Date:         Wed, 17 Feb 93 17:32:16 EST
From:         "Daniel A. Foss" <DFOSS@ccvm.sunysb.edu>
Subject:      beer cans on the path to wisdom
To:           Chris Chase-Dunn <CHRISCD@JHUVM>
 
Resonse to communication received from:
Tie-ting Su
Department of Sociology
McGill University
Montreal, Canada
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
   During what is more often than not the interesting phase of a sociological
subfield's growth, the discourse is contaminated with verbiage, some of it
rivalrous for the honor of meaning something of lesser nebulosity hence of the
initial contenders only one survives. Of the high-nebulosity gibberish, custom
long permitted idiosyncratic usage, so if you did not want to indulge in bad
form of the type, "This is X," you were allowed, "If indeed there is a This to
speak of, then it is X-oriented/X-directed/X-pattenrned," where of the latter
it was not rare to encounter "random-patterned." The C. Wright Millsian gnere
drew heavily for inspiration upon its allegely most mortal enemy, advertising
copywriting; and it was hardly necessary for the paradigm case to state, "I've
never empirically observed a Cheerful Robot, and, what's more, should I have
ever made a positive idntification, the data object would instantly have ceased
to conform to its type case and would most likely have rearranged my face." We
may at least grant that was sociology's dubious gain was outright denied to
vendors of the Hoover Vacuum Cleaner and the GE Potscrubber Two Dishwasher.
 
   The sociolanguage became wonderfully complicated with interestless loan
words, the tracking of which was withal fascinating, when the US became the
world center of creative Marxist scholarship in the 1970s, a position retained
until November 9, 1989. Of far more interest than the dialectics were the
dialects: High Marx, Solemn High Marx, Great Barrington Moore (MA), Critical
(= Sanderson said, "Daniel Foss is critical," which is impossible as I never
learned to think critically; and all efforts to teach me Critical Theory were
failures), and Weberian-Assimilationist Creole for the Tenure-crazed. This
admixed wildly with gender studies, which having begin with modest alterations
of Basic Stalin overheared from parents, whence "male chauvinist," has earned
my respect and I hope everyone else's too with language innovations so profuse
that I could not possibly acquire the basic vocabulary and accept that the
connotations would escape me altogether. May I mever live so long that I learn
what "co-dependency" meant at any given month of every single year of its
currency; and I hail the adoption by the All-Highest of that folk-Giddensian
and exquisitely unctuous "empowerment." (A Giddensism has for its type cases
"structuration" and "autopoeisis." It is not necessary for Giddens himself to
know with either clarity or certainty what these mean. It is however *critical*
for you, whether in making conversation or career development, to have quite
definitie, you may even claim *the definitive*, understanding of what Giddens
immanenently meant by these words even if he should overtly deny it himself.)
 
   Further proliferation of subfield dialects comes from Peoplehood Studies.
Yes, I rezlize that the bureaucratically appropriate usage is Cultural Studies,
but I firmly maintain that the technically correct babble is Peoplehood
Studies, which must be backed up at excessive length elsewhere.
 
   The frontier of sociology, its future, its impetus to legitimately tap
economic resources, is in the Past. Historical studies has grown at least
as fast as gender studies. The glorious Past offers a refuge for displaced
refugees (intellectual) from US Marxism, since the more recent the period
after 1850-1860 or thereabouts, and the more developed the society studied,
the more does Marxism fail to describe its object of investigation, which is
capitalism.
 
   The slogan of what at one time went by the hideous name of
Macro-Comparative/Historical Sociology has in recent years been, "putting the
state back in." Here, distinctions between Marxists and non-Marxists break
down. Immanuel Wallerstein never mentions social conflict (certainly not the
class struggle) when this can be helped. Charles Tilly is more of a vulgar
Marxist than anything else, all the more tribute to his lavish funding by the
US Department of Defense.
 
   Wallerstein's postulate (Tilly is in the process of changing his mind) is
that there is one state-system which has never been unified, and that is the
European [nation-state] system, in that it must be imbricated with capitalism.
   Let me digress. I use "state-system" rather than "interstate system" since
states are generated in multiples. This ultimately goes back to how states
originated in the first place, as there is little benefit if any to those
victimized by getting themselves en-stated. Very probably the combatants were
no better armed and disciplined in the unstated state than in the stated state.
What had occurred is that someone hid behind a wall and thought up a scheme to
get somebody else to do the work. States and ruling classes are found in close
combination, even before there is evidence of "civilization," which by
convention if dated to circa 5000 years before the present.
   The trick need be turned exactly once. What is required, very simply, is
inculcating in the minds of the enstated population that the rulers-state can
do with them whatever said rulers-state please and there is nothin, absolutely
nothing, that can be done about that. Possibly the rulers-state have even
received ineluctable orders from the deities or ancestors. Everywhere there is
found, not merely mass killing, but an iconography of killing. The Early
Dynastic (even Late Predynastic) Egyptian rulers are shown wielding enormous
stone clubs with which they are about to bash the heads of prostrate prisoners.
At Abydos, near Memphis, the king is accompanied in death by his former
concubines. In Ur, Sumer, the king is given a sendoff of entertainment by his
entourage, who have all been poisoned or are otherwise killed. The Shang tombs
contain human heads in considerable profusion with over thee hundred victims
found in the interment of Lady Hao.
   In Mesoamerica, the Danzantes are the tormented dying prisoners of war
captured by the rulers. Analogous memorials are found among the Maya states,
where vuctims bled to death in sacred pools; and this is prior to the invention
of their script.
 
