Classical Soc Theory Eval

Notes on the Editors xiAcknowledgments xii

Introduction 1

Part I Micro-Sociological Analysis 25

Introduction to Part I 27 1 The Phenomenology of the Social World

(from The Phenomenology of the Social World) 35 Alfred Schutz 2 The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

(from The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life) 46 Erving Goffman 3 Symbolic Interactionism (from Symbolic Interactionism:

Perspective and Method) 62 Herbert Blumer 4 “Interaction Ritual Chains” (from Interaction Ritual Chains) 75 Randall Collins

Part II Exchange and Rationality 91

Introduction to Part II 93 5 Social Behavior as Exchange

(from American Journal of Sociology) 100 George C. Homans

Contents

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vi Contents

6 Exchange and Power in Social Life (from Exchange and Power in Social Life) 112 Peter M. Blau 7 The Logic of Collective Action (from The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups) 124 Mancur Olson 8 A Theory of Group Solidarity (from Principles of Group Solidarity) 129 Michael Hechter 9 Cooperation without Law or Trust (from Cooperation without Trust?) 142 Karen S. Cook, Russell Hardin, and Margaret Levi

Part III Institutions and Networks 157

Introduction to Part III 15910 Economic Embeddedness (from “Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness”) 165 Mark Granovetter11 The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism

and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields(from “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields”) 175

Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell12 Catnets (from Notes on the Constituents of Social Structure) 193 Harrison White13 Structural Holes (from Stuctural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition) 204 Ronald S. Burt

Part IV Power and Inequality 221

Introduction to Part IV 22314 The Power Elite (from The Power Elite) 229 C. Wright Mills15 On Hegemony (from Selections From the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci) 237 Antonio Gramsci16 Coercion, Capital, and European States (from Coercion, Capital and European States, AD 990–1990) 251 Charles Tilly17 Power: A Radical View (from Power: A Radical View) 266 Steven Lukes

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Contents vii

18 State, Society and Modern History (from The Nation-State and Violence Volume Two of A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism) 277 Anthony Giddens

Part V The Sociological Theory of Michel Foucault 287

Introduction to Part V 28919 The History of Sexuality (from The History of Sexuality, vol. I: An Introduction) 295 Michel Foucault20 Truth and Power (from Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977) 305 Michel Foucault21 Discipline and Punish (from Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison) 314 Michel Foucault

Part VI The Sociological Theory of Pierre Bourdieu 323

Introduction to Part VI 32522 Social Space and Symbolic Space (from “Social Space and Symbolic Space: Introduction to a Japanese Reading of Distinction”) 335 Pierre Bourdieu23 Structures, Habitus, Practices (from The Logic of Practice) 345 Pierre Bourdieu24 The Field of Cultural Production, or:

The Economic World Reversed (from Poetics) 359 Pierre Bourdieu25 Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure

of the Bureaucratic Field (from Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field) 375

Pierre Bourdieu

Part VII Race, Gender, Difference 387

Introduction to Part VII 38926 The Conceptual Practices of Power (from The Conceptual Practices of Power: A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge) 398 Dorothy E. Smith27 Black Feminist Epistemology (from Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment) 407 Patricia Hill Collins

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viii Contents

28 Black Skin, White Masks (from Black Skin, White Masks) 417 Frantz Fanon29 The Paradoxes of Integration (from The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America’s “Racial” Crisis) 426 Orlando Patterson

Part VIII Sociological Theory of Jürgen Habermas 435

Introduction to Part VIII 43730 Modernity: An Unfinished Project (from Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity) 444 Jürgen Habermas31 The Rationalization of the Lifeworld (from The Theory of Communicative Action Volume 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason) 451 Jürgen Habermas32 Civil Society and the Political Public Sphere (from Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy) 469 Jürgen Habermas

Part IX Modernity 491

Introduction to Part IX 49333 The Social Constraint towards Self-Constraint (from The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization) 499 Norbert Elias34 Modernity and the Holocaust

(from Modernity and the Holocaust) 510 Zygmunt Bauman35 The Consequences of Modernity (from The Consequences of Modernity) 531 Anthony Giddens36 We Have Never Been Modern (from We Have Never Been Modern) 546 Bruno Latour

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Contents ix

Part X Crisis and Change 561

Introduction to Part X 56337 Systemic and Antisystemic Crises (from Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century) 569 Giovanni Arrighi38 Reconfiguring Territory, Authority, and Rights (from Territory. Authority. Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages) 579 Saskia Sassen39 The Modern World-System in Crisis (from World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction) 587 Immanuel Wallerstein

Index 000

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Contemporary Sociological Theory, Third Edition. Edited by Craig Calhoun, Joseph Gerteis, James Moody, Steven Pfaff, and Indermohan Virk. Editorial material and organization© 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Chapter 1

The Phenomenology of the Social World* [1932]Alfred Schutz

The Ambiguities in the Ordinary Notion of Understanding the Other Person

Before we proceed further, it would be well to note that there are ambiguities in the ordinary notion of understanding another person. Sometimes what is meant is intentional Acts directed toward the other self; in other words, my lived experiences of you. At other times what is in question is your subjective experiences. Then, the arrangements of all such experiences into meaning-contexts (Weber’s comprehension of intended meaning) is sometimes called “understanding of the other self,” as is the classification of others’ behavior into motivation contexts. The number of ambiguities associated with the notion of “understanding another person” becomes even greater when we bring in the question of understanding the signs he is using. On the one hand, what is understood is the sign itself, then again what the other person means by using this sign, and finally the significance of the fact that he is using the sign, here, now, and in this particular context. [. . .]

Alfred Schutz, “The Phenomenology of the Social World,” pp. 107, 113–16, 126–36 from Albert Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967. Copyright © 1967. Reprinted by permission of Northwestern University Press.

* Originally translated by George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert.

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36 Alfred Schutz

The Nature of Genuine Intersubjective Understanding

Having established that all genuine understanding of the other person must start out from Acts of explication performed by the observer on his own lived experience, we must now proceed to a precise analysis of this genuine understanding itself. From the examples we have already given, it is clear that our inquiry must take two different directions. First we must study the genuine understanding of actions which are performed without any communicative intent. The action of the woodcutter would be a good example. Second we would examine cases where such communicative intent was present. The latter type of action involves a whole new dimension, the using and interpreting of signs.

