewpoint, since society is attributed with greater impact than is the Subject comprising this society. Giddens has reservations concerning this hierarchical structure. In his opinion it is not accurate, since it does not enable us to properly understand social reality and the variety of processes occurring within this reality. Giddens’ approach indicates an attempt to distinguish between the ability to build reality – an active aspect – and the behavior dictated by the structured reality – a passive aspect. Such a distinction should enable us to obtain a more accurate picture of social reality, since we are prevented from attributing an absolute effect to any particular aspect. It should be indicated that according to Giddens, in action (active Subject) a prior assumption of structure exists, and in structure there is a prior assumption of an active

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Subject (Giddens, 1979, pp. 49–95, 1982a). We are therefore affected by structural factors but are simultaneously full partners in a dynamic process of constructing a social reality during which we also imprint our personal stamp (Giddens, 1971). Giddens combines another term, ‘‘unintended consequences’’, to his theoretical outlook. The idea behind this term is that life sometimes has its own dynamics, which cannot be predicted and whose implications form an integral part of social reality. This assumption leads Giddens to emphasize that reality cannot be bound within the framework of a theoretical model. Social theory must therefore clarify the nature of human activity in order to understand the concrete processes of social life (Giddens, 1984). The ‘‘Theory of Structuration’’ tries to understand and demonstrate the role of human agents in the process of shaping society (Giddens, 1984, p. 220). This clarifies Giddens’ call for dialogue between laymen and scientists (Giddens, 1984, p. 284) and again emphasizes the importance that this researcher attributes to the Subject, whoever he may be, in his theoretical outlook.

Jurgen Habermas: Central Points in his Thought This researcher’s thought can be characterized as a process composed of various stages. These stages include diagnosis of the social reality, identification of its diseases, exposure of their causes and suggestions for solutions that should lead to a positive change (Habermas, 1971a, b, 1973a, b, 1975, 1979, 1984, 1985, 1987, 1989, 1992). Three major concepts are intertwined in the above-mentioned stages – ‘‘lifeworld’’, ‘‘system’’ and ‘‘colonization of the lifeworld’’. The term ‘‘lifeworld’’ means culture, morality, human relations, etc. The term ‘‘system’’ means administration, power, and economics (Habermas, 1985) and the term ‘‘colonization of the lifeworld’’ means that economics and administrative systems play a growing part in the transcription of the ‘‘lifeworld’’ (Habermas, 1987, pp. 332–373). The colonization process expresses the diseases of human society, because it causes an imbalance between the ‘‘lifeworld’’ and the ‘‘system’’. Habermas claims that this is a problematic matter, since the ‘‘lifeworld’’ also has an independent effect. However, this effect is expressed less and less due to the colonization process. Thus, this aspect is overshadowed by economics and administration and social reality becomes uni-dimensional.

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Habermas, in an attempt to expose the reasons for this situation, examines the role of science in creating an imbalance between the ‘‘lifeworld’’ and the ‘‘system’’. In his opinion, this occurred when technology, with the help of science, became autonomic and began dictating its value system to the ‘‘lifeworld’’ (Habermas, 1971b). This is in agreement with the critical spirit that blew over the courtyard of the Frankfurt school which shaped Habermas’ academic worldview. However, Habermas’ writings, as opposed to those of his teachers, contain a different vein, a vein derived from the way he views the Subject and which is expressed in his theory of ‘‘Communicative Action’’. This theory is, to date, one of the most significant achievements of this thinker. ‘‘Communicative Action’’ is not an ‘‘ordinary’’ critical theory. In an ‘‘ordinary’’ critical theory the consciousness of man is placed vis-a-vis reality, with the critical theory in-between. This means that this theory is a type of prism through which man observes social reality and through which he is supposed to undergo a sobering process. It was thus supposed that an accurate understanding of social reality could be achieved, which would result in the possibility for a positive social change (Marcuse, 1970; Aron, 1974). In contradistinction, the theory of ‘‘Communicative Action’’ tries to examine the intuitive knowledge of people in order to expose the normative foundations of a critical theory of society (Habermas, 1987). Habermas’ working hypothesis therefore exposes a form of criticism different from the one described above and from which two significant conclusions are derived. First, the theory is not an objective framework that shapes human knowledge from the outside to the inside and second, a theory does not have to ensure the normative content of culture (Habermas, 1971a). According to Habermas, the theory of ‘‘Communicative Action’’ is a winning combination between Subject and science. This combination has the power to ensure several things:  Exposure of the rational basis found in the actions of the Subject.  Exposure of fundamentals to liberating criticism.  Breaking the comodification and the restricting objective frameworks of capitalist society – reinstating the balance between the ‘‘lifeworld’’ and the ‘‘system’’. Habermas did not hesitate to criticize man/science for the wrongs they caused. However, the complementary aspect of this criticism can be found in his opinion that those responsible for these flaws are also those who can repair them.

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PRELIMINARY SUMMARY AND OBJECTIVES OF THIS RESEARCH Reflection on the writings of Bellah, Giddens, and Habermas indicates two major points that form a conceptual common denominator between the characteristics of modern religion according to Bellah and the social-scientific thought of Giddens and Habermas: 1. The Subject has an active and creative role in constructing social reality. 2. No single analytic framework can independently analyze and explain social reality.1 In this chapter I will attempt to clarify the significance of this conceptual common denominator in a theoretical and social context.

THE COMMON DENOMINATOR BETWEEN BELLAH, GIDDENS, AND HABERMAS AS THE BASIS FOR A SOCIAL ORDER PARADIGM Bellah’s characteristics of modern religion and the social-scientific thought of Giddens and Habermas present three theoretical paradigms with which social reality can be analyzed and understood. Paradigms are known to contain the following components (Eisenstadt & Curelaru, 1982): 1. Identifying the dynamics of the components of social order – individuals, groups, symbols, etc. 2. Analyzing the mechanisms through which these components integrate into networks of social relations. 3. Understanding and analyzing the rules regulating the action of these mechanisms. Eisenstadt and Curelaru (1982) claim that these assumptions can be used to observe that when sociologists create a paradigm by which they analyze a certain social question, they will consider the following aspects: 1. Whether the behavior is based on personal creativity or whether it is determined a priori. 2. Finding institutional foci of personal creativity or of determinism. 3. Learning about the nature of human behavior via causal explanations or

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via explanations based on a meaning that does not necessarily stem from a causal reason. 4. Investigating the universal characteristics of social order versus the local characteristics of social order. 5. Understanding the nature of the social interrelationship activity – whether it is harmonic, stable, or variable. If we intertwine between these latter five points and the conceptual common denominator found between Bellah, Giddens, and Habermas, a social order paradigm that contains the following components can be presented: 1. Creative human behavior. 2. Explanations of human behavior supported also by the understanding of the meaning of things. 3. Social interaction as being variable. 4. Subjects can also act independently of structural factors. 5. Examination of social reality from several points of view. In light of the above, it can be claimed that two major variables, Subject and multi-dimensional analysis, create the common denominator between these theoreticians and as a result also create the basis for the above-presented paradigm. Each of these variables is independent, while also being related to another concept. This is a type of multi-dimensional viewpoint that indicates an absence of analytic closure and may enable a more accurate analysis of the various components of social reality. The above are supported by Eisenstadt and Curelaru (1982, pp. 315–316), who present several additional conclusions relevant to the analytical model derived from the conceptual meeting between Habermas, Giddens, and Bellah. The absence of analytic closure means that no variable can be placed in a central position compared to the others and that social analysis is performed through understanding the autonomy of each component and through an attempt to understand it from various theoretical and/or disciplinary viewpoints. Although this process may lead to misunderstandings due to the use of a variety of explanations, it will still enable us to reach a more accurate analysis of the subject under examination. This is a type of dialogue that will lead to progress, since the multi-theory and/or interdisciplinary approach will enable us to broaden the field of truth which we have so far attained (Collins, 1994; Pfhol & Gordon, 1986).

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This analytical frankness is characterized by a tendency to emphasize the human creativity involved in building the social-cultural environment, i.e. human expectations affect the progress of events (Koslowski, 1994) and we are not trying to investigate the pre-social components of human nature (Eisenstadt & Curelaru, 1982, p. 129). We can therefore conclude that researchers who support these assumptions will analyze social reality by examining the social-dynamic aspect and will not be content with structuralobjective effects. Focusing on the social-dynamic aspect symbolizes the important position of the Subject in constructing social reality. The fact that such an outlook is found in the thought of Bellah, Giddens, and Habermas has a symbolic significance in both the sociological-theoretical context as well as in the general context. I will begin with the general context.

THE SYMBOLIC SIGNIFICANCE OF AN ACTIVE SUBJECT IN THE GENERAL CONTEXT Focusing on the Subject as an active and creative factor affecting social reality indicates a social-cultural outlook that is significant in several levels. In the philosophical level, the way in which the Subject is perceived can be viewed as something symbolizing personal freedom with the individual having some leeway in directing his way (Kirsch, 1994). He has the ability to influence events and the Subject actually even creates social order (Castoriadis, 1987; Lash, 1990). This means that the Subject is responsible for the moral codes according to which society acts (Dupre, 1994; Frankfurt, 1971). In Kirkegaard’s words, this is a type of ethic action where man chooses between good and evil (Kelly, 1990). Thus, in the modern era the Subject has turned into an essential steering wheel (Flax, 1993; Guerra, 1994). Jacques Attali (Attali, 1976, 1985) continues this line of thought with what he terms ‘‘the right to compose your life’’. Attali claims that we have the right to create new codes, to be different and to act differently from the norm (Attali, 1985, p. 143). These codes, which can be translated into actions, are the product of internal intentions (Campbell, 1996). This is further support for the claim that reality is the product of Subjects (Koslowski, 1994; Tulea & Krausz, 1993). Nonetheless, although a focus on the Subject can be observed, this is not a transition to a philosophy of the Subject, since this approach has not been able to establish the idea that all knowledge and meanings are derived solely from the Subject (Foucault, 1993).

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One can summarize and say that there is no room for a purely subjective orientation, since this would lead to a narrow understanding of reality (Taylor, 1989). On the other hand, we can accept the idea that subjectivity is, to a certain extent, a source that creates and transcribes social reality (Farrell, 1994). The active Subject ‘‘created’’ the conceptual common denominator between Bellah, Giddens, and Habermas. This part presented the symbolic meaning of this common denominator. The value of this meaning to Sociology must now be clarified.

SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIAL VISION It was Bellah himself who claimed that researchers in the social sciences present behavioral stepping stones that people must adopt (Vaughan & Sjoberg, 1986). This statement is based on the viewpoint that Sociology is a form of moral dialogue (Fuhrman, 1986) and that moral direction to social life is anchored in social theories (Vaughan & Sjoberg, 1986, p. 128). The meaningful place afforded to the Subject can thus be regarded as a call to man/woman, wherever he/she may be, to become an active partner in constructing social reality. To a certain extent this is even his duty. It can therefore be concluded that these three thinkers do not adopt a neutral scientific viewpoint. They take a stand and present a direction, which to their understanding social reality should adopt. To be more precise, these researchers present a direction that the Subjects can adopt if they have not yet done so, and those who have adopted it should continue. In this context it is important to emphasize that Bellah, Giddens, and Habermas do this without gliding into dogmatics and out of the realization of the complex structure of social reality as well as in the spirit of analytical openness which I stressed above. The question we must raise at this point is, what is the significance of the fact that these three theoretical-social approaches call the Subject, by this or that formulation, to serve as a factor directing his life and thus also the society in which he lives. The answer, in my opinion, is that this is an antinomological scientific–educative–reflexive narrative, reflecting a vision of the desired face of human society. In order to clarify why the conceptual common denominator between these three researchers can be viewed as symbolizing an anti-nomological scientific–educative–reflexive narrative we must try to clarify, to some extent, the current meaning of ‘‘education’’.

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I realize that this is a loaded, multi-faceted term that is interpreted in many ways and with different emphasis. Therefore, I do not intend, and it would be wrong for me to do so, to present a sweeping definition. Rather, it will be a quick but firm glimpse, which will enable the preliminary foundation of the above-mentioned concept. Today, education means rejection of total absolute viewpoints of any kind (Zuckerman, 1997). In this respect the age of the great narratives perceived as objective and universal is over (Aviram, 1997; Offir, 1997; Aloni, 1997; Bronstein, 1999). This means that there is no absolute certainty, everything can be criticized and renewal has turned into an integral part of current human experience (Jiro, 1997). In this context we can say that even science cannot present itself as having ultimate ability, or as being the final anchor (Offir, 1997; Zuckerman, 1997). This sobering has even led thinkers to an acknowledgement of the importance of the different and the unique (Attali, 1976, 1985), in the legitimacy that it can make itself heard and that this will be heard comfortably (Jiro, 1997; Maclaren, 1999). It can thus be understood that education means a call for a rational and pluralistic dialogue, a call for human fulfillment in the form of involved and critical citizens (Aloni, 1997). Citizens who raise questions and who try to answer them out of the realization that the normative-cultural limits are not absolute. These thinkers break the circular structure of: reality - education adaptive people - reality, and praise the human potential for breaking limits as well as the personal responsibility we take on ourselves under these conditions. It seems to me that one of the researchers who intertwined between the various educational motifs mentioned above is Neil Postman in his book ‘‘The End to Education’’ (Postman, 1998). According to Postman, the educational narrative has several components. These include the existence of mutual responsibility between people – wherever they may be – to the world in which they live; an awareness of the partiality of human knowledge alongside an unending effort to broaden this knowledge; raising questions and unceasing discussion of topics viewed as essential; accepting and preserving the different. I will present some of this thinker’s sayings, in order to clarify matters. When referring to the question of the partiality of human knowledge Postman raises the following, among other things: The belief that we are like gods, or perfect, is one of the most serious sins we are capable of. The Greeks called this hybris, the Christians call it pride, and scientists call it dogmatics. The main subject of the story is that people make mistakes. All the time. [However] we can repair our mistakes if we progress without hybris, pride or dogmatics y .

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When we realize that we cannot know the entire truth, we may move toward it step by step and move everything we know to be false out of our way. We can then see the truth receding, etc. etc. [And science should be regarded not as the absolute truth but as] a moral command within a larger narrative, whose purpose is to afford learning a perspective, balance and habits of humility. (Postman, 1998, pp. 61–62)

The acknowledgement of the partiality of human knowledge and the role of science in this context leads the researcher to an additional characteristic of the educative narrative – the need to unceasingly raise questions on any subject we find fit. This is due to the fact that ‘‘no achievement affords the right to excessive pride, everything is fluid and may change, following better arguments resulting from future experiments’’ (Postman, 1998, p. 66). Another aspect comprising the educative narrative according to this thinker is the acceptance and preservation of differences. Upon examination of this question Postman attempts to clarify the danger of fixation and the price we may pay if we are not sufficiently open-minded. Every time a language or a form of art becomes fixed at a certain time and turns impenetrable, filled only with itself, it is punished [weakened/becomes extinct]. Wherever there is room for differences, the result is growth and strength. (Postman, 1998, p. 70)

If we intertwine between the above ideas, a clear picture of social reality forms before our eyes. This reality is characterized by mutual responsibility between the Subjects. It stems from their involvement in the process of constructing social reality, from the acknowledgement of the partiality of our knowledge at any point in time alongside the fact that we can expand the range of our knowledge if we wish, from the acknowledgement of the need to maintain a continuous dialogue between ourselves on all subjects and from the readiness to accept and even preserve the different, since difference also means viability. Thus, Postman’s educative viewpoint, similarly to Jiro’s, Zuckerman’s, and others, reflects a vision of the desired face of human society. A vision that, in my opinion, is reflected in the conceptual common denominator arising from the writings of Bellah, Giddens, and Habermas (or the other way around). And this reflection is what turns the conceptual common denominator found between these three into evidence for the existence of an anti-nomological scientific–educative–reflexive narrative in their theories. For the sake of clarity I will examine several ideas raised by Bellah, Giddens, and Habermas. I will try to point to the similarity between the picture painted by Postman, as well as of other thinkers mentioned above, and the conclusions I derived from the common denominator found between Bellah, Giddens, and Habermas.

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The central axis of thought is that the activity of the Subject – construction of social reality – has several implications that form the basis for the claim of the social-educative message in the theories of Bellah, Giddens, and Habermas. My first claim is that an active Subject necessarily testifies to personal and mutual responsibility between Subjects, because from the moment a person becomes a participant in the construction of social reality, even if only partially, he carries some of the responsibility for the order of events. As indicated above, this idea is expressed in different ways in the writings of Bellah, Giddens, and Habermas. The fact that Postman called this mutual responsibility and the three other researchers did not do so, should not prevent us from accepting the statement that this aspect is a motive common to Bellah, Giddens, Habermas, Postman and other researchers from the above-mentioned field of education. This is the state of affairs also when referring to the partiality of human knowledge and the role of science. Postman claimed that in being human we have partial knowledge, and are thus prone to error. Scientists are not endowed with traits that neutralize this aspect, but are those who are supposed to clarify matters, to neutralize arrogance and encourage constant efforts to broaden our knowledge. It has been mentioned that Bellah, Giddens, and Habermas, each in his own way, claimed that the truth belongs neither to religion nor to science. This has also been presented by me as an indicator of analytic openness and is expressed by Bellah when he wrote that ideas obtain renewed personal interpretation and when different people present different points of view they complement ideas raised by others. Giddens expressed this idea when he claimed that reality cannot be compressed into one theoretical model and when he coined the term ‘‘unintended consequences’’. With Habermas it can be observed, among other things, from his criticism of the nomological sciences and from the methodological assumption that the theory of Communicative Action should expose man’s intuitive knowledge. It appears to me that the conceptual thread intertwined between these researchers is clear. One researcher claims that we have partial knowledge and others claim that one theoretical model is not sufficient for examining social reality, that equal weight should be afforded to different personal interpretations and that human knowledge is not shaped solely ‘‘from the outside to the inside’’. The wording is different but the idea is the same. The need for constant debating on the subjects that build social reality, as a condition for the existence of a healthy society, is the following idea presented by Postman. The conceptual parallel of the three researchers

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arises from the fact that they indicate actions of Subjects within a social reality in which not everything is given beforehand. They emphasize that different people raise different ideas, and this obligates people to constantly discuss their way of life as an integral part of their experience. Bellah, Giddens, and Habermas describe a dynamic reality in which human dialogue takes place as part of the ongoing experience. This leads to the additional conclusion that social reality is not homogenous. This is also the next idea suggested by Postman in his educative outlook and in light of the above it will not be unfounded to conclude that Bellah, Giddens, and Habermas also do not support social-conceptual uniformity. In conclusion, Bellah, Giddens, and Habermas emphasize, whether consciously or unconsciously, several things whose meaning also symbolizes a social-educative vision. A vision calling for the encouragement of continual reflexivity, mutual attention, and the personal involvement of the individual in constructing his social reality. This is a scientific narrative striving to direct people in the spirit of the saying ‘‘Don’t ask for whom the bells tolledythey tolled for you’’ (Postman, 1998, pp. 59–60). And this tolling is strong enough not just to indicate the above-mentioned vision, but also indicates a turning point in the separation that has to date been created between the various theoretical streams of Sociology.

