georg simmel, on individuality and social forms

introduction, by donald levine (ix-lxiii)

(x): re: his noncomformity, contrast between Simmel and Durkheim "could scarcely be more conspicuous"

(xii): "he believed that the ultimate justification for scholarship lies in the materials it provides for the cultivation of educated individuals."

(xiii): "simmel's creativity was continuously exercised along three discernible lines"

1. origins, essences, and destinies of cultural forms.
   
2. "origins and structural properties of diverse social forms."
   
3. "the formal properties of fulfilled personality."

(xiv): three periods of intellectual development

1. early 1890s, influenced by social darwinism
2. neo-Kantian position for analysis of social and cultural forms
3. in his last years, concerned with "developing a philosophy of life"

(xiv-xv): important--for simmel, the study of social forms is sociology. so while he had a theory of culture, as well, it was not systematically integrated into his sociology--"it will, however, become apparent that his modes of analyzing social and cultural forms... are essentially similar..."

(xv): starting point is distinction between form and content

(xvi-xvii): key--"forms emerge to shape contents when the undifferentiated unity of immediate experience is ruptured by some sort of stress. the experiencing self divides into a self-conscious subject and a confronted object..." [a la Heidegger, at this level of generality]. this is the first level of cultural development, when culture is still 'pegged' to practical, structural interests. but, the more successful of these forms can take on a life of their own, and become 'objects of cultivation' themselves. [of course, there is a clear question raised by this question of success]. past this second level of cultural development, we come to a third--where "worlds" [of experience] can be formed.

(xviii): on individuality--"...individual persons are only limited realizations of their ideal selves--ideal not in the sense of a projection of the actual tendencies and syntheses manifested in each individual's own existence. the attainment of individuality is thus not a matter of arbitrary subjectivity, but rather a movement toward the realization of a determinat objective form."

(xix-xx): "objective culture" ("the complex of ideal and actualized [cultural] products") vs. "subjective culture" ("the extent to which individuals assimilate and make use of these products...")

(xx-xxi): 'it is our task not to complain or to condone but only to understand...'

(xxi): philosophy, for simmel, "operates at such a level of abstraction... that it does not matter if the general propositions it asserts are contradicted by data obtained form a position much nearer to things."

(xxii): important--anti-positivist understanding of history, insofar as history is not simply an accumulation of events that have actually occured (i.e., as content), but is a form-giving science--it is "a special way of constructing reality... history is that way of ordering the world that selects certain contents..." [at the same time, levine is arguing, he takes it so far that it is insulated from all other sciences, and becomes radically subjectivist in its implications--unlike weber]

(xxiii): important--roots of sociology, for simmel, lie in class conflict--it is the appearence of the analytical importance of the social environment that followed, which has set the stage for sociology as a science of social structures. within sociology, the form/content binary resurfaces--"'contents' take on a special meaning here: they are the needs, drives, and purposes which lead individuals to enter into continuing association with one another. 'forms' are the synthesizing processes by which individuals combine into supraindividual unities... the task of sociology properly understood is studying the forms of human sociality." [he is trying to delimit its scope at the same time agree that this is important, it seems...]

(xxv-xxvii): important--from (1) protoformal level (elementary social action), to (2) the level of institutionalized structures (in which "objectification of social forms that remains closely tied to praxis"), to (3) autonomous 'play' forms, to (4) the generic form of society itself.

(xxvii): important--"society," in simmel--"the concept of society is analogous... not to the concept of culture in general but to one of the world-forming cultural categories like religion, art... society exists as one of the ways in which all experience can potentially be organized. a given number of individuals therefore, can be society to a greater or lesser degree, just as agiven number of sounds can be music to a greater or lesser degree. society as a form presents the ideality of a world awaiting actualization. "

(xxix): "it is the nature of both history and sociology that they deal with contents which have already been given form. both of them study the already formed contents of human experience..."

(xxxi): important, Simmel's method--"His method is to select some bounded, finite phenomenon from the world of flux; to examine the multiplicity of elements which compose it; and to ascertain the cause of their coherence by disclosing its form. secondarily, he investigates the origins of this form and its structural implications."

(xxxii): "[his method[ does not force all phenomena together into a general scheme nor does it molest them with arbitrary or rigid categories; at the same time it avoids mindless empiricsim by providing a context of meanings for sets of observations. it enhances discovery."

(xxxii-xxxvii): four basic presuppositions

1. form--"the world consists of innumerable contents which are given determinate identity.. through the imposition of forms which man has created in the course of his experience..." [exist as methodological tools or as lived realities or as both?]
2. reciprocity--"no thing or event has a fixed, intrinsic meaning; its meaning only emerges through interaction with other things or events" [proto-structuralism?]
   
3. distance--"the properties of forms and the meanings of things are a function of the relative distances between individuals and other individuals or things." (forms arise, remember, when the unity of experience is "disrupted and a distance is interposed between subject and object.")
4. dualism--"the world can best be understood in terms of conflicts and contrasts between opposed categories." [a kind of primitive dialectic?]

(xxxvii): interesting amendment to Kant--"human mind is not a passive receptor of external stimuli", yes, but it can go so far as to create the categories with which it structures experience.

(xxxix): this sounds marxist, almost--"once created, forms are rigid. they are incapable of adapting to the continuous oscillations of subjective need. the conflict between established forms and vital needs produces a perpetual tension, a tension which is nevertheless the source of the dialectical development or replacement of social structures and cultural forms throughout history."

(xl-xlii): important, the twin 'tragedies'--(1) "Simmel sees the existence of individuality attacked and threatened by the very forms which individual creativity has produced--objective culture and sociality... the conflict between the forms of individuality and sociality is self-generated and inescapable; it constitutes the 'sociological tragedy.'" (2) "modern facilities and organization have made possible an unparalleled development of autonomous objective culture. this has greatly magnified the distance between subject and object.... man stands to become alienated from the most advanced products of his creative spirit..." [the 'cultural tragedy'--formally alienation, clearly]

(xlviii): "it is clear that Simmel's ideas enjoyed a privileged position in German sociology, until sociology in general and Simmel's books in particular were suppressed by the Nazis."

(liii): Park's appropriation of Simmel included a shift in definition of sociology which wasn't inconsequential--"by relegating competition and conflict to the sphere of the presocial, or subsocial, it led to an identification of sociality with consensus, rather than a conception of all social facts as inherently based on fundamental dualisms."

(lvi): lewis wirth identifying simmel's essay as 'the most important single article on the city from the sociological standpoint..'

(lvi): important angle into chicago school--"all these extension of simmel's ideas by Park's students... deal with social relationships, not sith social process."

(lxi): a kind of in sum: "Simmel's image of society may provide a continuing challenge to conceptions of social facts and social order which lay primary emphasis on systemic requirements and normative constraints, offering the counterparadigm of a luctuating field of self-regulating transactions--an alternative which stresses the phenomenology of individual experience and the dimension of distance in social relations..."

(lxiii-lxv): chapter summaries

--- --- --- --- --- --- ---

chapter one, "how is history possible?" [1905] (3-6)

(3): a critique of postivist history -- of "historical realism," which provides a mirror image of the past 'as it really was'

(3-4): possible, then, in the way that Kant's understanding of 'nature' is possible--the triumph of the 'ego': "inasmuch as the ego produces nature as its conception, and the general laws constitutive of nature are nothing other than the forms of our mind, natural existence has been subordinated to the sovereign ego."

(4): important--"man, as something known, is made by nature and history; but man, as knower, makes nature and history."

(5): in sum, the argument of this essay: "that form in which all psychic reality comes to consciousness, which emerges as the history of every ego, is itself a product of the creative ego. mind becomes aware of itself in the stream of becoming, but mind has already marked out the banks and currents of that stream and thereby made it into 'history.' the investigations which follow serve the general objective of preserving the freedom of the human spirit --that is, form-giving creativity--over against historicism in the same way that Kant did with respect to naturalism."

chapter two, how is society possible? [1908] (6-22)

(7): important: taking the nature-society comparison further--"the unity of nature emerges in the observing subject exclusively; ... by contrast, the unity of society needs no observer. it is directly realized by its own elements because these elements are themselves conscious and synthesizing units." [in other words, there is a distinction between where the form-giving function resides, in the two accounts]

(8): "the question of how society is possible... is answered by the conditions which reside a priori in the elements themselves, through which they combine... into the synthesis, society."

(9): two functions of the "sociological apriorities": (1) "more or less completely determine the actual process of sociation..."; (2) they are the ideational, logical presuppositions for the perfect society [is this a methodological / normative list? ]

(9-10): a necessary incompleteness in our perception of the Other (the necessity of classifying him not in terms of his singularity alone, but also "in terms of a general category" which cannot cover him fully).

(10): "all of us are fragments, not only of general man, but also of ourselves..."

(11): "the practice of life urges us to make the picture of a man only from the real pieces that we empirically know of him, but it is precisely the practice of life which is based on these modifications and supplementations, on the transformation of the given fragments into the generality of a type and into the completeness of the ideal personality... every member of a group... sees every other member not just empirically, but on the basis of an aprioric principle which the group imposes on every one of its participants..." [practice demands, in a sense, that we organize experience in this way--but again it's a practice that is independent of us. important to distinguish from the Kantian account of nature, as he said]

(11-12): "The civilian who meets an officer cannot free himself from his knowledge of the fact that this individual is an officer..."

(12): important--the question of reality: "in all these cases, reality is veiled by social generalization, which in a highly differentiated society, makes discovering it altogether impossible... but the very alterations and new formations which preclude this knowledge of him are, actgually, the conditions which make possible the sort of relations we call social. the phenomenon recalls Kant's conception of the categories: they form immediate data into new objects, but they alone make the given world into a knowable world."

(13): "for the social environment does not surround all of the individual. we know of the bureaucrat that he is not only a bureaucrat... this extrasocial nature--a man's temperament, fate, interests, worth as a personality--gives a certain nuance to the picture formed by all who meet him." [qua personality, counterposed to individual in society]

(13-14): "actually, individuals, as well as occupations and social situation, are differentiated according to how much of the non-social element they possess or allow along with their social content" [couple in love vs. catholic priest--but look to the text for explanation of this, because it's not what you'd think. or example of market exchange, later, wherein "the individual, inasmuch as he produces, buys, sells, and in general performs anything, approaches the ideal of absolute objectivity..."]

(14-15): important--"a society is, therefore, a structure which consists of beings who stand inside and outside of it at the same time... the individual can never stay within a unit which he does not at the same time stay out of..." [e.g., "to be one with God is conditioned in its very significance by being other than God." he applies, this, too the phenomenon of being both determined by nature, and free from its constraints]

(16): "on the one hand, we see ourselves as products of society... on the other hand, we see ourselves as members of society..."

(17-18): important--"the two--social and individual--are only two different categories under which the same content is subsumed." and man, of course, exists only as the synthesis of these two form--man is a "synthetic category." [the dual position--"the individual is contained in sociation, and, at the same time, finds himself confronted by it." to what extent, though, is this important as an analytical, rather than simply descriptive claim? i mean, it's clear he understand it as epistemologically terribly important, but--to an extent--it sidesteps the problem, no? or have we resigned ourselves to sidestepping the problem?]

(18): silly, standard reflections on equality

(21): reflections on the notion of "vocation"

(22): hmm... -- "the nexus by which each social element (each individual) is interwoven with the life and activities of every other, and by which the external framework of society is produced, is a causal nexus. but it is transformed into a teleological nexus as soon as it is considered from the perspective of the elements that carry and produce it--individuals... it is the dual nexus which supplies the individual consciousness with a fundamental category and thus transforms it into a social element."

chapter three, the problem of sociology [1908] (22-35)

(23): important, society is constituted by reciprocity--"the whole world could not be called one if each of its parts did not somehow influence every other part..."

(24): "in any given social phenomenon, content and societal form constitute one reality. a social form severed from all content can no more attain existence than a spatial form can exist without a material whose form it is."