Let us first take actions performed without any communicative intent. We are watching a man in the act of cutting wood and wondering what is going on in his mind. Questioning him is ruled out, because that would require entering into a social relationship with him, which in turn would involve the use of signs.

Let us further suppose that we know nothing about our woodcutter except what we see before our eyes. By subjecting our own perceptions to interpretation, we know that we are in the presence of a fellow human being and that his bodily movements indicate he is engaged in an action which we recognize as that of cutting wood.

Now how do we know what is going on in the woodcutter’s mind? Taking this interpretation of our own perceptual data as a starting point, we can plot out in our mind’s eye exactly how we would carry out the action in question. Then we can actually imagine ourselves doing so. In cases like this, then, we project the other person’s goal as if it were our own and fancy ourselves carrying it out. Observe also that we here project the action in the future perfect tense as completed and that our imagined execution of the action is accompanied by the usual retentions and reproductions of the project, although, of course, only in fancy. Further, let us note that the imagined execution may fulfill or fail to fulfill the imagined project.

Or, instead of imagining for ourselves an action wherein we carry out the other person’s goal, we may recall in concrete detail how we once carried out a similar action ourselves. Such a procedure would be merely a variation on the same principle.

In both these cases, we put ourselves in the place of the actor and identify our lived experiences with his. It might seem that we are here repeating the error of the well-known “projective” theory of empathy. For here we are reading our own lived experiences into the other person’s mind and are therefore only discovering our own experiences. But, if we look more closely, we will see that our theory has nothing in common with the empathy theory except for one point. This is the general thesis of the Thou as the “other I,” the one whose experiences are constituted in the same fashion as mine. But even this similarity is only apparent, for we start out from the general thesis of the other person’s flow of duration, while the projective theory of empathy jumps from the mere fact of empathy to the belief in other minds by an act of blind faith. Our theory only brings out the implications of what is already present


The Phenomenology of the Social World 37

in the self-explicative judgment “I am experiencing a fellow human being.” We know with certainty that the other person’s subjective experience of his own action is in principle different from our own imagined picture of what we would do in the same situation. The reason, as we have already pointed out, is that the intended meaning of an action is always in principle subjective and accessible only to the actor. The error in the empathy theory is twofold. First, it naïvely tries to trace back the constitution of the other self within the ego’s consciousness to empathy, so that the latter becomes the direct source of knowledge of the other. Actually, such a task of discovering the constitution of the other self can only be carried out in a transcendentally phenomenological manner. Second, it pretends to a knowledge of the other person’s mind that goes far beyond the establishment of a structural parallelism between that mind and my own. In fact, however, when we are dealing with actions having no communicative intent, all that we can assert about their meaning is already contained in the general thesis of the alter ego.

It is clear, then, that we imaginatively project the in-order-to motive of the other person as if it were our own and then use the fancied carrying-out of such an action as a scheme in which to interpret his lived experiences. However, to prevent misunderstanding, it should be added that what is involved here is only a reflective analysis of another person’s completed act. It is an interpretation carried out after the fact. When an observer is directly watching someone else to whom he is attuned in simultaneity, the situation is different. Then the observer’s living intentionality carries him along without having to make constant playbacks of his own past or imaginary experiences. The other person’s action unfolds step by step before his eyes. In such a situation, the identification of the observer with the observed person is not carried out by starting with the goal of the act as already given and then proceeding to reconstruct the lived experiences which must have accompanied it. Instead, the observer keeps pace, as it were, with each step of the observed person’s action, identifying himself with the latter’s experiences within a common “we-relationship.” We shall have much more to say about this later.

So far we have assumed the other person’s bodily movement as the only datum given to the observer. It must be emphasized that, if the bodily movement is taken by itself in this way, it is necessarily isolated from its place within the stream of the observed person’s living experience. And this context is important not only to the observed person but to the observer as well. He can, of course, if he lacks other data, take a mental snapshot of the observed bodily movement and then try to fit it into a fantasied filmstrip in accordance with the way he thinks he would act and feel in a similar situation. However, the observer can draw much more reliable conclusions about his subject if he knows something about his past and something about the overall plan into which this action fits. To come back to Max Weber’s example, it would be important for the observer to know whether the woodcutter was at his regular job or just chopping wood for physical exercise. An adequate model of the observed person’s subjective experiences calls for just this wider context. We have already seen, indeed, that the unity of the action is a function of the project’s span. From the observed bodily movement, all the observer can infer is the single course


38 Alfred Schutz

of action which has directly led to it. If, however, I as the observer wish to avoid an inadequate interpretation of what I see another person doing, I must “make my own” all those meaning-contexts which make sense of this action on the basis of my past knowledge of this particular person. We shall come back later on to this concept of “inadequacy” and show its significance for the theory of the understanding of the other person.

Meaning-Establishment and Meaning-Interpretation

We have now seen that the sign has two different functions. First it has a significative function. By this we mean that it can be ordered by an interpreter within a previously learned sign system of his own. What he is doing here is interpreting the sign as an item of his own experience. His act is just another example of what we call self-interpretation. But there is a second kind of interpretation in which he can engage. He can inquire into the subjective and occasional meaning of the sign, in short, the expressive function which it acquires within the context of discourse. This subjective meaning can be his own, in which case he must go back in memory to the experiences he had at the moment of using the sign and establishing its meaning. Or it can be someone else’s, in which case he must try to find out about the other person’s subjective experiences when he used the sign. But in any case, when interpreting signs used by others, we will find two components involved, the objective and the subjective. Objective meaning is the meaning of the sign as such, the kernel, so to speak; whereas subjective meaning is the fringe or aura emanating from the subjective context in the mind of the sign-user.

Let us take a conversation between two people as an example. As one person speaks, thoughts are building up in his mind, and his listener is following him every step of the way just as the thoughts occur. In other words, none of the thoughts comes out as prefabricated unities. They are constructed gradually, and they are interpreted gradually. Both speaker and listener live through the conversation in such a manner that on each side Acts of meaning-establishment or meaning- interpretation are filled in and shaded with memories of what has been said and anticipations of what is yet to be said. Each of these Acts can in turn be focused upon introspectively and analyzed as a unit in itself. The meaning of the speaker’s discourse consists for him and for his listener in his individual sentences and these, in turn, in their component words as they come, one after another. The sentences for both of them serve as the meaning-contexts of the words, and the whole discourse as the meaning-context of the separate sentences.