   The intent or rather practice of the enstating element of the population
is the inducement of gratitude among the ruled that they have not been already
killed. Once hierarchilzation has been firmly established by external coercion
*supplemented by internalization of inferiority*, the killing is superfluous
and the rulers may more profitably live off the labor of the ruled who accept
their place blindly.
 
   At some state in the invention of the first state it will get imitated. The
advantages to the would-be ruling class are even more obvious than before,
and the craving of the bulk of the people for protection from the newly
invneted menace should have become very powerful.
 
   Unless some key technique is involved, such as bronze metallurgy, as was the
case with Shang, the advantage of the state is in hierarchical discipline. It
is not that men on parade are better fighters than those who present the
appearance of an untidy mob. But if this impression is created in nearby
societies, it becomes a political variable in its own right by inducing the
yet-unstated to accept or even demand, as in the Farewell Address in the
Second Book of Samuel in the Old Testament, the duplication of the enemy's
state on their own behalf.
 
   From the firststate, a state system of clones and copies emerges forthwith.
 
   Once formed, all state systems tend toward unification due to intermittent
warfare. First the number of contenders shrinks drastically, then the survivers
are set apart as Major Powers whose diplomatic inclinations are watched with
suspicion by all others. The unification takes place by the forcible subjection
of the others by an inner state, an outer or "fringe" state, or by external
Barbarians:
   The states of the state-system have in common that they are "civilization"
while those outside ar "Barbarians" by virtue of cultursl differences
sufficiently profound to be decisive in social dmarcation. The technical or
cultural or organizational Inferiority of the Barbarians to the civilized is
unnecessary, and is more an ideological fixation of the latter than real.
 
   State systems may last for centuries, becoming in all component states more
highly mobilized for war. There are variations; The German states of the High
Medieval period attained maximal mobilization for war at quite small
territorial size due to impregnability of defensive works. Even with the
introduction of gunpowder, the "art" of fortification nearly kept pace. State
expansion till the eighteenth century was as likely to occur through marriage
as war. The Italian states drasticually declined in numbers but sustained
a balance of power solemnized at the Peace of Lodi, 1454. In 1494 they were
unified from without by "Barbarians," the Kingdom of France. The latter fought
with Spain for primacy in Europe till 1559, but sensibly for their own subjects
did so in Italy.
 
   The feudal politeies which emerged from the Zhou victory at Muye in 1122 BC
endured and, especially after 771 BC, consolidated themselves into bureaucratic
states which took until 221 BC to get unified by the marcher state of Qin. The
trajectory of unification in the Meditrerranean was as protracted and was
almost exactly contemproaneous.
 
   So what is the significance of the persistence of the European system of
Great Powers until November 9, 1989? The same significance that obtained in the
exact negative correlation betwen my age and the proximity of Halley's comet
to the sun *until* 1986.
   The state is defined by the monopoly of the means of violence. Not only
did the Untied States outproduce the entire remainder of the world in nuclear
weapons during 1945-1985 (60,000 warheads plus "elivery systems"); it retaisn
a capacity for manufacturing 6,000 annually, treaty or not. The monopoly of
nuclear weapons is for practical purposes complete with the collapse and
abject economic as well as politico-military surrender of the formerly rival
superpower.
 
   What I am saying is, in effect, that your "established" state system is
always provisional. State systems tend to unification in that making war or
other hostile activies such as US economic warfare against the USSR is an
*independent variable*. The disintegration of formerly unified state systems
must be described idiosyncratically.
 
   What you call *structural* systems are legalistic conventions, where the
nominal rulers of the legitimate state are not disturbed in occupancy of
office notwithstanding what in France was called, during the reign of Robert
The Pious, d. 1031, *imbecilitas regis*. The true characterization of the
polity may be feudalism or petty states. For the latter, e.g., Five Dynasties,
907-960, where only one of those claiming to be Emperor was generally
recognized, but there were ten states. The true political system was not
dynastic monarchy but similar to the coeval Byzantine Empire, where the Army
declared the Emperor who put on purple boots. In China the boots were yellow.
 
   I shall have something to say on another occasion regarding the Yongle
emperor's contradictions, in maintaining the policy of preventing emigration,
which had the paradoxical results of foreign war (Vientam) and defeat; also
the resuscitation of naval power as an adjunct to seaborne supply of the army
in Vietnam.
 
   Oh, I never said that Zhu Yuanzhang *uncritically* admired the Yuan system.
Both Hucker and Dardess agree that he incorporated feaures of the Yuan
administrative structure into his own state due to the very repressiveness and
hereditary-caste proclvities of the former regime. But he made it vastly more
repressive than it had been.
 
   There has also got to be an explanation for the sudden decline in science
and technology in the mid-fourteenth century. While Chinese science differed
considerably in its place in cultural organization from the European, I think
the decisive variable here was *where* the scientists were.
 
Daniel A. Foss
<bookworm>
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copies to Chris Chase Dunn, WSN Listowner
Tie-ting Su, addressee