(25): critical, spelling out his understanding of the science of society--"to separate, by scientific abstraction, these two factors of form and content which are in reality inseparably united; to detach by analysis the forms of interaction or sociation from their contents...; and to bring them together systematically under a consistent scientific viewpoint--this seems to me the basis for the only, as well as the entire, possibility of a special science of society as such."

(26): methodologically (or epistemologically?), there are two provisions which make this science possible, which are "undeniable facts": (1): the forms should be observable in diverse contents; (2) the content should manifest itself in diverse forms.

(27): "this conception of society implies a further proposition: a given number of individuals may be society to a greater or smaller degree."

(28): like the ideal-type, or not? -- "sociological forms, if they are to be even approximately definite, can apply only to a limited range of phenomena... what is needed is the study of specific kinds of superordination and subordination, and of the specific forms in which they are realized. through such a study, of course, these forms would losein applicability what they would gain in definiteness."

(28-29): need to mediate, too, between the abstract ("the object abstracted from reality may be examined in regard to laws entirely inhering in the objective nature of the elements") and the concrete ("the forms of sociation may be examined... in regard to their occurence at specific places and at specific times...")

(30-31): important--there is only ever an 'approximate' match between form and content [this clearly marks out his antipositivist orientation, even if it was already evident]... as he writes later, "there is no means of teaching, and, under certain conditions, even of performing the analysis of form and content into sociological elements."

(33): "there is always one reality and we cannot grasp it scientifically in its immediacy and wholeness but must consider it from a number of different viewpoints and thereby make it into a plurality of mutually independent scientific subject matters."

(33-36): important--distinction between sociological and psychological categories [corresponds to social/individual?]: "in this sense, then, the givens of sociology are psychological processes whose immediate reality presents itself first of all under psychological categories. but these psychological categories, although indispensable for the description of the facts, remains outside the purpose of sociological investigation. it is to this end that we direct our study to the objective reality of sociation, a reality which, to be sure, is embodied in psychic processes and can often be described only by means of them."

chapter five, exchange [1907] (43-70)

(43): exchange, at the highest level of generality, seems to stand in for the notion of necessary reciprocity outlined earlier.

(44): distinction between economic and other forms of exchange; "of all kinds of exchange, the exchange of economic values is the least free of some tinge of sacrifice."

(46): "considered with reference to its immediate content, exchange is nothing more than the causally connected repetition of the fact that an actor now has something which he previously did not have, and for that has lost something which he previously did have."

(46): weak rejoinder to the marxist theory of exploitation, here

(46): he wants to look at exchange subjectively--"it is extremely important to carry through this reduction of the economic process to that which takes place in actuality, that is, within the psyche of every economic actor... to the process of balancing two subjective events within an individual."

(47): subjectively, then, "exchange is just as productive... as is so-called production." [this is where weber et. al. were ripping out their hair, i'm sure]

(48-49): sacrifice/value? "...sacrifice is the condition of all value; not only the price to be paid for individual values that are already established, but that through which alone values can come into being."

(49): effectively, a 'non-labor' theory of value (what we give up)

(50): relativity of value--much like a line cannot be 'long' in and of itself, but only in relation to other lines.

(52): a theory, in effect, of non-exploitation--"the value which an actor surrenders for another value can never be greater, for the subject himself under the actual circumstances of that moment, than that for which it is given."

(53): is he using the orgasm as a heuristic?

(54): important--again, relativity of value: "economic value as such does not inhere in an object in its isolated self-existence, but comes to an object only through the expenditure of another object which is given to it."

(55): not simply subjective, desire is not enough--"[it is] certain that desire in and of itself could not establish any value if it did not encounter obstacles..."

(56-57): key, in sum--"the possibility of economy is at the same time the possibility of the objects of economy. the very transaction between two possessors of objects... which brings them into the so-called economic reation, namely, reciprocal sacrifice, at the same time elevates each of these objects into the category of value. the logical difficulty raised by the argument that values must first exist, and exist as values... is now removed. it is removed thanks to the significance we have perceived in that psychic relationsihp we designated as the distance between us and things... economic values thus emerge through the same reciprocity and relativity in which the economic condition of values consists."

(57): "there is no need to invoke a prior process of valuation... what is required for this valuation takes place in the very act of exchange itself."

(58): using 'primitives' and children to establish, again, the importance of subjective desire in the notion of value.

(59): again, he is stretching the subjective explanation to breaking point ("starvation wages" preferable to not working--thus, work 'valued' as equivalent to "starvation wages") [after all, how do you stop the subjective explanation from becoming a total non-explanation? it's not clear if you can, in fact]

(60): there is value formed from the traditions of society, and value formed from the individual. but we make a mistake thinking that the former is explicable by objective rules. they are both subjective, just have unfolded at different scales [this is my interpretation, at least]

(61): important--we can speak of standards of value (here about labor-power, socially necessary labor time), but he is really making clear that he is after the metaphysics of value, which has to be rooted in some kind of relation to subjective assessments of 'sacrifice/gain.'

(61-62): not a bit tautological?--essentially, what it means for things to exchange is for them to be valued equally. but what is the evidence that they've been valued equally? well that they exchange, of course!

(62): arguing that absolute value can be understood in these terms, as well: "exchange is, indeed, nothing other than the interindividual attempt to improve an unfavorable situation arising out of a shortage of goods; that is, to reduce as much as possible the amount of subjective abstinence by the mode of distributing the available supply."

(65): using Italy and the Orient to show the origins of exchange-value: "this shows clearly how the set price emerges out of the counterposition of subjects--the whole thing represents an intrusion of precommercial relations into a going exchange economy, but one that has not yet been consistently realized."

(66-67): in sum, the same point--"in this sense which holds true of all cultural development, then, exchange is originally a matter of social arrangements, until individuals become sufficiently acquainted with objects.. there may be doubt that these socially legislated rates... could only have resulted from numerous previous transactions which initially took place in irregular and unfixed form among individuals. this objection holds for exchange, however, no more than it does for language, custom, law... for all the fundamental forms of life... for a long time these forms, too, could only be explained as the inventions of individuals, whereas they surely arose from the very beginning as interindividual formations, as the product of interaction between individual and collectivity, so that no individual is to be credited with their origin."

(68): "by no means does it follow logically from those... properties of things which we call utility and scarcity... the meaning that an object has for an individual always rests soley in it desirability. for whatever an object is to accomplish for us, its qualitative desire is decisive."

(68-69): in an unintended way, he is making an important point about the always-social nature of scarcity, here

(69): in sum--"the difficulty of attainment, that is, the magnitude of the sacrifice involved in exchange is, thus the element that peculiarly constitues value."

(69): in sum--"we may examine an object ever so closely with respect to its self-sufficient properties, but we shall not find its economic value. for this consists exclusively in the reciprocal relationship which comes into being among several objects on the basis of these properties..."

chapter six, conflict [1908] (70-95)

(70): conflict, of course, is a form of sociation

(70-71): "conflict is thus designed to resolve divergent dualisms; it is a way of achieving some kind of unity, even if it be through the annihilation of one of the conflicting parties..." it is not purely negative, a la indifference--it contains something positive.

the sociological relevance of conflict (71-72)

(72): where you have unity, you also have discord--"an absolutely centripetal and harmonious groupd, a pure 'unification', not only is empirically unreal, it could show no real life process." [yin-yang sociology, i feel--but would be instructive to properly tease out distinction with dialectics]

unity and discord (73-74)

(73): there is an analytical mistake insofar as "what is eventually left standing is [seen] as the result of the subtraction of the two (while in reality it must rather be designated as the reslut of their addition.)"

conflict as an integrative force in the group (74-76)

(74): using this approach to 'understand' marriage and caste

(75): important--again, groups are characterized as much by their cooperation as they are by their mutual replusion--"the disappearence... of repulsive energeis does by no means always result in a richer and fuller social life... but in a different and unrealizable a phenomenon as if the group were deprived of the forces of cooperation." (see 76)

(76): and the 'urban'--"without such aversion, we could not imagine what form modern urban life, which every day brings everybody in contact with innumerable others, might possibly take. the whole inner organization of urban interaction is based on an extremely complex hierarchy of sympathies, indifferences, and aversions of both the most short-lived and the most enduring kind."

homogeneity and heterogeneity in social relations (77-80)

(77): important--"relations of conflict do not by themselves produce a social structure, but only in cooperation with unifying forces."

(79): it is also possible that we are unable to grasp the underlying consistency--"the structure may be sui generis, it smotivation and form being wholly self-consistent, and only in order to be able to describe and understand it, do we put it together, post factum, out of two tendencies, one monistic, the other antagonistic." (example given is nobility working for the king & being compelled to defend their interests against the king)

antagonism as an element in sociation (80-83)

(80): "while antagonism by itself does not produce sociation, it is a sociological element almost never absent in it."

(81): sociology vs. ethics

(81): interesting--"if... there is any consideration, any limit to violence, there already exists a socializing factor, even though only as the qualification of violence."

(82-83): only a fight for its own sake, it seems, is "wholly free from the admixture of other forms of relation."

antagonistic games (83-84)

(83): the single case where the fascination of the fight is the exclusive motivation--yet, even here: "one unites in order to fight, and one fights under the mutually recognized control of norms and rules. to repeat, these unifications do not enter into the motivation of the undertaking, even though it is through them that it takes shape." [this is actually a place where we can interrogate the methodological/analytical/normative question]

legal conflict (84-86)

(85): legal petifoggery!

(85): important--"legal conflict rests on a broad basis of unities and agreements between the enemies. the reason is that both parties are equally subordinated to the law..." [but again, there needs to be a distinction between this as consent, and this as coerced subordination--in what way are people freely subject to the law, after all? this is a distinction that his framework seems incapable of making.]

conflicts over causes (86-90)

(87-88): interesting, in particular, because here he is speaking about Marx and Marxism: "ever since marx, the social struggle has developed into this form [of wholly decisive victories, and where peace is treason], despite infinite differences in other respects." [there is a question, too, about how one mediates between objective and subjective--do you see the entrepreneur as a person or in his social role?]

(88): "an interesting example of this correlation is the workers' boycott of the berlin breweries in 1894. this was one of the most violent local fights in recent decades, carried out wit the utmost foce by both sides, but without any personal hatred of the brewers by the leaders of the boycott... it thus appears that conflict can exclude all subjective factors... at the same time we see that this common basis increases, rather than decreases, the intensity, irreconcilability, and stubborn consistency of the fight" [this framing, though, is of course highly dubious--in what way do the respective parties share a 'common basis'? this could be his own political intervention.]

common qualities vs. common membershp in larger social structures as basis of conflict (90-92)

(90-91): "two kinds of commonality may be the bases of particularly intense antagonisms: common qualities, and common membership in a larger social structure."

(91): too true--"people who have many common features often do one another worse or 'wronger' wrong than complete strangers do... we confront the stranger, with whom we share neither characteristics nor broader interests, objectively; we hold our personalities in resrve; and thus a particular difference does not involve us in our totalities... the more we have in common with another as whole persons, however, the more easily will our totality be involved in every single relation to him..."

conflict in intimate relations (92-95)

(92-94): odd relationship science, here

(95): hmm, maybe need to re-read the class conflict section in light of this point--"the degeneration of a difference in convictions into hatred and fight ordinarily occurs only when there were essential, original similarities between the parties. the (sociologically very significant) 'respect for the enemy' is usually absent where the hostility has arisen on the basis of previous solidarity."

chapter 18, group expansion and the development of individuality [1908] (251-293)

(251-252): "rather than pursuing a single abstracted form in the phenomena where it happens to appear, ... this chapter presents a particular correlation, an interactionally determined pattern of development among forms of association."

(252): "individuality in being and action generally increases to the degree that the social circle encompassing the individual expands."