Understanding the conscious Acts of another person who is communicating by means of signs does not differ in principle from understanding his other Acts. Like the latter, it occurs in the mode of simultaneity or quasi-simultaneity. The interpreter puts himself in the place of the other person and imagines that he himself is selecting and using the signs. He interprets the other person’s subjective meaning as if it were his own. In the process he draws upon his whole personal knowledge of the speaker, especially the latter’s ways and habits of expressing himself. Such personal knowledge continues to build itself up in the course of a conversation.



The same process goes on in the mind of the speaker. His words will be selected with a view to being understood by his listener. And the meaning he seeks to get across will not only be objective meaning, for he will seek to communicate his personal attitude as well. He will sketch out his communicative aim in the future perfect tense, just as he does the project of any other act. His choice of words will depend on the habits he has built up in interpreting the words of others, but it will, of course, also be influenced by his knowledge of his listener.

However, if the speaker is focused on what is going on in the mind of his listener, his knowledge of the latter is still quite uncertain. He can only estimate how much he is actually getting across. Any such estimate is necessarily vague, especially considering the fact that the listener’s interpretation is always subsequent to the choice of words and fulfills or fails to fulfill the speaker’s project in making that choice.

The listener is in a different position. For him the actual establishment of the meaning of the words has already occurred. He can start out with the objective meaning of the words he has heard and from there try to discover the subjective meaning of the speaker. In order to arrive at that subjective meaning, he imagines the project which the speaker must have had in mind. However, this picturing of the project starts out from the speaker’s already spoken words. Contrary to the case of the speaker who is picturing something future on the basis of something present, the listener is picturing something pluperfect on the basis of something past. Another difference is that he is starting from words which have either succeeded or failed in fulfilling the speaker’s project, and he is trying to uncover that project. The speaker, on the other hand, starts out with his own project as datum and tries to estimate whether it is going to be fulfilled by the listener’s future interpretation.

Now since the words chosen by the speaker may or may not express his meaning, the listener can always doubt whether he is understanding the speaker adequately. The project of the speaker is always a matter of imaginative reconstruction for his interpreter and so is attended by a certain vagueness and uncertainty.

To illustrate what we mean, consider the fact that, in a conversation, thoughts like the following may run through the heads of the participants. The person about to speak will say to himself, “Assuming that this fellow speaks my kind of language, I must use such and such words.” A moment later his listener will be saying to himself, “If this other fellow is using words the way I understand them, then he must be telling me such and such.” The first statement shows how the speaker always chooses his words with the listener’s interpretation in mind. The second statement shows how the listener always interprets with the speaker’s subjective meaning in mind. In either case an intentional reference to the other person’s scheme is involved, regardless of whether the scheme is interpretive or expressive.

As the speaker chooses his words, he uses, of course, his own interpretive scheme. This depends partly upon the way he himself usually interprets words and partly upon his knowledge of his listener’s interpretive habits. When I read over a letter I have written to someone, I tend to interpret it just as if I were the receiver and not the sender. Now, my purpose in writing the letter was not merely to communicate an objective meaning to the reader but my subjective meaning as well. To put it in


40 Alfred Schutz

another way, I want him to rethink my thoughts. It may very well be, therefore, that when I read over my letter I shall decide that it falls short of this purpose. Knowing the person to whom I am writing and knowing his customary reactions to certain words and phrases, I may decide that this or that expression is open to misinterpretation or that he will not really be in a position to understand this or that thought of mine. Or I may fear that he will, as he reads, miss the point I am trying to make due to some subjective bias or some failure of attention on his part.

On the other hand, the recipient of the letter can carry out the opposite process. He can take a sentence and imagine that he himself wrote it. He can try to reconstruct the intention of the writer by guessing at some possible intentions and then comparing them with the actual propositional content of the sentence. He may conclude, “I see what he was trying to say, but he really missed his mark and said something else. If I had been he, I should have put it in such and such a way.” Or the reader may say to himself instead, “My friend always uses that term in an odd way, but I see what he means, since I know the way he thinks. It’s lucky that I am the one reading the letter. A third party would have been thrown off the track entirely at this point.” In the last case, the reader really carries out a threefold interpretation. First, he interprets the sentence objectively on the basis of his ordinary habits of interpretation. Second, from his knowledge of the writer, he reconstructs what must be the latter’s real meaning. Third, he imagines how the ordinary reader would understand the sentence in question.

These considerations hold true quite generally for all cases in which signs are either used or interpreted. This being the case, it ought to be clear that in interpreting the subjective meaning of the signs used by someone else, or in anticipating someone else’s interpretation of the subjective meaning of our own signs, we must be guided by our knowledge of that person. Naturally, therefore, the degree of intimacy or anonymity in which the person stands to us will have a great deal to do with the matter. The examples we have just used were all cases where knowledge of the other person was derived from direct contact; they belong to what we call the domain of directly experienced social reality. However, the use and interpretation of signs are to be found in the other areas of social life as well, such as the worlds of contemporaries and of predecessors, where direct knowledge of the people with whom we are dealing is minimal or even absent. Our theory of the establishment and interpretation of the meaning of signs will naturally undergo various modifications as it is applied to these areas. Even in the direct social relations we have used as examples, it was obviously impossible for the participants to “carry out the postulate of grasping each other’s intended meaning,” a point that we discussed earlier. The subjective meaning that the interpreter does grasp is at best an approximation to the sign-user’s intended meaning, but never that meaning itself, for one’s knowledge of another person’s perspective is always necessarily limited. For exactly the same reason, the person who expresses himself in signs is never quite sure of how he is being understood.

What we have been discussing is the content of communication. But we must remember that the actual communicating is itself a meaningful act and that we must interpret that act and the way it is done as things in their own right.



The Meaning-Context of Communication. Recapitulation

Once the interpreter has determined both the objective and subjective meanings of the content of any communication, he may proceed to ask why the communication was made in the first place. He is then seeking the in-order-to motive of the person communicating. For it is essential to every act of communication that it have an extrinsic goal. When I say something to you, I do so for a reason, whether to evoke a particular attitude on your part or simply to explain something to you. Every act of communication has, therefore, as its in-order-to motive the aim that the person being addressed take cognizance of it in one way or another.