THE THEORETICAL TURNING POINT SOUNDED BY THE ACTIVIST BELL The meaning of the theoretical turning point is exposed only when examining the sequence of sociological–theoretical thought from the beginning of the discipline. The sociological–theoretical dialogue has gone a long way from the days of Comte until today. Comte, who is regarded by some as the one who shot the opening shot of the discipline, tried to follow the different social processes under the assumption that collective social facts are bound by laws that are external to man. This assumption was also at the foundation of the division he created between social statics and dynamics and which symbolizes the marginal position of the Subject in constructing social reality. The fact that the Subject is a dependent factor (Sztompka, 1994). Durkheim adopted Comte’s basic assumptions and created a theoretical trend positioned at the heart of sociological thought (Collins, 1994). This researcher had reservations as to the dual concept and therefore turned

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human society into his sole research object. Society is an unending driving force for any action by man and man owes his human existence to society. This is the social-structural context which according to Durkheim determines the individual’s identity, preserves it and if necessary even changes it. These sayings have a methodological as well as a symbolic significance. Methodologically, social facts cannot be reduced or analyzed in terms of the individual’s behavior. Symbolically, Subjects play second fiddle to anything related to their part in constructing social reality. The marginality of the Subject is expressed also by Marx. Indeed the Subject is the one who creates social change, but this change stems from his position in the production process. It is the embodiment of historical materialism, a term that is at the heart of Marx’s political and social outlook and clarifies his philosophy of history. Weber, as opposed to Marx, does not think that there exist universaldeterministic economic rules. Instead, this researcher presented a multi-dimensional outlook composed of materialistic and idealistic aspects. In this outlook, as opposed to the previous two founding fathers, the Subject is not solely a dependent factor. Reinforcement for this statement can be found from examining several questions dealt with by Weber – formal and substantive rationality, the action theory in the center of which is the term ‘‘understanding’’ (verstehen) and the charismatic authority. Weber, in the term formal rationality, exposes the existence of a calculative-beneficial aspect in man. In contradistinction, in the term substantive rationality he exposes value aspects in which pure economic considerations are not expressed and which affect social processes. These aspects are awarded a more comprehensive discussion in the action theory, a theory that calls for examining the actions of the Subject and their motive/ basic value. Another research field in which Weber dealt and from which one can learn about his attitude toward the Subject is his political writings, which are also known as the theory of Legitimate Domination. Weber presented three domination patterns – traditional, rational, and charismatic. These three patterns clarify the fact that in social reality, fixed and dynamic aspects exist side by side. However, the dynamics – the charismatic domination – originate in man and not in factors that are external to him. The charismatic personality can create far-reaching change and even redefine the basic assumptions of social order – ‘‘charisma is also the revolt of the private personality against history and society’’ (Poper & Ronen, 1989). The topics discussed above indicate that the conceptual thread intertwined between them in Weber’s theory is that the Subject is both an

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affecting and an affected factor. However, beyond that, Weber’s writings created the possibility for a more profound outlook on the phenomenology of human order (Eisenstadt & Curelaru, 1982, p. 127). The three founding fathers – Durkheim, Marx, and Weber – cast the conceptual and methodological foundations of Sociology. The sociological discussion that developed as a result drew its inspiration from these directions of thought. However, some time passed between the stage at which the founding fathers presented their theory and the stage when a theoretical model was proposed which won a central position in Sociology. The Structural–Functional model developed, for the first time since the founding fathers, a powerful analytic framework whose inspiration is drawn from the theories of Durkheim and Weber (Eisenstadt & Curelaru, 1982, pp. 205–206). Supporters of this model claim that its strength stemmed from a comprehensive analytic mapping of the components of social order. This mapping enabled a comprehensive and methodological analysis of social reality, which soon turned it into the central research model. At a later period [the 40s and 50s of the previous century], the effect of the Structural– Functional approach was felt, as were the orientations and analytical concepts it entailed, in numerous fields of research. Almost no field of sociological research remained untouched by these developments. The reason for this was that the Structural–Functional approach supplied not only a general perspective, an image or map of the social system for almost all fields of sociology, but also hinted at additional analytical specifications that could become focal points for research.yNumerous research programs and specific paradigms were derived from the general Structural–Functional framework or were related to it. Furthermore, other important fields, such as studies on public opinion and voting habits, which tended to focus on medium-range theories, used concepts developed in the Structural–Functional model and this model also served as the basis for a more general orientation in these fields. The effect of this model also spread to other disciplines y and the increase in the level of intellectuals’ expectations [from the model] y was the result of the development of this model itself (Eisenstadt & Curelaru, 1982, pp. 213–214).

These lines clarify the extent to which this model influenced sociological research and several related disciplines. It was not perceived as the sole explanatory model, and opposing models were suggested both in the United States and elsewhere. However, its effect was so widespread that many other research directions developed as a result of disagreements with this model (Eisenstadt & Curelaru, 1982, p. 219). Criticism of the Structural model was voiced beginning in the 50s of the previous century. Criticism of this model’s methodologies was voiced by Wright Miles, as well as by others. Adoreno and Horkheimer as well as other sociologists criticized the model’s philosophy. Other aspects of the

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model were also criticized. It can be concluded that this criticism was directed against the assumptions of the approach, the way in which it observed social order and the social and human vision of the model. One of the criticisms raised in this context was that in the Functional model man was reduced to fulfilling roles and was activated according to the needs of the social system. The criticisms aroused attempts to present alternative explanations based on basic assumptions different from the assumptions of Functionalism. These alternative explanations rested on both old and new sociological theories including the Conflict theory, the Individual-Rational trend with affinity to the Exchange model, Symbolic Interaction, etc. Each model obviously chose weak points in the Structural–Functional theory in light of the questions it considered essential. For example, the Conflict model concentrated on the shortcoming stemming from Functionalism’s focus on the normative-value consensus formed by agreement of members. The Symbolic Interaction model criticized Functionalism because it presented man as fulfilling a role and that human essence is expressed in fulfilling social roles. This means that the systemic aspect of society builds social reality. In contradistinction, those supporting the Symbolic Interaction model claim that our human essence is found in the interrelationships we form in our daily lives, in personal and interpersonal definitions of social reality. A reality built from a combination of the definitions of the state of the personality and human awareness. In this respect an institutional structure of society is formed from interpersonal interactions and not as described in the Structural–Functional model. This prolonged stage is characterized by the different emphasis of these and other models and the Structural–Functional model and therefore the emphasis of conceptual limits distinguishing between the four major streams – Functional, Conflict, Rational-Beneficial, and Micro-Interactionist (Collins, 1994). However, the significant role of the Subject in building social reality, which I stressed before, exposes a change in the theoretical-sociological level. Bellah, Giddens, and Habermas have a rather similar outlook on the role of the Subject in society. Elvin Gouldner claims that scientists express interest in questions they deem to be real (Gouldner, 1972). This means that for Bellah, Giddens, and Habermas it seems real that the Subject is not solely a passive factor in building social reality. It can therefore be concluded that the fundamental perception of modern religion according to Bellah is compatible with the description of reality and the system of

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analytic concepts crystallized by two central theories in sociology that examine today’s society. This conceptual common denominator exposes a change in the distinction formed between several theoretical trends, when referring to the theoretical tradition in which each researcher shaped his academic opinions. Examination of the historic-academic background indicates that each of these three researchers shaped his academic viewpoint within the framework of a different theoretical tradition. The roots of Bellah’s thought lie in the Functionalistic tradition, Giddens’ in the Positivistic tradition and Habermas’ in the neo-Kantian tradition. However, all three have a rather similar view concerning the Subject. This does not mean that the theoretical dialogue has become a single entity. Instead, it means that in a certain sense the borders between these theoretical trends have become more flexible. This flexibility seemed impossible in earlier periods.

NOTES 1. Another illustration of the existence of a conceptual common denominator between the three: Bellah claims that man is capable, within limits, to recreate the world with the symbolic forms that shape his living conditions (Bellah, 1970, p. 42). One of the parallel statements made by Habermas is that during the dialogue process the individual presents himself as a Subject, while shaping and renewing his interpersonal relations as part of building the total social reality (Habermas, 1984, pp. 237–337). One of the parallel statements made by Giddens is that each social ‘‘actor’’ knows the transcription conditions of the society to which he belongs, but all the ‘‘actors’’ have a certain effect on shaping the social system (Giddens, 1979). This means that these three researchers present a rather identical picture of the Subject’s active part in constructing social reality. A detailed description of the ideas common to Bellah, Giddens, and Habermas can be found in the dissertation (Reiner, 1997, pp. 73–118, 144–210).

REFERENCES Aloni, N. (1997). The rise and fall of humanistic education: From the classical to the postclassical. In: A. Gur-Zeev (Ed.), Education in the era of postmodern dialogue (pp. 13–42). Jerusalem: Magnes. Anthony, D., & Robbins, T. (1975). From symbolic realism to structuralism. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 11, 403–414. Aron, R. (1974). Progress and disillusion (pp. 175–201). Tel-Aviv: Am Oved.

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Attali, J. (1976). Remarks on the relationship between the social consequences of the world economy crisis, the development model of advanced countries, and the new international economic order. Labor and Society, 14, 97–104. Attali, J. (1985). Noise. The political economy of music (p. 132). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Aviram, R. (1997). The education system in postmodern society: Anomalic organization in a chaotic world. In: A. Gur-Zeev (Ed.), Education in the era of postmodern dialogue (pp. 103–120). Jerusalem: Magnes. Bellah, R. (1970). Between religion and the social science. In: R. Bellah (Ed.), Beyond belief (pp. 237–257). New York: Harper. Bellah, R. (1985). Religion. In: R. Bellah, R. Madsen, W. Sullivan, A. Swidler & S. Tiopton (Eds), Habits of the heart (pp. 219–249). California: University of California Press. Ben-David, J. (1971). The Scientist’s role in society. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. Berger, P. (1974). Some second thoughts on substantive versus functional definition of religion. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 13, 125–133. Bronstein, A. (1999). Paulo prier talks with. In: A. Gur-Zeev (Ed.), Modernity, postmodernity, and education (pp. 101–120). Tel-Aviv: Ramot. Campbell, C. (1996). The myth of social action (p. 162). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Castoriadis, C. (1987). The imaginary institution of society. Cambridge: MIT Press. Collins, R. (1994). Four sociological traditions. New York: Oxford University Press. Dobbelaere, K. (1984). Secularization theories and sociological paradigms: convergences and divergences. Social Compass, 31, 199–219. Douglas, K. (1973). Religious influence in the rise of modern science. In: C. Russell (Ed.), Science and religious belief (pp. 74–102). London: University of London Press. Dupre, L. (1994). The modern idea of culture: Its opposition to its classical and christian roots. In: R. McInerny (Ed.), Modernity and religion (pp. 1–18). Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Eisenstadt, S., & Curelaru, M. (1982). The form of sociology: Paradigms and crises (pp. 97–98). Jerusalem: Magnes. Farrell, F. (1994). Subjectivity, realism, and postmodernism – the Recovery of the world (p. 221). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Flax, J. (1993). Multiples: On the contemporary politics of subjectivity. Human Studies, 16, 33–49. Foucault, M. (1993). About the beginning of the hermeneutic of the self. Political Theory, 21, 198–227. Frankfurt, H. (1971). Freedom of the will and the concept of a person. The Journal of Philosophy, LXVIII, 5–20. Fuhrman, E. (1986). Morality, self, and society: The loss and capture of the moral self. In: M. Wardell & S. Turner (Eds), Sociological theory in transition (pp. 69–79). London: Allen and Unwin. Giddens, A. (1971). Capitalism and modern social theory (p. 148). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Giddens, A. (1972). Introduction: Durkheim’s writings in sociology and social psychology. In: A. Giddens (Ed.), Emile Durkheim: Selected writings (pp. 1–50). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Giddens, A. (1974). Positivism and sociology (p. 10). London: Heinemann.

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Giddens, A. (1976a). Functionalism: Apres la Lutte. Social Research, 43, 325–366. Giddens, A. (1976b). Classical social theory and the origins of modern sociology. American Journal of Sociology, 81, 703–729. Giddens, A. (1979). Central problems in social theory (pp. 1–8). Los Angeles: University of California Press. Giddens, A. (1981). Time and space in social theory: Critical remarks upon functionalism. Current Perspectives in Social Theory, 2, 3–13. Giddens, A. (1982a). Power, the dialectic of control and class structuration. In: A. Giddens & G. Mackenzie (Eds), Social class and the division of labor (pp. 29–45). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Giddens, A. (1982b). Hermeneutics and social theory. In: A. Giddens (Ed.), Profiles and critiques in social theory (pp. 1–17). Berkeley: University of California Press. Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society (pp. 17–18). Los Angeles: University of California Press. Giddens, A. (1986). Action, subjectivity, and the constitution of meaning. Social Research, 53, 529–545. Giddens, A. (1987). Social theory and modern society (p. 27). California: Stanford University Press. Giddens, A. (1987b). Time and space in social theory. Social Science, 72, 99–103. Giddens, A. (1990a). Theories of religion. In: A. Giddens (Ed.), Sociology (pp. 457–463). Cambridge: Polity. Giddens, A. (1990b). The consequences of modernity (p. 15). California: Stanford University Press. Giddens, A. (1990c). Modernity and utopia. New Statesman and Society, 3, 20–22. Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and self identity (p. 32). California: Stanford University Press. Gouldner, A. (1972). The coming crisis of western society (p. 41). London: Heinemann. Guerra, F. X. (1994). The paradoxes of modernity. In: R. McInerny (Ed.), Modernity and religion (pp. 19–30). Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Habermas, J. (1971a). Knowledge and human interests: A general perspective. In: J. Habermas (Ed.), Knowledge and human interests (pp. 301–317). Boston: Beacon. Habermas, J. (1971b). Technology and science as ideology. In: J. Habermas (Ed.), Toward a rational society (pp. 81–122). Boston: Beacon. Habermas, J. (1973a). What does a crisis mean today? Legitimation problems in late capitalism. Social Research, 40, 643–665. Habermas, J. (1973b). The classical doctrine of politics in relation to social philosophy. In: J. Habermas (Ed.), Theory and practice (pp. 41–81). London: Heinemann. Habermas, J. (1975). Legitimation crisis (p. 104). Boston: Beacon. Habermas, J. (1979). Historical materialism and the development of normative structures. In: J. Habermas (Ed.), Communication and the evolution of society (pp. 95–129). London: Heinemann. Habermas, J. (1984). The theory of communicative action. Reason and the rationalization of society. Boston: Beacon. Habermas, J. (1985). Questions and counterquestions. In: R. Bernstein (Ed.), Habermas and modernity (pp. 192–216). Cambridge: MIT Press. Habermas, J. (1987). The theory of communicative action. Lifeworld and system: A critique of functionalist reason. Boston: Beacon.

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Habermas, J. (1989). Jurgen Habermas, on society and politics, A reader (p. 121). Boston: Beacon. Habermas, J. (1992). Autonomy and solidarity (p. 89). London: Verso. Henri-Levi, B. (1980). The testament of God (p. 88). New York: Harper & Row. Jiro, H. (1997). Pedagogy of limits and the politics of modernism/postmodernism. In: A. GurZeev (Ed.), Education in the era of postmodern dialogue (pp. 43–64). Jerusalem: Magnes. Johnson, B. (1977). Sociological theory and religious truth. Sociological Analysis, 38, 368–388. Kelly, M. (Ed.) (1990). Hermeneutics and critical theory in ethics and politics (pp. 60–62). Cambridge: MIT Press. Kirsch, Y. (1994). The atom and free will. In: R. Lifschitz (Ed.), Mosaic, science, culture and society (Supplement) (pp. 9–11). Tel-Aviv: The Open University. Koslowski, P. (1994). Metaphysics, christian religion, and social order. In: R. McInerny (Ed.), Modernity and religion (pp. 31–60). Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Lash, S. (1990). Sociology of post-modernism (p. 128). London: Routledge. Lemert, C. (1979). Science religion and secularization. The Sociological Quarterly, 20, 445–461. Maclaren, P. (1999). Postmodernism, post-colonialism and pedagogy. In: A. Gur-Zeev (Ed.), Modernity, postmodernity and education (pp. 51–86). Tel-Aviv: Ramot. Marcuse, H. (1970). One-dimensional man and a mass about liberation. Tel-Aviv: Sifriat Hapoalim. Merton, R. (1973). The puritan spur to science. In: R. Merton (Ed.), The sociology of science (pp. 228–253). Chicago: Chicago University Press. Offir, A. (1997). Postmodernism: A philosophical viewpoint. In: A. Gur-Zeev (Ed.), Education in the era of postmodern dialogue (pp. 135–164). Jerusalem: Magnes. Pfhol, S., & Gordon, A. (1986). Criminological displacements: A sociological disconstruction. Social Problems, 33, S94–S113. Poper, M., & Ronen, A. (Eds) (1989). On leadership (p. 23). Tel-Aviv: Sifriat Hapoalim. Postman, N. (1998). The end of education. Tel-Aviv: Sifriat Hapoalim. Reiner, H. (1997) The nature and sociological significance of thought tangents between the characteristics of modern religion according to Bellah and the sociological thought of Jurgen Habermas and Anthony Giddens. Ph.D. Thesis, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel, the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. Robertson, R. (1977). Individualism, societalism, worldliness, universalism: Thematizing theoretical sociology of religion. Sociological Analysis, 38, 281–308. Sztompka, P. (1994). Sociology of social change (p. 101). Oxford: Blackwell. Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the self. The making of modern identity (p. 511). Cambridge: Harvard: University Press. Tonnies, F. (1963). Community and society. New York: Harper & Row. Tulea, G., & Krausz, E. (1993). Changing approaches in postmodern sociological thought. International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 34, 210–221. Vaughan, T., & Sjoberg, G. (1986). Human rights theory and the classical sociological tradition. In: M. Wardell & S. Turner (Eds), Sociological theory in transition (pp. 127–141). London: Allen and Unwin. Weber, M. (1978). Max Weber. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zuckerman, M. (1997). On post-modernism and education. In: A. Gur-Zeev (Ed.), Education in the era of postmodern dialogue (pp. 89–102). Jerusalem: Magnes.