(253): abstract solidarities between groups--socialist internationals and aristocratic cabals, both

(254): the fall of the guilds, rise of capital/labor divide

(255): division of labor, internal differentiation--" as soon as the boundaries of the group are ruptured and it enters into trade in special products with another group, internal differentiation develops between those who produce for export and those who produce for domestic consumption--two wholly opposed inner modes of being."

(255): account of dissolving of feudalism traces this process through the emancipation of the serfs (i.e., the process whereby they're divested of the means of production)

(256): thus, "differentiation and individualization loosen the bond of the individual with those who are most near in order to weave in its place a new one... with those who are more distant..."

(256): this is quite painful, these apologetics for the current order

(256-257): important--"these examples hint at a relation that will be found everywhere in the course of this inquiry. the nonindividuation of elements in the narrower circle and their differentiation in the wider one are phenomena that are found, synchornically, among coexistent groups and group elements, just as they appear, diachronicaly, in the sequence of stages through which a single group develops."

(257): basic thesis, it seems--"the narrower the circle to which we commit ourselves, the less freedom of individuality we possess; however, this narrower circle is itself something individual... correspondingly, if the circle in which we are active... enlarges, there is more room in it for the development of our individuality; but as parts of this whole, we have less uniqueness: hte larger whole is less individual as a social group. thus, the leveling of individual differences correpsnds not only to the relative smallness... of the collectivity, but also... to its own individualistic coloring." [i.e., infuriating, nested dualisms abound. also, note that he is advocating we use this as a kind of ideal type.]

(258): quakers; north vs. south

(259): crux--"we lead... a halved existence. we live as an individual within a social circle, with tangible separation from its other members, but also as a member of this circle, with separation from everything that does not belong to it." this gives rise to a contradictory impulse--the more we want to distinguish ourselves from others in our group, the more we undercut the unity of the group (from which we also find satisfaction, don't forget)

(259-260): employing this as a heuristic--again, a very loose claim on what is actually happening (this gets us back to the normative/methodological questions)

(262): the family

(263): expanding to the animal kingdom -- in other words, the contingency of his argument is a non-issue, in his opinion

(263): family, con't--it's sociological duality: "on the one hand, it is an extension of one's own personality... on the other hand, the family also constitutes a complex within which the individual distinguishes himself from all others..."

(265): methodologically, then, we're dealing with nested circles, which makes analysis complex. he is arguing, though, that "it is always precisely the intermediate structure that exhibits the pattern in question."

(266): there is, of course, an intederminacy to how this individuality drive might emerge

(267): tracing the general pattern through a general model of three concentric circles: "one might sacrifice oneself for a single human being...; and then again, for an incomprehensible multitude; but for a hundred people, hardly anyone brings himself to martyrdom..." [this may sound neat, but it's all hogwash]

(269): key--"the larger circle encourages freedom, the smaller one restricts it."

(269): speaking about spouses and our ability to be picky--"a more profound meaning of freedom emerges here: individual freedom is freedom that is limited by individuality."

(270): in sum--"the relatively undeveloped condition certainly imposed a social constraint on the individual; however, this was linked to the negative freedom of nondifferentiation... in the more advanced state, on the other hand, social possibilities are much enhanced, but now they are restricted by the positive meaning of freedom in which every choice is... the unambiguously determined expression of an unalterable kind of personality."

(271-272): two meanings of individuality--(1--an 18t century variant) "individuality in the sense of the freedom and responsibility for oneself that comes from a broad and fluid social environment..."; freedom from external influence (2--a 19th century variant) "means that the single human being distinguishes himself from all others; that his being and conduct.. suit him alone..."; freedom in individual flowering

(272): french revolution, and unions

(273): 'the objective mind', which gives birth to 'tradition' and objective culture

(274): individualism of equality vs. individualism of inequality [?]

(274): individualism and cosmopolitanism

(275): differentiation/expansion as 'cause' of collapse of holy roman empire?!

(277-278): cash economy and differentiation/expansion: "money is the connection that relates maximal expansion of the economic group to maximal differentiation of its members, both in the dimension of freedom and a sense of responsibility for oneself, and in the dimension of a qualitative differentiation of labor."

(278): enclosures--ugh, what the fuck.

(279): e.g., absolutism and the end of the guild/corporation

(279): despotism and leveling, republicanism and tyranny: "the shattering of group constraints within a whole that somehow belongs together is so intimately related to the accentuation of individuality that both the cohesion of the ruling personality and the individual freedom of all group members center upon it like two variations on a single theme."

(280-281): tracing this dynamic through the question of representation (as you get larger, more differentiated, administration demands rule of a single man...)

(283): through law--smaller collectivities do not distinguish, unlike larger ones, between public authority and private life

(284-285): a corollary, which was mentioned earlier, too--"as man as individual... comes to replace man as social element..., the bond must tighten that pulls him... toward all that is human, suggesting to him the notion of an ideal unity of mankind."

(285-286): important--seemingly setting up an opposition between pursuit of individuality and pursuit of equality (but i think this is more complicated that we might think, at first glance)--example is increased education: "it seeks to eliminate glaring differences in mental level and, precisely via the creation of a certain equality, to secure for each person the previously denied chance of making good his individual capacities..." again, the two different understandings of individuality are key--the first, freedom from external constraint, he deems compatible with inequality; the second, however, is not at all compatible.

(287): a la durkheim, seeing society as an organism

(289-290): forshadowing the tragic?--"...when the individual's relations begin to exceed a certain extensiveness, he becomes all the more thrown back upon himself..."

(291): even if there has been a certain leveling of personality, he's arguing, "life in a wider circle and interaction with it develop, in and of themselves, more consciousness of personality than arises in a narrower circle." we become conscious of ourselves, as constant ego, the greater the variability of the world around us.

(292): again, a la durkheim--"the generation of functional organs is the means wehreby the cohesion of the group is united with the greatest freedom of individuals." the individual finds his niche. [my god i hate this hogwash]

chapter twenty, the metropolis and mental life [1903] (324-339)

(324): key--"the deepest problems of modern life flow from the attempt of the individual to maintain the independence and individuality of his existence against the sovereign powers of society..." [prefiguring the tragedy]. in each movement for emancipation (from Nietzsche to the Socialists), Simmel sees "the same fundamental motive [at work], namely the resistance of the individual to being levelled, swallowed up in the socio-technological mechanism."

(325): important--the classic definition of the 'urban'/rural: "to the extent that the metropolis creates these psychological conditions--with every crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational, and social life--it creates in the sensory foundations of mental life, and in the degree of awareness necessitated by our organization as creatrues dependent on differences, a deep contrast with the slower, more habitual, more smoothly flowing rhythm of the sensory-mental phase of small town and rural existence."

(326): the metropolitan type that emerges is less emotional, more rational (as protection, it seems...). corresponds to emotional relationships vs. objective relationships.

(327): a kind of commodity fetishism-line, though not really: noting that now people are provided for and produce for producers/consumers that they don't know. "thereby, the interests of each party acquire a relentless matter-of-factness."

(328): the city as a "firmly fixed framework" above and all subjective elements, possibly

(328): punctuality, calculability, exactness, condition the "exclusion of those irrational, instinctive, sovereign human traits and impluses which originally seek to determine the form of life from within instead of receiving it from without." this is why Nietzsche hated the city.

(329): the blase outlook, without which life in the metropolis would be impossible (see 331-332, also)

(330): money as the frightful leveler [that] "hollows out the core of things, their pecularities..."

(332): re: the blase outlook--"what appears here directly as dissociation is in reality only one of the elementary forms of socialization."

(333): same argument as last essay--the small town as panopticon

(334): "for here, as elsewhere, it is by no means necessary that the freedom of man reflect itself in his emotional life only as a pleasant experience."

(334): a 'geometric' model re: the "urban"--the ecological critique is very apt, here

(335): something like the "urban effect"--"...the city exists only in the totality of the effects which transcend their immediate sphere."

(335-336): the city as site for most extensive division of labor

(336): "all this leads to the narrower type of intellectual individuation of mental qualities to which the city give rise in proportion to its size."

(337): important--again, an allusion to the modern tragedy (the creation of man as a "cog")--"the development of modern culture is characterized by the predominance of what one can call the objective spirit over the subjetive; that is... there is embodied a sort of spirit, the daily growth of which is followed only imperfectly and with an even greater lag by the intellectual development of the individual." spirituality and value escape their subjective existence, and become objective reality. culture "has outgrown every personal element."

(338): "the atrophy of individual culture through the hypertrophy of objective culture lies at the root of the bitter hatred which the preachers of the most extreme individualism, in the footsteps of Nietzsche, directed against the metropolis."

(339): summary passage, in which the metropolis is read as the site in which the two understandings of individuality (the 18th and 19th century-versions) meet, collide--"it is the function of the metropolis to make a place for the conflict and for the attempts at unification of both of these in the sense that its own peculiar conditions have been revealed to us as the occasion and stimulus for the development of both."

chapter twenty-two, social forms and inner needs [1908] (351-352)

(351): "a basic dualism" afflicts all sociation--"a relation, which is a fluctuating, constantly developing life-process, nevertheless receives a relatively stable external form." [again, this passage provides ample opportunity to work out normative/methodological/analytical/epistemological]

(352): we give 'form' to our "inner life", yet these "forms... do not express or shape an ideal, a contrast with life's reality, but this life itself."

(352): forms can outrun content, just as content can outrun forms [example of a new political constitution]

chapter twenty-four, the conflict in modern culture [1918] (375-393)

(375): key--here, gesturing towards the tragic: "...these forms [cultural forms] encompass the flow of life and provide it with content and form, freedom and order. but although these forms arise out of the life process, because of their unique constellation they do not share the restless rhythm of life... these forms are frameworks for the creative life, which, however, soon transcends them... this new rifidity inevitably places them at a distance from the spiritual dynamic which created them and which makes them independent."

(376): "each cultural form, once it is created, is gnawed at varying rates by the forces of life.... life constantly struggles against its own products..."

(376): fits the Marxist narrative into this larger framework

(377): "life is always in a latent opposition to the form" [here, again, clearly 'real', this form/content -- relevant for the normative/methodological question.]

(377): important, a unique conjuncture?--"... what is happening is not only a negative, passive dying out of traditional forms, but simultaneously a fully positive drive towards life which is actively repressing these forms."

(378): notion of the 'central idea' / 'secret being' of an epoch (378-379: history of this development, across epochs)

(380): "i will now illustrate... the uniqueness of the cultural situation we are undergoing..."

(381-382): in art, expressionism--"artist replaces his model with the impluse lying behind the model... according to the artist's intention, the form represents only a necessary evil."

(384): van gogh

(385): in philosophy, pragmatism--truth is that which sustains life; "there is no originally independent truth... the purest expression of life as a central idea is reached when it is viewed as the metaphysical basic fact, as the essence of all being..."

(388): a turn away form classicism, which "is the ideology of form."

(388): towards a new erotic life

(390): in religion--"tendency for forms of religious belief to dissolve into modes of religious life, into religiosity as a purely functional justification of of religion"

(392-393): important, a restatement of the fundamental contradiction of our age--"life must either produce forms or proceed through forms... life is inseparably charged with contradiction. it can enter reality only through the form of its antithesis, that is, only in the form of form.... the forms themselves, however, deny this contradiction: in their rigidly individual shapes, in the demands of their imprescriptible rights, they boldly present themselves as the true meaning and value of our existence... life wishes here to obtain something which it cannot reach. it desires to transcend all forms and appear in its naked immediacy. yet the processes of thinking, wishing and forming can only substitute one form for another. they can never replace the form as such by life which as such transcends the form..."

(393): hinting at a dialectic, rather than simple dualism, in a sense: "in short, the present is too full of contradictions to stand still. this itself is a more fundamental change than the reformations of times past..." [how to integrate this with the earlier reflections?]

mike, nothing to lose but their chains

(3): thesis--"Instead, I consider the inverse question: historically, how did welfare policies condition a working-class party’s success or failure in winning votes? In doing so, this project hypothesizes that private social provisions pushed industrial working-class political history in a radically different direction in the US than in Europe and Australasia."