The person who is the object or recipient of the communication is frequently the one who makes this kind of interpretation. Having settled what are the objective and subjective meanings of the content of the communication by finding the corresponding interpretive or expressive schemes, he proceeds to inquire into the reason why the other person said this in the first place. In short, he seeks the “plan” behind the communication.

However, the seeker of the in-order-to motive need not be the person addressed at all. A nonparticipant observer may proceed to the same kind of interpretation. I can, indeed I must, seek the in-order-to motive of the communication if I am ever to know the goal toward which the communication is leading. Furthermore, it is self-evident that one can seek the in-order-to motives even of those acts of other people which have no communicative intent. What an actor’s subjective experience actually is we can only grasp if we find his in-order-to motive. We must first light upon his project and then engage in a play-by-play fantasy of the action which would fulfill it. In the case of action without communicative intent, the completed act itself is properly interpreted as the fulfillment of the in-order-to motive. However, if I happen to know that the completed act is only a link in a chain of means leading to a further end, then what I must do is interpret the subjective experiences the other person has of that further goal itself.

Now, we have already seen that we can go beyond the in-order-to motive and seek out the because-motive. Of course, knowledge of the latter presupposes in every case knowledge of the former. The subjective meaning-context which is the in-order-to motive must first be seen and taken for granted as an already constituted object in itself before any venture into deeper levels is undertaken. To speak of such deeper levels as existing by no means implies that the actor actually experiences them subjectively as meaning-contexts of his action. Nor does it mean that he can become aware even retrospectively of those polythetic Acts which, according to my interpretation, have constituted the in-order-to motive. On the contrary, there is every evidence against the view that the actor ever has any awareness of the because-motive of his action. This applies to one who is establishing a meaning as well as to any other actor. To be sure, he lives through the subjective experiences and intentional Acts which I have interpreted as his because-motive. However, he is not as a rule aware of them, and, when he is, it is no longer as actor. Such awareness, when it


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occurs, is a separate intentional Act independent of and detached from the action it is interpreting. It is then that a man can be said to understand himself. Such self-understanding is essentially the same as understanding others, with this difference – that usually, but not always, we have at our disposal a much richer array of information about ourselves and our past than others do.

Later on we shall describe the relation of the in-order-to motive to the because-motives in the various regions of the social world. At this point we shall merely try to recapitulate the complex structures involved in understanding another person insofar as these bear on communication and the use of signs. For to say, as we do, that for the user of the sign the sign stands in a meaning-context involves a number of separate facts which must be disentangled.

First of all, whenever I make use of a sign, those lived experiences signified by that sign stand for me in a meaning-context. For they have already been constituted into a synthesis, and I look upon them as a unit.

In the second place, for me the sign must already be part of a sign system. Otherwise I would not be able to use it. A sign must already have been interpreted before it can be used. But the understanding of a sign is a complicated synthesis of lived experiences resulting in a special kind of meaning-context. This meaning- context is a configuration involving two elements: the sign as object in itself and the signatum, each of which, of course, involves separate meaning-contexts in its own right. The total new meaning-context embracing them both we have called the “coordinating scheme” of the sign.

Third, the Act of selecting and using the sign is a special meaning-context for the sign-user to the extent that each use of a sign is an expressive action. Since every action comprises a meaning-context by virtue of the fact that the actor visualizes all the successive lived experiences of that action as one unified act, it follows that every expressive action is therefore a meaning-context. This does not mean that every case of sign-using is ipso facto a case of communication. A person may, talking to himself for instance, use a sign purely as an act of self-expression without any intention of communication.

Fourth, the meaning-context “sign-using as act” can serve as the basis for a superimposed meaning-context “sign-using as communicative act” without in any way taking into account the particular person addressed.

Fifth, however, this superimposed meaning-context can enter into a still higher and wider meaning-context in which the addressee is taken into account. In this case the communicating act has as its goal not merely that someone take cognizance of it but that its message should motivate the person cognizing to a particular attitude or piece of behavior.

Sixth, the fact that this particular addressee is communicated with here, now, and in this way can be placed within a still broader context of meaning by finding the in-order-to motive of that communicative act.

All these meaning-contexts are in principle open to the interpreter and can be uncovered systematically by him. Just which ones he does seek to inquire into will depend upon the kind of interest he has in the sign.



However, the statement that all these meaning-contexts in principle lie open to interpretation requires some modification. As we have said repeatedly, the structure of the social world is by no means homogeneous. Our fellow men and the signs they use can be given to us in different ways. There are different approaches to the sign and to the subjective experience it expresses. Indeed, we do not even need a sign in order to gain access to another person’s mind; a mere indication can offer us the opening. This is what happens, for instance, when we draw inferences from artifacts concerning the experiences of people who lived in the past.

Subjective and Objective Meaning. Product and Evidence

We have now seen the different approaches to the genuine understanding of the other self. The interpreter starts with his own experience of the animate body of the other person or of the artifacts which the latter has produced. In either case he is interpreting Objectivations in which the other’s subjective experiences manifest themselves. If it is the body of the other that is in question, he concerns himself with act-objectifications, i.e., movements, gestures, or the results of action. If it is artifacts that are in question, these may be either signs in the narrower sense or manufactured external objects such as tools, monuments, etc. All that these Objectivations have in common is that they exist only as the result of the action of rational beings. Because they are products of action, they are ipso facto evidence of what went on in the minds of the actors who made them. It should be noted that not all evidences are signs, but all signs are evidences. For an evidence to be a sign, it must be capable of becoming an element in a sign system with the status of coordinating scheme. This qualification is lacking in some evidence. A tool, for instance, although it is an evidence of what went on in the mind of its maker, is surely no sign. However, under “evidences” we mean to include not only equipment that has been produced by a manufacturing process, but judgment that has been produced by thought, or the message content which has been produced by an act of communication.

The problematic of subjective and objective meaning includes evidences of all sorts. That is to say, anyone who encounters a given product can proceed to interpret it in two different ways. First, he can focus his attention on its status as an object, either real or ideal, but at any rate independent of its maker. Second, he can look upon it as evidence for what went on in the mind of its makers at the moment it was being made. In the former case the interpreter is subsuming his own experiences (erfahrende Akte) of the object under the interpretive schemes which he has at hand. In the latter case, however, his attention directs itself to the constituting Acts of consciousness of the producer (these might be his own as well as those of another person).