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RECONSTRUCTING ZYGMUNT BAUMAN’S POSTMODERN SOCIOLOGY OF MORALITY$ Rekha Mirchandani ABSTRACT Zygmunt Bauman’s work is a case study in the possibilities of postmodernism for sociology. Characterized on the one hand by a gloomy epistemology about knowledge and morality in a postmodern world and on the other, by provocative new concepts to empirically describe a postmodern world, Bauman’s work evidences a key tension within postmodern thought. Is it possible to reconcile Bauman’s pessimistic epistemology with his optimistic sociology? My argument is that if we recast Bauman as a critical theorist and his method as dialectical immanent critique, we can see how his positive empirical concepts are based on his negative epistemology. In this way we can make sense of the complexity of Bauman’s work and appreciate his prophetic abilities. The complexities and possibilities of postmodern thought in general become clearer as well.

$

Thanks for helpful comments to audience and panel members at Social Theory 2000, the Inaugural Conference of the International Social Theory Consortium, May 11–14, Lexington, KY.

Social Theory as Politics in Knowledge Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Volume 23, 301–335 Copyright r 2005 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0278-1204/doi:10.1016/S0278-1204(05)23006-2

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INTRODUCTION Now that we have entered the period some have begun to refer to as ‘‘After postmodernism,’’1 sociological responses can be summarized as including both strongly negative and strongly positive attitudes toward the postmodern. For the critics, postmodernism is apocalyptic, a Baudrillard-inspired project of deriding, rather than studying, the social world (Gitlin, 1989; O’Neill, 1995) and frivolous, a Rabelesian play among the fragments of society, culture, intellectual traditions and truth remaining after the intellectually destructive project of postmodernism (Best & Kellner, 1991; Wengel, 1993–1994). For sociological proponents of postmodernism, however, postmodernism is an exciting, forward-looking approach that can stimulate the theory and practice of sociology in areas from social psychology to social stratification. Is it possible to come to terms with these divergent understandings to better understand the potential contribution of postmodernism to sociology? In this chapter I examine the work of Zygmunt Bauman which exhibits these extremes of postmodern destruction and construction. I argue that if we see Bauman’s work as critical theory, an approach characterized by its dialectical method, we can reconcile its epistemological darkness and empirical hopefulness as part of a back and forth process that pushes it forward toward significant conceptual contributions to sociology. I end by suggesting that it might be possible to see contrasting sociological attitudes toward postmodernism as stemming from a similar dialectic within the postmodern approach more generally.2 Negativity toward postmodernism within sociology particularly is not surprising. Baudrillard (1983), generally considered one of the leading intellectual figures of postmodernism,3 has explicitly declared the death of the social. By this he means the end of social relations as individuals collapse into an undifferentiated mass culture and the structure of social relations that matters most is among the signs themselves.4 Ultimately, the death of the social reduces sociology to cultural studies or simply causes it to disappear.5 And even for those sociologists who say forget Baudrillard, postmodernism still threatens. According to critics, the call for destruction and derision and its main results, incoherence and relativism, contradicts the modern social science search for rationality, universality, progress and scientific method (D’Amico, 1992; Collins, 1989, 1992; Turner, 1992a; Wagner, 1992a). For these critics, to declare the end of modernity and to welcome postmodernity is inimical to both the substance and the goals of sociology. In addition, postmodernists tend to write in a language few can understand, pursue a subculture that emphasizes the celebration of status and celebrity,

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make judgements on the basis of sophistication, ironic detachment, lack of standards and in general refuse to take seriously the conditions that have been constitutive of social science. Other sociologists are more optimistic about the postmodern contributions to sociology (Agger, 1989, 1991; Beck, 1992, 1994, 1997; Giddens, 1991, 1994a, b, c; Gottdiener, 1985, 1991, 1995; Kellner, 1988; Lemert, 1992, 1994, 1997; Mestrovic, 1991, 1993).6 For these sociologists, postmodernism is conceptually innovative based on the premise that the future looks significantly different from the past and that modern concepts are limited. Postmodern thinkers replace key concepts of classical social theory: production-based capitalism with consumer capitalism (Agger, 1989; Harvey, 1989; Gottdiener, 2000a, b; Jameson, 1984a, b, 1991, 1998; Kellner, 1988; Lash & Urry, 1987; Offe, 1985; Ritzer, Goodman, & Wiedenhoft, 2001), industrial society with risk society (Beck, 1992, 1997, 1999; Beck, Giddens, & Lash, 1994; Boyne, 2003, Douglas, 1992, Lash, Bronislaw, & Brian, 1996) and the nation-state with globalization (Giddens, 1990, 1991, 1994a, b; Harvey, 1989; Jameson, 1991). Postmodernism is inspiring further conceptual innovation in fields from criminology (Milovanovic, 1997; South, 1997) to women’s studies (Ashenden, 1997) to family studies (Allen, 2000; Cheal, 1996; McGraw, Zvonkovic, & Walker, 2000; Stacey, 1996) to media studies (Ulmer, 1989) to social psychology (Holstein & Gubrium, 1999; Gubrium & Holstein, 2000) to urban sociology (Dear & Flusty, 2001; Dear, 2000, 2001; Hannigan, 1998; Smith, 1992; Soja, 2000; Zukin, 1988) to sociology of education (Smith & Webster, 1997) to politics and war (Best & Kellner, 1998; Moskos, Williams, & Segal, 1999) to sexuality (Seidman, 1996) to stratification (Savage, 2000) to social theory itself (Agger, 2002; Allan, 1998; Delanty, 2000; Lemert, 1992; Nicholson, 1992; Seidman, 1992a; Turner, 1992b). Zygmunt Bauman is widely touted as the leading sociologist of postmodernism (Beilharz, 2000, p. vii; Giddens cited by Beilharz, 2001; Kilminster & Varcoe, 1998, p. 26),7 and it could be argued that his oeuvre is a case study in the possibilities of postmodern thought for contemporary sociology. On the one hand, Bauman is epistemologically pessimistic, he tells us ‘‘terrible stories’’ (Beilharz, 2001, p. 15) about the Holocaust, genocide, camps, war and individual compliance with terror, which he argues are the result of modern, including sociological, forms of thought. He ‘‘mounts a full-scale attack on modernity’’ (Smith, 1999, p. 123) using derision, destructiveness and exaggeration to critique modern social scientific goals of universalism, rationality and foundations. He is not much more optimistic about postmodern epistemologies arguing that they mimetically

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represent the varied, shifting, plural nature of the social world without enabling us to understand it as a whole. But on the other hand, Bauman is empirically optimistic that he can create sociological concepts to help us analyze a changing world,8 ‘‘a sociological vocabulary for the postmodern experience’’ (Beilharz, 2001, p. 19). A significant portion of Bauman’s work is oriented toward optimistically reassessing the possibilities for morality in a postmodern world, and he helps this along by creating a model of postmodern ethics. Nonetheless, it would seem ultimately that Bauman’s epistemological gloominess about the possibilities of truth, science and morality would undermine the usefulness of his empirical models. But, there is a growing sense that there are two postmodernisms: a skeptical one and an affirmative one (Rosenau, 1992, pp. 42–61), a zeitgeist postmodernism and a grounded postmodernism (Crook, 2001, p. 310), an apocalyptic postmodernism versus a millennium postmodernism (Kumar, 1995, pp. 149–154), a set of postmodern theoretical claims versus a set of postmodern historical claims (Wagner, 1992b), an epistemological postmodernism and an empirical postmodernism. In this chapter, I suggest that Bauman’s thought can be described as alternating between what he terms a postmodern sociology,9 negatively oriented to breaking sociology’s links with the ontological and epistemological premises of modernity, and a sociology of postmodernity,10 which eschews questions of method and, more positively, creates new concepts for a postmodern epoch. I suggest furthermore that we can reconcile these two moments by casting his work as critical social theory. My point is that just as critical theorists’ negative dialectics exaggerate the negative in order to push forward beyond existing facts to glimpse what could be, so Bauman’s extreme epistemological negativity moves his analysis forward, i.e., is part of the dynamism of his social theory and results in a conceptually innovative, far seeing postmodern approach. In other words, by viewing Bauman’s project as critical social theory it is possible to synthesize postmodern theories and methods (postmodern sociology) with the practical requirements and analysis of postmodern culture and society (sociology of postmodernity). The organization of the chapter is as follows. In the second section below I begin with a sketch of Bauman, explaining his focus on postmodernism and changing forms of morality. As I point out here, Bauman’s morality is an important, integrating and original theme running through his recent work, and I consider how the central dichotomy structuring Bauman’s thought, a tension between a postmodern sociology and a sociology of postmodernity, structures his analysis of morality. In his first approach to morality, a postmodern sociological approach, Bauman epistemologically

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deconstructs modern morality as universal, rational and foundation-seeking and ultimately elite controlled (subsection one) in order to create space for a sociology of postmodern morality, an empirically relevant analysis of postmodern morality more oriented toward the individual (subsection two). Ultimately, however, this project is flawed (as I argue in subsection three) because Bauman’s picture of modernity is one-sided and reductive; he neglects aspects of modernity that do not fit his narrow definition of it, such as democratic theory, European Romanticism and relativism, all of which are as fundamental to modernity as the rationalism that he paints in overly vile terms. In the third section, I describe how it is possible to make sense of Bauman, flaws and all, by viewing his work as critical social theory. By now, commonalities within the supposedly oppositional projects of critical theory and postmodernism are regularly remarked (Agger, 1991; Calhoun, 1995b; Dews, 1978; Smith, 1999), but they tend to concentrate on substantive similarities like themes of instrumental reason and the collapse of meaningful social interaction. My argument is that postmodernists and critical theorists share similarities of analytical method. Especially useful for comprehending Bauman’s project is the critical theory technique of dialectic and immanent critique, particularly as outlined by Horkheimer and Adorno (1972). In the fourth section, I illustrate Bauman’s success at the last but important step in critical theory, helping us to recognize, even prophesize, contemporary moral challenges. I conclude in the fifth section by showing how a reconciliation of the epistemological and empirical aspects of Bauman’s work reveals its dynamic sociological potential.

ZYGMUNT BAUMAN AS SOCIOLOGIST OF POSTMODERN MORALITY Zygmunt Bauman has been touted as the ‘‘greatest sociologist writing in English today’’ (Beilharz, 2001, p. 1) and ‘‘the preeminent theorist of the postmodern’’ (Giddens in Beilharz, 2001, p. 1). Present and active during the development of the socialist state in Poland, Bauman self-identified as a Marxist intellectual and was committed to the socialist ideals of fraternity and equality.11 State-imposed exile in 1968 shifted his vantage point to England from where he observed the difficulties and ultimately the collapse of communism in 1989.12 Bauman’s early work13 was on the topics of communism, socialism and class, and this has given him a unique perspective, more recently, for contrasting the modern and the postmodern. An

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important theme in Bauman’s corpus of work on modernity and postmodernity is that communism and capitalism are both modern forms, indeed ideological siblings, both concerned with social engineering, both emerging from the perspective of traditional nineteenth century modern thought. Communism was simply: ‘‘the extremely spectacular dramatization of the Enlightenment message’’ (Bauman, 1992, p. 221). Thus, for Bauman, the fall of the iron curtain was more than the end to a political economic system, it was the final moment of modernity, the sudden illustration of impossibility of the Enlightenment project. The real ‘‘other’’ or counter perspective within Western thought then is no longer Marx and communism but the ‘‘not modern’’ whatever that may come to be. It is the question of the ‘‘not’’ or ‘‘post’’ modern that Bauman explores in recent works (1992, 1993, 1995, 1997, 1998a, b, 1999) and that focus has been responsible for his ‘‘spectacular success’’ (Kilminster & Varcoe, 1998, p. 26) from the late 1980s onward. Bauman’s emphasis on ‘‘not’’ or ‘‘post’’ modern morality stems first from his analysis of the Holocaust. In his best-known work Modernity and the Holocaust (1989a), Bauman argues that the Holocaust was a logical result of modern ways of thinking rather than an aberration or a product of German character flaws.14 Bauman relates the Holocaust first to the instrumental rationality and the scientific engineering zeal of modern thought that he suggests took a lethal form in the modern German state. Second, Bauman connects the Holocaust to modernity’s moral heteronomy: the state’s control of ethics takes moral decision making out of the hands of modern individuals making them vulnerable to Naziism, to Stalinism and to other state-imperatives. Postmodernity then is about renewing moral and ethical independence, and at the end of Modernity and the Holocaust, Bauman seeks to relocate responsibility in the postmodern individual and continues to develop an individual based postmodern morality in Postmodern Ethics (1993), Life in Fragments (1995) and Postmodernity and Its Discontents (1997). In this way, Bauman ‘‘reenchants’’ the social world. But despite the quantity and quality of his work on the postmodern, there has been very little critical commentary (Beilharz, 2000, 2001; Smith, 1999; Kilminster & Varcoe, 1998). Possible reasons are first that Bauman’s work does not easily lend itself to the systematic analysis and tracking that some have applied to other contemporary social theorists like Foucault, Habermas and Luhmann. Second, Bauman’s attitude is provocative: he ‘‘pokes you in the eye’’ (Beilharz, 2001, p. 2) or more euphemistically, Bauman’s work ‘‘does not provide quiet comfort, security or certainty’’ (Smart, 2001, p. 336). Third, and related to the second, is Bauman’s dark and uncomfortable message. Bauman shares with the titans of

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postmodernism like Baudrillard a fundamentally ‘‘destructive’’ turn of mind. In describing postmodern sociology, he says, ‘‘This is a state of mind marked above all by its all-deriding, all-eroding, all-dissolving destructiveness’’ (1992, pp. vii, viii). This is not an idle threat; Bauman is insistently and unrelentingly critical of modern ways of thinking. It is not just that Bauman relates the Holocaust to modernity’s emphasis on science, rationality and engineering ‘‘not a message most sociologists would care to hear’’ (Beilharz, 2001, p. 2). Bauman’s other ‘‘terrible stories’’ include defining modern thought as war (particularly against nature, but also against mystery and magic) as genocide, again aimed at nature (‘‘the world of nature y had to be beheaded’’ (1992, p. x)); as leading to the prison camps of totalitarianism (the ‘‘long march to prison’’ (1992, p. xvii)). And, as we have seen, Bauman criticizes what he calls the modern tendency to put the weight of these terrifying modern consequences on education, class, sex, culture rather than on the individual alone. It was, says Bauman, modernity’s propensity to strike ‘‘the question of ‘doing good’ out of the [individual’s] moral agenda altogether’’ that led to modern horrors. These criticisms ultimately impugn sociology whose modern quest for social order and social understandings of responsibility bring it directly into range of Bauman’s criticisms. But Bauman’s postmodernism is not confined to epistemological suspicions and skepticisms, Bauman’s sociology of postmodernity contributes significantly to understanding contemporary society. His empirical analyses are ‘‘analytically sensitive and acutely responsive to a diverse range of complex local and global processes of transformation to which contemporary social life and human modern experience continues, inevitably y to be subject’’ (Smart, 2001, p. 327). The goal here is to find a way to reconcile Bauman’s dark and epistemologically provocative postmodern sociology with his much more optimistic and far-seeing empirical sociology of postmodernity by understanding Bauman’s method as dialectical critical theory. The centrality of the topic of morality to Bauman’s work should not be underestimated.15 Bauman’s works on morality represent an important and unifying theme in his work as well as exemplifying what is best (Smart, 2001, p. 328) and most original (Beilharz, 2001, p. 19). As Bauman himself points out, ‘‘I am inclined to emphasize the ethical aspects of postmodernism y ethical issues are y central to postmodernity’’ (interview with Cantell & Pedersen, 1992, p. 136). These works on morality and ethics have also come to fill what has come to be seen as a hole in sociology; ethical analysis was prominent in the classical social theory of Weber and Simmel and central to Durkheim’s work but has received little attention in twentieth century sociology (Gouldner, 1971; Levine, 1995; Lukes, 1973). Arguably,

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the twenty-first century’s ‘‘new social theory’’ has renewed interest in issues of ethics and Bauman is a leading representative (Seidman & Alexander, 2001). Next, Bauman’s works on morality are important for their practical application, Bauman’s ethical concepts have implications for a more effective sociological understanding of contemporary social life. Now, Bauman does not imply that sociology should itself make moral statements; but by studying norms, in particular problematic modern moral ethics, sociology can come to awareness of and conceptually describe alternative possibilities for the normative resolution of conflicts. But Bauman’s works on morality also have a darker side; Bauman suggests that modern morality shores up elite (legislators and interpreters) dominance and destroys individual moral initiative resulting in a spineless unthinking amoral mass citizenry. Lastly then Bauman’s morality is of interest as his dark epistemology of modern morality and the practical concepts that emerge mean that it well represents the postmodern sociology/sociology of postmodernity tension that I propose we can understand through critical theory. In my analysis below I trace the route from the deconstruction of modern morality to a more positive, concept laden and empirically relevant postmodern morality through what some call the second trilogy of Bauman’s recent work, Postmodern Ethics (1993), Life in Fragments (1995) and Postmodernity and Its Discontents (1997). It can be argued that this second trilogy is in response to the first trilogy of Bauman’s recent works, Legislators and Interpreters (1987), Modernity and the Holocaust (1989a), and Modernity and Ambivalence (1991a), which presents the shortcomings of modern forms of morality. The third trilogy extends some of these insights to empirically manifest contemporary conditions in Globalization: The Human Consequences (1998a), Work, Consumerism and the New Poor (1998b) and In Search of Politics (1999). Works published since the last trilogy, Liquid Modernity (2000), Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World (2001), The Individualized Society (2002a), Society under Siege (2002b), Liquid Love (2003) and Wasted Lives (forthcoming 2004) have continued this latest form of contemporary analysis and commentary. In this analysis, I focus on Postmodern Ethics, which is Bauman’s central and most philosophical work on ethics, more sociological examples of these moral concerns come from Life in Fragments and Postmodernism and Its Discontents. Eventually, I discuss how critical theory can help to make sense of Bauman’s epistemological negativity and can thus help us positively claim his empirical concepts for our own use. And, again, in this process, perhaps we can come to a better understanding of the generally gloomy tendencies of epistemological postmodernism and reconcile them with the potentials of empirical postmodernism.