(6): "The relationship between business and the government in the US, however, was unlike that found in other countries, whose states played a more directive role in providing welfare. The response to the upsurge in labor militancy in the US moved in a sharply different direction. While reformers in the American Association for Labor Legislation sought to establish workingmen’s insurance along the lines of the European model, few of their policies were taken up by the state. Unlike the legislative profiles of nascent welfare states in Europe and Australasia, the US was exemplified by its lack of nationwide public protections for male workers and the elderly."

(7): "But, while European workers found legislative pursuits increasingly rewarding between the 1870s and the 1910s, American workers encountered effective retrenchment. During the 1880s and the early 1890s, the Knights of Labor, the American Federation of Labor and other trade unions won some legislative victories in areas such as legal hour’s limits, prohibitions on sweated labor, prohibitions on company stores, and union protections. But these gains were not sustained, often paltry and too often unenforced. By 1920, the courts struck down roughly three hundred labor laws (Skocpol 1992:227)." [if i read this with skeptical eyes, though, i want more -- i need convincing that this wasn't the same in other countries--proving that there was a serious, qualitative difference, rather than a difference in degree]

(7): key--"Major industrialists, eager to check and repel labor militancy and a short-lived tide of government regulation, proffered welfare capitalism as an alternative to the welfare statism they saw taking form abroad."

(9-10): "Ultimately, the US developed a welfare regime with three main features: a network of minimal direct social spending programs, a constellation of indirect or “hidden” state interventions through tax breaks and regulations, and, most importantly for this project, the domination of private social protections in large firms (Hacker 2002:11)."

(11): I hypothesize:

1. Firm intervention into social policy in the US was sufficient to obstruct the consolidation and expansion of industrial working-class votes for the Socialist Party in national elections.
2. State intervention into social policy in non-American industrializing countries did not inhibit the political mobilization of workers support for working-class parties.
3. Private welfare measures were abandoned at different rates across firms (Moriguchi 2005), and it was precisely their disparate rate of adoption in the US that helps explain the uneven development of industrial working-class based politics at the municipal level.
   

(12): three ways in which private social insurance obstructs w-class party formation:

1. "Wider income disparity generated by private social benefits act to disincentivize the formation of class-based politics by widening inequality and exposure to risk between working people."
2. "serves to secure employee allegiance to particular firms. In more extreme cases, it disincentivizes unionization and independent political action by allowing the firm to only award those employees willing to reject such strategies for maximizing their income and benefits."
3. "they isolate employee grievances at the level of the firm or plant. If an employee wants to negotiate the conditions of their benefits, the individual firm is the natural object of contestation. On the other hand, public social benefits constitute the state as the key arena for employee voice over the conditions of their benefits."

(14-15): "The potential for industrial working-class support for working-class parties across all industrializing contexts was driven by two interconnected economic and social factors:

1. Industrialization of key economic sectors that were previously under the control of skilled artisans and craftsmen resulted in intense deskilling and restructuring after 1870; the workers in these firms became the main supporters of working-class parties in all advanced capitalist countries.
2. Economic dislocation, a series of crises in the late 1800s, drove people to seek alternative strategies for securing their economic livelihood in labor militancy and political action."

(16-?): introducing five positions in the literature that try and explain this

1. "Institutionalists are dominant in the American exceptionalism debate. They view state structures and state policies as independent and determinative forces on party formation and success." [electoral system, early suffrage stopped party formation] (16-17)
   
2. "Repressionists argue that in America, there was much more repression of working-class movements than elsewhere, which made potential working-class political activists skeptical about the effectiveness of building parties." (17)
3. "Culturalists, on the other hand, argue from a large range of different vantage points. But, what unites their claims is the notion that unique systems of self-understanding in the US, either by the entire population or critical sections of it, precluded the support of working-class parties. A dominant position here is that since the US lacked a feudal past, the liberal tradition that emerged undermined the class-based grievances found elsewhere that gave working people a reason to support working-class parties." [feudal shackles...] (17-18)
4. "Another set of explanations suggest that the tactical decisions of both influential labor leaders and the leaders of the Socialist Party can explain the failure of working-class politics." (18-19)
5. "Finally, economic arguments share a common failing with the rest of the literature in that they make broad claims that cannot account for internal variation. A frequently cited explanation rests on the claim that American workers simply had fewer economic grievances than their counterparts." (20) ["Others demonstrate that a surge in Socialist Party votes in both Europe and America corresponded with an increase in working-class income and living standards (Sturmthal 1973; Fetscher 1973). And critically, from my perspective, it is unable to account for internal variation within the US context."]

(29): "However, it also lays a theoretical groundwork for subsequent explanations for the more general weakness of class-based politics throughout America’s history since the turn of the 20th century. So, while this project offers a historically conditional theory of the failures and successes of the American Socialist Party in industrial working-class communities, in the end it aims to provide theoretical concepts useful for the study of present controversies concerning working-class political behavior and business unionism." [how much will you focus on this?]

-----

questions:

1. possibility that you are pushing back the causal chain -- i.e., you have identified something that will itself need to be explained. in fact, it could be that the five explanations you identify might work through this mechanism, that you are identifying. this does not compromise the research, of course, but raises questions about the scope of the conclusions you will be able to make.
2. in other words, when you switch from asking how w-class activism forced welfare provision, to asking how the type of welfare provision influenced w-class activism, there is a way in which you're framing makes the whole thing too neat. how do we explain the difference in the type of welfare provision, systematically? otherwise it becomes a kind of exogenous variable.

neil smith, the new urban frontier

preface (xiii-xx)

(xiii): the "urban wilderness" [and transformation into "frontier" in the 1960s -- xiv]

(xiv): "antiurbanism has been a central theme in US culture..."

(xiv): the 'frontier' idiom invovles, also, the fact that the present populations are seen as natural elements of the physical surroundings -- a "city not yet socially inhabited"

(xv): "it was a short path from a failed liberalism to the revanchist city of the 1990s"

(xvi): important, gentrification and uneven capitalist development--"economic expansion today no longer takes place purely via absolute geographical expansion but rather involves internal differentiation of already developed spaces. at the urban scale, this is the importance of gentrification vis-a-vis suburbanization. The production of space in general and gentrification in particular are examples of this kind of uneven development endemic to capitalist societies. Much like a real frontier, the gentrification frontier is advanced not so much through the actions of intrepid pioneers as through the actions of collective owners of capital."

(xvii): four parts

1. "sets the stage for the... conflicts raised by gentrification." (involving the "central argument that in the 1990s, continuing gentrification contributes to what i call the 'revanchist city.'")
   
2. "interconnection between shifts in the social economy and the myriad detail of local instances of gentrification" (role of the state; catch-22 for working-class)
3. turning frontier motif on its head.
   
4. 'revanchist urbanism' as an attack on populations accused of stealing the city from the white working-classes

(xviii-xix): "while i accept that... radically different experiences of gentrification obtain in different... contexts, i would also hold that among these differences a braid of common threads ripples through..."

introduction--chapter 1 (3-29)

(3): 'class war, class war, die yuppie scum'

(6-7): important--"largely abandoned to the working class amid postwar suburban expansion, relinquished to the poor and unemployed as reservations for racial and ethnic minorities, the terrain of the inner city is suddenly valuable again, perversely profitable. this new urbanism embodies a widespread and drastic repolarization of the city along political, economic, cultural and geographical lines since the 1970s, and is integral with larger global shifts... simultaneously a response and contributor to a series of wider global transformations: global economic expansion in the 1980s; the restructuring of national and urban economies in advanced capitalist countries toward services, recreation and consumption; and the emergence of a global hierarchy of world, national, and regional cities. These shifts have propelled gentrification from a comparatively marginal preoccupation in a certain niche of the real estate industry to the cutting edge of urban change."

(10): from cement benches to wrought-iron benches "to prevent homeless people from sleeping."

(10): tomkins square as jane jacobs' neighborhood park

(11): [in 1873] 'There was in any case a strong ideological objection to the concept of relief itself and a belief that the rigors of unemployment were a necessary and salutary discipline for the working classes.' [in protest being shut down, newspaper's evoking the spectre of the paris commune]

(12): Triangle fire of 1911, which killed 146 women proletarians on the l. east side; Palmer raids of 1919

(12): suburbs burgeoning in the 1920s [how is this to be related to post-war suburbanization?]

(12): "myth is constituted by the loss of the geographical quality of things, as well."

(17-18): the use of the frontier myth to exculpate the metropolis; to "justify monstrous incivility in the heart of the city" (18)--"the frontier was conveyed in the city as a safety valve for the urban class warfare brewing in such events as the 1863 NY draft riot, the 1877 railway strike... urban social conflict was not so much denied as externalized." (17)

(18): naming of 'east village'

(18-19): complicity of art in gentrification

(20-21): 1929 regional plan (coming after 1924 federal decision to severely curtail european immigratoin), which envisaged the reconstruction of 'high-class residences' in the area. but then came the depression, and the area was abandoned to its devices. "Not until a further half-centtury of disinvestment, dilapidation and decline did the 1929 vision begin to be implemented."

(21): pop. numbers

(22): property value story (including the nutty story of the Christodora)

(23): important, role of property re-developers and real estate (comparison to molotch's account, useful?)--"the perverse rationality of real estate capitalism means that buildling owners and developers garner a double reward for milking properties and destroying buildings. first, they pocket the money that should have gone to repairs and upkeep; second, having effectively destroyed the building and established a rent gap, they have produced for themselves the conditions and opportunity for a whole new round of capital reinvestment. having produced a scarcity of capital in the name of profit they now flood the neighborhood for the same purpose, portraying themselves all along as civic-minded heroes..."

(23): profit rate re-vitalized, as city life is de-vitalized

(24): the State (local gov't) is hard at work in this process, too--the "more prosaic tasks: reclaiming the land and quelling the natives. in its housing policy, drug crackdowns, and especially in its parks strategy..."

(24): use of foreclosed properties (in rem)

(26): 'union square park' and 'revitalization'; 'washington square park'

(26): "... the future gentrified city, a city sparkling with the neon of elite consumption anxiously cordoned off from homeless deprivation."

(26-27): mystification and ideology--"gentrification portends a class conquest of the city. the new urban pioneers seek to scrub the city clean of its working-class geography and history... physical effacemetn of original structures effaces social history and geography; if the past is not entirely demolished it is at least reinvented--its class and race contours rubbed smooth--in the refurbishment of a palatable past."

(27): 'Westward Ho!' -- unbelievable...

(28): is there a systematic way think about urban periphery/urban core, and the shifting way in which this maps on to class divides?-- "evicted from the public as well as the private spaces of what is fast becoming a downtown bourgeois playground, minoriites, the unemployed and the poorest of the working class are destined for large-scale displacement. once isolated in central city enclaves, they are increasingly herded to reservations on the urban edge."

(28): important, the local in a global narrative (key difference from molotch, i would insist)--"gentrification and homelessness in the new city are a particular microcosm of a new global order etched first and foremost by the rapacity of capital. not only are broadly similar processes remaking cities around the world, but the world itself impinges dramatically on these localities. the gentrification frontier is also an 'imperial frontier.'... not only does international capital flood the real estate markets that fueld the process, but international migration provides a workforce for many of the... jobs associated with the new urban economy--a workforce that needs a place to stay..."

(29): "the 'primitive' conditions of the core are at once exported to the periphery while those of the periphery are reestablished at the core.'... a new social geography of the city is being born but it would be foolish to expect that it will be a peaceful process..."

introduction--chapter two (30-50)

(32): simple definition of 'gentrification' for friends and family--an "unpredicted reversal of what most twentieth-century urban theories had been predicting as the fate of the central and inner city."