This relation between objective and subjective meaning will be examined in a more detailed way at a later point. We speak, then, of the subjective meaning of the product if we have in view the meaning-context within which the product stands or stood in the mind of the producer. To know the subjective meaning of the product means


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that we are able to run over in our own minds in simultaneity or quasi-simultaneity the polythetic Acts which constituted the experience of the producer.

We keep in view, then, the other person’s lived experiences as they are occurring; we observe them being constituted step by step. For us, the other person’s products are indications of those lived experiences. The lived experiences stand for him, in turn, within a meaning context. We know this by means of a particular evidence, and we can in an act of genuine understanding be aware of the constituting process in his mind.

Objective meaning, on the contrary, we can predicate only of the product as such, that is, of the already constituted meaning-context of the thing produced, whose actual production we meanwhile disregard. The product is, then, in the fullest sense the end result of the process of production, something that is finished and complete. It is no longer part of the process but merely points back to it as an event in the past. The product itself is, however, not an event but an entity (ein Seiendes) which is the sediment of past events within the mind of the producer. To be sure, even the interpretation of the objective meaning of the product occurs in step-by-step polythetic Acts. Nevertheless, it is exhausted in the ordering of the interpreter’s experiences of the product within the total meaning-context of the interpretive act. And, as we have said, the interpreter leaves the original step-by-step creation of the product quite out of account. It is not that he is unaware that it has occurred; it is just that he pays no attention to it. Objective meaning therefore consists only in a meaning-context within the mind of the interpreter, whereas subjective meaning refers beyond it to a meaning-context in the mind of the producer.

A subjective meaning-context, then, is present if what is given in an objective meaning-context was created as a meaning-context by a Thou on its own part. Nothing, however, is thereby implied either about the particular kind of meaning-context into which the Thou orders its lived experiences or about the quality of those experiences themselves.

We have already noted that the interpreter grasps the other person’s conscious experiences in the mode of simultaneity or quasi-simultaneity. Genuine simultaneity is the more frequent, even though it is a special case of the process. It is tied to the world of directly experienced social reality and presupposes that the interpreter witnesses the actual bringing-forth of the product. An example would be a conversation, where the listener is actually present as the speaker performs Acts that bring forth meaningful discourse and where the listener performs these Acts with and after the speaker. A case of quasi-simultaneous interpretation would be the reading of a book. Here the reader relives the author’s choice of words as if the choice were made before his very eyes. The same would hold for a person inspecting some artifacts, such as tools, and imagining to himself how they were made. However, in saying that we can observe such subjective experiences on the part of the producer, we only meant that we can grasp the fact that they occur. We have said nothing about how we understand what experiences occur, nor how we understand the way in which they are formed. We shall deal with these problems when we analyze the world of contemporaries, the world of direct social experience, and the world of the



genuine We-relationship. Still, it can be said even at this point that what is essential to this further knowledge is a knowledge of the person being interpreted. When we ask what the subjective meaning of a product is, and therefore what conscious experiences another person has, we are asking what particular polythetically constructed lived experiences are occurring or have occurred in a particular other person. This other person, this Thou, has his own unique experiences and meaning-contexts. No other person, not even he himself at another moment, can stand in his shoes at this moment.

The objective meaning of a product that we have before us is, on the other hand, by no means interpreted as evidence for the particular lived experience of a particular Thou. Rather, it is interpreted as already constituted and established, abstracted from every subjective flow of experience and every subjective meaning-context that could exist in such a flow. It is grasped as an objectification endowed with “universal meaning.” Even though we implicitly refer to its author when we call it a “product,” still we leave this author and everything personal about him out of account when we are interpreting objective meaning. He is hidden behind the impersonal “one” (someone, someone or other). This anonymous “one” is merely the linguistic term for the fact that a Thou exists, or has once existed, of whose particularity we take no account. I myself or you or some ideal type or Everyman could step into its shoes without in any way altering the subjective meaning of the product. We can say nothing about the subjective processes of this anonymous “one,” for the latter has no duration, and the temporal dimension we ascribe to it, being a logical fiction, is in principle incapable of being experienced. But precisely for this reason the objective meaning remains, from the point of view of the interpreter, invariant for all possible creators of the meaningful object. Insofar as that object contains within its very meaning the ideality of the “and so forth” and of the “I can do it again,” to that extent is that meaning independent of its maker and the circumstances of its origination. The product is abstracted from every individual consciousness and indeed from every consciousness as such. Objective meaning is merely the interpreter’s ordering of his experiences of a product into the total context of his experience.

It follows from all we have said that every interpretation of subjective meaning involves a reference to a particular person. Furthermore, it must be a person of whom the interpreter has some kind of experience (Erfahrung) and whose subjective states he can run through in simultaneity or quasi-simultaneity, whereas objective meaning is abstracted from and independent of particular persons. Later we shall study this antithesis in greater detail, treating it as a case of polar opposition. Between the understanding of subjective meaning and the understanding of pure objective meaning there is a whole series of intermediate steps based on the fact that the social world has its own unique structure derived, as it is, from the worlds of direct social experience, of contemporaries, of predecessors, and of successors.


Contemporary Sociological Theory, Third Edition. Edited by Craig Calhoun, Joseph Gerteis, James Moody, Steven Pfaff, and Indermohan Virk. Editorial material and organization© 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Chapter 18

State, Society and Modern History [1987]Anthony Giddens

Power and Domination

In this opening section I outline some general notions connected with the concept of power, which will help construct basic underlying themes of the book as a whole. ‘Power’, along with ‘agency’ and ‘structure’, is an elementary concept in social science.1 To be a human being is to be an agent – although not all agents are human beings – and to be an agent is to have power. ‘Power’ in this highly generalized sense means ‘transformative capacity’, the capability to intervene in a given set of events so as in some way to alter them. The logical connection between agency and power is of the first importance for social theory, but the ‘universal’ sense of power thus implied needs considerable conceptual refinement if it is to be put to work in the interests of substantive social research.

Such conceptual refinement needs to be of two principal sorts. On the one hand, power must be related to the resources that agents employ in the course of their activities in order to accomplish whatever they do. Resources implicated in the reproduction of social systems that have some degree of continuity – and thus ‘ existence’ – across space and time form aspects of the structural properties of those social systems. Two types of resource can be distinguished – the allocative and the authoritative. By the first of these I refer to dominion over material facilities, including material goods and the natural forces that may be harnessed in their production. The second concerns the means of dominion over the activities of

Anthony Giddens, “State Society and Modern History,” pp. 7–17 from Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence, Volume Two of A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism. Palgrave Macmillan 1987. Reprinted with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.