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The Epistemological Deconstruction of Modern Morality According to Bauman, modernity’s most important project is social order, and more particularly, social order through the social construction of norms.16 In his terms, ‘‘political and theoretical necessities y lifted ethics to a most prominent position among the concerns of the modern era. And also made it into the raison d’eˆtre, as well as the stumbling block, of much of the modern philosophy’’ (1993, p. 24). Thus Bauman associates the social construction of norms with the state and the university. There are a number of reasons why these forces combined to create norms. According to Bauman, modern legislators and intellectuals, working together at the Enlightenment dawn of the new modern state, saw their control as threatened by uncouth and unrestrained masses seemingly incapable of reining in their passions. In addition, these elites saw the heterogeneity of local life, of fragmented communities that had stemmed from the dislocations of modern life, as at odds with the purposes of the modern state. If the state was to be an adequate force of social order it would have to both rein in obstreperous individuals and impose some homogeneity upon them. Intellectuals sketched blueprints and provided the normative justification for policies that legislators implemented to guarantee the elite-desired social order. According to Bauman, intellectuals helped design the prisons, workhouses and other institutions (most famously the panopticon) intended to impose disciplinary power as well as helping to create the moral codes and norms for identifying those (the corrupt, the criminal, the crazy) who belonged here. A related problem with modernity, according to Bauman, was its orientation toward freedom as problematic. Modern elites, whether legislative or intellectual, adopted the idea from the middle ages that an unrestrained individual was dangerous, that free will would only be used to depart from religious teachings to choose wrong over right. Bauman is critical of modern legislators who believed that the individual needed to be constrained by moral rules or codes in order to behave morally. modern legislators and modern thinkers alike felt that morality, rather than being a ‘natural trait’ of human life is something that needs to be designed and injected into human conduct; and this is why they tried to compose and impose an all-comprehensive, unitary ethics – that is, a cohesive code of moral rules which people could be taught and forced to obey (1993, p. 6).

Implicit in Bauman’s vision is a modern/postmodern dichotomy between a modern conception of morality as socially constructed – norms formulated by the state in order to control the individual and create social order – and a

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postmodern idea of morality as natural, as pre-existing in a pre-social individual. The purpose of postmodern ethics is to deconstruct the first side of this dichotomy in order to free the second from its domination. For Bauman, deconstructing modernity largely means showing that its method of norm formation aims to shore up the power of an elite minority – usually legislators and philosophers – at the price of the freedom of a non-elite majority. Bauman performs this deconstruction by describing three characteristics of modern norms he says serve elite interests: their universalism, their foundations and their rationality. Universalism was an epistemological project that sought to discover a universal human nature to guide the construction of universal norms. Modern legislators recognized that morality may vary by place and time, and that any quest for power and control would require the establishment of some moralities as more appropriate or adequate than other moralities. With a notion of universal human nature, they could say that the system of moral rules most in tune with humanity’s ‘‘natural’’ tendencies is superior. Those moral rules, which are at odds with what they termed the universal core of human nature, could then be rejected as the result of superstition, ignorance, perhaps even ill will. But of course this universalism was constructed by those in power. And, according to Bauman, it had the negative effect of undermining moral potential in individuals. The expropriation of morality by the larger collectivity leads eventually to the loss of individual initiative and ability to act morally. ‘‘The state has a y soporific effect on moral conscience’’ (Bauman, 1993, p. 183). Foundation building complemented universalism by taking one or two aspects of what was posited to be universal human nature to fine tune and draw out. Modern elites appropriated supposedly natural potential, cultivated it into a set of rules and used it as a basis for legislating. The purpose of foundation building was to be able to provide a detailed answer to the question: why should I (the average citizen) follow this set of rules and principles rather than another? In this way it was possible to convince the followers that the rules are not mere caprice but coherent and relevant to human nature. Here again, the philosopher or legislative-elite is the architect of modern morality. But like universalism, foundation building – Bentham’s utilitarian calculus, Hobbes’ leviathan, Parsons’ cultural system – is created by those in power, the philosopher or legislative-elite. And like the project of universalization, foundation construction leads to the diminished autonomy of the moral subject. In fact, says Bauman, the construction of foundations is usually based on an explicit distrust of the moral self: the idea is that selves lack internal ethical means.

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Rationality, for Bauman, is also socially constructed. Again, it could not be expected that individuals would behave morally simply because they were exhorted to by the state or by socializing agents. The foundation to morality, as the answer to ‘‘why should I follow these principles?’’ had to have a response related to the good of the individual concerned. In Bauman’s words, ‘‘Doing good had to be shown to be good for those who did it’’ (1993, p. 27). This would be accomplished if it could be shown to be ‘‘rational’’ for the individual, to be a rational choice leading to the achievement of the desired rewards. But this rationality was also always elite constructed – spun out of the heads of legislators and as arbitrary as any other assumption about how individuals naturally behave. According to Bauman, the modern state creates the instrumentally rational actor, socializes individuals to act in this way, while assuring them that this is what their enlightened selves look like. So like universalism and foundation building, the project of rationality also deprives individuals of autonomy and moral potential.17 From this rendition, albeit flawed, of modernity, some Bauman-based desiderata for an alternative or postmodern morality already begin to stand out. First of all, it is clear that postmodern morality must eschew modern epistemological aims; in particular, a postmodern morality cannot be socially constructed as Bauman argues these universal, foundation-based and rational projects are elite-based. After we have destroyed all social forms, remaining, according to Bauman’s Heideggerian view, is the fundamental core, dasein or ‘‘being.’’ In art, aesthetic appearance precedes the judgement of taste; in history the consciousness of being precedes any recounting; in language, the universally linguistic character of human experience precedes all linguistic method. And, according to Bauman, after the social forms which accrete on the moral have been cleared away, what remains is a fundamental ethical being. A postmodern theory of morality must reject social construction and locate morality squarely in the autonomous individual and must operate in a way consistent with the preservation of that autonomy. For Bauman, this pre-social, and indeed, pre-ontological or pre-being moral individual is at the heart of postmodern morality. Bauman’s concepts of beingfor, face, proximity, sobering up and the ethics of imagination described below are designed to illustrate the properties of a pre-ontological morality.

The Empirically Oriented Postmodern Moral Concepts Bauman uses the work of French ethical philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who puts the responsibility for the other at the forefront of his philosophical

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understanding, to outline the powers of a pre-social, pre-ontological autonomous moral agent. The pre-ontological moral individual is by nature, moral.18 Bauman explains that if we do not conceive of human beings as originally moral, even before they become conscious of being, then any morality they are to be associated with must come from outside them. It must be socially constructed. And, as we know, Bauman views socially constructed morality as elite-driven and depriving individuals of autonomy. For Bauman’s pre-ontological, pre-social actor, the moral relationship comes not from the constraints of modern elite-constructed state laws and general norms, but from the constraints that the Other imposes. According to Levinas, the basic freedom of the postmodern individual is to act consistently with the state of ‘‘being-for,’’ a state of unconditional responsibility, which is the replacement for ‘‘being-with’’ at the root of a modern moral theory. I am for the Other whether the Other is for me or not; his being for me is, so to speak, his problem, and whether and how he ‘handles’ that problem does not in the least affect my being-for him y . Whatever else ‘I-for-you’ may contain, it does not contain a demand to be repaid, mirrored or ‘balanced out’ in the ‘you-for-me’ (1993, p. 50).

Characteristic of this non-instrumentalist orientation is a lack of symmetry and reciprocity. Bauman gives examples of being for morality: ‘‘I am ready to die for the Other,’’ says Bauman is a moral statement while, ‘‘The Other should be willing to die for me’’ is not. In fact, a demand that the Other should sacrifice herself for anything – homeland, child, cause – can never be moral. Similarly, the statement that ‘‘I am my brother’s keeper’’ is a moral statement while any reversal of this implying that my brother should also be my keeper immediately undermines the morality of the statement. The notion of the one-sidedness of morality is continued in the concept of ‘‘Face.’’ Face is only encountered if there is no expectation of response, if the relationship with the Other is conclusively non-symmetrical. An encounter with Face cannot depend on the Other’s past, present or anticipated future reciprocation. As this relationship with Face occurs in a pre-ontological, pre-social state, the Other never utters her commands. To do so would constitute a kind of heteronomy or morality from outside. Instead the ‘‘humanism of the other’’ morality requires the self to understand the unspoken, perhaps not conceived needs of the other. So asymmetry, non-reciprocity inequality, and irreversibility define the moral encounter, an encounter with Face.19 Now it is true, concedes Bauman, that criticisms may be made of this moral state as impossible. How can we exist in a state that is pre-ontological

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or before existence? Bauman describes the modern and postmodern worlds as dominated by practices of socialization and sociality, respectively, and, as he admits, neither permits a non-social morality. What is important, however, about the pre-ontological state is not so much whether or not it tangibly exists, but that it is a motivating utopia. It is the act of attempting to ‘‘imagine’’ this pre-ontological state and of conceiving oneself as a fundamentally moral being that is finally important. In the process, one awakens to the fact of the other and the realization that the self is constituted not by being-with, some attempt to socially construct a bridge between self and other, but that the self is constituted by being-for, an absolute and primary commitment for the other. Levinas (1993) refers to this as ‘‘sobering up.’’ The self may be born only out of union. It is through structuring myself towards the Other that I have become the unique, the only, the irreplaceable self that I am y . It is such a responsibility – utterly, completely unheteronomous, radically unlike the responsibility on behest or obligations stemming from contractual duty – that makes me into I. (1993, p. 77)

What is born out of sobering up or awakening is a moral state that Levinas refers to as ‘‘proximity,’’ the bridging of distance between two resulting in responsibility or being-for. Proximity or the ability to describe moral closeness between two individuals is, in Bauman’s view, the main achievement of Levinas’ theory. Bauman’s Limits Proximity, face, sobering up, being for – these are the key moral concepts that emerge from Bauman’s work – and despite their categorization as motivating ideal types, their lack of correspondence to the social world remains troubling. Some have argued that Bauman is a sociologist with too much Heideggerian distance from practical analysis. He describes the moral relationship, a relationship that has not regularly been a focus of sociological investigation, but he does not locate it in social space. Between which two people and in what context might such a relationship come into being? What aspects of the social world might be penetrated by such a moral relationship? Like Marx with respect to communism, Bauman might be accused of utopianism. In order to move ahead with Bauman, it is necessary to accept this critique and think of Bauman in terms of potential applicability rather than in terms of describing already existing and occurring social forms. I will make this point in section four below by illustrating some areas that would benefit from the introduction of a Baumanian analysis.

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More problematic than looking for potential correspondence for Bauman’s empirical concepts, however, is accepting his epistemological postmodernism. Some critics have pointed to his epistemological critiques of modernity as ‘‘sensationalist’’ (Smith, 1999, p. 50) referring particularly to his argument that rational, universal, philosophically founded projects may lead to self-deluded and dangerous leaders like Stalin and Hitler. Other critics have made this point that his epistemological arguments are ‘‘restrictive’’ (Morawski, 1998, p. 35) and ultimately ‘‘not sound’’ (Morawski, 1998, p. 36) and even ‘‘aporetic’’ (Morawski, 1998, p. 36). Below I elaborate on the epistemological arguments that have the subject of so much criticism. In particular, I explore the one-sidedness of Bauman’s criticisms of modernity as an elite-driven, totalitarian project of social order. Take, for example, Bauman’s overarching accusation of elite dominance of modernity. While historically, the modern West has seen fascism, Stalinism, power-elites, corporate elites and in general the unequal distribution of wealth, power and prestige; and theoretically, the early modern thinker Hobbes ends up with conception of a sovereign or leviathan whose authority is absolute, at the same time modern western thinkers have also struggled to describe democratic participation, constitutional rights, intermediary associations and egalitarian sociopolitical associations. Vigorous modern conceptions of democracy stretch from de Tocqueville to Dewey to Rawls and Habermas. Intermediary associations, the veil of ignorance,20 communicative action and the public sphere are all modern conceptions and practices constitutive of democracy. In short, it becomes clear that one difficulty with Bauman is one-sidedness. He extends criticisms of a few selected examples of modern projects as elite-dominated to the conclusion that all modern projects are elite-dominated and undermine individual autonomy.21 We can also say that Bauman’s discussion of modernity’s foundationalism as elite-dominated is one-sided. Hobbes’ foundational theory of the state takes morality out of the hands of the individual to bequeath it to the sovereign who becomes an almost absolutist law-giver; Bentham’s theory derives laws from a utilitarian calculus operating over the heads of most individuals; Parsons’ theory of morality locates ethics in a system overarching the individuals who follow it. But Bauman restricts his genealogy of modernity to Hobbesian-inspired thinkers.22 In a larger intellectual context, modernity is more complex. Modern tensions exist between the priorities of social order and individual freedom, and some theorists (those he cites) stress social order – with its implications of elite dominance – while others paid more attention to individual freedom (those he does not cite – Kant,

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Locke, & Mill). Indeed Kant’s categorical imperative, Locke’s social contract, Rousseau’s general will, and more recently today, in the same tradition, Rawls’ veil of ignorance, are all attempts to bridge the tension between individual freedom and social order to create a theory that allows both. Hegel too made one of the first and clearest of modern attempts to reconcile individual freedom and social integration. It becomes clear that the tensions often used to distinguish the modern from the postmodern actually reside within the modern itself. Additionally, Bauman’s view that the Enlightenment was defined exclusively by its rationality is one-sided; this ‘‘age of reason’’ ‘‘was as much a time of Pamela’s tears and Rousseau’s sentiment’’ (Calhoun, 1995a, p. 24). Rousseau, Goethe and the Romantic poets have been as central to modernity as Hobbes, Bentham and Parsons. In fact, Kant is a particularly useful figure to remind us of modernity’s complications: Kant, often identified as the Enlightenment’s most rationalistic voice, admired none so much as the romantic Rousseau, whose bust he kept on his desk. At the same time, Bauman’s depiction of rationality as elite-driven is too restrictive. Purposive, contract-driven and calculation-driven instrumental rationality is problematic for morality, according to Bauman, because it takes decisions out of the hands of the individuals involved and instead requires that they be guided by some means-end calculus that is self-interested rather than moral. But is all rationality instrumental rationality? Even those who predicted the salience of instrumental rationality, Weber, for example, have posited the possibility of other forms of rationality. Some recent critical theorists have broadened Weber’s concept of substantive rationality to include communicative rationality, defined as the raising and redeeming of validity claims with the goal of mutual understanding through speech (Habermas, 1987, 1979, 1984). Communicative rationality is a participatory form of rationality; it is by definition democratic, explicitly non-instrumental and not elite-dominated. In sum, modern rationality is neither as all prevalent nor as dominated by instrumentality and elites as Bauman depicts it.