(33): ruth glass and her original, 1964 definition (and its 'critical intent')

(34): "although the emergence of gentrification proper can be traced to the postwar cities of the advanced capitalist world, there are significant precursors..."

(35): Engels, and "haussman[ization]" -- a preliminary, working definition ("It was hardly 'general,' but sporadic, and it was surely restricted to Europe since few cities.... elsewhere had the extent of urban history to provide whole neighborhoods of disinvested stock.")

(35): also, just a note--gentrification doesn't entail a geographic expansion of the city, but a "spatial reconcentration"

(37-8): important--so how unique to post-war world? "the answer lies in both the extent and the systemic nature of central and inner-city rebuilding and rehabilitation beginning in the 1950s. the nineteenth-century experiences in london and paris were unique, resulting from a confluence of a class politics aimed at the threatening working classes and designed to consolidate bourgeois control... this all begins to change in the postwar period, and it is no accident that the world 'gentrification' is coined in the early 1960s... gentrification today is ubiquitous in the central and inner cities of the advanced capitalist world."

(38): AND "not only has gentrification become a widespread experience... but it is also systematically integrated into wider urban and global processes, and this too differentiates it from earlier, more discrete experiences of 'spot rehabilitation.'"

(39): as context/cause, he's identifying the same kind of process that sassen was concerned with--"gentrification became a hallmark of the emerging 'global city'"

(39): important--"...a much larger endeavour: the class remake of the central urban landscape. it would be anachronistic now to exclude redevelpoment from the rubric of gentrification" [see above, too]

(40): important--doesn't, though, spell the end of the 'suburbs': "there is really no sign that the rise of gentrification has diminshed contemporary suburbanization. quite the opposite... [a] parallel decentralization... suburbanization still represents a more powerful force than gentrification in the geographical fashioning of the metropolis..." but the former is critiqued thoroughly in the academy, while the latter goes unnoticed.

(41): in academia, the contours of the debates

(41): consumption-side (for whom a 'new middle class' were the subjects of history)vs. production-side (capital, finance, 'uneven development', 'rent gap')

(43): the postmodern, 'culturalist', consumption-side argument as "foucault run amok."

(44-45): the 'revanchist' city -- involving a "broad, right-wing reaction against both the 'liberalism' of the 1960s and 1970s and the predations of capital." [in an odd relationship to gentrification, which can ebb and flow with crisis/recovery]

part one--chapter three, local arguments (51-74)

(51): important--"it is my contention that the complexity of capital mobility in and out of the built environment lies at the core of the process. for all the interpretive cultural optimism that shrouds it, the new urban frontier is also a resolutely economic creation... it also represents an integral dimension of global restructuring."

(52): consumption-side, cultural theories vs. economic, 'price-of-gas' theories (but both share an emphasis on consumer preference, individualistic -- 'consumer sovereignty')

(54): not so much, he's arguing, a 'back-to-the-suburbs' story, at all

(55): again, "even at the height of 1980s gentrification, suburban expansion proceeded apace. this would seem to cast doubt on the traditional cultural and economic explanations of gentrification as the result of altered consumer choices amid economic constraints."

(56): the follies of the neoclassical rendering of this model, which are legend, of course

(57-58): we need, of course, a deeper theory of why certain areas become profitable, etc. -- neoclassical urban theory out the window! always nice to see this in action.

(58): important--three 'idiosyncrasies' of land as a commodity

1. "private property rights confer on the owner near-monopoly control over land and improvements..."
   
2. "land and improvements are fixed in space but their value is anything but fixed."
   
3. "while land is permanent, the improvements built on it are not but generally have a very long turnover period in physical as well as value terms."
   

(59): key, the 2nd circuit--"particularly when economic growth is hindered elsewhere in the economy, or where profit rates are low, the built environment becomes a target for the switching of much profitable investment."

(59-60): 19th century city, and values taking the classical conical form (high at center, slant towards periphery). thus begins a very imp. historical story: expansion in the post 1893-1897 depression; rise of suburb/periphery, decline/disinvestment in (part of) center through 30s... [see very instructive graph on pg. 60)

(61): towards a theory of gentrification, which will require four terms

1. house value (61) -- comprised of "the amount of socially necessary labor time," integrated with its rate of devalorization through use
   
2. sale price (62) -- value of house plus additoinal rent component
   
3. capitalized ground rent (62) -- claim made by landowner on surplus-value made on site
   
4. potential ground rent (62) -- what could be capitalized under 'highest and best' use

(63-70): the theory of gentrification, at a high level of abstraction

(65): key point in the narrative refers to the so-called 'neighborhood effect,' which is when capitalized ground rent drops below the potential ground rent, making it desirable to just hang on, for the landlord...

(67): till 'abandonment', which comes "not because they are unusable, but because they cannot be used profitably..."

(67): and here, we see the "rent gap" -- "the disparity between the potential ground rent level and the actual ground rent capitalized under the present land use." produced both by devalorization and urban growth in surrounding areas (67-68). in steps the "gentrifier."

(68): noting that the State is often active int his process; financial institutions as well, of course.

(69): three kinds of developers (professional, occupier, landlord)

(70): gentrification as a 'back-to-the-city' movement of capital (not people)

chapter four, global arguments (75-91)

(75): the global--"but in addition to these local dynamics, gentrification represents a significant historical geogrpahical reversal of assumed patterns of urban growth intimately connected to a wider frame of political-economic change."

(75): short-lived exception or long-term reversal? neither, insofar as they're both ungrounded in a larger, master narrative, he's arguing.

(77): "at the urban scale, gentrification represents the leading edge of [uneven development]"

(77): towards a systematic treatment of "uneven development" (in three parts)

1. a general framework of "tendencies toward differentiation and equalization" (77-83) -- (1) on the one hand, expansion, 'space-time' compression--annihilation of space through time; (2) on the other hand, a dynamic which involves the "progressiv divison of labour at various scales, the spatial centralization of capital in some places... (etc., etc.)... "At the urban scale, the main pattern of uneven development lies in the relation between the suburbs and the inner city. the crucial economic force mediating this relation, at the urban scale, is ground rent. it is the equalization and differentiation of ground rent levels between different places in the metropolitan region that most determines the unevenness of development."
   
2. valorization and devalorization of capital in the built environment (83-86) -- capital invested in built environment has a long turnover period, during which a relatively long period of devalorization unfolds ("the devalorization cycle"). roughly, the narrative is quite simple--(1) capital is invested in inner city; (2) barriers to further investment in inner city mean that capital goes to suburbs; (3) devalorization of inner city leads, eventually, to the rent gap; (4) rent gap is taken advantage of, you have new investment opportunities in the center.
3. reinvestment and the rhythm of unevenness (86-88) -- in the urban economy, the rhythms of capital are obviously tied to the larger, national and international contexts. and thus gentrification, as well, via mechanism of second circuit (capital searching for profit rate)
   

(81): "suburbanization" vs. "ribbon development"

(81): more on ground rent as mediating level: "...the ground rent surface translates into a quantitative measure of the actual forces toward differentiation in the urban landscape... of two major sources... the first is functional in the more specific sense, referring to the difference between residential, industrial, recreational... the second force... is differentiation according to class and race"

(82): wage-rates and suburbanization--"dependent less on intraurban population density and more on the nature of the work process."

(82): interesting, back to the urban question; 'labor-market' definition of the spatial scale: "the urban scale as a distinct spatial scale is defined in practice in terms of the reproduction of labor power and the journey to work. the entire urban area is relatively accessible for most commuters..."

(83): summary passage, re: 'land value valley' ("this pattern suggests the operation of both an equalization process and a differentiation process. on the one hand, the development of the suburbs has significantly reduced the general differential between central and suburban ground rent levels for any given location in the suburbs. but on the other hand, a 'land value valley' has emerged in the inner city surrounding the central area..."

(84): "suburbanizaton as complementary to inner-city decline in a wider pattern of uneven development at the urban scale..."

(85): social centralization of capital can become a 'spatial centralization' of capital -- both as the natural outcome of competition

(85): at a particular period in time, "it is not that suburbanization was the only alternative per se. it is just that the redevelopment of the established city was not an economical option. the center was still functional..."

(85-86): in time, though, the "rent gap" emerges

(87): "urban renewal" as an outlet for capital

(87): key, the master narrative, concisely put--"in the US, suburbanization was a concrete social response to the depressions of the 1890s and 1930s, in the sense that suburban development opened up a whole series of investment possibilities which could help to revive the profit rate. with FHA mortgage subsidies, the construction of highways, and so on, the state subsidized suburbanization quite deliberately as part of a larger solution to crisis... albeit a reversal in geographic terms, the gentrification... of the inner city represents a clear continuation... like suburbanization, the redevelopment and rehabilitation of the central cities functions as a substantial engine of profit."

(88): mention of the countryside, whose "urbanization," smith is suggesting, will be necessary in perpetuity.

(88): there is, surely, a question to be asked about how the accumulation cycle beginning with gentrification will complete itself (in other words, sassen's concerns--the city cannot forsake those that it expels to the periphery, precisely because they reproduce it. so what happens when you build hyatt regency upon hyatt regency? what demand are you satisfying? demand extrinsic to the city, mostly?)

(89): astonishing! according to the annual housing survey, 2 million people are displaced every year (86% displaced by private-market activity).

chapter five, social arguments (92-116)

(92-95): the "new middle class" ("i will take as axiomatic the broad proposition that class is defined according to people's social relations to the means of production.")

(95): Poulantzas, "neither own the means of production nor perform productive labor but who are political and ideological participants in the domination of the working class"; Erik Olin Wright, "a 'contradictory class position', pulled hither and tither...

(96-98): important--looking at the puzzle of the yuppies in more detail, noting that it simply cannot be true that it's pegged to changing occupational structure as a rule, given the increasing maldistribution of incomes (i.e., no upwardly mobile strata is really evident--rather, an apparent shrinking of the middle class). the three possibilities, at this early stage.

(98): gentrification and the breakdown of the patriarchal household

(101): first, question of how elite or mass this movement of women-as-gentrifiers is, really; second, question of what extent women play a specific role as women.

(104): the marginal gentrifier

(105-106): gay gentrification

(106): "the point of the argument, then, is that gentrification is an inherently class-rooted process, but it is also a lot more..."

(106): erik olin wright and 'contradictory class positions', once more--"classes are always in the process of constitution... during periods of dimished class struggle, class boundaries become more difficult to identify..."

(108-109): against the consumption-based theories, again: "the conundrum of gentrification does not turn on explaining where middle-class demand comes from. rather it turns on explaining the essentially geographical question why central and inner areas of the city, which for decades could not satisfy the demands of the middle class, now appear to do so handsomely."

(110): "social restructuring is a vital piece of the gentrification puzzle, but it makes sense only in the context of the emergence of a rent gap and a wider political and economic restructuring..."

(112): important, regulation school account--because of crisis and challenge in late nineteenth century, capitalism moves from an extensive to an intensive regime of accumulation [though he suggests that this is setting the system in international context, it really seems the opposite; for to understand early 1900s capitalism, internationally, surely it's necessary to talk primarily of imperialism? e.g., lenin, cartels and global export of capital]. this is especially important, considering what he goes on to say: "the transition to an intensive regime of accumulation is also marked by the geographical transition from the absolute expansion of global capitalism to its internal expansion and differentiation, and the emergence of the classical pattern of uneven development."

(112): "at the urban scale it was a period of dramatic suburbanization in which the state actively sponsored working-class homeownership and decentralization..." [this, obviously, raises the questions about effective demand/crisis in a gentrifying age]

(112): in sum, need to pin down the periodization, here: 1850-1890s -- extensive regime of accumulation / 1890s-1950s -- (because he often talks about 1920s suburbanization--is it adequate to think of this as a transitional phase)? / 1950s - 1970s -- intensive regime of accumulation (suburban solution and welfare state) [and then, how do we layer on the conventional marxist discussions of imperialism and the like--there is a larger question, here, of course, about the merits and demerits (and marxist credentials) of the 'regulation school' approach.]