278 Anthony Giddens

human beings themselves.2 Both sources of power depend in large degree upon the management of time-space relations.

In the sociological and anthropological literature, both Marxist and non-Marxist, primacy has often been given to allocative resources in the constitution of society and in the explication of social change. Such a view is given full and direct expression, of course, in historical materialism, if that term be taken to refer to the interpretation of history that Marx outlines in the ‘Preface’ to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.3 ‘History’ there is understood in terms of the expansion of the forces of production, underlying both the institutional organization of different types of society and their processes of change. But it is by no means only in historical materialism that this sort of emphasis appears. It is characteristic of virtually all those theories that can be classified under the rubrics of ‘cultural’ or ‘social evolutionism’. Such theories attempt to understand social change in terms of the differential adaptation of forms of society to their ‘environment’. I have criticized this view extensively elsewhere, and there is no point in recapitulating that critique here.4 Suffice it to say that, according to the standpoint informing this book, no account of history that gives to allocative resources some sort of determining role in either social organization or social change can be defended.

To say this does not mean moving to the other extreme – placing the whole weight of the emphasis upon authoritative resources. If there are no prime movers in human history (even in the last instance) the problem for social analysis becomes that of examining a variety of relations between allocative and authoritative resources in the constitution of social systems and in the dynamics of social change.5

Resources do not in any sense ‘automatically’ enter into the reproduction of social systems, but operate only in so far as they are drawn upon by contextually located actors in the conduct of their day-to-day lives. All social systems, in other words, can be studied as incorporating or expressing modes of domination and it is this concept more than any other that provides the focal point for the investigation of power. Social systems that have some regularized existence across time-space are always ‘power systems’, or exhibit forms of domination, in the sense that they are comprised of relations of autonomy and dependence between actors or collectivities of actors.6 As has been exhaustively discussed in controversies over the nature of power, forms of domination thus portrayed cannot be reduced to acts or decisions taken, or policies forged, by individual agents. Power as the capability to effectively decide about courses of events, even where others might contest such decisions, is undeniably important. But ‘decisions’, and ‘contested policies’, represent only one aspect of domination. The term ‘non-decision-making’ is an unhappy one to refer to the other aspect of power, but it has become quite firmly established in some sectors of political science. What matters is not just that certain decisions are not made, but that they are not even considered. Non-decision-making, in other words, is not accurately seen just as the obverse of decision-making, but as influencing the circumstances in which certain courses of action are open to ‘choice’ in any way at all. Power may be at its most alarming, and quite often its most horrifying, when applied as a sanction of force. But it is typically at its most intense and durable when


State, Society and Modern History 279

running silently through the repetition of institutionalized practices.7 As I use it, therefore, ‘domination’ is not a concept that carries an intrinsically negative connotation.8

All social systems of any duration involve an ‘institutional mediation of power’.9 That is to say, domination is expressed in and through the institutions that represent the most deeply embedded continuities of social life. But in the context of any collectivity, association or organization,10 domination is expressed as modes of control, whereby some agents seek to achieve and maintain the compliance of others. I shall refer to relatively stable forms of control as types of rule. Forms of rule are (more or less) stable relations of autonomy and dependence in social systems and are sustained by the routine practices that those in superordinate positions employ to influence the activities of others. As such they are to be analytically separated from the institutional mediation of power.11 Thus, for example, a given type of bureaucratic organization may generate a high level of power in the sense of transformative capacity. This is true, for example, of the modern, large industrial corporation, as judged in terms of both the allocative and authoritative resources it commands. However, the capability of any individual, or group of individuals, to control what goes on in the organization is not a direct extension of the ‘amount’ of power generated. An individual may be in a ‘powerful’ position in the sense that he or she has the capability to deploy a range of resources. But how far these can be used to secure specific outcomes depends upon securing whatever compliance is necessary from others.12 The frequently stated experience of those in positions of ‘high power’ that what they can accomplish is hedged with very defined limits is not wholly disingenuous.

We should distinguish the ‘scope’ of rule from its ‘intensity’.13 The former refers to how far actors in superordinate positions are able to control large areas of the activities of those subject to their rule. The scope of control of a managerial executive over those in lower echelons of the labour force may be quite extensive, although usually confined to whatever goes on in the sphere of ‘work’ only. By the intensity of control I refer to the sanctions that can be invoked to secure compliance, the most extreme being the command over the means of violence, of life and death. A variety of possible relations exist between the scope and intensity of control – a matter of great significance for the themes of this book. Thus, many traditional rulers have possessed ‘complete’ power over their subjects, in the sense that those subjects are supposed to obey their every command ‘under pain of death’. But such power by no means yields a wide scope of actual mastery over the conduct of the subject population. Ruling groups in traditional states, as I shall argue in some detail later, lack the means of regularly influencing the day-to-day lives of their subject populations. One of the major characteristics of the modern state, by contrast, is a vast expansion of the capability of state administrators to influence even the most intimate features of daily activity.

All types of rule, then, rest upon the institutional mediation of power, but channel this through the use of definite strategies of control. Strategies of control naturally always depend in substantial degree upon the form of domination within which


280 Anthony Giddens

they are invoked. In a modern industrial setting, for instance, strategies used by managers to achieve compliance from workers operate within a framework in which the direct threat of violence or the use of force cannot be brought to bear. Much of what ‘management’ means in modern industry derives from this fact. Nonetheless, the resources that managers are able to draw upon to sustain control over the work-force can be focused and applied in a range of different ways. All strategies of control employed by superordinate individuals or groups call forth counter-strategies on the part of subordinates. This phenomenon represents what I call the dialectic of control in social systems, something that connects back directly to the theme of human agency with which I opened this discussion. To be an agent is to be able to make a difference to the world, and to be able to make a difference is to have power (where power means transformative capacity). No matter how great the scope or intensity of control superordinates possess, since their power presumes the active compliance of others, those others can bring to bear strategies of their own, and apply specific types of sanctions. ‘Self-consciousness’, Hegel says, ‘attains its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness’,14 speaking of the master-slave dialectic. Hegel makes of this a teleological philosophy of history but, stripped of such grandiose pretensions, what is at issue is the capability even of the most dependent, weak and the most oppressed to have the ability to carve out spheres of autonomy of their own.