INTERPRETING BAUMAN AS A CRITICAL THEORIST One way to accept Bauman’s one-sided epistemological postmodernism – his relentless critique of modern forms of thought – and to appropriate his

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empirical postmodernism – his relevance to postmodern experience – is to align him with the modern project of critical social theory. Critical theory is a term that came into use in Germany during the 1920 and 1930s. Its original purpose was not to designate a new social theory but to highlight theoretical elements in common across existing theories. Marx, Kant and Hegel along with Freud, Nietzsche and Weber were identified as sharing the idea that there was more to understanding or knowledge than looking at surface appearances, received realities or what were sometimes termed ‘‘facts.’’23 A key critical theoretical question is why were some possibilities historically realized and others not: in particular, how might things be different from the way they present themselves. In other words, critical theorists thematize the contingency, the arbitrariness even, of present-day realities from cultures to ideologies to theories. Critical theorists also reject positivism for accepting the world ‘‘as is,’’ but they are not antiscience: empirical research is important to critical theory to demonstrate that alternatives to the ‘‘facts’’ are possible, not only preferable. The main critical thinkers of the early twentieth century were the members of the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt, notably Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. Horkheimer (1982 (1937)) gives a classic formulation to the emerging notion of critical theory in a 1937 (1982) essay on distinctions between ‘‘traditional’’ and ‘‘critical’’ theory. And in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1972), Horkheimer and Adorno coin the concept of non-identity,24 the notion that a given social form is multiple, plural, constituted by tension and that these ‘‘other’’ forms can be appropriated as a source of creativity. As they illustrate, the individual includes both a ‘‘dark side’’ (an idea shared by Freud, the romantics, and Nietzsche) and a multiple self, constituted intersubjectively through social relations with others (a key sociological idea); for the individual, non-identity thus means the ability to reach beyond ‘‘narrow self-identity’’. In this way, they reinforce the critical theoretical idea that to stick only to the facts or surface realities is to risk a kind of theoretical philistinism – a contentment with an unexplored world and an unreflective state of mind (Calhoun, 1996). These characteristics of critical theory, particularly the criticisms of ‘‘identity thinking’’ continue to be held by members beyond the Frankfurt School. It has recently been argued, for example, that we should consider recent French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, a critical theorist (Calhoun, 1993, 2000). He too promotes a critical substantive analysis of social life in terms of the possible not just the actual, he problematizes uncomplicated knowledge arguing that we must struggle to win knowledge from the everyday ideological

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misunderstandings, and he is attuned to the assumptions underlying his own empiricism. My argument below is that Bauman’s postmodern project is also well described by the method of critical social theory, and when seen this way, it helps us to understand his radical epistemology.25 It is important to note that classifying Bauman as a critical theorist is not unprecedented (Beilharz, 2000), key influences on Bauman during the first half of his career include Marx, Gramsci and Habermas. Bauman himself notes methodological commonalties with the critical theory project (1991c), particularly in his own critiques of identity thinking; on his theory he says early on ‘‘It will insist on asking ‘How has this world come about? It will demand that its history be studied and that in the course of this historical study the forgotten hopes and lost chances of the past be retrieved’’ (1991c, p. 280). My argument below explores how well Bauman’s later work on postmodernism is aligned with the project of critical theory.26 Perhaps the most significant critical theory debt in Bauman’s postmodern work today is to Horkheimer and Adorno’s method of immanent critique. Immanent critique is itself inspired by two major insights – first the concept of non-identity we saw above – that the facts are not enough and second, that it is possible to see beyond the facts by looking for tensions, contradictions, and diremptions within existing reality. This is a well-rehearsed critical theoretical procedure manifest, for example, in Hegel’s ‘‘dialectic of enlightenment,’’ a dialectic which registers tensions within modernity’s existing reality in order to point to the larger context of any given event as well as to its possible transcendence. Similarly, Marx, following Hegel, went beyond surface reality by defetishizing it; he pointed out how categories of capital – commodity, value – hid the centrality of human labor to the economy and society; defetishizing meant theoretically reconnecting these categories to the processes that constituted them. Important to Horkheimer and Adorno’s own method of immanent critique are three moments. First, an immanent critique, as the name implies, works immanently beginning with existing categories of thought. But remaining within the immanent is not enough, to go beyond the facts, Horkheimer and Adorno stress the second term in this process: critique. Critique is defined as the tool for finding and then heightening or radicalizing tensions, contradictions and problems in the immanent. The back and forth between aspects of existing tensions, between the ideal and he real, the past and the future takes critique toward the third step, which is the recognition of how things might be different from the way they are. Dialectical immanent critique, similar to Hegel’s dialectic of

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enlightenment or Marx’s defetishizing, subjects received understandings to social theoretical reconsideration to show us empirically or theoretically new possibilities.27 Bauman’s epistemological deconstruction of morality can be well described by the method of immanent critique. First, Bauman begins immanently, as does a critical theorist, by describing modernity and its existing intellectual and moral forms: as we have seen, he focuses on modernity’s search for order, foundations, universality and rationality. Second, to go beyond these facts or existing reality, Bauman radicalizes and deconstructs modernity: he overgeneralizes from a few exaggerated examples to paint allencompassing elite domination of the moral projects of universalism, foundationalism and rationality. In this way, he delivers a skewed picture of modernity, one in fact that is so one-sided, exaggerated and overly general that he later refers to the ‘‘downright unattractiveness’’ (1992, p. 53) of it. It is this that critics have called ‘‘sensationalist’’ (Smith, 1999, p. 50) and ‘‘not sound’’ (Morawski, 1998, p. 36) and I call exaggerated. But in this way, Bauman clears a space for a dialectical other. From the second step, then, the recoil from the modern, he is able to move to the third step, which is to sketch possibilities of the not modern or postmodern morality, in fact a morality that is not constructed at all (since all constructed morality runs the risk or inevitably succumbs to heteronomy) and instead lies at the individual’s core being. The third step of exploring new possibilities for postmodern morality within the existing social world may then take place empirically, a crucial step for all critical social theory28 (Calhoun, 1996, p. 462; Agger, 1991). And, as in critical theory, for Bauman it is the epistemological maneuvering of the first two steps that permits this empirical exploration. Viewing Bauman as a critical theorist can help us understand Bauman’s one-sided modernity. It might be said that the purpose of Bauman’s exaggerated attitude toward the modern is not so much to give an accurate rendition of modernity (that it fails to do so even Bauman acknowledges29) but it exists to provoke thoughts of other possibilities. An extreme view of modernity means that postmodernity can step in as a dialectical moment to suggest potential beyond the (modern) facts. To see Bauman as a critical theorist engaged in immanent critique is an interpretation more favorable to Bauman and more realistic than to suppose that he does not understand modernity. It also allows us to appropriate his empirical concepts understanding rather than doubting their derivation. A fruitful place to begin is with the moral challenges that Bauman argued initially called forth the epistemological project.30

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BAUMAN AS PROPHET – MORAL CHALLENGES IN A COMPLEX SOCIETY Perhaps the most dramatic upcoming postmodern challenges to traditional morality are the ways our actions carry across distances. Whether we call the new social relations we form ‘‘distantiated,’’ (Giddens, 1990, 1991) ‘‘disembedded,’’ (Beck et al., 1994) or ‘‘indirect,’’ (Calhoun, 1992)31 we recognize that between our actions and their consequences there is sometimes a distance so large that we cannot fathom the effects. Present moral tools do not measure well the consequences of our own actions. Marx of course made a theme of how new technologies increased the distance between action and effects; for Marx, this distance distinguished pre-modernity from modernity, (e.g., the pre-industrial shoe-wearer would know his shoemaker by face while the industrial society shoe-wearer could not trace the shoemaker but as thousands of shoes are manufactured through a division of labor in a factory, it might be said that there was no one individual who made the shoe.) In a post-industrial society, technology further abstracts these labor processes from individual relationships by computer controlled manufacturing processes and distribution networks that cross many national boundaries. Technological effects travel across space: for example, nuclear and chemical plants spew gases, which, because of their cloud-like composition, may travel over very long distances. The melt down of a nuclear reactor in Chernobyl caused weather changes in Finland; daily effects of American industry may be experienced in Canada in the form of acid rain. Technological effects also cross generations through insecticides or drugs: birth defects and chromosomal abnormalities are found in offspring of those exposed to products as wide ranging as herbicides (such as Agent Orange) and morning sickness pills (DES). And, in each of these cases, consequences, such as the pre-modern or the modern shoemaker might never have imagined, are attached to the distance traversed by the product. Bauman puts the challenge as follows: ‘‘Morality which always guided us and still guides us today has powerful, but short hands. It now needs very, very long hands indeed. What chance of growing them?’’ (1993, p. 218). Social scientists agree with Bauman that we need new concepts and theories to describe new social relations and the possibilities for moral integration in the new worlds they constitute. While postmodern theories have been successful at addressing changes in capitalism (from production-based to consumption-based), industrial production and media and culture, few have addressed changes in social relations. ‘‘This is a dimension missing from most postmodernist accounts y they do not address the empirical

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question of whether social relations y are in fact changing’’ (Calhoun, 1993, p. 83). Relatedly few have addressed new postmodern forms of moral integration: as Robert Bellah and his colleagues suggest, new distantiated social relations challenge our ‘‘solidarity with those near to us y those who live far from us, [and] those who are economically in situations very different from our own’’ (Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, & Tipton, 1996, p. xxx). The call then is to sociologists to revitalize the core tradition of inquiry into social solidarity in order to understand new international, transnational and non-national social relations and their ethical possibilities. De Greiff and Cronin (2002) make the specific point that transnationally distant social relations require an asymmetric ethics that thematizes responsibility on the part of the strong, developed countries and their citizens: ‘‘the moral force y rests on the undeniable fact that a disproportionate share of the responsibility for the justices of the current global political order must be laid at the door of the West’’ (De Greiff & Cronin, 2002, pp. 2–3). Thus, to continue the example from above, manufacturers of Agent Orange provided a threat to soldiers and citizens in Vietnam and we now discover, their offspring, but these soldiers, citizens and children cannot be understood as similarly dangerous to the manufacturers. The owners and managers of Union Carbide, it turned out, were creating a risk for the workers and neighbors of their Bhopal plant and its sister plant in West Virginia unlike any these workers and neighbors presented to them. In general, postmodern social relations involve two unequal parties: those in command of new and ongoing technologies – factories, weapon systems, consumer items – and those who are potentially threatened – neighbors, workers, consumers, clients distant in time and space. De Greiff and Cronin also argue citing Calhoun (2002), that we need to give people a powerful way of imagining these social relations and morality within them: the efficacy of distantiated moral social relations ‘‘depends on the emergence of a corresponding transnational ‘social imaginary’ since social reality is shaped in part by how it is represented in the culture of the society in question and thereby comes to be collectively imagined’’ (De Greiff & Cronin, 2002, p. 26). It turns out that Bauman’s theory is admirably well suited to describe the challenges asymmetric almost unimaginable distance poses to moral social relations in a postmodern world. Bauman’s concept of ‘‘being-for’’ gives us a powerful way to describe asymmetric social relations. As we see dramatically in social relations from Bhopal to Chernobyl to Agent Orange to DES as well as in more everyday affairs, postmodern social relations may involve two unequal parties: those in command of new and ongoing technologies – factories, weapon systems,

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consumer items – and those who are potentially threatened – neighbors, workers, consumers, clients distant in time and space. In these relations, the Other, the potential victim, is vulnerable, weak, and relatively powerless: the Other cannot prevent the agent from doing whatever the agent thinks worth doing nor can the Other reverse the situation and become the potential victimizer. In traditional Kantian ‘‘being-with’’ conceptions of morality, ethical actions are dependent on some expected response from the other: do unto others as you would have generally done. But of course in a postmodern world as represented by Bhopal, Chernobyl, DES, Agent Orange and others, the Other is powerless. A being-for morality becomes appropriate for putting the responsibility for morality entirely in the lap of the actor: unlike being-with, I am for my employee/neighbor/client, whether near or far, born or unborn, regardless of their ability to repay me or to be for me; being-for is simply my responsibility and the condition of my freedom and self-constitution. Engaging in the process of ‘‘being-for’’ has the result of ‘‘Face’’, which is only encountered in the Other if there is no expectation of response, if the relationship with the Other is conclusively non-symmetrical. And it is this asymmetric, non-reciprocal, unequal, irreversible relationship that defines the moral encounter for Bauman and creates proximity or the bridging of distance between two people separated by vast stretches of time, space and inequality. Now for many critics, as we have seen, Bauman, like Marx with respect to communism or Habermas with respect to communicative ethics, is utopian. ‘‘Being-for’’ and the Face it permits might be desirable in a postmodern world; these concepts describe a positive response to postmodern distantiated social relationships. But in what actual context might such a relationship come into being? As we have seen, Bauman concedes that this moral state as impossible: how can we exist in a state that is, as he terms it, preontological or before existence? What is important, however, about the preontological state is not so much whether or not it presently exists, rather that it is a motivating utopia. In the process of Bauman’s new ethics, one awakens to another mode of being where the self is not constituted by beingwith, some attempt to socially construct a bridge between self and the other, but the self is constituted by being-for, an absolute and primary commitment for the other. Bauman thus provides what has been referred to as a ‘‘social imaginary’’ a way of collectively imagining and representing distantiated social relations and the moral possibilities within them. For Bauman then, as for advocates of the social imaginary like De Greiff and Cronin (2002) and Calhoun (2002), it is the act of attempting to ‘‘imagine’’ this pre-ontological state and of conceiving oneself as a fundamentally

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moral being that is finally important. Bauman, following Levinas, refers to this as ‘‘sobering up.’’ And the ethics that is proposed on the part of the actor may be summed up as an ‘‘ethics of imagination’’: the task of visualizing the consequences of action or inaction (and the guilt of neglecting the need of visualizing them or not visualizing them properly) and cutting the action to the measure of such consequences, rests fairly and squarely with the actor y . Whether inside the circle of proximity or beyond, I am morally responsible y for my imagination, and for stretching it to limits when it comes to action or refraining from action (1993, p. 220).

An ethics of imagination then is useful on two fronts: first because we need to be able to reconceive collectively what solidarity, ethics and morality means. An ethics of imagination is also useful because we cannot really know the long-range effects of technology. For example, we frequently cannot foresee the ‘‘unanticipated consequences’’ of our technology using ordinary powers of perception. We cannot possibly travel far enough or live long enough to see how technology will be used cross-culturally or what the generational effects of new chemical compounds will be. Thus a theory, which stresses the actor’s moral imagination, is fitting to a postmodern, yet to be fully experienced or conceived, social world. Proximity or the ability to describe the bridging of distance and the resulting moral closeness between two individuals is, in Bauman’s view, the main achievement of his concepts of ‘‘being-for,’’ ‘‘Face,’’ ‘‘sobering up,’’ and the ‘‘ethics of imagination.’’ The Holocaust, a powerful memory for Bauman, is useful for reminding us of the old modern and the new postmodern restraints that distance provides to morality. Bauman points out that even avid National Socialists could ‘‘work up a lather about the abstract Jewish menace, and yet still know their own personal ‘good’ Jews’’ (1989a, p. 187). Nor can we forget the role technology plays in compounding distance: in modern times, gas chambers delivered a kind of distance and ultimately a genocide, which the program could not approximate; in postmodern times, fighter pilots’ targets appear to them only as crosses on a computer screen. In addition, moral problems are increased by the new complexities provided by experts, bureaucracies and the resulting division of labor: increasingly moral people can be persuaded to do immoral acts when convinced by experts who only demand that we follow orders to achieve supposedly morally neutral bureaucratic values. Finally moral distance is increased by difference: part of what we mean by distance is conjured by the term ‘stranger.’ ‘‘The figure of the stranger thus becomes more strange in postmodern times, not less. We may all be strangers, today, yet there are some strangers whose attributes are less exotic than repelling’’ (Beilharz,

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2000, p. 133). The Jew was of course a stranger; Jews stood outside mainstream society, did not integrate and were hard to classify as they were neither heathens nor heretics; today, there are also tourists, vagabonds and players who newly constitute the problem of the stranger. Bauman’s sociology of postmodernity recognizes the distance begun by modernity and compounded by postmodernity and seeks to address its moral implications.

CONCLUSION: RECONSTRUCTING BAUMAN’S POSTMODERNISM AS CRITICAL THEORY In conclusion, we can appropriate Bauman’s sociology of postmodernity on stronger grounds by looking at it through the lens of critical theory. A number of distinct advantages result from using the non-identity reasoning and immanent critique methodology to analyze Bauman’s approach. First of all, aporias in Bauman’s thought – his exaggerated epistemological characterization of modernity that he himself acknowledges is false – are explained once we see these machinations as critical theory methodology and recognize that his achievements are dependent on it. My argument is that the extremism of Bauman’s epistemological postmodernism drives the theory forward to innovative concepts; we might compare these manipulations to Weber’s ideal type or the use of dummy variables, intended to produce a certain result rather than to exactly reflect reality. We might argue that what Smith (1999) calls Bauman’s prophetic abilities, catching early sight of moral dilemmas, emotional torments, social pressures and political choices that are due to plague us in the future (Smith, 1998, p. 51) are a result of the critical theory method. By refusing to take the world ‘‘asis’’ rather as an object of harsh criticism, Bauman has been able to see beyond the immediacy of the moment, to reveal new and different sides of that same reality, which helps him to imagine to some of what may be; in particular he helps us to understand how our future wars, i.e., upcoming moral challenges may be different. Bauman’s epistemological postmodern sociology becomes a strength if we see it in the context of the critical theoretical maxim to go beyond existing facts to seek the future. Taken together the extreme epistemological postmodernism and the abstract empirical postmodernism mean that Bauman’s theory is ‘‘exploring what is possible as well as recording what is’’ (Smith, 1998, p. 41), the ideal of a critical theoretical project.

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Bauman’s project, once we have used critical theory to reconcile its epistemological and empirical moments, can be seen as postmodern progress. Bauman’s work avoids many of the problems of earlier postmodern theory. For example, though postmodern theorists recognize the ‘‘other,’’ they have been criticized for degenerating into a relativism that undermines the worth of that other, or at best, simply fails to take the other seriously.32 Bauman’s postmodern morality, in contrast, focuses specifically on the other. ‘‘Face’’ is encountered as a moral relationship based on a non-symmetrical encounter with the other where commitment to that other is not dependent on the other’s reciprocal commitment. ‘‘Sobering up’’ through the use of ‘‘imagination’’ is waking up to the fact of the other’s existence and needs, and ‘‘proximity’’ is a moral closeness that results from bridging the gap with that other. Second, Bauman’s project sidesteps the label of ‘‘postmodernism as pseudohistory’’ (Calhoun, 1995). According to this criticism, historical and cultural details regarding the new postmodern epoch are sparse. ‘‘Pseudohistory’’ refers to the fact that contrasts between the modern and postmodern ‘‘are seldom developed as very precise categories y or contexualized in serious historical or cross-cultural analysis’’ (Calhoun, 1995, p. 98). In this light, Bauman’s postmodern works lay the principles and dominant characteristics of a postmodern era, in particular they describe postmodern distantiated social relations and describe the possibilities of morality within them. Bauman’s theory, particularly his moral approach, has prophetic analytical purchase on the age. Bauman’s project, once we reconcile its epistemological and empirical moments, might also point the way to sociological innovation and progress. It is possible that the epistemological rumblings of the early postmodern era in sociology, while seeming dark and destructive on their own, might be part of a dialectic that leads to a sunnier and more empirical moment of concept innovation in sociology and social theory resulting in new purchase on and new relevance to a changing world. In this way, perhaps we can come to see postmodernism as a stirring and forward-looking approach able to enrich the theory and practice of sociology in areas from family studies to globalization.