(113): the Keynesian city, and an environment oriented around "consumption"

(115): important--a distinction that seems crucial to his larger argument -- "consumption-led urbanization" is not the same as "demand-led urbanization" (and Harvey, in fact, conflates the two!) "Consumption led growth implies the importance of the consumption sector of the economy and the production of goods in that sector, whereas 'demand-side urbanization' implies that in the move from the extensive to the intensive regime of accumulation, the dyanmics and demand of accumulation are now subordinated to those of consumption..."

(116): 1973 as key turning point, of course

part two--chapter 6, market, state and ideology (119-139)

(119): dating gentrification's origins to the 1950s/1960s, which means that--again--it doesn't map on exactly to the regulation school narrative; though perhaps it doesn't need to. "postwar economic expansion funneled capital towards the development of the suburbs and only very selectively toward existing urban centres" (here, the first example--Society Hill in philadelphia)

(122): public-private organization + state + private financial institutions = gentrifying vanguard

(123): from 'redlining', to 'greenlining'

(124-125): the state-finance revolving door

(126): "the largest financial institutions financed the state at zero risk to invest in an area..." [finance-state nexus]

(127): aloca, the aluminum multinational, moves into real estate -- "would provide high depreciation allowances in its tax returns as well as turn a high profit rate..."

(128): cataloging the different investors in society hill towers

(130): not lack of investment in society hill in immediate postwar period; rather, active disinvestment ("busy with low-risk, high-profit mortgages in the suburbs...")

(135): re: society hill, "although much gentrification in the US and in Britain has enjoyed public subsidy in one form or another, such strict orchestration of the process this early was rare." (though state, as in amsterdam, can obviously intervene to prevent gentrification, as well -- it is the character, not the simple fact, of intervention that is important)

(136): interesting, vs. britain--"the more active involvement of the US state at an earlier stage of gentrification therefore speaks both to the more instrumental relationship between capital and the state in the US and to the depth of disinvestment... "

(136): periodization--"but two things happened by the early 1970s... in the first place, the well-publicized financial success of projects like Society Hill encouraged other developers to invest in rehabilitating old working-class neighborhoods witht he benefit of less generous state subsidies and without such a blanket absorption of the risk. the rent gap, in other words, was coming to be exploited profitably enough through the private market... second, gentrification... was increasingly bound up with a broader urban restructuring that followed the political upheavals of the 1960s and the global economic depression of the early to mid-1970s..." (see also page 140--"by the late 1970s...")

(137): helps the city's tax base, which explains a lot, a la Molotch/Logan

(138): "'what i want to know,' argued one recent immigrant to the neighborhood, 'is by what authority do these people have roots? if you don't own, you don't have roots. what have they planted, their feet in the ground?'" [!!!]

chapter seven, catch-22 & harlem (140-164)

(140): the specific things it brings (but insofar as we're talking about capital coming back to the city center, aren't there other things it could do? has it done other things elsewhere? and would those be called gentrification?)

(142): history of harlem--late 1800s was developed, but with crash in 1904-1905--> "faced with imminent ruin," largely white landlords took unprecedented step of opening it up to black residents(context for "blockbusting")--> increased migration from south during WWI, Harlem renaissance in 1920s--> little further investment till the 1980s.

(143): "in short, black residents -- middle-class and working-class -- who moved into Harlem int he early years of the century largely saved the financial hides of white landlords, speculators and builders who had overdeveloped. in turn, these residents, their children and their children's children were repaid by a bout of concerted disinvestment from harlem housing that has lasted for nine decades..."

(143-144): harlem as a "supreme test" for the gentrification process (both close to one of the highest-rent districts in the world, and subject to decades of disinvestment)

(155): particular importance of the state in Harlem, given that 60 percent of units are state-owned or assisted.

(158-159): gentrification in harlem began in early 1980s, but paused in early 90s (due to stockmarket crash in 1987, it's implied)

(160): interconnection of race and class, in harlem

(163): cultural voyeurism as a lubricant for gentrification -- interesting

(163): the catch-22 (but resolution is quite straightforward--the state, as public)

chapter 8, three european cities (165-186)

(165): gentrification in europe vs. US

(167): in netherlands, "deregulation and privatization of the housing sector was driven as much by mounting budgetary constraints as by an ideological agenda, unlike in Britain perhaps, where Thatcher's privatization of housing was, before anything, ideologically led."

(168): state regulation in amsterdam has meant that disinvestment has never been as severe

(172): summary passage: "the story of gentrification in amsterdam..." [key difference with US, really, is the character of the state -- slowly leaves the market in amsterdam, where in US much more activist]

(174): re: budapest, "gentrification is integral to this changing social, economic, and political geography of Budapsest occuring at the behest of global integration..."

(175): state-centered reasons for disinvestment in the urban center (investment in social housing at the urban periphery)

(177): "the question of demand" -- there in US/Europe, but not really in Hungary (as a contingent phenomenon, in other words--interesting)

(179): "the momentum behind housing privatization and the extent to which the state remains committed to providing affordable housing for the working class will be crucial..."

(185): in sum, "no continental divide" between the Europe and NA -- of course, in other words, a "general theoretical stance" is necessary.

part three--chapter nine, mapping the frontier (189-209)

(190): intention is to actually map the front line, in the lower east side

(190-194): the obvious economic rationality of all actors involved in an ongoing process of disinvestment, but also trying to write against the argument that it is "self-fulfilling" [there is no place for practice here, though]

(198): resolved to tracking sustained disinvestment through tax arrears

[skipping this chp, for now]

(209): local complexity of gentrification pattern--not a simple straight-line.

chapter 10, to the revanchist city (210-232)

(210): de-gentrification?

(211): at least, "gone is the white, upper-middle-class optimism of gentrification which was supposed to reclaim the 'new urban frontier'... in its place has come the revanchist city..."

(211): important-- "this revanchist antiurbanism represents a reaction against the supposed 'theft' of the city, a desperate defense of a challenged phalanx of privileges, cloaked in the populist language of civic morality, family values, and neighborhood security."

(213): the world that the white upper-class male can no longer control

(217): "the revengeful reaction to the city in the 1990s represents a response to a failed urban optimism at the end of the 1980s" (turning point, depression from 1988-1992)

(218): "liberal concern for homeless people, kindled initially by the surge in homelessness int he 1980s expansion, and nurtured in neighborhoods like the Upper West Side, began to diffuse..."

(223): "eviction, in fact, represented the only true homeless policy of the dinkins administration between 1990 and 1993"

(223): key--failure of liberalism is "primarily a failure of political will"; ultimately, never cares enough

(224): "it was on this foundation of the abject failure of liberal urban policy... that a newly elected Mayor Rudy Giuliani set about consolidating the emerging revanchist city in 1994" (as crisis began to try sympathy for the homeless, as well)

(224): "'we're working on the weather'"!!!

(225): horrific account of police brutality

(225): neoliberal revisionism--"discussion of causes increasingly reverted to aspects of individual behavior rather than societal shifts..."

(229): "de-gentfrification" as a "passing lapse in an otherwise fervid rebuliding"--

(231): the Sioux as vanguard model!? and squatting...

max weber, types of legitimate domination

part one: the basis of legitimacy (212-217)

(212): the premise, in effect: "every genuine form of domination implies a minimum of voluntary compliance, that is, an interest... in obedience."

(213): normally, domination cannot simply be based on material interest, affectual/ideal solidarity, but requires a "belief in legitimacy."

(213-214): much is obscured by weber's use of the word "freely"

(214): "what is important is the fact that in a given case the particular claim to legitimacy is to a significant degree and according to its type treated as 'valid'"

(215): crux, "three pure types of legitimate domination"

1. rational grounds--belief in the legality of enacted rules and the right of those elevated to authority under such rules to issue commands
   
2. traditional grounds--resting on an established belief in the sanctity of immemorial traditions and the legitimacy of those exercising authority under them
3. charismatic grounds--resting on devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an individual person, and of the normative patterns or order revealed or ordained by him.

(216): NB--"the idea that the whole of concrete historical reality can be exhausted in the conceptual scheme about to be developed is as far from the author's thoughts as anything could be."

part two: legal authority with a bureaucratic administrative staff (217-226)

(218-223): preliminary delineation of the basic nature of rational authority (enumerating, essentially, the rational, ordered features of bureaucratic organization--importance of 'technical qualification' (221-222))

(223): "the purely bureaucratic type of administrative organization--that is, the monocratic variety of bureaucracy--is, from a purely technical point of view, capable of attaining the highest degree of efficiency and is in this sense formally the most rational known means of exercising authority over human beings... [moreover], the needs of mass administration make it today completely indispensable. the choice is only that between bureaucracy and dilettantism in the field of administration."

(224): here, furthermore, predicting that the bureaucracy will have to persist to manage a society like ours.

(224): important--reflections on capitalism and bureaucracy, and the question of their co-evolution: "though by no means alone, the capitalistic system has undeniably played a major role in the development of bureaucracy. indeed, without it capitalistic production could not continue and any rational type of socialism would have simply to take it over and increase its importance... on the one hand, capitalism in its modern stages of development requires the bureaucracy, though both have arisen from different historical sources. conversely, capitalism is the most rational economic basis for bureaucratic administration and enables it to develop in the most rational form, especially because, from a fiscal piont of view, it supplies the necessary money resources."

(225): "socialism would... require a still higher degree of formal bureaucratization than capitalism..." [of course, to a dilettante he sounds prophetic; for us, it is clear that the notion that this nonsense explains 1917 is simply hogwash]

(225): "bureaucratic administration means fundamentally domination through knowledge. this is the feature of it which makes it specifically rational."

(225): in general, the following social consequences (and here, the iron cage is forming)--second is tendency to plutocracy, and third is the dominance of a spirit of formalistic impersonality...

(226): bureaucracy is a process of 'social leveling', and "foreshadows mass democracy" [but, of course, this is all much more ominous than he is letting on here, as he writes elsewhere]

(226): two general characteristics

1. formalism
2. "tendency to substantive rationality" -- tendency to a "utilitarian point of view in the interest of the welfare of those under their authority."
   

part three: traditional authority (226-241)

(226-227): traditional authority -- "in the simplest case... based on personal loyalty which results from common upbringing... obedience is owed not to enacted rules but to the person who occupies a position of authority by tradition or who has been chosen for it by the traditional master."

(227): interesting--"the exercise of power is oriented toward the consideration of how far master and staff can go in view of the subjects' traditional compliance without arousing their resistance. when resistance occurs, it is directed against the master or his servant personally, the accusation being that he failed to observe the traditional limits of his power. opposition is not directed against the system as such--it is a case of 'traditionalist revolution.'" [perhaps thinking of a peasant jacquerie, i suppose; and in this sense it might be interesting to re-cast the argument about the uniqueness of the proletarian revolution in these ideal-typical, Weberian terms. though i'm not sure it would still work.]

(229): "master's discretion" exists in place of rationally established rules and regulations.

(231): gerontocracy and primary patriarchalism

(231): patrimonalism -- "whenever traditional domination develops an administration and a military force which are purely personal instruments of the master."

(232): estate-type domination -- when the administrative staff appropriates administrative powers and economic assets

(238-240): important, capitalism and traditional authority--capitalist trading, capitalist tax farming, capitalist provision of supplies for the state, capitalist plantations may emerge. "All these [latter] forms are indigenous to patrimonial regimes and often reach a very high level of development... [But a higher] type of capitalism is altogether too sensitive to all sorts of irrationalities in the administration of law, administration and taxation, for these upset the basis of calculability."

part four: charismatic authority (241-246)

(241): charismatic authority

(243): "the administrative staff of a charismatic leader does not consist of 'officials'... it is rather chosen in terms of the charismatic qualities of its members..."