All forms of rule have their ‘openings’ that can be utilized by those in subordinate positions to influence the activities of those who hold power over them. One consequence of this is that technologies of power – in other words, formalized procedures of rule – rarely if ever work with the ‘fixity’ which on the face of things they might seem to possess. The more a social system is one in which the control exercised by superordinates depends upon a considerable scope of power over subordinates, the more shifting and potentially volatile its organization is likely to be. The literature on prisons or asylums, for example, is replete with descriptions of the ‘effort-bargains’ which those who administer such organizations are forced to conclude with inmates in order to make their rule effective.

All social reproduction and, therefore, all systems of power, are grounded in the ‘predictability’ of day-to-day routines. The predictable – that is to say, regularized – character of day-to-day activity is not something that just ‘happens’, it is in substantial part ‘made to happen’ by actors in the diverse settings of social life. Of course, actors do not do this ‘consciously’ in the ordinary sense of the term, although they do often discursively reflect upon the nature of the activities in which they engage. Many of the characteristics of social life that actors ‘make happen’ are accomplished via non-discursive ‘practical consciousness’.15 That is to say, actors routinely monitor reflexively what they do in the light of their complex knowledge of social conventions, sustaining or reproducing those conventions in the process. Since agents in all societies are ‘social theorists’, whose discursively articulated accounts are in some part constitutive of the social forms they reproduce in their conduct, it is never the case that they blindly enact and re-enact the routines of daily life. Even in the most traditional of cultures ‘tradition’ is reflexively appropriated and in some sense ‘ discursively understood’.



In traditional societies, however, especially in small oral cultures, ‘tradition’ is not known as such, because there is nothing that escapes its influence and, therefore, nothing with which to contrast it. ‘History’ is not understood as the use of the past to mobilize change in the future, but as the repetitiveness of ‘reversible time’.16 A significant alteration in the conditions of human social existence comes about with the invention of ‘history’. From then on the circumstances of social reproduction are themselves reflexively monitored in an effort to influence the form institutions assume. I take this to be the main feature that separates organizations from other types of collectivity. The term ‘organization’ will crop up a great deal in this study. An organization is a collectivity in which knowledge about the conditions of system reproduction is reflexively used to influence, shape or modify that system reproduction. All forms of state administrative bodies are organizations in this sense, for reasons I shall document at some length in what follows. In modern nation-states, however, the reflexive monitoring of system reproduction is much more highly accentuated than in any pre-existing form of state and, in addition, ‘organization’ characterizes many other aspects of social life.

I have earlier linked domination with the mastery of time-space. Elaborating the implications of this means giving some conceptual attention to the timing and spacing of human social activities.17 It is particularly important to emphasize the association between power and locales, which will also be one of the leading themes of the book. I use ‘locale’ in deliberate preference to the notion of ‘place’ as ordinarily employed by geographers, because ‘place’ is often only a vaguely formulated notion and because it does not usually mean the co-ordination of time as well as space. Locales refer to the settings of interaction, including the physical aspects of setting – their ‘architecture’ – within which systemic aspects of interaction and social relations are concentrated. The proximate aspects of settings are chronically employed by social actors in the constitution of interaction, a matter of quite fundamental significance to its ‘meaningful’ qualities.18 But settings also are everywhere involved in the reproduction of institutionalized activities across wide spans of time and space. Thus, a dwelling is a locale displaying specific architectural features: these are socially relevant in so far as they are bound up with the distribution and the character of behaviour in time-space. A dwelling which has several rooms is ‘regionalized’, not just in the sense that there are various distinct ‘places’ which it thereby contains, but in the sense that the rooms are habitually used for different types of pursuit, distributed differentially in the routines of day-to-day life. I do not mean by ‘locale’, however, just settings of a fairly confined nature. Locales include internally regionalized settings of very wide time-space extension, from cities to nation-states and beyond.

The importance of locales to the theory of power can be spelled out as follows. Certain types of locale form ‘power containers’ – circumscribed arenas for the generation of administrative power. A locale is a power container in so far as it permits a concentration of allocative and authoritative resources. In what I shall call class-divided societies, castles, manorial estates – but above all cities – are containers for the generation of power. In the modern world, the administrative settings of


282 Anthony Giddens

organizations – business firms, schools, universities, hospitals, prisons, etc. – are centres for the concentration of resources. But the modern state, as nation-state, becomes in many respects the pre-eminent form of power container, as a territorially bounded (although internally highly regionalized) administrative unity.

It is possible to give some general indication of how power is generated by the ‘containment’ of resources, although naturally there are many specific differences between settings within different types of society. Power containers generate power, as has been mentioned, first and foremost through the concentration of allocative and administrative resources. The generation of allocative resources is, of course, influenced directly by forms of available technology in any society, but the level of their concentration depends primarily upon factors creating authoritative resources. These are of the following kinds.

1 The possibilities of surveillance that settings of various kinds allow. ‘Surveillance’ refers to two related sorts of phenomena. One is the accumulation of ‘coded information’, which can be used to administer the activities of individuals about whom it is gathered. It is not just the collection of information, but its storage that is important here. Human memory is a storage device, but the storage of information is enhanced vastly by various other kinds of marks or traces that can be used as modes of recording. If writing is in all cultures the main phenomenon involved, in modern states electronic storage – tapes, records, discs, etc. – considerably expands the range of available storage mechanisms. All modes of information storage are simultaneously forms of communication, cutting across the face-to-face communi cation that is exhaustive of human interaction in oral cultures. The ‘ externalized’ character of information traces inevitably severs communication from its intrinsic connection with the body and the face. But electronic communication for the first time in history separates ‘immediate’ communication from presence, thereby initiating developments in modern culture that I shall later argue are basic to the emergence and consolidation of the nation-state.