NOTES 1. Critics have been conceptualizing what comes ‘‘after postmodernism’’ for some time. See for example Sociology after Postmodernism (Owen, 1997) and ‘‘After Postmodernism – Back to Sociological Theory?’’ (McLennon, 1995) and for a more sober

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view ‘‘After Postmodernism: Reactionary Tribalism’’ (Antonio, 2000). For discussion of ‘‘post-postmodernism’’ (Ritzer, 1997) outside of sociology see Ferry and Renaut, 1985/1990; Lilla, 1994; Lipovetsky, 1987/1994. 2. One of postmodernism’s complications is that its terminology is not always clear. One frequently noted example is the distinction between poststructuralism and postmodernism. I define poststructuralism as the historical movement stemming from 1960s French philosophy involving cultural issues and mainly epistemological topics (critiques of subject centered reason, of grand narratives, of general truth claims and of the Enlightenment generally). In contrast, I see postmodernism as a broader movement, encompassing poststructuralism, concerned with describing a new epoch, both intellectually and empirically. ‘‘Postmodernism is the most comprehensive of recent theories. It includes in its generous embrace all forms of change, cultural, political and economic’’ (Kumar, 1995). 3. In his review article on postmodern social theory, Smart calls Baudrillard ‘‘another figure associated with postmodern social and philosophical thought, if not the figure’’ (1996, p. 400 italics his). 4. More specifically, Baudrillard argues that media dominance, advertising for example, makes individuals into passive recipients rather than autonomous subjects, and as a result, the study of consumer seduction replaces that of labor/capital relations. At center stage are the messages themselves, simulacra or representations of the real that, Baudrillard argues, become hyperreal or more real than reality, and thus the structure of social relations that matters most is among the signs themselves. 5. According to some, a symbolic collapse of sociology into cultural studies is apparent in many bookstores today (Powell, 1999; Soares, 1999). 6. Beck and Giddens, also Lash, eschew the term ‘‘postmodern’’ and refer to what they agree is a new epoch as ‘‘late modernity’’ or ‘‘reflexive modernity.’’ Their descriptions of these epochs, however, are almost indistinguishable from descriptions of postmodernism and indeed some thinkers have come to refer to late modernity and postmodernity in the same phrase (Bauman, 1998b). Some thinkers have even concluded that ‘‘continuists’’ like Beck and Giddens are more radical in their description of social change than many postmodernists or ‘‘discontinuists’’ (Crook, 2001, p. 318). 7. Unlike some who have been theorized as postmodernist but reject the label (most notoriously Foucault), Bauman self characterizes as postmodern: ‘‘Some social theorists suggest that we should talk about ‘late modernity,’ whereas I prefer the term postmodernity which provides more intellectual courage – you are not bound by certain articulations typical of modern times. You can try to put yourself aside and look in from outside at what is going on, and come forward with new concepts, new articulations and new models. It is simply a salutary decision to speak of postmodernity, rather than late modernity, without necessarily accepting every rubbish written in the name of postmodern theory’’ (cited in Beilharz, 2001, p. 20). 8. Bauman is clear in his belief that there is a new epoch that can be called postmodernity: ‘‘Postmodernity is not a flawed variant of modernity; neither is it a diseased state of modernity, a temporary ailing yet to be rectified, a case of modernity in crisis. It is instead an essentially viable, pragmatically self-sustainable and logically self-contained social condition defined by distinctive features of its own’’ (1991b, p. 34).

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9. ‘‘Indeed, if postmodernity means what the current concepts imply: a reform of culture, of world-perception, of the intellectual stance – then sociology faces the task of an essentially strategical adjustment. It must make itself resonant with new, postmodern culture, and break its links with the ontological and epistemological premises of modernity. It must transform itself into a postmodern sociology’’ (1989b, p. 35). 10. ‘‘If, on the other hand, the self-containment of contemporary culture, and the associated implosion of vision, signal processes which reach beyond the realm of culture proper, (if they accompany transformations in say, principles of systemic organization or power arrangements) – then it is not the traditional strategy of sociology which calls for revision, but a new focus of inquiry is needed, and a new set of categories geared to the changed social reality. In this case – without resigning its formative questions – sociology must develop into a sociology of postmodernity’’ (1989b, p. 35). 11. For more on Bauman’s Poland years see Morawski, 1998. 12. For more on Bauman’s English years see Smith, 1998. 13. Bauman’s early and late work can be divided by the watershed moment in which he decided that the socialist project that had long oriented and inspired him had failed. Bauman’s narrative of progress toward a socialist utopia was replaced by the narrative of the transition from modernity to postmodernity. It is the latter period that forms the central concern in this paper. Key works in Bauman’s early period include Between Class and Elite (Bauman, 1972), Culture as Praxis (Bauman, 1973), Towards a Critical Sociology (Bauman, 1976a), Socialism: the active utopia (Bauman, 1976b), Hermeneutics and Social Science (Bauman, 1978), Memories of Class (Bauman, 1982) and Freedom (Bauman, 1988). Key transition works include Legislators and Interpreters (Bauman, 1987), Modernity and the Holocaust (Bauman, 1989a, b), Modernity and Ambivalence (Bauman, 1991a, b). Key later works include Intimations of Postmodernity (Bauman, 1992), Postmodern Ethics (Bauman, 1993), Life in Fragments (Bauman, 1995), and Postmodernity and Its Discontents (Bauman, 1997), Globalization (Bauman, 1998a), In Search of Politics (Bauman, 1999), Liquid Modernity (Bauman, 2000), Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World (Bauman, 2001), The Individualized Society (Bauman, 2002a), Society under Siege (Bauman, 2002b), Liquid Love (Bauman, 2003), Wasted Lives (Bauman, 2004). 14. As Beilharz (2001) puts it ‘‘The contrast say with a popular controversial view like Daniel Goldhagen’s in Hitler’s Willing Executioners is apparent; Bauman, to simplify sees nazism as a modern, rather than ‘German’ accident waiting to happen’’ (p. 8). 15. Philosophers themselves are not clear about what, if any, is the distinction between morality and ethics. Some suggest that morality, exemplified by Kant, is a modern systematized abstract approach to pressing questions while (postmodern) ethics replaces formality with postmodern practicality and a focus on the autonomous individual. I, however, follow Bauman in using the terms morality and ethics interchangeably. 16. The importance to Bauman of describing modernity’s project as social order cannot be emphasized enough. Quotes like the following reference to modernity suggest the centrality of social order: ‘‘In this reason-drafted city with no mean streets [modernity], order was to be made, there was to be no other order. Hence the

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urge, the desperation: there would be as much order in the world as we manage to put into it y . The ordering impulse would be fed ever again by the fear of chaos never to be alloyed. The lid of order would never seem tight and heavy enough’’ (1992, p. xv). 17. Bauman’s criticism of the rationality project is not only that it disrupts individual autonomy, but also that it is unable to foster morality. Any system of rules and principles, which advocates adherence to itself with the explicit message that following it will lead to the achievement of some sort of self-interest, cannot be categorized as a moral system. Bauman thus rejects a number of modern social forms as specifically not conducive to moral behavior because they are calculating. Meansend rationality has to be rejected because it undermines the individual’s ability to be moral (1991a, p. 213; 1993, p. 56; 1995, p. 40). 18. It has ‘‘moral capacities’’ (1993, p. 12), a ‘‘moral self-conscience,’’ (1993, p. 11) ‘‘moral impulses’’ (1993, p. 10, 13). As a moral individual there is a ‘‘mystery of morality inside me’’ (1993, p. 35). Morality is the ‘‘ultimate, non-determined presence; indeed an act of creation ex nihilo if there ever was one’’ (1993, p. 13); ‘‘Morality is the absolute beginning’’ (1993, p. 74). 19. It is from the general position of rejecting the social construction of morality that Bauman disposes of most operating moral theories. As we have seen, he views most rational modern morality as instrumental. For example, Kant locates his moral theory in already constituted amoral beings, and his problematic is how to describe the possibility of social behavior that is rational and moral. His answer, the categorical imperative, says that people’s behavior can be described as moral if they perform actions that they would wish to be a universal rule for all. More specifically, they must be motivated by the concept of ‘‘Do unto others as you would have done unto you.’’ But, says Bauman, this cannot be morality as it clearly involves an element of calculation; another way of putting it is ‘‘I will do unto you in the expectation that you or the generalized other will do the same unto me.’’ In particular, the calculating orientation of the categorical imperative is at odds even with Kant’s intentions, which say that morality means treating individuals as ends in themselves rather than means. Rational theories such as Kant’s categorical imperative are destructive of the moral relationship. Following Levinas, Bauman argues that this instrumental orientation is to be discovered in the breadth of constructivist Kantian moral philosophy, and he also makes examples of Buber and Heidegger. 20. The veil of ignorance is a counterfactual condition that Rawls (1971) hypothesizes will guarantee equality and democracy by requiring individuals to choose social orders without awareness of their own definitional identities. 21. Reviewers have consistently pointed to this flaw in Bauman’s work. For a couple of strong examples see reviews of Postmodern Ethics (Vetlesen, 1995) and Modernity and Ambivalence (Seidman, 1992b; Zaretsky, 1992). Both the work itself and then this common recognition among the reviewers leave the reader with some puzzlement on why Bauman’s work consistently and continually paints modernity in this way. 22. Bauman makes the association between Hobbes and the modern project of order explicit. Bauman points out that ‘‘In a recent study, Stephen L. Collins put the spotlight on the Hobbesian problem as the epitome of the modern spirit: ‘Hobbes understood that a world in flux was natural and that order must be created to

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restrain what was natural’’’ (1992, p. xvi). Bauman also makes it clear that Bentham and Parsons are Hobbesian thinkers: ‘‘Jeremy Bentham, arguably more than any other thinker responsible for the agenda of modern ethical philosophy believed – true to Hobbesian inspiration – that ‘human beings are y deficient in altruism and therefore require the threat of coercion to encourage them to seek majority interests rather than their owny’’’ (1993, p. 64) and ‘‘In Parsons’ memorable phrase, sociology was best understood as an ongoing effort to solve the ‘Hobbesian problem’’’ (1992, p. 39). 23. ‘‘Critical theory is a metaphor for a certain kind of theoretical orientation which owes its origins to Kant, Hegel and Marx, its systematization to Horkheimer and his associates at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt and its development to successors, particularly the group led by Jurgen Habermas, who have sustained it under various redefinitions to the present day’’ (Rasmussen, 1996, p. 1). 24. This concept of non-identity was, not surprisingly, in conflict with more traditional views of social science: ‘‘The view that thought is a means of knowing more about the world than may be directly observed y seems to us entirely mysterious’’ (Horkheimer & Adorno quoted in Calhoun, 1996, p. 442). In response, Horkheimer & Adorno argue that because traditional theorists (positivists, for example) are not self-reflexive, i.e., because they do not view themselves as a part of the world they study and influenced by the forces they study, they cannot imagine that the world might look and be other than the way they see and conceptualize it. Traditional theorists make a distinction between the real and not real (between facts and values, respectively) because their work is illuminated by the belief that intellectuals standing outside the currents of the social world, ‘‘free floating’’ in Mannheim’s term, can distinguish objective or real truth. Crucial to critical theory in contrast is rejection of the view from nowhere and recognition of the role that perspective plays. In this way critical theorists, unlike traditional theorists, recognize contingency and contradiction and treat existing conditions as only one of many potential conditions that might exist. 25. To think of a preeminent postmodern thinker as a critical theorist is not an obvious step, because these two schools of thought were developed in opposition to one another and along a rather sharp dividing line in the 1980s and 1990s. Postmodernism and critical theory have been at odds on such issues as the possibility of rationality, of grounded theory, of universal theory and in general of the Enlightenment project of optimism and progress itself (see Habermas, 1987). But key poststructuralists and postmodernists share a methodological approach with critical theorists; like critical theorists, postmodernists build on the idea that the facts are not enough: they argue against positivist models that aim to simply reflect the world ‘out there’ and, like Derrida (1966), suggest new ways of reading and writing science (see Agger, 1991, pp. 111–113). In critical theory this method is called non-identity (Horkheimer & Adorno, 1972); in postmodernism it is called deconstruction. Benhabib (1996) argues furthermore that not only do postmodernists share with critical theorists Habermas and Adorno the concept of non-identity, both approaches seek to discover new selves that can ‘‘appreciate otherness without dissolving in it, that can respect heterogeneity without being overwhelmed by it’’ (Benhabib, 1996, p. 337).

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26. A comparison has also been drawn between the work of Levinas, the key influence on Bauman’s sociology of morality, and critical theory though the focus is more on common themes such as totality than on method (see Alford, 2002). 27. The idea of implosion, of exploding surface reality from within in order to see something of what could be was not invented by postmodern thought. 28. Theoretical complexity is never a license to take the empirical less seriously. 29. As he says regarding rationalization: ‘‘Beginning with Romantic poetry of the early nineteenth century, through decadence, the militantly ‘modernistic’ avantgarde of the early twentieth century: dadaism, surrealism and up to present-day postmodern culture – the modern rationalization drive has been accompanied by a stridently oppositional culture bent on the defense of individual freedom and emotional experience’’ (Beilharz, 2001, p. 170). 30. While critical theory can help us understand Bauman’s approach, Bauman also moves the critical theory project forward. Horkheimer and Adorno, like Marx, put their faith in revolution or large-scale transformation as the actual moment of transcendence. Following immanent critique, more or less spontaneously, is social reordering with this new knowledge in mind. In other words, social transformation occurs in tandem and in response to discovered tensions and diremptions. But it is this step that eventually presents difficulties to Horkheimer and Adorno. A Marxian faith in the proletariat was short-lived in the twentieth century and in Frankfurt School theorists and other Western Marxists – not just Horkheimer and Adorno but also Lukacs and Gramsci – who searched for and rejected alternative social agents – Jews, students, the Third World poor. Without transformative agents, Horkheimer and Adorno, writing just after World War II, could only imagine a continuation of enlightenment totalitarianism: a Nazi-like political regime, the culture industry’s mass production, instrumental rationality used to eradicate selective minorities rather than to eradicate poverty and injustice. Horkheimer and Adorno feared that existing society permitted no bases for overcoming an existing anti-humanistic, repressive and ultimately bankrupt social order. Bauman’s work can also be viewed as a constructive late twentieth century contribution to this tradition of critical theory. For Bauman as critical theorist then, the critical theoretical ‘‘other’’ or counterperspective to existing surface or factual reality is no longer communism or some similar alternative system achieved through revolution but this already existing ‘‘post’’ modernism. In other words, the issue of transformative agent is less important, because transformation has already occurred, behind our backs as it were, while we were doing other things. Postmodernism is upon us. The weakened nation-state has loosened the hold that both legislators and intellectuals have on individual lives, globalization (created in part by revolutions in communications and transportation) has vastly increased the scope and impact of everyday individual choice, and subpolitical and new social movement groups provide forums for exercising these choices. While this new world may not resemble Marxian, Frankfurt School or Baumanian utopias (globalization has vastly increased modern corporate control and associated risks), it does become a place to put future plans, and it gives us hope that, even if things do not turn out exactly as we want, transformation is conceivable. Epochal change in the form of postmodernism has provided a way out of the cul de sac that stymied critical theorists of an earlier generation.

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31. Calhoun refers to ‘‘what I have called indirect social relations – those mediated by information technology (communications, especially, but also other computer applications and surveillance) and complex administrative organizations as well as by markets and other self-regulating systems’’ (1993, p. 83). 32. It is not always realized that while the widespread postmodernist attitude avoids a tendency to intellectual domination characteristic of many Enlightenment theories, the way in which it recognizes the other borders on trivializing’’ (Calhoun, 1995b, p. 98).

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Calhoun, C. (2000). Pierre Bourdieu. In: G. Ritzer (Ed.), The Blackwell companion to the major social theorists (pp. 696–730). Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Calhoun, C. (2002). Constitutional patriotism and the public sphere: Interests, identity and solidarity in the integration of Europe. In: P. De Greiff & C. Cronin (Eds), Global justice and transnational politics (pp. 275–312). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cantell, T., & Pedersen, P. P. (1992). Modernity, postmodernity and ethics – An interview with Zygmunt Bauman. Theory, Culture & Society, 9, 133–144. Cheal, D. J. (1996). New poverty: Families in postmodern society. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Collins, R. (1989). Sociology: Proscience or antiscience? American Sociological Review, 54, 124–239. Collins, R. (1992). The confusion of the modes of sociology. In: S. Seidman & D. Wagner (Eds), Postmodernism and social theory. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Crook, S. (2001). Social theory and the postmodern. In: G. Ritzer & B. Smart (Eds), Handbook of social theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. D’Amico, R. (1992). Defending social science against the postmodern doubt. In: S. Seidman & D. Wagner (Eds), Postmodernism and social theory. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Dear, M. J., & Flusty, S. (2001). The spaces of postmodernity: Readings in human geography. New York: Blackwell. Dear, M. J. (2000). The postmodern urban condition. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Dear, M. J. (2001). From Chicago to LA: Making sense of urban theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. De Greiff, P., & Cronin, C. (2002). Introduction. In: Global justice and transnational politics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Delanty, G. (2000). Modernity and postmodernity: Knowledge, power and the self. New York: Sage. Derrida, J. (1966). Structure, sign, play in the discourse of the human sciences. In: Writing and difference (1978). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dews, P. (1978). The limits of disenchantment: Essays on contemporary European philosophy. London, New York: Verso. Douglas, M. (1992). Risk and danger. In: Risk and blame: Essays in cultural theory. London: Sage. Ferry, L., & Renaut, A. (19851990). French philosophy of the sixties: An essay on antihumanism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Giddens, A. (1990). The consequences of modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and self-identity: Self and society in the late modern age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Giddens, A. (1994a). Beyond left and right: The future of radical politics. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Giddens, A. (1994b). Living in a post-traditional society. In: U. Beck, A. Giddens & S. Lash (Eds), Reflexive modernization: Politics, tradition and aesthetics in the modern social order (pp. 56–109). Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Giddens, A. (1994c). Risk, trust, reflexivity. In: U. Beck, A. Giddens & S. Lash (Eds), Reflexive modernization: Politics, tradition and aesthetics in the modern social order (pp. 184–197). Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Gitlin, T. (1989). Postmodernism: Roots and politics. In: I. Angus & S. Jhally (Eds), Cultural politics in contemporary America. New York: Routledge. Gottdiener, M. (1985). The social production of urban space. Austin: University of Texas Press.