(244): important--"Since it is 'extra-ordinary,' charismatic authority is sharply opposed to rational, and particularly bureaucratic, authority, and to traditional authority, whether in its patriarchal, patrimonial, or estate variants, all of which are everyday forms of domination; while the charismatic type is the direct antithesis of this. Bureaucratic authority is specifically rational in the sense of being bound to intellectually analysable rules; while charismatic authority is specifically irrational in the sense of being foreign to all rules... Traditional authority is bound to the precedents handed down... charismatic authority repudiates the past, and is in this sense a specifically revolutionary force."

part v: the routinization of charisma (246-255)

(245): "in traditionalist periods, charisma is the great revolutionary force." [and later?]

(245): important--"in its pure form charismatic authority may be said to exist only in statu nascendi. It cannot remain stable, but becomes either traditionalized or rationalized, or a combination of both."

(249): routinization through succession, but also through the interests of the administrative staff.

(251): moreover, "for charisma to be transformed into an everyday phenomenon, it is necessary that its anti-economic character should be altered. it must be adapted to some form of fiscal organization to provide for the needs of the group..."

(254): "along with the ideology of loyalty, which is certainly by no means unimportant, allegiance to hereditary monarchy in particular is very strongly influenced by the consideration that all inherited and legitimately acquired property would be endangered if people stopped believing in the sanctity of hereditary succession to the throne. it is hence by no means fortuitous that hereditary monarchy is more adequate to the propertied strata than to the proletariat."

part six: feudalism (255-)

(255): two types: fiefs, and benefices.

(257): a tension emerges whenever the grants are "highly developed"--because the overlord's authority, then, "is very dependent on the voluntary obedience and and hence the purely personal loyalty of the members of the administrative staff, who... are themselves in posession of the means of administration."

(259): out of this struggle, in a sense, the seeds of absolutism--"in modern times it everywhere issued in the ruler's victory, and that meant in bureaucratic administration... it was influenced by the rise of the bourgeoisie... it was in addition aided by the competition for power by means of rational... administration among the different states. this led, from fiscal motives, to a crucially important alliance with capitalistic interests..."

(260): "prebendal feudalism"

(262-263): important--"the above discussion makes it quite evident that 'ruling organizations' which belong only to one or another of these pure types are very exceptional... in general, it should be kept clearly in mind that the basis of every authority... is a belief by virtue of which persons exercising authority are lent prestige. the composition of this belief is seldom altogether simple..."

(264): importance of administrative staff, for authority: "for the habit of obedience cannot be maintained without organized activity directed to the application and enforcement of the order."

(265): re: discussion of german post-WWI experience, the bureaucracy appears here as a 'tool' to be handled. an empty instrument. [how is this articulated with the state, in the weberian model?]

(266): ah, brief mention of the russian revolution

part seven: the transformation of charisma in a democratic direction (266-271)

(266-267): charismatic authority, in particular it seems, can "be subject to an anti-authoritarian interpretation, for the validity of charismatic authority rests entirely on recognition by the ruled..." in this sense, he's arguing, it can, as it's routinzed, develop into a democratic form of organization on the basis of the principle of election.

(267): extending democracy to the administrative staff (and this, it seems, means that "they are not 'bureaucratic'") [is this a possible escape route, away from the iron cage? he does go on to imply that these will be wildly more 'inefficient'; but there is a place to raise the normative foundations of the definition of 'efficiency']

part eight: collegiality and the division of powers (271-284)

(271-272): exogenous limitations on the powers of authority (means which are necessary, agencies with their own authority, etc.)--"principle of collegiality"

(277): "collegiality almost inevitably involves obstacles to precise, clear, and above all, rapid decision"

(277): "collegiality is in no sense specifically 'democratic.' where privileged groups have had to protect their privileges agianst those who were excludded from them they have always attempted to prevent the rise of monocratic power..."

(278): 'dictatorship of the proletariat' being read as an individual dictatorship (on behalf of masses) [you can critique marx, but no need to butcher him--this is straw-manning at its worst]

(281): "from an historical point of view it is in terms of collegiality that the concept of an 'administrative agency' first came to be fully developed... only collegial bodies of officials, which were capable of standing together, could gradually expropriate the Occidental monarch, who had become a 'dilettante.'

(281): from monarchy, to bureaucracy, to prime minister, to monocracy (and the victory, then, of the bureaucracy)

(283): "historically, the separation of power in Europe developed out of the old system of estates..."

part nine: parties (284-289)

(286): "structurally, parties may conform to the same types as any other organizations."

(286): "it is of crucial importance for the economic aspect of the distribution of power and for the determination of party policy by what method the party activities are funded."

part ten: direct democracy and representative administration (289-292)

(289): ah, weber is seeing our alternative; what do you think, max?

(290): he believes that "immediate democracy" needs to be small-scale and insufficiently concerned with technical concerns, necessarily -- otherwise the bureaucracy will reassert itself. (see also 291)

(290): the notable, the representative--"presupposes that the individual is able to live for politics without living from politics."

part eleven: representation (292-298)

(292): appropriated representation

(293): estate-type representation

(293): instructed representation

(293): free representation

(294): weber sees the separation between active parties and politically-passive citizens

(296-297): exploring, in general, the harmonious co-evolution of representative government and modern capitalism

(296): "one factor in the development of free representation was the undermining of the economic basis of the older status groups. this made it possible for persons with demagogic gifts to pursue their career regardless of their social position. the source of this undermining process was modern capitalism."

(297): interesting--"two main factors have tended to make monarchs and ministers everywhere favorable to universal suffrage, namely, the necessity for the support of the proletariat in foreign conflict and the hope, which has proved to be unjustified, that, as compared to the bourgeoisie, they would be a conservative influence." [can we just saw, weber is deploying these class-categories--ideal-typically, perhaps--with reckless abandon? i approve! and he neglected to mention agitation for universal suffrage, of course]

(297): important--class character of parliamentary system: "parliaments have tended to function smoothly as long as their composition was drawn predominantly from the classes of wealth and culture... established social status rather than class interests underlay the party structure. the conflicts tended to be only those between different forms of wealth, but with the rise of class parties to power, especially the proletarian parties, the situation of parliaments has changed radically."

(298): the 'soviets' as an interest group [but let's not forget that he basically also admitted the class character of bourgeois democracy, above]

(299): mention of 'works councils' in germany, too

weber, objectivity in social science

(51): the question, put neatly: “in what sense are there in general 'objectively valid truths' in those disciplines concerned with social and cultural phenomena?

(51-52): our science began as a 'technical science' – even though slowly have we come to appreciate this, he's arguing, we have not made the critical distinction between normative and existential knowledge (we were hampered, in this, by a kind of evolutionary determinism—what exists, in effect, could be no other way; the normative question isn't appropriate, in that sense)

(52): “it can never be the task of an empirical science to provide binding norms and ideals from which directives for immediate practical activity can be derived.” NEITHER is it the case, though, that empirical science must forsake norms/ideals. “The problem is rather: what is the meaning and purpose of the scientific criticism of ideals and value-judgments?”

(52-53): proposing, here, an analysis in terms of ends-means, technical criticism. “Science can make him realize that all action and naturally... inaction imply in their consequences the espousal of certain values... The act of choice is his own responsibility.”

(54): science can aid the decision-maker in a quest for logical consistency of principles, too. But again: “As to whether the person expressing these value-judgments should adhere to these ultimate standards is his personal affair; it involves will and conscience, not empirical knowledge.”

(55): “only on the assumption of belief in the validity of values is the attempt to espouse value-judgments meaningful. However, to judge the validity of such values is a matter of faith.”

(56): in other words, a rejoinder to the technocrats and social engineers: “The distinctive character of a problem of social policy is indeed the fact that it cannot be resolved merely on the basis of purely technical considerations which assume already settled ends. Normative standards of value can and must be the objects of dispute in a discussion of a problem of social policy because the problem lies in the domain of general cultural values.”

(56): ah yes, dear max: “And the conflict occurs not merely... between 'class interests' but between general views on life and the universe as well.” [though he goes on to suggest that, yes, class interests play their part]

(57): critical, summary passage: “The fate of an epoch which has eaten of the tree of knowledge is that it must know that we cannot learn the meaning of the world from the results of its analysis... it must rather be in a position to create this meaning itself. It must recognize that general views of life and the universe can never be the products of increasing empirical knowledge, and that the highest ideals, which move us forcefully, are always formed only in the struggle with other ideals which are just as sacred to others as ours are to us.”

(58): this is critical, and perhaps gives us the first opportunity to push back: “This proposition remains correct, despite, as we shall see, the fact that those highest 'values' underlying the practical interest are and always will be decisively significant in determining the focus of attention of analytical activity in the sphere of the cultural sciences.” [in my translation-cum-extension—the necessary partiality of any position re: the empirical facts-on-the-ground is due to this necessary feature of scientific life; the spectre of the practical lurks, always, affecting the nature of what is understood as “factual,” what is deemed worthy of attention, etc. in this sense, weber's account is obviously informed by an excessive optimism, even as he's, rightly, attacking the technocrats. But is his defense, perhaps, meant as an “aspiration”?]

(59-60): at any time, he's arguing, that “value-judgements” enter the pages of this journal, they must be made explicit; any attack on another's world-view must proceed from the conscious self-presentation of one's own world-view (“it must be a struggle against another's ideas from the standpoint of one's own”).

(60): again, the same question as foregrounded above—here, Weber is striving to distinguish the scientific person from the evaluating/acting one.

(61): again, we get the impression that he understands the critique that we would level, back. And yet he's defending this optimistic vision of the purely scientific man. See, for example: “Hence, the very recognition of the existence of a scientific problem coincides, personally, with the possession of specifically oriented motives and values.”

(62): the journal as 'partial' to the interests of the working class

(63): moving, then, to the problem at the heart of the earlier formulation—how can we speak of “objectivity,” as such?

(64): interesting, a very specific definition of what social science is concerned with: “By a social science problem, we mean a task for a discipline the object of which is to throw light on the ramifications of that fundametnal social-economic phenomenon: the scarcity of means.” [I would only add what is really meant here, is the [relative] scarcity of means]

(64-65): what, exactly, are we to make of this prominence of the “economic” within the essay?

(65-66): important, a Weberian materialism, which will require some unpacking as the essay proceeds, with particular attention paid to this distinction between the “economically conditioned” and the “economically relevant”: “Specifically economic motives... operate wherever the satisfaction of even the most immaterial need or desire is bound up with the application of scarce material means. Their forces has everywhere on that account conditioned and transformed not only the mode in which cultural wants or preferences are satisfied, but their content as well, even in their most subjective aspects. The indirect influence of social relations... extends... into all spheres of culture without exception... They are 'economically conditioned.'... On the other hand, all the activities and situations constituting an historically given cultrue affect the formation of the material wants... They thereby affect the course of 'economic development' and are accordingly 'economically relevant.'”

(66): an immediate distinction, which seems critical, pegged to the question of causality, between “historical knowledge” and those things that are preliminary contributions to “historical knowledge” – the former seems to consist of inquiry into the origins of “economic cultural phenomenon”; the latter into tracing these phenomena across cultural contexts.

(67): “We are only drawing the conclusions of this policy when we state that the scientific investigation of the general cultural significance of the social-economic structure of the human community and its historical forms of organizaiton is the central aim of our journal.” [how shall we interpret “cultural,” here? Does it simply mean “ideological”? Not that? Something more, something less?]