The other sense of surveillance is that of the direct supervision of the activities of some individuals by others in positions of authority over them. The concentration of activities within clearly bounded settings greatly enlarges the degree to which those activities can be ‘watched over’, and thus controlled, by superordinates. In most types of non-modern society, the possibilities of surveillance in this second sense (as in the first) are relatively limited. There are many examples of large aggregates of people being brought together in the construction of public projects, for example, the building of temples, monuments or roads. But these groupings usually only exist for a limited duration and are relatively marginal to the activities and involvements of the majority of the population. Within fairly confined areas, such as small rural communities, certain kinds of surveillance procedures can be sustained in class-divided societies and these can be linked to larger networks with varying degrees of success. Examples can be found in the role of local priests in medieval Catholicism, or in the use of informers by the traditional Chinese state. But only in cities could direct and regular surveillance be maintained by the central



agencies of the state, and then with a low degree of success compared with modern organizations. In modern organizations, either large segments of the daily lives of social actors (as in factories or offices), or substantial periods of their lives in a more ‘total’ setting (as in prisons, or asylums) can be subject to more-or-less continuous surveillance.

The two senses of surveillance belong quite closely together, since the collection of information about social activities can, and very often is, directly integrated with styles of supervision – something which again tends to be maximized in modern types of organization.

2 The possibilities of assembling, within definite settings, large numbers of individuals who do not spend most of their daily activity involved in direct material production. The formation of organizations, and of any substantial level of disciplinary power, depends upon the existence of specialized administrative officials of some kind. In orthodox versions of historical materialism, the early emergence of such administrative specialism is ‘explained’ in terms of the prior development of surplus production. But the way this explanation is often presented makes it neither plausible nor even a valid empirical description. It is hardly an explanation at all, even in the most general sense of that term, because surplus production has to be co-ordinated in some way if it is to become a resource for the generation of administrative power. However, it is also empirically wanting. If ‘surplus production’ means anything specific, the term must refer to material production which develops beyond what, for a given population of producers, are traditional or pre-established needs. Thus defined, surplus production is not even the necessary condition for the formation of specialized administrative apparatuses. Such organizations have very often come into being in circumstances of acute deprivation for many of the subjects of their rule – the appropriation of the ‘surplus’ perhaps being at the origin of that deprivation.19

As Max Weber emphasizes, the regularized ‘containing’ of assemblages of individuals within the settings of organizations can only be extensively achieved in a society given various other conditions in addition to the expansion of ‘surplus production’. Some of these conditions are peculiar to the modern West. They include, particularly, the disappearance of ‘prebendal’ forms of renumeration and the associated development of a full-blown money economy. The purely ‘vocational’ official is one with a salaried income, whose sources of renumeration have become wholly cut off from the use of the official position to gather material resources put to private use.

3 The facilitating of the scope and intensity of sanctions, above all the development of military power. There are two locales of overwhelming significance here, or so I shall argue – the city in class-divided societies and, in modern societies, the nation-state. The relation between military power and sanctions of law is always important. Organizations of all types develop legal rules of some sort. All forms of law, in turn, involve sanctions administered in one way or another via officials. Such


284 Anthony Giddens

administration is backed, in a direct or a more indirect manner, by the threat of the use of violence.20 It will be part of my main thesis later in this book, however, that in many modern organizations – in contradistinction to what was the case in class-divided societies – the sanction of the use of violence is quite indirect and attenuated. Moreover, military power on the whole tends to become rather clearly distinct from policing power, the one turned ‘externally’, the other pointed ‘internally’.

The first formation of permanent armed forces injects something substantially new into world history. But in all class-divided societies, no matter how strong the military forces commanded by the state, there are significant sources of armed opposition that escape the control of the central apparatus. The prominence of local war-lords, the existence of marauding nomadic groups, and all kinds of pirates and brigands, express the segmental character that class-divided societies display.

4 The creation of certain conditions that influence the formation of ideology. The system integration of class-divided societies does not depend in a significant way upon the overall acceptance of particular symbolic orders by the majority of the population within those societies. What matters is the hegemony achieved through such acceptance on the part of the members of dominant groups or classes. Concentration of activities within city milieux plays an important part here in more than one way. Through the expansion of surveillance, especially for example as pressed into the service of some kind of formal education, even if this is confined to a small stratum of the literate, the influence of ideology can be considerably sharpened. But probably also the sheer physical lay-out of many traditional cities has ideological effects. In such urban forms, the city is frequently dominated architecturally by state and religious edifices, giving a visual representation of power that no doubt makes an impress upon the minds of those who move in the vicinity of them.21

[. . .]

notes

The following books by the author are referred to in abbreviated form throughout the notes:

Central Problems in Social Theory (London: Hutchinson, 1977) – CPST.New Rules of Sociological Method (London: Hutchinson, 1976) – NRSM.The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies (London: Hutchinson, 1979; revised

edition, 1981) – CSAS.A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (London: Macmillan, 1981),

vol. I – CCHM, vol. I.The Constitution of Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984) – CS.



State, Society and Modern History

1 cf. CPST, ch. 2; CS, passim. 2 For a fuller exposition, see CPST, ch. 3. 3 K. Marx, ‘Preface’ to ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’, in K. Marx

and F. Engels, Selected Works in One Volume (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1968); cf. CPST, ch. 3.

4 CS, ch. 5. 5 See especially CCHM, vol. 1, chs 3, 4 and 5; CS, chs 4 and 5. 6 NRSM, ch. 3. 7 Talcott Parsons, ‘On the concept of political power’, Proceedings of the American

Philosophical Society, 107, 1963. 8 CPST, p. 91ff. 9 CSAS, pp. 156–62.10 CS, ch. 5.11 Ibid., p. 14ff.12 CPST, pp. 88–94.13 Ibid.14 G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). p. 126.15 CPST, chapter 2; CS, ch. 1 and passim.16 On this matter see the celebrated debate between Lévi-Strauss and Sartre about the

nature of history. For a summary version, cf. Claude Lévi-Strauss: ‘Réponses à quelques questions’, Esprit. 31, 1963.

17 CS ch. 3 and passim. Simmel’s remarks on such matters can still be read with profit. See ‘Der Raum und die raumlichen Ordnungen der Gesellschaft’, in his Soziologie (Leipzig: Duncker and Humbolt, 1908).

18 CPST, pp. 84–5.19 CCHM, vol. I, pp. 97–100. The work of Jane Jacobs, however it might be criticized in

some respects, is particularly important here.20 In this book I use ‘violence’ in a straightforward sense, not in the much wider meaning

attributed to it by Bourdieu and others. I mean by ‘control of the means of violence’ control over the capabilities of doing physical harm to the human body by the use of force.

21 CCHM, pp. 140–56.


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