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BEYOND NEGATIVE RIGHTS: LIVING WITHOUT CERTAINTY, SOCIAL CHANGE AND THE POSSIBILITY OF POSTMODERN ETHICS Ann Neir Woodward INTRODUCTION Of all the aspects of theories that contain ‘‘postmodern sensibilities,’’ none seems to engender as much unease and resistance in its critics as the presumed celebration of moral deficit and the supposed debunking of ethical universalism. The charge of nihilism is usually traced back to a number of thinkers broadly associated with postmodern or poststructural theory. Nietzsche and his attempt to go ‘‘beyond good and evil,’’ as well as Foucault’s disdain for the centered epistemological subject, are frequently cited as examples of postmodern theory’s inability to grapple with the ubiquity of ethical issues, concerns for responsibility and the necessity of making moral valuations. While concerns for ethics do not appear, at first glance, as central issues, theory that is broadly associated with postmodernism is, I contend, often deeply aware of issues surrounding ethics and morality.

Social Theory as Politics in Knowledge Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Volume 23, 337–356 Copyright r 2005 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0278-1204/doi:10.1016/S0278-1204(05)23007-4

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For Nietzsche (1974 [1882], p. 285) we might uncover a deeper sense of morality by denying its absolutism and unsettling its ambiguous acceptance: ‘‘Thus nobody up to now has examined the value of that most famous of medicines which is called morality; and the first step would be – for once to put it in question. Well then, precisely this is our task’’. In later writings, Foucault (e.g., 1984a, 1984b, 1994, 1996) began to engage the connection between the self, ethics and politics. Remarking on the disjunction between ethics and any social institutional system, he states (1984e, p. 343) that ‘‘most of us no longer believe that ethics is founded in religion, nor do we want a legal system to intervene in our moral, personal, private life. Recent liberation movements suffer from the fact that they cannot find any principle on which to base the elaboration of a new ethics.’’ Elsewhere, he states (1988c, p. 43) that ‘‘I am a moralist, insofar as I believe that one of the tasks, one of the meanings of human existence – the source of human freedom – is never to accept anything as definitive, untouchable, obvious, or immobile.’’ If one had to single out the most common aspect of postmodern-inspired theory that relates to an engagement with ethics and the enabling of positive forms of critique, the likeliest theme would be the shared resistance to defining the ‘‘ethical’’ in terms of a system of norms, rules, laws or values, which can be secured through transcendental arguments and thus can be codified in a rigorous way. If the common theme is the denial of ethical universalism then, I argue, postmodern theory must more closely engage the connection between ethics and politics and, in particular, the ways in which contemporary theory can inform a wider revitalization of Leftist thought and action. Two issues guide my belief that postmodern theory, engaged in positive critique, has much to offer efforts to reinvigorate Leftist-inspired political action. The first is that postmodern theory’s emphasis upon difference and its suspicion of moral absolutism should be taken seriously in the contemporary period. By the same token, however, postmodern theory must begin to translate its critique into positive types of social change and become more attune to the ways in which difference is politicized in the real world. The second issue concerns the importance of historical context to contemporary assaults on rights, democracy and citizenship. A better use of historical study, I contend, can provide unique opportunities for various groups struggling for change to forge common linkages. Following a discussion of how postmodern theory can, by engaging in positive critique, revitalize the connection between theory and politics, I illustrate the importance of a better understanding of history to contemporary political movements for change. In particular, queer movements and

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struggles surrounding labor could begin to envision a stronger connection by historicizing their political initiatives in the context of the ascendancy of the New Right. The emergence of neo-conservative thought and action is highly relevant to both queer movements and to labor politics. I conclude with a brief discussion of why certain postmodern themes are important to issues concerning rights, democracy and citizenship.

TO BE OR NOT TO BEyA ‘‘POSTMODERN LEFTIST’’?: THAT IS THE QUESTION One development in contemporary theory and cultural criticism is the surge of interest in the idea of retaining ostensibly modern assumptions and categories in a postmodern context. While much of the discourse produced under the label ‘‘postmodernism’’ is profoundly skeptical toward the moral and political ideals of modernity, the Enlightenment and liberal democracy, there are also concomitant perspectives that are disenchanted with purely a ‘‘negative’’ critique. As Anderson (1998, p. 265) states, ‘‘a number of theorists have begun to reexamine universalism, asking how we might best combine the critique of partial or false universals with the pursuit of those emancipatory ideals associated with traditional universalism.’’1 Postmodern theory is in, I believe, a unique position to infuse discourses of fragmentation with a renewed sense of ethical possibilities. Part of this challenge necessarily entails interrogating whether postmodernism marks an eclipse of the ethical. As Slater (1997, p. 57) asks, ‘‘does a postmodern interruption mean that somehow we are living in an era characterized by the ‘twilight of duty’, the eclipse of the ethical, the implosion of the social, and the endless referral of any radical subversive positioning?’’ Several contemporary writers use postmodernism to discern the possibilities for retrieving the ability to make valuations without a transcendental or absolutist framework (Connor, 1992; Fekete, 1988; Plotnitsky, 1988; Sim, 1992; Smith, 1988; Renegger, 1995; Earnshaw, 1994; Burgass, 1994; White, 1991; May, 1995). It is critical, though, for postmodern theory to become aware of the connection between theory and politics and the necessity to reflect upon ethical issues and the ubiquity of moral valuations. As Wood (1999, p. 105) notes, ‘‘the importance of concepts to ethical life is not difficult to grasp. We owe to concepts like ‘justice,’ ‘rights,’ ‘duty,’ ‘virtue,’ ‘good,’ ‘responsibility’ and ‘obligation’ our very capacity for ethical judgement.’’2

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If postmodern theory is to more closely engage positive forms of critique and to inform a larger revitalization of Leftist thought and action, there are four important issues that must be brought to the forefront of contemporary theoretical debates. The first is that contemporary avowals to be ‘‘postmetaphysical’’ or ‘‘post-political’’ fail both theoretically and politically. Connolly (1997, p. 20), for example, aims his criticism at the ‘‘large and growing club in the academy that purports to move ‘beyond metaphysics,’ to be ‘post-metaphysical,’ to be ‘political, not metaphysical,’ or to be ‘postfoundational’.’’ Professing to be ‘‘post-metaphysical’’ fails theoretically because ‘‘of the constitutive ambiguity in the term metaphysics’’ and fails politically, he states (p. 21) because ‘‘academics are pretty much the only people in politics today who effect the post-metaphysical pretense in the name of practicality.’’ The second issue concerns the way in which discussions of the fragmentation of the subject or agent of change have enabled a shift of attention to issues of corporeality. There is a sense in postmodern theory where, according to Nicholson (1995, p. 44), ‘‘we associate the body’s increasing role in providing testimony to the nature of the self it houses.’’ There is a tendency to conceive of the body as essentially a passive, blank surface upon which power relations are inscribed (e.g., Halberstam & Livingston, 1995a, b; Grosz, 1992, 1994a, b; Haraway, 1990, 1991; Lowe, 1995; Mason, 1995). The problem, as McNay (1999, p. 97) notes, is that ‘‘the process of corporeal construction is considered in isolation from a notion of agency.’’ The critical concern for politics is that ‘‘the impression is given that identity is fully amenable to a process of self-stylization’’ (ibid.).3 If postmodern theory is to more closely inform the connection between ethics and politics, it is critical to maintain some focus upon a centered, epistemological subject capable of engaging in emancipatory politics. This does not mean an ‘‘essentialized’’ version of the subject, but rather illustrates the need for discussions of human corporeality to be more politically responsible. As one critic asks: ‘‘What happens to moral deliberation when the subject is construed corporeally? If there is something like a body-subject, how does it force a reconsideration of notions of freedom and responsibility?’’ (Wyschogrod, 1996, p. 54). The third issue that must be addressed concerns the singular focus upon ‘‘otherness’’ in postmodern theoretical perspectives. The willingness of some to focus almost exclusively upon issues of marginality is a result of the tendency in postmodern theory to privilege the ‘‘responsibility of otherness’’ over the ‘‘responsibility to act’’ (White, 1991). The singular focus upon otherness tends to obscure, rather than advance, contemporary politics. As

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Steiner and Helminski (1998, p. 3) state, ‘‘postmodernism has given us ‘Don’t marginalize the Other. Don’t negate their marginality’y . This formulation invokes a traditional dialectical synthesis which ultimately collapses into a familiar liberal metaphysics.’’ Donald (1992, p. 178), for example, asks that we ‘‘heed different, marginal, abnormal and transgressive voices’’ while simultaneously reminding us to ‘‘deflate claimsyto speak and even more, claims to speak for.’’ This represents a wider current in contemporary theory and the translation is that we must hear the marginalized but should not speak their language, for risk of demarginalization. As Cutrofello (1993, p. 106) suggests, the ‘‘next question after ‘How dare you speak for marginalized group x?’ is ‘How dare you speak for me, this particular individual’?’’ What starts out as an absolute commitment to otherness, he continues (ibid.), ends ‘‘in a degenerate affirmation of the isolated bourgeois individual, in short, a solipsistic Kantianism less compelling than the original.’’ The final issue concerns the necessity of postmodern perspectives to more closely discern the ways in which issues of ‘‘difference’’ are politicized in the real world of social policy. More specifically, one advance that postmodern theory is credited with is the raising of questions concerning identity and difference. Certainly, I contend, that because of the wider intellectual currents associated with postmodernism, numerous important themes have been raised concerning the conceptual salience of gender, race and ethnicity, sexuality, and so on. The next step is to discern the ways in which questions of subjectivity and identity lie at the heart of contemporary debates in social policy, which constructs discrimination as arising on the basis of ‘‘difference’’ – sexual, ethnic, bodily, gender, and so on. As O’Brien and Penna (1998, p. 123) state, ‘‘differences serve as the vehicles for the distribution of statuses, rights, entitlements, obligation, rewards and penalties: the social and political systems through which these distributions are routed constitute the inequalities that differences represent.’’ Typically, postmodern theorists see their critiques of universalism as ‘‘politicizing’’ the ubiquity of difference by illustrating the decentered nature of subjectivities. The critical issue that postmodern writers must confront is the way in which issues of ‘‘difference’’ are not merely theoretical but intimately connected to the empirical distribution of society’s rewards and penalties. ‘‘Differences are always fully politicised,’’ according to O’Brien and Penna (ibid.), ‘‘they are effects or dimensions of power relations, contesting in every particular arena of struggle for rights, benefits, etc., the ‘universality’ of individual needs and social identities.’’ While it is easy to ‘‘praise the hybridity of the postmodern migrant subject,’’ Zˇizˇek (1999)

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notes, postmodern theorists must distinguish between two sociopolitical levels of ‘‘difference.’’ On the one hand, there is ‘‘the cosmopolitan upper and upper-middle class academic, always with the proper visas enabling him or her to cross borders without any problemyand thus able to ‘enjoy the difference.’’’ On the other, there is ‘‘the poor (im)migrant worker driven from his home by poverty or violence, for whom the celebrated ‘hybridity’ designates a very tangible traumatic experience’’ (p. 220). Each of these concerns are important in an effort to enable postmodern theory to forge stronger political connections. Another critical issue concerns the importance of historical context. Queer movements and struggles associated with labor are rarely connected in the contemporary period. They are, however, much closer politically than either realize. While rights and protective initiatives for gays and lesbians are continually under attack, workers in this culture are more insecure now than in any previous historical moment. In order not only to better grasp the political failures of both queer movements and struggles for labor, and also to see potential connections between these groups, it is important, I contend, to historically contextualize each of these movements with a discussion of the rise of the New Right. Two cornerstones in the Right’s policy arsenal are an assault upon the working poor and an attack upon the rights of gays and lesbians. Following a brief discussion of the ascendancy of the New Right, I briefly illustrate the failures of both queer movements and also labor politics. In the former example, there is a tension between ‘‘aestheticized’’ politics and assimilationist initiatives, while in the latter example, labor, since the 1970s, has alienated itself from most Leftist and democratic politics and thus has been at the mercy of the Rights’ economic assault upon the working poor.

THE ‘‘NEW’’ POLITICS OF THE NEW RIGHT Miller’s statement in 1995 captures the importance of discerning the reemergence of conservative politics: ‘‘I could be over-interpreting but there’s a paranoid smell in the airysomething has shifted. They’re [the Right] idealising the storm-trooper in the name of liberty’’ (Ansell, 1997, p. 1). Over the course of the last two decades, political notions have underwent a shift to the right. This shift should be taken seriously in the contemporary period. As Ansell (p. 8) notes, ‘‘today the New Right is championing the growth of social inequality, accompanied by a new spirit of social meanness, which helps sustain the shift to a more authoritarian form of democracy.’’ Following a brief discussion of what constitutes the ‘‘New Right,’’ I focus

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upon their use of economic policy which targets both labor and the poor and their construction of antigay policy as a cornerstone of the ‘‘moral imperative’’ of conservative ideology. There are numerous commentators who illustrate the way in which the New Right has succeeded in setting the ideological agenda for social policy in the U.S. since the 1970s (e.g., Berlet, 1995; Bruce, 1990, 1994; Frum, 1994; Hoeveter, 1991; Jordon & Ashford, 1993; Ansell, 1996, 1997a, b; McAllister, 1996). There are two issues that are important in discussing the rise of conservative politics. Initially, many articulate the importance of interrogating the boundaries that are used to distinguish between extremist manifestations of the rightward shift and the seemingly more benign conservative cultural and political groups. While certainly there are differences between various groups broadly associated with the New Right, constructing ‘‘such a boundary obscures,’’ according to Ansell (1997b, p. 1), ‘‘the process by which liberalism itself is being highjacked by the so-called respectable right to serve an illiberal agenda; an agenda that is all the more poisonous because it is largely invisible or misrecognized.’’ I use the term ‘‘New Right’’ to refer to various organizations and to aggregates of individuals who share a particular worldview concerning economic liberalism and the ubiquity of traditional family values (see Ansell, 1998a, b; Smith, 1994a, b; Levinas, 1985, 1986a, b; Rogers, 1986; Crawford, 1980; Dorrien, 1993, 1998; Wolff, 1998; Diamond, 1989, 1998; Peele, 1984; Lienesch, 1998). The New Right espouses its policy prescriptions via several outlets ranging from think tanks, grassroots organizations, academic journals and public policy. The second issue that is important to a contemporary discussion of the rise of right-inspired thought and action concerns the twin events in history that laid the groundwork for a larger political shift. Many point both to the fall of communism and to the crisis of the economy in the 1970s as important elements to understand in light of the foothold that conservative politics has today (e.g., Noble, 1997; Himmelstein, 1990; Bowles et al., 1990; Kochan et al., 1986; Akard, 1992; Berman, 1994; Ferguson & Rogers, 1986; McQuaid, 1994; Edsall, 1984; Goldfield, 1987; Matusow, 1984). There are three issues in relation to the New Right that are particularly important to historicize in light of queer movements and labor politics. The first concerns the economic offensive of the Right since the 1970s. The Reagan Revolution of the 1980s consisted of a twin attack upon the nation’s poor and upon the working class. Reagan made no secret of his hostility to labor unions when he, in 1981, fired 11,000 striking air traffic controllers, and whittled away at such worker-protection policies and programs like the

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Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Jones, 1999; Frum, 1994; Skocpol, 1996; Steinmo & Watts, 1995; Brady & Buckley, 1995; Katz, 1986). Reagan’s plan to devolve social-welfare responsibilities to individual states is intimately connected to the assault upon labor (Gilens, 1999; Epstein, 1997; Fletcher, 1998; Noble, 1997; Wilcox, 1996; Cose, 1993; Feldman, 1988; Schier, 1992). The results, according to Jones (1999, p. 223) have been disastrous for workers with ‘‘the minimum wage in 1995 was twenty-five percent less than the minimum wage in 1967’’ and by the early 1990s, union membership only ‘‘constituted about fifteen percent of the workforce.’’ The second issue relates to the Right’s construction of antigay policy. Hostility toward gays and lesbians has been a consistent theme since the 1970s (Ansell, 1998a; Diamond, 1989, 1995, 1998; Herman, 1997a, b; Kaplan, 1997a, b; Phelan, 1997a; Smith, 1994a, 1998b; Hardisty, 1998). As Escoffier (1998, p. 8) notes, ‘‘now, instead of containing ‘the communist threat’, American conservatives seek to crush the ‘homosexual threat’ to America’s so-called traditional values.’’ Since the 1970s, the Right, sometimes referred to as the ‘‘Christian Right,’’ has made antigay activity central to its political practice and social vision. It is important to connect the rise of the Right to the widespread emergence of backlash against gay and lesbian rights. As Herman (1997a, p. 4) notes, ‘‘the more the lesbian and gay rights movement gathered momentum and achieved successes, the more disquiet of the orthodox increased.’’ Numerous books and videos, which are widely distributed, have emerged specifically dedicated to ‘‘identifying the gay threat’’ and calling Christian believers to arms (e.g., LaHaye, 1978; Rueda, 1982, 1987; Dannemeyer, 1998; McIlhenny et al., 1993; Grant & Horne, 1993; Dobson & Bauer, 1990). The final issue concerns the rise and consolidation of conservative sentiments in the university. The transfer of power initiated with Reagan’s election to the presidency in 1980, coincides with a certain conservativeinspired realignment of public policy and intellectual life. Behind this realignment lay an elite of conservative intellectuals, situated in foundations, journals and think tanks, and importantly, who are lavishly funded by major corporations (e.g., Murray, 1984, 1994; Kimball, 1991; Bennett, 1991, 1992, 1994; Brimelow, 1995; Henry, 1994; Williams, 1995; D’Souza, 1991, 1995; Keyes, 1995, 1996). The neoconservative analysis of the intellectual in recent American history owes its earliest formulation to Trilling, whose ideas were subsequently picked up by Bell (1973, 1984) and Kristol (1979, 1983). In the 1960s, Trilling (1965, p. 23) introduced the notion of an adversary culture in his dismay with his students’ willingness to engage in ‘‘the socialization of the anti-social, or the acculturation of the anti-cultural, or

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the legitimization of the subversive.’’ The work of Bloom (1988), who was profoundly influenced by Strauss (1950), represents the current conservative sentiment about the decline of university life and the subsequent abandoning of objectivity and truth. ‘‘The crisis of liberal education is,’’ he states (p. 346), ‘‘an intellectual crisis of the greatest magnitude, which constitutes the crisis of our civilization.’’