(67-68): he is perfectly aware of the alleged “one-sidedness” of the 'economic' approach to cultural life that is being espoused, here. However: the defense is that this one-sidedness is intentional, and necessary; in a nutshell, he seems to be arguing that doing away with this one-sidedness exposes us to an investigation whose breadth forecloses scientific investigation. In that sense, this is not a “general social science”--and that is precisely what makes it possible [but we have the question of 'causality,' again; it is not clear to me that limitation-as-defense can spare you from the thorny theoretical problems that are at the heart of the question of how to understand culture, regardless of the scope of your investigation; although, differently understood (more accurately, inverted), this is kind of the accommodation that a Marxist materialism must perform, too]

(68): critical, rejection/appropriation of Marx: “Liberated as we are from the antiquated notion that all cultural phenomena can be deduced as a product... of the constellation of 'material' interests, we believe nevertheless that the analysis of social... phenomena with special reference to their economic conditioning and ramifications was a scientific principle of creative fruitfulness... The so-called 'materialistic conception of history'... as a a formula for the causal explanation of historical reality is to be rejected most emphatically. The advancement of the economic interpretation of history is one of the most important aims of our journal..”

(68-70): only “laymen” and “dilettantes” are partial to the materialism outlined in the Communist Manifesto! He sees people searching for “economic” explanations—the abuse of 'in the last instance.' Nevertheless: precisely this, in his mind, explains the fact that social scientists have begun to underestimate its scientific power.

(70-71): after more commentary on this alleged search, in the Marxist tradition, for an “economic” explanation of everything, he writes: “The explanation of everything by economic causes alone is never exhaustive in any sense whatsoever in any sphere of cultural phenomena, not even in the 'economic' sphere itself.” [again, it is interesting to try and respond with the framework of limiting the object of analysis—that some things, indeed, have internal, non-material explanations, but that at a higher level of generality (and scientific meaningfulness), when we expand the bounds of what we want to explain, this is simply not the case. superficially, remember, he seems to be agreeing to a similar kind of materialism via limiting. yet it should be obvious that ours is worlds apart, precisely because it asserts the primacy of an ordered materialism. To me it is unclear that his, in this admission of “one-sidedness,” is anything more than an epistemological mish-mash.]

(72): and thus, all explanations are “one-sided,” in some, very primary, fundamental way: “There is no absolutely 'objective' scientific analysis of culture—or put perhaps more narrowly but certainly not essentially differently for our purposes—of 'social phenomena' independent of special and 'one-sided' viewpoints according to which—expressly or tacitly, consciously or unconsciously—they are selected, analyzed, and organized for expository purposes.”

(73): applying a law to explain concrete reality requires you to decide what, exactly, will constitute the explanandum: “those elements in each event which are left unaccounted for by the selection of their elements subsumable under the 'law' are considered as scientifically unintegrated residues which will be taken care of in the further perfection of the system of 'laws.'”

(73): following from this, he notes the quest for “astronomical knowledge” – “the attitude which declares the ideal which all the sciences... towards which they should strive... is a system of propositions from which reality can be 'deduced.'”

(73-75): important--his critique recalls Hume: “the reality to which the laws apply always remains equally individual, equally undeducible from laws.” and later, on pg 75, arguing against the notion that reality can be broken up into building blocks ('factors') that can then be used to explain things causally, he makes the same kind of point: “The real reason is that the analysis of reality is concerned with the configuration into which those (hypothetical!) 'factors' are arranged to form a cultural phenomenon which is historically significant to us. Furthermore, if we wish to 'explain' this individal configuration 'causally' we must invoke other equally individual configurations on the basis of which we will explain it with the aid of those (hypothetical!) 'laws.'”

(76): important--acknowledging, again, the necessary partiality of our object of study, in the cultural sciences (how, again, are we to relate this to the social sciences? As subset? As distinct? Surely the same principle applies, to everything): “The significance of a configuration of cultural phenomena and the basis of this significance cannot however be derived and rendered intelligible by a system of analytical laws... since the significance of cultural events presupposes a value-orientation towards these events. The concept of culture is a value concept. Empirical reality becomes 'culture' to us because and insofar as we relate it to value ideas. It includes... only those segments of reality which have become significant to us because of this value-relevance... Perception of its meaningfulness to us is the presupposition of its becoming an object of investigation.”

(78): the object of our study is defined by its individuality, in this sense: “We seek knowledge of an historical phenomenon, meaning by historical: significant in its individuality.”

(78): important--arguing that we have to perform this selection of what is significance (i.e., it is not simply a perennial obstacle to 'pure' knowledge; it is a necessary, epistemological tool): “And the decisive element in this is that only through the presupposition that a finite part alone of the infinite variety of phenomena is significant, does the knowledge of an individual phenomenon become logically meaningful. Even with the widest imaginable knowledge of 'laws,' we are helpless in the face of the question: how is the causal explanation of an individual fact possible—since a description of even the smallest slice of reality can never be exhaustive?... A chaos of 'existential judgements'... would be the only result of a serious attempt to analyze reality 'without presuppositions.'... Only certain sides of the infinitely complex concrete phenomenon, namely those to which we attribute a general cultural significance—are therefore worthwhile knowing.” ”

(79): again, we can only capture things as they exist concretely and individually (“imputation”): “It is in brief a question of imputation. Wherever the causal explanation of a 'cultural phenomenon... the knowledge of causal laws is not the end of the investigation but only a means. It facilitates and renders possible the causal imputation to their concrete causes of those components of a phenomenon the individuality of which is culturally significant.”

(79): you do need, of course, what he calls 'nomological' knowledge; in other words, the 'general' and the 'universal' have their place: “whether a single individual component... is... to be assigned causal responsibility for an effect... can in doubtful cases be determined only by estimating the effects which we generally expect from it...”

(80): “in the cultural sciences, the knowledge of the universal or general is never valuable in itself.”

(80): summary passage, outlining why knowledge of cultural phenomena cannot be 'objective': “Firstly, because the knowledge of social laws is not knowledge of social reality but is rather one of the various aids used by out minds for attaining this end; secondly, because knowledge of cultural events is inconceivable except on a basis of the significance which the concrete constellations of reality have for us in certain individual concrete situations.”

(81): “All knowledge of cultural reality... is knowledge from particular points of view.”

(83): a refutation of a refutation of the materialist understanding of laws as 'superstructrue' (which doesn't, of course, mean that it is a defense of the materialist position).

(84): important—truth is pegged to the 'pursuit': “It obviously does not follow from this that research... can only have results which are 'subjective' in the sense that they are valid for one person and not for others. Only the degree to which they interest different persons varies... IN the method of investigation, the guiding 'point of view' is of great importance for the construction of the conceptual scheme which will be used in the investigation. In the mode of their use, however, the investigator is obviously bound by the norms of our thought just as much here as elsewhere. For scientific truth is precisely what is valid for all who seek the truth.”

(84-85): the assertion of a universal, general will come up with problems because 'everything is in flow'

(85): turning, now, to the question of methodology – what is the status/use of the objects we employ?

(85): against the enlightenment weltanschung, which had its roots in the optimism/technical character of the natural sciences (the non-problematic move from concrete to abstract)

(86): with the theory of evolution, this reached its peak: “it appeared as if there was in general no conceivable meaning of scientific work other than the discovery of the laws of events.”

(87-88): dealing, here, with a more sophisticated theorist, who agrees on the non-identity of laws with reality, but still believes in the pursuit of abstract laws which can model reality. He's arguing that they're caught in a bind, it seems: “In spite of the fundamental methodological distinction between historical knowledge and the knowledge of 'laws' which the creator of the theory drew as the first and only one, he now claims empirical validity, in the sense of the deducibility of reality from 'laws,' for the propositions of abstract theory... This claim fails to observe that in order to be able to reach this result even in the simplest case, the totality of existing historical reality including every one of its causal relationships must be assumed as 'given' and presupposed as known.”

(90): important--introducing the “ideal-type,” by way of the free-market model: “The ideal typical concept will help to develop our skill in imputation in research: it is no 'hypothesis' but it offers guidance to the construction of hypotheses. It is not a description of reality but it aims to give unambiguous means of expression to such a description. It is thus the 'idea' of the historically given modern society, based on an exchange economy, which is developed for us by quite the same logical principles as are used in constructing the idea of the medieval 'city economy' as a 'genetic' concept... It is a utopia. Historical research faces the task of determining in each individual case, the extent to which this ideal-construct approximates to or diverges from reality...” [note my emphasis, which suggest that the ideal-type itself must be recognized as a product of a particular history]

(92): ideal-type, con't: “The construction of abstract ideal-types recommends itself not as an end but as a means. Every conscientious examination of the conceptual elements of historical exposition shows however that the historian as soon as he attempts to go beyond the bare establishement of concrete relationships and to determine the cultural significance of even the simplest individual event in order to 'characterize' it, must use concepts which are precisely and unambiguously definable only in the form of ideal types.”

(93): and more still: “it is even less fitted to serve as a schema under which a real situation or action is to be subsumed as one instance. It has the significance of a purely ideal limiting concept with which the real situation or action is compared and surveyed for the explication of certain of its significant components.”

(94): I suppose this means that it is only in application that the ideal-typical becomes filled out? “...the concepts thereupon become ideal-typical in the sense that they appear in full conceptual integrity either not at all or only in individual instances.”

(94): he is obviously, as he says here, not saying that these things are real, or that they are a 'procrustean bed' into which history can be cast, or that they are real forces which explain the passage of history.

(98): the ideal-typical might become evaluative—as in, it contains what the author thinks christianity 'ought' to contain. This is obviously departing from what Weber wants the theorist to do. “The sphere of empirical science has been left behind and we are constructed with a profession of faith, not an ideal-typical construct.”

(99): are you proceeding, then, from what men themselves think? “In other words, here too the practical idea which should be valid or is believed to be valid and the heuristically intended, theoretically ideal type approach each other very closely and constantly tend to merge with each other.”

(100-101): these passages are important, though I have not fully understood the argument that leads to this assertion (though I understand the assertion): “The goal of ideal-typical concept-construction is always to make clearly explicit not the class or average character but rather the unique individual character of cultural phenomena.”

(101-102): here are the passages where he acknowledges the fixity of the ideal-type as hitherto constructed, and thus proposed an ideal-type of 'developmental' dimensions; in other words, you apply the ideal-type to a historical progression: “This procedure gives rise to no methodological doubts so long as we clearly keep in mind that ideal-typical developmental constructs and history are to be sharply distinguished from each other...”

(102): “The danger of this procedure... lies in the fact that historical knowledge here appears as a servant of theory instead of the opposite role.”

(103): important—assimilating Marx: “we will only point out here that naturally all specifically Marxian 'laws' and developmental constructs—insofar as they are theoretically sound—are ideal types. The eminent, indeed unique, heuristic significance of these ideal types when they are used for the assessment of reality is known to everyone... Similarly, their perniciousness, as soon as they are thought of as empirically valid or as real 'effective forces,' 'tendencies,' etc., is likewise known to those who have used them.”

(104): the idea that we will transcend the era of ideal types one day is wrong, even as it is right to point out the inevitable obsolescence of current ideal-types, weber thinks: “At the very heart of their task lies not only the transiency of all ideal types but also at the same time the inevitability of new ones.”

(106): important—he is writing explicitly against this position, remember—the position that makes ends of theoretical concepts, rather than recognizing it as means: “the latter still hold in many ways, expressly or tacitly, to the opinion that it is the end and the goal of every science to order its data into a system of concepts, the content of which is to be acquired and slowly perfected through the observation of empirical regularities, the construction of hypotheses, and their verification, until finally a 'completed' and hence deductive science emerges.”

(108-110): an illustration of the 'buzzing, confused complexity' through agriculture

(110): summary passage: “The objective validity of all empirical knowledge rests exclusively upon the ordering of the given reality according to categories which are subjective in a specific sense, namely, in that they present the presuppositions of our knowledge and are based on the presupposition of the value of those truths which empirical knowledge alone is able to give us.”

(111): summary passage: “The 'objectivity' of the social sciences depends rather on the fact that the empirical data are always related to those evaluative ideas which alone make them worth knowing and the significance of the empirical data is derived from these evaluative ideas. But these data can never become the foundation for the empirically impossible proof of the validity of the evaluative ideas.”