The Alienation of Labor Politics and the Ascendancy of the New Right Contextualizing labor politics with a discussion of the rise of the New Right is a critical exercise. A central concern is the necessity of connecting the Right’s assault on the welfare state with their attacks upon organized labor. For several decades, ‘‘welfare bashing’’ has been a popular staple of American politics. ‘‘The current welfare system,’’ Nixon proclaimed in 1971, ‘‘has become a monstrous, consuming outrage – an outrage against the community and against the taxpayer.’’ In 1977, Carter described welfare as ‘‘antiwork, anti-family, inequitable in its treatment of the poor and wasteful of taxpayers’ dollars.’’ Most recently, Clinton ran for office on the pledge to ‘‘end welfare as we know it.’’ Welfare as we know it, compared to other industrialized countries, is relatively small. As Noble (1997, p. 3) states, ‘‘after a hundred years of welfare-state building, Americans remain more vulnerable to the free play of market forces than do the people of nearly every other rich capitalist country.’’ Many commentators point to America’s failure to provide government-guaranteed health care, as well as the general treatment of the poor, as indicators of the relative insecurity offered by state assistance (Mishel & Schmitt, 1996; Smeeding, 1992; White, 1995; Schafer & Faux, 1996; Weir, 1992; Amenta, 1993; Peterson, 1996; DuBoff, 1996). In order to understand the ‘‘gutting’’ of the welfare state since the 1970s, it is necessary to discern the position of labor and the emergence of conservative economic policy. More specifically, as the economic crisis of the 1970s sharpened, both organized labor and the presumed ‘‘bloated’’ welfare-state, were seen as the primary obstacles to U.S. competitiveness. The political mobilization of the business community beginning in the 1970s, and its effort to restrain social spending and cut taxes, must be seen in the context of the precipitous decline of organized labor (Gordon, 1994; Brinkley, 1995; Orloff, 1988, 1993; Ross, 1993; Kahn & Kemmerman, 1993). Labor’s political power ebbed for two reasons. Initially, union membership declined. As Noble (1997, p. 109) states, ‘‘for the first time since the 1930s,

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the overall number of workers in unions actually began to fall: from 22.4 million in 1979–1980 to 17 million in 1987–1988. By 1994, less than 15% of the civilian labor force was unionized, compared with nearly 35% just forty years earlier.’’ This is an important historical moment toward understanding the failure of labor politics. During the 1980s, the height of the turn toward conservative policy, labor’s actual numbers declined dramatically. The second reason for the decline and failure of labor politics concerns labor’s alienation from various democratic and left-inspired movements for change. By focusing attention upon already unionized workers and failing to support the chronically unemployed and underemployed, labor acted on behalf of capital more often than in the interest of real workers (Battista, 1999; Freeman & Katz, 1995; Fraser & Freeman, 1997; Fletcher, 1997; Gilens, 1999; Piven, 1997a, b; Piven & Cloward, 1997a, b; Blackwell, 1997). The alienation of labor beginning in the 1960s from nearly every major social movement on the left, including the civil-rights, antiwar, and feminist movements, helped to lay the conditions that the political right was able to manipulate around ‘‘welfare reform’’ (Drew, 1996; Beito, 1997; Paul, 1997; Pierson, 1994; Levine, 1988; Palmer, 1986; Johnson & Broder, 1996). As Fletcher (1997, p. 127) states, ‘‘given the extent to which sections of organized labor perceived the poor as ‘them’ or the ‘other’, to the extent to which sections of organized labor perceived community-based organizations doing workers’ rights and economic justice work as interlopers or disruptive, it should come as no surprise that our own house was divided in its approach to these mean-spirited initiatives.’’ Given labor’s historic alienation from leftist politics, it has neither been able to encourage wider initiatives on behalf of all workers nor has it been able or willing to organize against contemporary efforts at retrenchment. The draconian provisions incorporated into welfare reform in 1996, such as cutbacks in public assistance and mandatory work requirements for welfare recipients, have proceeded largely unrecognized by organized labor.

Queer Politics in an Antigay Atmosphere A cornerstone in the policy of the New Right concerns the assault upon gays and lesbians. Just as the working poor are seen as an obstacle to economic growth, gays and lesbians are seen to threaten the very fiber of the traditional American family. While contextualizing the failure of labor politics in the rise of the New Right sheds light upon how struggles for workers are alienated from other progressive movements, similarly, contemporary queer

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politics could benefit from a closer look at the emergence and consolidation of conservative ideology. The two main strands of politics, both ‘‘aestheticized’’ visibility and assimilationist initiatives, have been unable to challenge the dominance of right-inspired antigay policies. The first type of politics concerns a process of ‘‘making visible’’ the struggle for queer acceptance (Crimp, 1992; Bower, 1997; Smith, 1993; Duggan & Hunter, 1995; Cohen, 1998; Barnard, 1996; Herrell, 1993). As Walker (1993, p. 868) notes, ‘‘privileging visibility has become a tactic of late-twentieth identity politics, in which participants often symbolize their demands for social justice by celebrating visual signifiers of difference that have historically targeted them for discrimination.’’ The emergence of ‘‘Queer Nation’’ exemplifies a form of politics that, rather than prioritizing the demand for legal recognition, views the articulation of identity as a political project in itself (Woods, 1995; Chee, 1991; Berlant & Freeman, 1993; Berlant, 1991, 1997). From ‘‘die-ins’’ to tactics such as ‘‘Queer Nights Out’’ and ‘‘Queer Shopping Network,’’ the dominant form of politics in this context is ‘‘aesthetic.’’ Thus queer, as a site of collective contestation is, according to Butler (1993, p. 228), in the present, never fully owned, but always redeployed, twisted, ‘queered’ from prior usage and in the direction of urgent and expanding political purposes.’’ One issue that is important to consider is the extent to which these ‘‘campaigns’’ assume queer identity is like an ‘‘aesthetic lifestyle,’’ whereby gays are ‘‘accepted’’ as consuming rather than as social subjects (Clark, 1991; Fraser, 1999b; O’’Sullivan, 1994; Blasius, 1994; Duggan, 1992; Zimmerman, 1993; Abelove, 1993; Be´rube & Escoffier, 1991; Schwartz, 1990). In particular, several critics of ‘‘aestheticized’’ politics raise salient concerns about the implications of construing queer identity as purely performative (e.g., Norton, 1997; Phelan, 1993; Escoffier, 1991, 1998; Martins, 1998; Tyler, 1998; Thomas, 1995). Hennessey (1995, p. 150), for example, notes that ‘‘queer theory too, like queer activism, reduces the question of social change to that of cultural representation.’’ The central issue is whether an emphasis upon ‘‘aestheticized’’ politics can adequately challenge the larger sociopolitical arena where the struggle for rights is constantly under attack. The ‘‘American mythos’’ of queer activism, according to critics, fits particularly well with ‘‘lifestylization’’ insofar as both imply that there is no aspect of the self which cannot in some way be altered or ‘‘overcome’’ if the subject chooses (Rayside, 1998; Epstein, 1999; Clark, 1991; Cottingham, 1996; Fraser, 1999a, b; Lury, 1997, 1998; Tyler, 1994). Clark (1991), in her analysis of the commodification of gay identities, suggests that (life)stylization ‘‘promotes a liberal discourse of choice that

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separates sexuality from politics and connects them both to consumerism’’ (p. 193). While visibility is important, if the main emphasis is ‘‘aesthetic,’’ the central question becomes whether this type of politics confronts the Right’s antigay agenda. As Sedgewick (1994, p. 226) explains, the notion that we can choose whatever sexual identity we want to be has facilitated the right-wing prescription that ‘‘gays who wish to share in human rights and dignities must (and can) make the free-market choice of becoming ex-gays.’’ The other political strand of thought addresses the gap between contemporary queer perspectives and the practicalities of political engagement (e.g., Cooper, 1993; Neu, 1998; Kaplan, 1991, 1997; Mohr, 1990; Jeffreys, 1991). ‘‘Formal political culture,’’ according to Mort (1994, p. 220), ‘‘is still almost exclusively organised around fixed epistemologies,’’ thus it is necessary ‘‘to inject a more urgent sense of the political realities into the pluralist project.’’ Echoing Mort’s challenge, many current activists raise critical questions concerning liberal rights discourse and the demanding of the same rights as heterosexuals (e.g., Smith, 1994a, 1997, 1998; Herman, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1997a; Salokar, 1997; Eeham & Hagland, 1997; Wilson, 1993; Bristow & Wilson, 1993; Currah, 1995; Weeks, 1995). While more directly challenging the conservative assault upon the rights of gays and lesbians, assimilationist-type politics has been subject to critique. The implication that a queer must have ‘‘their identity papers in order’’ in order to claim legitimacy in the public realm of rights and citizenship is particularly problematic in light of the Right’s antigay agenda (Phelan, 1994, 1997a; Herman, 1997b; Stychins, 1995, 1996a, b, c, d; Halley, 1991, 1993a, 1994). The dilemma of ‘‘having one’s identity papers in order’’ is that in accepting the essentialization of personal identity, queers also accept the inferior status that this identity assigns them in the heterohomosexual binary (Seidman, 1997; Phelan, 1994; Stychin, 1998). The seeking of state protection is evidence of present social and political inferiority and carries with it wider implications. As Lehring (1997, p. 193) notes, ‘‘in the struggle for equal rights, equality is defined by the superior partner in the dichotomy; in short, equality means sameness.’’ The central implication is that by demanding the same rights as heterosexuals, in requesting integration into various social institutions such as family and marriage, ‘‘nothing is done to change the process by which difference was constructed in the first place, leaving intact the cultural and social institutions which produce ‘otherness’’’ (ibid.). Herman (1994, p. 148) similarly states that ‘‘when we argue for rights as a fixed ‘minority’ywe simultaneously imply that our demands ‘stop here’.’’ The difficulty, according to Herman, is that ‘‘these hierarchies are reproduced within lesbian and gay communities’’ (ibid).

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The central issue with asserting an essentialized minority identity is that any rights garnered in the process can only be construed as ‘‘negative.’’ The central implication is that in the struggle for negative rights, gays and lesbians are less able to envision connections to other groups struggling for change. In this context, lesbians and gays, according to Stychin (1998, p. 13), ‘‘attempt in various ways to construct themselves as ‘good’ citizens; in the United States, for example, they are capable of being good soldiers and good CIA agents – that is, ‘normal’ citizens.’’ As important as this integrationist logic is, there are wider implications of using the traditional language and processes of liberal rights claims. ‘‘The claims of excluded minorities,’’ according to Weeks (1995, p. 120) ‘‘of equality of domestic arrangements, or of equal rights under the lawyare essentially negative claims: freedom from interference from and discrimination by the law on the grounds of equal status.’’ The implication is that, in demanding negative freedoms, queer perspectives do not in the process engage wider elements of marginalization within their own communities and are unable to forge alliances with other groups struggling for wider social change.

BEYOND NEGATIVE RIGHTS The use of assimilationist-type politics by gays and lesbians raises several important issues not only about queer politics in the contemporary period but also about the position many groups find themselves in as a result of conservative policies. A focus on both labor struggles and queer politics provides a unique opportunity to discern possible linkages between movements enacting wider social change. One reason I see the connection between labor and gay identity as important to a revitalization of Leftist thought and action is that each of these ‘‘movements’’ are frequently pitted against one another in the contemporary period. Those on the Left who are critical of postmodern theory and the use of cultural criticism are concomitantly critical of privileging sexuality over other political concerns. Similarly, issues concerning labor more generally are not central to contemporary queer perspectives. More historical study is needed, I contend, in order to forge a stronger connection between groups acting on behalf of labor and movements that seek wider social and political entitlements based on queer sexuality. The common historical context for each of these movements is the emergence and consolidation of New Right politics. Those on the Right not only see the working poor as an affront to US hegemony, but also see gays and

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lesbians, and any other non-normative sexual identity, as an assault upon the values of traditional family. In the case of labor, the Right has been able to manipulate groups by pitting the working class against any other groups struggling economically to survive. At this point, labor is about the furthest it can be from engaging in wider leftist politics. In the case of contemporary queer politics, both ‘‘aestheticized’’ visibility and assimilationist-type initiatives have been unable to mount a wider attack upon the Right’s antigay agenda. In the case of the former, a focus upon queer identity as merely ‘‘lifestyle’’ feeds into the conservative thinking that one can choose ‘‘to be or not to be’’ gay. In the case of the former, while challenging conservative policy on a wider scale, seeking only integration into the heterosexist mainstream does not transform dominant ideologies that construe gay identity as deviant in the first place. The wider implication for contemporary Leftist thought and action is that in both cases, by narrowly construing their political demands, the tendency is to seek only negative rights. There are several issues confronting the Left that require attention. While there is an interest in renewing notions of citizenship in the contemporary period (e.g., Twine, 1994; Culpitt, 1992; Mohr, 1998; Grattet, 1998; Espinosa, 1998; Andrews, 1991; Miller, 1993, 1998a, b) and the potentiality of radical democratic issues to connect various groups engaging in wider social change (e.g., Connell, 1996; Squire, 1998; Howard, 1996; Young, 1986, 1989, 1990, 1993, 1997; Notermas, 1997; Low, 1997), in order for these issues to possess real political potential, there must be a greater emphasis upon historicization. An additional issue to confront is possible ways to connect social-welfare to identity politics. Often the welfare state is seen at odds with identity politics and vice versa. This is part of the larger struggle on the Left between issues of recognition and issues of redistribution or what is frequently termed the difference between concerns for culture and an emphasis upon political economy. Finally, I do believe that postmodern perspectives can participate meaningfully in the revitalization of Leftist thought and action. The key is that postmodern theory must ground itself in the realm of actually existing politics and better grasp the ways in which ‘‘difference’’ in the real world determines ‘‘who gets what and why.’’

NOTES 1. This also highlights the importance of intellectual history. There are several modern or classical perspectives that influence present day thinking about morality

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and ethics. Since Aristotle’s (1966) criticism of Plato’s theory of the good and of the ideal state and since Hegel’s (1971, 1977) critique Kantian ethics, formalist and universalist ethical and moral theories have been continuously challenged. The limitations of Kantian ethics and the implications of construing freedom as transcendental were central issues for early critical theorists (Marcuse [1934]1988, [1936]1983, [1937a]1988, [1937b]1988; Horkheimer [1933]1993, [1935b]1993, [1936b]1993). Uncovering the darker side of the liberal ideals of economic growth and scientific progress, as well as the loss of democratic practices in the wake of repression, were important considerations in their interrogation of the absolutism in morality and ethical, valuation (Adorno & Horkheimer [1947a]1972, [1947b]1972; Adorno, 1950a, [1950c]1993; Horkheimer [1936a]1995). Arendt (1951, 1958, 1977, 1982) was similarly concerned with rethinking transcendental ethics and sought to reformulate Kant’s notion of ‘‘enlarged thought’’ to capture the ways in which a person moves from a narrowly subjective perspective to a socially inclusive view. Issues of moral reasoning and universalizability in post-Kantian ethics have remained central to moral philosophers in the postwar era (e.g., Baier, 1965; Gewirth, 1978; Hare, 1963; Singer, 1961; Toulmin, 1953). 2. Some use the collapse of grand narratives and the failure of value-neutral objectivity in the human sciences to raise concerns about the epistemological grounding in science and theory (e.g., Allen, 1993; Harding, 1991, 1992; Proctor, 1991; Longino, 1990; Crook, 1991; Rouse, 1991a, b, 1996). In this context, issues of reflexivity, rhetoric and meaning-making practices are central themes (e.g., Woolgar, 1988; Billig, 1996; Myerson, 1994; Roberts & Good, 1993; Bruner, 1990; Harre´ & Gillett, 1994). Other contemporary writers attempt to discern whether postmodernism marks an eclipse of the ethical (e.g., Slater, 1997; Cooke, 1997; Skinner, 1991, 1992; Honneth, 1991; Dussel, 1991, 1995, 1997; Small, 1996; Stevenson, 1997; Kearney, 1999; Steiner & Helminski, 1998; Martins, 1998; Linklater, 1998). 3. The shift toward postmodern corporeality is an example of the Enlightenment project par excellence. As Wang (1998, p. 96) notes, ‘‘the emergence of the postmodern politics of the ‘body’ does not constitute a paradigm shift away from the Enlightenment doctrine of the ‘senses’ but indicates the culmination of the development of such a doctrine.’’ In the shift toward human corporeality, not only is the Cartesian split between mind and body maintained, but the move from bodily fragmentation to actual politics is problematic.

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